YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Just out of curiosity who is their equivalent person on the left?
> Can’t we all try to find consensus and compromise?
What consensus and compromise do you want when the President of the US wants to "find" the votes or when calls the rioters good people and we love you?
>Just out of curiosity who is their equivalent person on the left?
I really am befuddled at the inability of people to avoid beng taken in by bad faith arguments like this.
It is exceedingly difficult to understand your position that this represent a 'bad faith argument'.
The comparison is one comparing the role played. It not a comparison of one's opinion of the person playing the role.
I really am befuddled at the inability of people to be taken in by bad faith arguments like this.
Oh yeah, he hasn't.
You'd have to go considerably further out.
Steve Bannon was arrested for fraud and, while on bond, used his podcast to call for beheading Fauci and FBI director Wray and putting their heads up on pikes. The both sides-ism doesn't work when one person is suggesting upholding the law and the other routinely suggests killing people who they disagree with politically.
>“Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man... I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you’re gone – time to stop playing games.””
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/05/steve-bannon-makes-beheading...
It's also hard to compare the two as Olbermann is a sports presenter turned Political Opinion show host while Bannon was the head of a news organization, became head of a party's Presidential campaign and then served in the White House. I'm not sure there's any insider who has made anything close to the kind of unsubstantiated rhetoric Bannon has or used their journalistic positions (rather than Opinion show) in the way he has. There are a few podcasts by former Obama staffers but I can't recall any of them ever calling for murder.
I remember the internet at the time used to feel like there were tons of Truthers that would argue and argue on all sorts of forums. Where did all those people go anyway?
I'm for banning anyone who's inciting violence like what we saw at the capital regardless of political leaning, so it's not a rhetorical question
I want to know who to report
In these interviews, he indicates that there are reasons to believe that Bush administration had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. These statements came long before the "28 pages", which removed any doubt that there was a cover-up after the fact and provided more evidence that Bush and his terrorist friends organized the whole thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRNti8P_o-I
And yet, even after Barr released his summary of the report, 84% of Democrats and 41% of Independents believed that Trump had colluded with the Russians.[2]
Many of you in this thread likely still believe the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians. If the past is any guide, many of you will attempt to defend the lie by replying with distracting "whataboutisms" regarding Paul Manafort, or obstruction, or what have you, willfully ignoring the fact that that *the overwhelming majority of Democrats* were, less than two years ago, convinced of a lie that is eerily similar to right's lie-de-jour regarding the results of the 2016 election.
[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/schiff-... [1]https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2... [2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-poll/des...
No that is wrong. "The investigation found there were over 100 contacts between Trump campaign advisors and individuals affiliated with the Russian government, before and after the election, but the evidence was insufficient to show an illegal conspiracy"
> Many of you in this thread likely still believe the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians.
Many of you also believed that Hillary was responsible for Benghazi and Republicans wasted millions of dollars and time on that investigation and yet she was not guilty.
> replying with distracting "whataboutisms" regarding Paul Manafort
So he and many other broke the law and went to jail for that, why is that a bad thing. Why did Trump pardon them though?
How many people in the US went to jail because of the Benghazi investigations?
Mueller did not say that Trump was innocent, why didnt he say that?
The fact that presidential advisers, among the US Senators, former diplomats, and foreign advisors, had contact with foreigners is not surprising in the least. I'd be happy to discuss any specific contacts that you find to be troublesome, though.
> Many of you also believed that Hillary was responsible for Benghazi and Republicans wasted millions of dollars and time on that investigation and yet she was not guilty.
The Benghazi investigation was undeniably an attempt, in part, to damage Hillary Clinton politically. The question of who was "responsible" for Benghazi is a matter of opinion. The question of whether there is evidence for Trump-Russia collusion is one of fact. That's an important difference.
Another important difference is the fact that the the lie-de-jour of the right--that the 2016 election was stolen--is currently being panned as anti-democratic, fascist, a danger to the very fabric of our nation, etc, etc., and we're told that his is because it is undermining our sacred institutions. Well if that's the case, it's odd that nobody seemed to give a shit that the Democrats did the exact same thing four years ago. After all, the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians is effectively the same lie--it's simply a different side of the same coin. This is very different from the Benghazi issue, which is, at worst, a run-of-the-mill political hatchet job.
> So [Manafort] and many other broke the law and went to jail for that, why is that a bad thing. Why did Trump pardon them though?
I never said that it was. Criminals should, of course, be punished. But this has no bearing on my point about Trump-Russia collusion, which is why I specifically mentioned it as a distraction. As for the pardons, who can say why Trump does what he does?
> How many people in the US went to jail because of the Benghazi investigations?
No idea...?
> Mueller did not say that Trump was innocent, why didn't he say that?
Who cares whether Mueller himself said Trump was innocent? In a system where the accused are innocent until proven guilty, his report said it for him. "[The report] did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign."
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the fact that almost 90% of Democrats were still convinced of the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians, and how that differs from the current right-wing mania about the 2016 election, which affects a much smaller proportion of the country.
This sentence is not from the Mueller report, but is from Bill Barr's summary of the Mueller report, which a federal judge characterized as "misleading" and "substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report". https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6796353-barr-ruling....
As myself and others have noted, you need to read the actual Mueller report and the Senate Intel Committee report before engaging on this topic further.
For example, the idea that no one in the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians flies in the face of the finding in the (Republican lead) Senate Intel report which shows that Trump's campaign chair was transmitting internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer.
Paul Manafort, why is Trump's campaign manager talking and sharing data with Russian agents?
Roger Stone, again why was he coordinating with Assange to leak those hacked emails?
> After all, the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians
His people did collude with Russia though?
> But this has no bearing on my point about Trump-Russia collusion
How is that a distraction, his people did collude.
> As for the pardons, who can say why Trump does what he does?
You can say that Trump pardoned those people who went to jail for him and did not go against him. Why didnt he pardon Cohen because he went against him.
> almost 90% of Democrats were still convinced of the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians
Again his people did collude with Russia and went to jail and Trump pardoned, his son also met with Russians, are you saying those facts did not happen?
> The Benghazi investigation was undeniably an attempt, in part, to damage Hillary Clinton politically.
Many Republicans believe that Clinton was guilty because of that.
And yet, the vast majority of adult human beings do this everyday, multiple times per day, without any regard for whether others think they should or not.
I encourage you to actually read the report.
I asked what kind of messages the Russians used to influence people on large scale for the election - silence ensued. This is ridiculous, like in a cult.
This is plainly US propaganda at its finest.
I find some Russian espionage operations in the report. It was actually US Americans that told me to expect such things when their mass surveillance went public. I did not find anything too relevant.
"Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."[1]
Note, "collusion" and "conspiracy" are different things. Conspiracy is used in the legal sense here and requires a meeting of the minds between Trump and the Russian Government (i.e. Putin). That didn't happen, and even some of the most ardent pushers of the collusion idea didn't believe that happened. But collusion is a more nebulous term (not a legal term) that, for many, was used to indicate a tacit agreement between the two groups to arrive at a mutual goal - electing Trump. That is absolutely what happened. When we say there was "collusion" and you point out there was no "conspiracy", therefore we are wrong, that's a straw man.
Also note that while this says the investigation did not establish the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russians, this is not entirely accurate. Trump did put out public statements to the Russians (famously "Russia, if you're listening"), and the Mueller report found that, in fact, there was direct response from Russian hackers to that call in the form of attempted hacks on Hillary Clinton. The Special Counsel didn't consider that "coordination" because it was in public, but.... I mean the evidence is there.
A final note, there is stark difference between "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign..." and "the investigation established that members of the Trump Campaign did not...". The former is not a conclusive statement. You seem to be basing your opinions as if the report contains the latter statement.
Remember, Bill Barr put out the second half of that sentence and held back the full Mueller Report from the press so that part would cycle around to news orgs and people would repeat it ad infinitum. A federal judge characterized Bill Barr's summary and public statements as a "misleading" and "lacking candor" (so when you repeat what the AG did by leaving out the first half of that sentence, which really changes the tone and impression left on readers, perhaps take note of how this reflects on you).
"The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller’s principal conclusions, coupled with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough representation of the findings set forth in the Mueller Report, causes the Court to question whether Attorney General Barr’s intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller Report — a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report"
"The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary." [2]
Remember, this is a person who has seen more of the report than you or I have, and he seems to think what Bill Barr wrote is "substantively" inconsistent with what's written behind those black boxes.
Oh, and the other thing you left out is the entire second half of the Mueller report. The first half concludes that the investigation was incomplete due to obstruction from the Trump campaign in the form of lying, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, dangling pardons, and trying to fire the investigators themselves. You can't cite the Mueller Report as a conclusive authority without also acknowledging the Trump campaign and Trump specifically obstructed the investigation repeatedly.
> Many of you in this thread likely still believe the lie that Trump colluded with the Russians.
Can you blame us? The Republican lead Senate released a report which shows that Trump Campaign manager was funneling internal campaign data to a Russian Intelligence Officer [3], while the GRU were busy hacking Trump's opponents. The Mueller report showed that Trump's family was meeting with a Russian spy at Trump's home and Trump lied about it. We also learned from Michael Cohen that Trump was attempting to build a Trump Tower Moscow with a penthouse dedicated to Vladimir Putin, and Trump lied about that as well after telling us he had 0 business in Russia and his campaign had 0 contacts with Russians (there were over 100 contacts). What conclusion are people supposed to draw?
As soon as this bit of info from the Republican lead Senate Intelligence Committee gets cleared up, I'd love to hear how the Trump campaign was completely innocent in 2016:
> The Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's "high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services" was a "grave counterintelligence threat". The foremost individual was Manafort's employee Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian. The committee identified Kilimnik as a "Russian intelligence officer"; describing that Manafort and Kilimnik had a "close and lasting relationship" even through the 2016 election. Manafort repeatedly tried to "secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik", including "sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy".
> The Senate Intelligence Committee introduced a new allegation regarding Kilimnik, that he "may have been connected" to the Russian military intelligence's hack and leak of Democratic Party material. However, the report's discussions on this topic are redacted. Manafort's connection with the Russian hack and leak operation is "largely unknown", but possible, given "two pieces of information" the committee found; the details of such information were also redacted. [4]
[1] https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/04/18/mueller-report-sea... (The actual Mueller Report)
[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6796353-barr-ruling....
[3] Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, Volume V.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
Even Trump appointed Supreme court judges rejected these cases.
Even Trump appointed Supreme court judges rejected the case because there is nothing there.
I hear things like this, and I think it would be great if corporate policy in general were appeal-able to the government the banned person resides in. People get put into corporate jails and excluded from service wrongly all the time. That's a conversation I'm willing to have. But the like of Bannon and Giuliani have just been fleeing from platform to platform as their detestable ideas and statements finally catch up with the strong stomachs of advertisers. The government shouldn't be overriding private corporations who make an ethical objection in the face of boycott, without a very clearly laid out due-process.
I'd strongly suggest taking a harder look at the systems like HN, and consider how-- for example-- the posting speed it encourages works against you in this respect.
E.g., what made you write "equivalent person on the left" since that turns out not to be a relevant detail to you?
I think the system here-- like Twitter et al-- encourages posting too quickly in this context. Sure, it works great if I'm just complaining from memory about the SVG spec or something. If I get it wrong, someone will call out the error and I can double-check the spec and confirm the mistake.
But it's a royally bad idea wrt large political issues like this one. Instead, the entire system should go slower in general, encouraging one to reflect on their current knowledge and current blind spots before finalizing a post. That process could even be piecemeal over the period of days. A UI could easily be designed that makes it an enjoyable process to slowly build a post out of more meaningful little "lego-like" blocks.
To me there's a frightening disconnect here on HN. A significant portion of the users know about or perhaps even work on dark patterns like recommendation algos where one can fairly accurately predict the number of users who will fall down into conspiracy rabbit holes. Yet with HN's opaque posting/sorting/scoring system that knowledge goes down the memory hole; for some reason "personal responsibility" always seems to stand in for any serious attempt at analyzing the system.
Edit: clarification
I can't name democrats who facilitated ilegal insurrection in regards to this past election, but I can name democrats who facilitated illegal insurrection against their own communities after the George Floyd incident. The democrats who refused to call out rioting and looting (as a separate incident from the peaceful protesting), those who called for the short-sighted defunding of police departments in cities with high crime (look up the uptick in shootings and murder in NYC after the city removed $1 billion from the police department) have meaningfully facilitated illegal insurrection in their own communities, in my opinion.
I agree that Bannon does make egregious comments, but I tend to think the media blows his comments out of proportion. Due to his military background, he often uses war analogies, which make for the detestable quotes you mention. For example, in the Fauci "head-on-a-pike" comment that he made, it was clear to me that he was not suggesting for folks to literally murder Fauci. He was suggesting for an example to be made out of Fauci by removing him from power. It's similar to when athletes say they want to "kill" the opposing teams. Regardless of this, I agree with you that comments such as the one I mentioned are in bad taste.
On the other hand, left-leaning celebrities who posted picture depicting Trunp's dead body (e.g. Snoop Dogg) did not seem to face similar consequences from big tech.
I think it takes a particularly steelman interpretation to see the content of Giuliani's "trial by combat" speech as not insurrectionist.
“So let’s have trial by combat! I’m willing to stake my reputation, the president is willing to stake his reputation on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there.”
> last summer
Sure, there are democrats who turned too much of a blind-eye to violence over the past summer. But I find it fallacious in the extreme to equate reducing a police budget with insurrection. For the particular New York exception, the budget cut to NYPD came to about 10% of the budget, which very closely tracks New York's budget shortfall as a result of the Covid exodus from the city (12% budget shortfall) [0].
> head-on-a-pike
“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put the heads on pikes. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats,” he explained, as Media Matters for America first reported.
“You either get with the program or you’re gone ― time to stop playing games,” Bannon added. “Blow it all up.”
“That’s how you win the revolution,” Bannon said. “The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party. It was a civil war.”
Even when one takes that statement as charitably as you do, it doesn't help the level of discourse.
> Left leaning celebrities
I said upthread, I believe we should be moving corporate moderation etc into a local government due process. IMO the Texas DA (for example) should be able to ask Twitter to moderate a statement like that, and have the moderation heard in court. But Snoop Dogg doesn't hold nuclear codes, or hold the ear of the person who does.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-city-budget-police-d...
If the content is criminal to knowingly carry, they can. (And not just “ask”, they can notify Twitter and inform them they will file criminal charges otherwise.)
If its lawful content, law enforcement at any level has no business getting involved, that’s kind of the point of the First Amendment.
But Twitter also isn’t (unless it has a contract in place obligating it to someone) required to carry any content, just because they aren’t legally prohibited from doing so. That’s also what the First Amendment is about.
> But I find it fallacious in the extreme to equate reducing a police budget with insurrection.
It's not just the reduction of the NYC police budget that I am referring to as insurrection. It's the post-George-Floyd rioting, and the extreme comments made by certain leaders of these movements that I see as insurrectionist. In many cities across the country, government buildings were vandalised/looted, the Portland Federal courthouse set on fire being an example [1]. In another example, Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the BLM organization, has referred to herself and another co-founder as "trained marxists", and cites Mao Tse-tung as political inspiration [2][3]. In another case, the BLM Chicago organizer Latrell Allen publicly supported looting, likening it to a form of reparations [4]. And, I want to be clear, I am not criticizing entirety of the BLM movement, simply the factions that have made extreme statements or engaged in violence. Would you classify these as insurrectionist as well?
> the budget cut to NYPD came to about 10% of the budget, which very closely tracks New York's budget shortfall as a result of the Covid exodus from the city
Even taking into the consideration the budget shortfall, the NYPD was defunded significantly out-of-proportion in regards to other agencies. In fact, from your quote alone, it seems like the NYPD bore the entire brunt of the NYC budget shortfall. So even though there was a budget shortfall, I would still consider the NYPD to have been intentionally defunded. FYI, here are statistics on the NYC crime rate after the budget cuts [5].
> But Snoop Dogg doesn't hold nuclear codes, or hold the ear of the person who does.
Yes, thank you, Snoop Dogg indeed doesn't hold the nuclear codes, but celebrities and Hollywood in general holds influence amongst the population, and they certainly hold the ears of politicians as well.
> Even when one takes that statement as charitably as you do, it doesn't help the level of discourse.
I don't think I'm taking the statements charitably, I'm trying to separate analogy from intent; however, I agree that such rhetoric certainly doesn't help discourse. I would even go on to say that in the ears of extremists, such rhetoric is dangerous and provocative. But, in the Bannon quotes you mentioned, I personally don't interpret him as speaking in a literal sense. As someone who occasionally tuned into Bannon's show, Bannon's ultimate objective seems to be to take down the CCP. Since we are already engaged in a political/cyber/information war with China (which hopefully doesn't escalate into a kinetic war), Bannon tends to frame everything leading up to a confrontation with China with war analogies. But again, such rhetoric will not help his cause, and I agree that it can be dangerous.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/police-declare-riot-...
[2] (go to 7:03 for the quote) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCghDx5qN4s&feature=emb_titl...
[3] https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/39587/1/black-...
[4] https://www.wbez.org/stories/winning-has-come-through-revolt...
[5] https://abc7ny.com/nyc-crime-shooting-nypd-defund-the-police...
The power matters, burning down the government is different than burning down a Wendy’s.
No one was planning the looting of a store three weeks in advance, and this is a really large difference being a riot representing the (unproductive) language of the unheard, and an insurrectionist plot.
However, while there certainly were some riots in the summer done out of spontaneous rage, there certainly were planned events as well. For example, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, which lasted 3 weeks:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/2/21310109/ch...
Also the 100 consecutive days of protest in Portland, where the federal courthouse was set on fire:
https://apnews.com/article/b57315d97dd2146c4a89b4636faa7b70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8z0jFxOmFo&ab_channel=Bloom...
As for the peaceful protesters on Capitol Hill, I think they tend to be a bit misunderstood as well. These folks often get grouped into the extreme right, but in reality, they are moreso moderate people who face a harsh economic reality caused by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, the automation of jobs, and losing jobs to regulations. They also seem to be the population most affected by the Opioid epidemic. However, the left-wing media has an agenda that is increasingly focused on identity politics, and not the economic realities that they face. Instead, these folks are constantly painted as racist, uncultured, and extreme by the left-wing media. So lots of them are left with no choice but to support Trump in spite of his delusions, not for them. So I personally don't paint the entirety of the MAGA crowd as the enemy; many are reluctant supporters.
But again, the insurrectionists and the violent protesters at Capitol Hill should be punished. But for sake of consistency, perhaps we should also be also outraged at the riots that occurred this past summer, especially the ones that caused loss of life and/or damaged government buildings?
The nightly riots in Portland and other cities were planned and organized in advance through messaging and social apps as well as with physical posters. You can find the screen caps and photos online if you look. There were also several instances where groups of people were arrested after crossing state lines to attend riots. Both sides have bad actors and no one is absolved. The main contention here seems to be that many people rightly want the law applied equally to both sides but there is a clear bias evidenced by the amnesia or blindness that people seem to be suffering regarding the last year.
If people just went to a protest expecting some possible light violence, I don't see how that's comparable. Would you make OWS or G7 protests illegal because people going there rightly expect tear gas and batons?
1. The left is generally good; the right is generally evil.
2. The goal of leftists is equality and harmony for all. The goal of rightists is to eliminate Jews/blacks/LGBTQ/etc.
3. Leftist rhetoric must be taken at face value, or at least as innocuously as possible; rightist rhetoric must be treated as a secret coded dogwhistle message that actually calls for war, genocide, or other unspeakable horrors. When a rightists uses conflict-related metaphors they are certainly to be taken at face value, whereas a leftist going on about "slicey bois" is certainly not a threat.
4. Accordingly, leftist violence must be considered either the relatively harmless or completely justified actions of a single individual or relatively small group of individuals with no coordination larger than a single cell taking place ("antifa is not a group, it's an idea"). Rightist violence must be considered to be highly coordinated, with individual attacks receiving secret coded dogwhistle instructions, directly or indirectly, from the top thought leaders on the right including the POTUS if he be Republican. ("stochastic terrorism").
5. Therefore, leftist violence is to be grimly tolerated at worst -- hopefully actively supported and encouraged as an essential step toward a more just society. Rightist violence is to be met with swift punishment not just for the offender, but their family, pets, and anyone caught displaying any sympathy for them. Anyone questioning the narrative that these are terrorist operatives taking orders from the top are to be shunned and shut out of decent society by decent people, and certainly not allowed to communicate.
I make no statements as to the truth or falsity of the above.I think it's a bit more nuanced than the extremes of either side will care to admit. But these are the rhetorical rules you have to deal with because if you don't, louder voices will drown you out and eventually shun you.
Shouldn't you be? It's kind of important to defending him...
> In fact, from your quote alone, it seems like the NYPD bore the entire brunt of the NYC budget shortfall.
That isn't how percentages work. Say NYPD is 20% of the NYC budget, a 10% cut to NYPD would be 2% of a cut to the entire budget.
This is facilitating illegal insurrection? And NYC is your example...
Surely this could have nothing to do with covid and the whatever else but a 112% increase in shootings must be the consequence of a budget cut of a bit more than 1%.... Have you perhaps considered who it is that is registering this uptick in crime and drawing the connections? Why it was the insanely high to begin with. Like what? Do their janitors earn a million yearly?
Not having a slightly less mindblowing budget is not meaningfully facilitating illegal insurrection it's slightly more sane fiscal policy
To me, the crime is high due to the unfortunate realities of inner city gang culture. Yes, historical factors cannot be ignored, and yes, police misconduct also does exist. Police reform is necessary, but a $1 billion budget cut ignores the reality of urban crime, and seem to cause a greater net amount of deaths, and the victims will unfortunately be mostly black/brown. Listening to a few of the chart-topping, yet violent rap songs should give an unfortunate indication of the current state of gang culture, and why the police provide an imperfect-yet-needed check to gang members.
But on the other hand, why would COVID cause an increase in shootings/murder? I could understand if there was an uptick in robberies, but from the data I’ve seen, the uptick is in shooting and murder.
The related lockdowns and such could play a role. I wasn't putting it forward as the sole factor but to me it seems more likely that this among other things like the police reporting differently because they're mad playing a bigger roll in a bloody 112% increase. That's a whole lot you realise that right?
Which brings me back to some of those questions left unanswered:
How do you tie a bit more than 1% decrease in budget to a 112% increase in shootings?
Do you have any reasonable argument for that?
Why do they spend such a ridiculously insane amount per employee, in total or however which way you want to calculate it?
Can you justify this given the results?
The topic is complicated, COVID + "Defund" + Other topics increasing crime in NYC.
When one side is being banned for not meeting a standard, "both sides, both sides" is an extremely valid argument.
If so, can you lay out the case for me? Even just a few links for me to check out would be good. Comments like yours, here on HN, would lead me to the conclusion that Trump is the most dangerous leader to come along since the bad old days of the 20th century. And I just don't see it.
He just incited followers to do a coup. How come don't you see that as him being the most dangerous leader of the modern era?
The "coup" was a joke by any standard, the only reason it became such a big deal is because DC cops allowed the rioters into the Capitol instead of doing their job. I for one would've liked to see tear gas and rubber bullets but those were worryingly absent.
-bavell
Why do we not treat our general discourse similarly? Why don't we demand a minimum threshold based on, say, the same criteria we use in a court of law: internal consistency, causal-based, preponderance of evidence, etc. If one can't meet this minimum threshold then the others incur a penalty: being robbed the time and attention for those ideas that meet and exceed the threshold.
As an EU citizen, I feel this is pretty much a no-brainer. Politics based on compromises between parties, rather than single-party majorities, slows the political process down and it definitely opens the door for a whole lot of different issues, but it kinda works. Switching from extreme to extreme every 4/8 years feels like it's just going to increase political polarization until societal cohesion breaks and something bad happens.
Yes, we Europeans whine a lot about the EU and there's a shitload of things that need to be improved about it, but the last few years' circus on the other side of the Pond has convinced me that the alternative isn't that much better.
When viewed from a dispassionate distance I feel that the desire for 'political expedience' is a major factor in the extreme polarization of US politics today.
Again, wanting a representative who is not experienced at politics to represent you is kinda like wanting a lawyer who isn't experienced at practicing law to represent you. Or a doctor who isn't experienced at medicine to treat you.
What I'm saying is, I think you've latched on to the wrong quality as a focus of your ire. People being career politicians is not the problem, it's people being corrupt power-seeking assholes. That's a difficult problem to solve, I know, which is why it is so tempting to blame the problem on something easier to solve, but I think that sentiment is one pushed largely by career pundits to manipulate people.
I agree.
> It’s probably impossible to do away with the career politicians since they are specialists
Again I must emphasize that it is not the career part of this that is the problem. The only alternative that doesn't involve career politicians is electing amateur ones who have no experience navigating the political landscape.
> I think we should do more to keep them accountable like selecting a group of people whose task is to both directly observe and petition elected officials.
I could envision a system like that that I could support but there'd be a lot of complications to work out. We should probably have something like that for police too.
> Basically solving the problem of politicians being so far removed from the people by bringing a sample of the people to the politician
This I just find kinda funny, since that's already how it works. You can get a meeting with your senator or congressman directly, though it isn't easy. Talking to one of their staff is pretty doable. Letters and phone calls are low-effort, but of course they also count for a lot less. The term "special interest groups" gets bandied about frequently in derogatory fashion, and while it does include corporate lobbyists it also covers hobby clubs, activist groups of various kinds, and trade unions, all of which make their cases to senators and congressmen on behalf of their members (which may include you). And of course your locally elected officials also meet with them about their concerns.
Can you explain the compromise possible between "fighting the COVID 19 death toll should be based on science" and "Fauci should be beheaded"?
Replacing Fauci with someone more scientific and less political would probably qualify.
Fauci is one of the most qualified and well respected scientist in the field - who had worked for democrat and republican presidents alike.
Which scientist who is both "more scientific" and "less political" would qualify in your view? How would you assess this?
Right, and he politicized the response to COVID-19 and we don't care if he used to be awesome, we want someone who will put evidence over politics.
> Which scientist who is both "more scientific" and "less political" would qualify in your view?
Probably someone who would be more evidence oriented. I don't have a short list.
> How would you assess this?
By comparing their public statements and actions with those of other physicians, immunologists, and the evidence.
By putting politics over science.
> "an American physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984"
His resume means no one in the professional world is more scientific? He couldn't have possibly put politics over science because he has degrees and a job?
> Seriously, do you even pay attention to what you regurgitate?
I'm not sure why you're so confident but its entirely possible for scientists to play politics.
I'm not convinced that its technically correct to call Bannon a terrorist or call his words a threat. So your hyperbole has estopped your criticism of Bannon's hyperbole.
> So your meet in the middle position is, just to be clear,
My meet in the middle position is that a scientist needs to be evidence-based and open to the possibility of his own error. I was disappointed in how Fauci handled the diversity of opinion and the mask issue. He went on the cover of In Style magazine and vainly refused to wear a mask. Masks are important and this magazine cover is seen by millions yet he declined the opportunity to set a proper example.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
I've long been convinced that this is true, thanks.
So, when you say "Can’t we all try to find consensus and compromise?", in my opinion that already goes against what conservatives and right leaning people value. An individual having to compromise for "the greater good" goes against their core values.
Now, I do think that life is more complex than simply choosing one side. Because life isn't necessarily copatible with "human rationality". Sometimes there are situations where it is more rational to be hypocritical or sometimes it is more rational to let conflicting opinions exist.
I think it comes down to what humans learn at a young age and in school. If we were able to focus more on ethics and helping people find a purpose to live at a young age already, it would make a big difference.
The right values order and stability even if at the expense of those at the bottom.
I don't think either side is against compromise but first each side has to see where each other is coming from and that there is some value in the opposite view.
Demonizing and miscaracterizing the opposite view, and failing to actually see why they think how they do, is a big problem right now.
As another outsider, I get the impression US conservatives are selective about the groups they consider worthy of those rights and freedoms. They oppose women's choice to abort. They oppose rights and freedoms for immigrants. They came out in support of cops who had violated rights of their own african-american citizens.
1) "Pro-life" conservatives believe that fetuses are human lives (persons) worthy of protection and prioritize that over the right of the mother to control her own body. That might sound bad, but there is a logic to it.
"Pro-choice" advocates would argue that the fetus is not a person and that ultimately the mother should have full rights to her own body. Leaving aside the argument about the definition of personhood, outside of cases of rape (even among pro-lifers opinions differ on whether or not that changes anything), the mother had engaged in activity fully cognizant that creating a human life was a possible outcome. By engaging in the activity anyway she can be said to have accepted the risk and that acceptance further diminishes her right to avoid the consequences. Pro-lifers would argue the right to life of the person (fetus) outweighs the mother's right to control her own body in this circumstance. There are of course many other arguments to be had either way because this issue is an enormous one and is ultimately about many fundamental philosophical issues.
2) Anti-immigrant conservatives would argue that immigrants (specifically illegal immigrants, mind you) are not citizens of the United States and therefore do not have many of the same rights as citizens of the United States. The argument is largely over which rights are inalienable human rights and which are rights exclusive to US Citizens. They would further argue that illegal immigrants are actually criminals by virtue of being here illegally and restricting the rights of criminals is not exactly unprecedented or unreasonable.
3) Conservatives would argue that many[0] of those cases are not being reported factually, and that the officers involved were not actually violating the rights of those citizens unduly.
What I'm trying to say is, the selection is not arbitrary.
[0] Floyd is not among these. At least I can't find anyone who makes a good-faith argument why that wasn't basically straight-up murder.
That is certainly true for the "left". In quotes because I am not from the US, but the effect he had is very obvious.
I am curious how the next term plays out. What would they even complain about?
This is not, however, a violation of free speech, even if you believe in the general concept that a private company should allow dissenting opinions on its platform. This user has violated the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" exception to free speech, which even the most ardent supporters of the concept admit is important to protect.
These private institutions aren't perfect, and judging if speech breaks the one exception to the moral concept of "free speech" is hard. We'll get it wrong. The alternative, however, is to let the panic incited to occur unabated, which seems substantially worse.
The US president, perhaps the one with the most platform and audience and reach, couldn't even summon a properly armed militia, it was only a small group of mostly unarmed rioters. Their best efforts achieved precisely nothing: they did not seize any power, they did not hold any territory. It wasn't even a battle. Far from an insurrection, it was just some smashed windows and an instagram moment and now they're all in jail. Calling what happened an armed insurrection is factually inaccurate, even if a few of the rioters brought weapons.
If platform and reach are proportional to messaging effectiveness (the presumption that this sort of censorship makes) then everyone else's efforts along these lines (who isn't the president of the United States) will be substantially less effective than even this massively ineffective display in DC.
Let them squawk. Misinformation and lies simply aren't that dangerous, otherwise we would have had to ban the church centuries ago.
Americans are inundated constantly with bullshit messaging from large, powerful organizations. They aren't nearly as malleable as the pro-censorship people seem to think they are.
This isn't a legal opinion but a personal one: people who decide unilaterally for other adults what they should be allowed to read or see are assholes.
My web host is in many senses like my ISP: I don't pay them to editorialize.
In the US there is already a huge and well- (and perhaps over-)funded machinery for investigating and enforcing the law. If the laws are being broken, why not let them handle it? (This has the added benefit of applying the existing body of legal wisdom regarding state censorship.)
If the laws aren't being broken, what's the problem?
What are corporations allowed to do then, in your mind?
If gigantic multinationals and infrastructure providers stop hosting anything that might be unpopular or generate bad PR, then we quickly approach a world where the tyranny of sheep logic[1] (not what people think, but what people think other people think) will dictate the very narrow range of what products, services, media, literature, and art are available.
That world sucks and we should avoid it.
This has already mostly happened for concert venues in the US, as well as video hosting.
Already we've made a world where the basic human unclothed form is all but outlawed except in clinical (or apparently yoga) settings online. I don't think there's any upper bound to what a culture can contort into believing is unacceptable.
Wouldn't another definition of "sheep logic" just be "society", and don't we kind of all agree that society (though not without drawbacks) is vastly superior to no society?
This argument feels like frustration with the price we pay for allowing others to exist alongside us.
Having non-mainstream beliefs or opinions isn't illegal, and I don't think people should be losing their accounts and data for things that aren't illegal.
We already take that approach for public utilities; your water can't be shut off because of your political affiliation or membership in some unprotected class like BDSM practitioners.
Perhaps web and infrastructure hosting (app stores and communications systems (ie social media) included) should be approached in a similar fashion.
The pro-trumps will raise the question: "what are the other-side so afraid of, that they are trying to shut us off?" So instead of calming them down, it'll actually have the opposite effect - the feeling that the other side is much more evil than imaginable.
And the questions for bystanders will be "If the powers-that-be can snuff that side, what guarantees that I/we won't be snuffed?"
If you see the foundations of democracy, 'Freedom-of-speech' is actually a device to ensure no political party can have dictatorial powers over what the public can know. Moreover, democratic societies are actually more resilient due to these 'room-to-wiggle' - the other option will be much more violent 'revolution' experienced by dictator-states at their end.
Anyway, the other side is producing gibberish, then so be it. Just refute them properly inside a shared platform.
The problem is that you're not really addressing the actual issue, which is whether or not I can enter into agreements or not contingent on my own actions.
If I can, then it's fair for the other party of that agreement to exercise that part of the agreement and end our relationship. If I can't, then I'm not allowed agency over my own actions, nor is the other party...
Are you suggesting that groups shouldn't create terms of use that are contingent on how a service is used?
A service can today kick you off without your having ever violated the terms of use they publish.
To answer your question, our society presently restricts several types of businesses from either offering or not offering service to certain groups in various circumstances. This wouldn't really be any more of a stretch than preventing the electric company from denying you service.
But what I hear you saying is that society should not allow people to enter into agreements that would be conditional on what they use that service for, is that right?
If so, I strongly disagree.
I should be allowed to enter into agreements based on how I behave, and I expect people I enter into agreements with to abide by what they claimed they'd do, including if they agreed ahead of time that it was up to me to evaluate their behavior and judge for myself when to stop allowing them access to my service.
To deny me this right would be a violation of the concept of ownership, which I believe is a critical aspect of modern society.
This is a different discussion if you don't think people can own things (which is a fair argument, though I would have disagreements as well).
President Trump, however, played his role well. He refused to call in the military to end the insurrection, giving the rioters several hours to run rampant though the Capitol of the world’s biggest military power.
To compromise is the reaction any troll by original definition aims for. And it didn't even work to achieve any goal.
So, you have banned some controversial users. What now?
The issue is that if Twitter can't qualify how people use their site, then they're losing agency over a resource they spend a lot of time and effort maintaining. They'd have to operate at a loss for the good of the people who use it.
Should the US government run a public version of Twitter? Maybe the UN, even?
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
I also don’t agree with their equivalent person on the left.
In fact I am skeptical of most “career politicians”.
dunk on the other tribe
Anecdotal.
There are tens of millions of GOP voters, I have many friends that support GOP, non of them is a fasict.
i'm not from US - we've got a multiparty system that seems to kind of work - but I've done one of those political alignment tests for parties, got a result, and then proceeded to do a political alignment test for politicians. None of the folks I was supposedly aligned with were members of the party I was aligned with best. make of that what you will.
No, its full of corporatocrats [0]. Corporatism [1] is a political position (Wikipedia calls it an “ideology”, but it may be better to be viewed as a facet of ideology found in lots of very different ideologies; e.g., fascism includes corporatism as a component), but its not one that is particularly popular among Democrats, either in leadership or the base, neoliberal or progressive (though there definitely is a progressive corporatism that has some support.)
All of them?
All of them?
Something that some of you may have missed: This banning thing already moved into the infrastructure/cloud services layer (AWS):
Which makes sense of you believe that some listeners will simply not have the interest in jumping over to a new platform. Repeat several times and with every platform shift the audience reduces.
This research was done at a time when there was little to no backlash against Big Tech. When you factor in a billion+ people moving from one platform to another it is not the platform that is deplatforming users but it is the users abandoning the platform. I have seen it happen multiple times in my life: From Yahoo Messenger to Orkut, from Orkut to Myspace, from Myspace to Facebook. I have witnessed these shifts happen in India and it is crazy how quickly these platforms that had an established presence lose their dominance literally overnight. I bet that research you refer to hasn't included the Indian psyche in the mix. We move in hordes. All it takes is for one trusted and respected family member or relative to suggest jumping ship. Everyone just follows the leader blindly. Those companies that understand this psyche of Indians and cater to this mindset will do extremely well in India. But it is a double-edged sword. We don't have attachments to any platform. If we see that the platform is going against us, repeatedly, we just shift en-masse. I have seen it happen numerous times to know this time is no different (the most recent one that comes to mind is public orchestrated ban on TikTok after the Indo-China clashes. The Government was forced to ban TikTok after a majority of Indians demanded that it be banned). In few months WhatsApp will lose its dominance completely. The shift has only just begun.
If you don't believe me you can save this HN comment and revisit it in a few months from now.
We've seen this happen in the U.S. too with the recent conservative shift from Twitter to Facebook and Parler. If Parler does go down due to AWS pulling the plug, we will again see a shift to a new platform - it's a matter of where and when, not if.
Exactly right! No platform is permanent. No company is permanent.
To be honest, I just think this is how political infrastructure restabilizes. Heavy is the head on which sits the Crown [and vulnerable the neck], as they say. Once impedance mismatch hits critical levels, out come the fangs. Fangs coming out either prompts more impedance mismatch (crackdowns and self-preservation plays by established actors), prompting more crazy, or people start getting the message, and stability is trended back toward.
It's the most simultaneously fascinating and horrifying dynamic equilibrium problem I've ever witnessed play out in my life.
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Rate limited so editing my reply for comment below
Thanks for the link. I couldn't find it. If this is the situation then it's extremely bad. The entire situation is fucked up. We literally are in a Censorship era. But the silver lining is that now there will be serious efforts into creating a decentralised internet that isn't controlled by any Big Tech Cartel. In the same way Bitcoin was a response to 2008 economic crises. This crises will create strong alternative platforms. No doubt about it. It's no longer a matter of if but when. Incentives for an alternative internet have never been stronger.
> “We’re going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible. But we’re having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won’t work with us. Because if Apple doesn’t approve and Google doesn’t approve, they won’t.”
i've been spending ten times more time on Gab this year. just saying.
Gab is so overloaded these days it's hard to log in.
According to what the companies say:
- The President incited some people last week to engage in violent behavior at and towards Congress.
- There is evidence that further violence is being planned via a variety of platforms.
- The platforms are attempting to limit their exposure to facilitating such actions.
Some people think that the companies have ulterior motives. I will leave it to you to decide what you think the real reasons are.
Besides federated dark web anarchy, which is a nice thing to try in parallel.
This is the turning point where as a society, we need to decide where the new line for utilities needs to be, and what parts of the internet and financial systems are fundamental to maintaining the fabric of society.
What ever we decide at this crossroads, may end up haunting us for a very long time.
How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?
Isn't it already the case that it is simple to coordinate violent acts against people one doesn't agree with?
>How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?
Why wouldn't we be able to?
exactly the same point that China was making when the US politicians were supporting the Hong Kong protestors.
and similar point Fidel Castro was making when he let the Cubans escape into Florida.
We could prevent humans from using communications technology to plan violence by banning all such technology. That would be an unacceptable price imho.
There is _always_ collateral damage. You can’t ban all the bad content and only the bad content. There’s a wide range of mitigation strategies. If we discussed specifics it might possible to establish some first principles.
If end-to-end encryption were banned and the US government had full access to all private communication they might be able to stop some violence. On the other hand many governments, the US included, would likely use that power to commit violence. I would not support this particular strategy.
As always the means need to be weighed against the end.
There is always a line between black and white that some human has to look at and decide "yeah this is ban-worthy" or not. Sometimes it's obvious - sometimes it's not so much.
One example: remember that "documentary" "Loose Change" that came out after 9/11 and questioned if it was an inside job? I watched it out of curiosity at the time. It was later debunked - but if it had been just immediately removed from every site and nearly impossible to watch I think that could have had a reverse effect. Instead I was able to evaluate the details (or "misinformation", in some cases) from both sides.
So, I believe the previous poster is implying there are always going to be subjective, biased, and sometimes morally questionable issues that arise when censoring information across multiple major platforms - similar to the issue of allowing encryption vs banning it. If you could ban encryption only for child pornography distribution purposes then yes that would be great, but unfortunately that comes at a cost (and it's not like people/politicians haven't tried to do just that).
I don't think we have stepped into full great firewall of China level censorship or anything, but this is a step in that direction - for better or for worse.
For a long time "Learn to code" was a statement made by journalist to the working class about how they need to better themselves and adapt to the changing work requirements. Now it is considered harassment because it was being thrown back at the same journalists when they started losing their jobs.
Do you think that the people pushing for these laws and restrictions are doing so because they want to help your side or because they want power? And once they get the power they seek, do you think they will allow for the change you wish to enact to come to fruition, especially if it runs the risk of diminishing their power?
These sort of simplistic quips reveal that either: not much thought has gone into what your saying, or what your saying is a propagandizing effort to conceal ulterior motives.
Does it elude you that this heightened concern in quashing all discussions of violence seems to be rather targeted at a certain segment of the population? Are they the only ones that "plan violence"? Or the only ones where violence originates from?
If your goal is saying nobody "should be able to make plans involving violence," then you're saying nobody should be able to make plans of any sort without being surveiled, so that a determination can be made as to whether those plans involve violence. Who's doing the determining? What if the violence is ostensibly to an end the determiner believes is righteous?
The issues at hand are not so simple as your comment suggests, and it creates a feeling that you're trying to pull one over on people.
There are issues here that needs addressing, the events at the capitol yes, but an equally if not more important issue of how do we map old notions of private property and public property/infrastructure onto socio-techno society where these notions are converging? How do we bring the rights and norms of a healthy, functional, non-repressive society from the pre-internet world to the post internet world?
Violence pre-internet did not elicit calls of "ban all telephones," or "ban them from the telephone network," or "confiscate their printer."
We've barely begun to form the language to talk about these things, and to take in the scope and complexity of the issues arising from the way society and technology have evolved. Glib comments of "violence is bad," make it harder to discuss in a productive way.
Violence is bad. The violence at the capitol was bad. And the violence that rocked American cities all summer was bad. Great concern about quashing all discussion of violence was curiously absent this past summer? Well, discussions of it were jeered, quashed and censored unless you were praising it.
Is that a conversation you'd like to have?
My personal view happens to be that it is a good thing if people can plan violence on the internet. The alternative is to move further in the direction of state monopolisation of violence, which I view to be a move further away from democracy (and I view democracy to be a disarable thing).
Remember that the people in charge of deciding what is and is not legitimate may have their own agenda and interests that will not always align with yours, and will change over time, even capriciously
By "exposure", perhaps the commenter means possible sedition charges.
To me, this is further evidence that these websites are neither common carrier nor public forum. The telephone company is not going to cut off anyone's service because of seditious communications. Nor is any public place going to ban people from committing seditious acts there. They will just be arrested when they commit the the crime. Will any ISP terminate anyone's service for fear of enabling sedition. These companies like Google are, first and foremost, websites. The website is the company. If there is no website, there is no company.
What is interesting about this is that these websites are protected by Section 230. Are there limits to Section 230 protection. Do they end at sedition.
Times Square is just the first public place that I thought of. Not every public place is used for advertising. What if it was the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The point is that, generally, necessary permits notwithstanding, people can enter always public places and communicate with the public. That is why they are deemed public places not private ones.
I am not even sure what advertising has to do with this. Maybe I missed something in the story. I was under the impression it was a YouTube "channel" getting banned not some customer's ability to purchase ads from Google to be shown on YouTube.
If you are a website which allows users to publicly post some kind of media, and have a user base >N per year, then you have to connect your website to the public moderator API, and pay some amount for the privilege.
Social media companies don't want responsibility for moderating things people publish on them, nor the blame when they get it wrong (or when they get it right but some people disagree, or when it's just plain judgement call).
At the same time, most people probably don't trust social media companies to do that moderation correctly. Also, as individual and companies we want some certainty about the rules and access to timely recourse if we do get moderated.
Not having moderation isn't an option (see child porn etc.).
(The fact that these are international platforms makes this extra difficult.)
It isn't just ulterior motives, there is an argument to be made that they do not have the competence to police their own policies. Twitter's argument for what constituted incitement had nothing to do with the words Trump used and everything to do with the context in which they were typed.
It is impossible to use that standard of evidence for action and get fair results. If it were possible, "oh yeah everyone knows that" would be a normal standard in the court system. It isn't, because we have established through countless moral panics and knee-jerk reactions over history that higher standards are needed to get fair results.
Media companies as powerful as YouTube using substandard evidence to moderate political debate is huge news. With this standard they aren't half as suitable a platform for political news as they used to be.
Seems like whatever battle Trump and his faction was waging behind the scenes the last 4 years failed and he simply failed to win over enough power/influence to his side. We'll never know what really happened, we can just guess.
But feels like history is happening. I don't think any of us have lived to through anything like this. I know I certainly haven't.
Before 2018?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/35-times-capito...
These people are upset because they perceive that different standards are being applied to the same actions because of the politics of the actors involved. I don't think this is going to go away as a result of us clutching our pearls at the horrific violation of our sacred legislative building.
This isn't getting walked back.
what is the evidence of this intent?
why it is being banned is that it has convinced people to attack the government because they believe the government has done things (for example, “stealing elections”) that it has not done.
big tech has apparently decided that they do not want to be blamed when the government has to shoot a bunch of delusional people to stop them from committing violent crimes based on lies
what’s novel is the centralized nature of social media (in terms of # of people reached from a single source) and the fact that some incredibly wealthy companies control these sources and face an existential risk if their platforms are used to create enough civil unrest that whoever ends up controlling the government is convinced that these companies are too dangerous to leave unregulated.
We're also seeing the refusal of legal representation, which seems nearly unprecedented. At some point, the only thing left will be civil death [0].
The social network bans are businesses protecting themselves from people whom threaten their business. Like a fast food restaurant refusing to serve customers who smoke crack in the restaurant.
The platform and infrastructure bans are also businesses protecting themselves but not from people, rather from other businesses. This is on level with U-haul banning drug cartels from renting their trucks.
No one's civil liberties are being taken away
Funny, Didn't see all this crying about censorship when MC & Visa cut off pornhub...
edit: just to be clear, I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. Thats just capitalism.
I can't clobber you over the head with a product I bought just like how many countries have laws to say I can't kick you out of private property that's also a public square.
However, you can evict me from the property and charge me with trespassing, which is closer to whats happening here.. edit: Hell, you can even infringe my 2nd amendment rights and ban me from having a gun on your property!
Also, I'm not sure 'private' property can be a 'public' square. At least in New England, the town commons was public land ?
Quickly looking this up brings me to the supreme court ruling, Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins [1], which involved laws that were specific to the state of California.
Notably, the applicability of this ruling was narrowed over time. Despite this, it has been brought up as an argument in situations with circumstances that differed from those of the original ruling, where questions of its applicability can be easily raised.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
edit: I seem to remember my son's class not being able to petition in front of a grocery store in California like 20 years ago...Wonder if it had been narrowed by then?
[0] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/1... [1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/13/law-firm-drops-trum... [2] https://thenewamerican.com/new-low-democrats-approve-harassm...
If we affirm that the right to legal counsel is a human right and that corporations also receive that right, how do we protect lawyers from clients which ignore legal counsel and file frivolous that can threaten the lawyer's right to practice law?
We're entitled to an attorney when defending ourselves from criminal prosecution, but where does it say we're entitled to legal counsel at any other time?
At the end of the day Law Firms are businesses, and again these are just businesses protecting their own self interests.
If they end up needing legal counsel for a criminal trial they'll receive it. Otherwise they can just grab a phonebook and start calling ambulance chasers until they find one who will meet their other legal needs.
That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.
Even so that wouldn't apply here. Parler lost their private counsel, not their legal counsel.
Access to legal representation is similarly an ideal that can't be reduced to its partial encoding in a very flawed legal system.
Does corporate personhood extend to the idea of legal representation?
Does the right to legal representation mandate that any legal firm be compelled to provide counsel to any client who demands it?
Read the PRC's constitution some time and see all the rights that it guarantees, yet no one actually enjoys those rights. They exist on paper only.
You continually ask questions that attack positions which no one has suggested. I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions. No one said a word about "corporate personhood", for example, and no one is even talking about legal representation of corporations. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion like this.
Parler is a business, not a person.
To be clear, I don't think that the Trump lawsuits had any merit or should have been brought in the first place. But they should absolutely have been allowed to go through the normal legal process so they could be convincingly rebutted. Sending hundreds of threats to law firms should not be a political tactic in a democracy. That does nothing but give ammunition and validity to conspiracy theorists.
Your first comment was responding to someone talking about AWS, Apple, and Google dropping Parler. The discussion was around the right of lawyers to drop clients, clients being so toxic that no one is willing to represent them, legal counsel as a right, and the ramifications of a client being unable to secure counsel.
No one was talking about mass harassment but you.
> I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions.
You're trying to argue something completely out of context. That 80% of comments you're ignoring are about the topic at hand.
Alternatively (or additionally) they could move the damage from the server side to the client: think OSes and browsers, not to mention hardware. It won't be long before "secure boot" technologies prevent people from installing "extremist" operating systems.
At the very least, I hope this encourages companies to backup their Cloud data frequently and separately.
https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/link-a-domain/#...
I don't want this to sound wrong, but I perceive most of the people complaining about censorship to be hypocrites. They'd be the first to censor if they were in charge of these platforms. They are some of the first to ban in moderated communities like reddit.
The reason they're upset is because they are not in control. I think in some ways they are like the people scared of change, and the once change has taken place they are scared of not being in control.
Based on what? I and many people I'm close to in real life are constantly concerned about these escalating erosions of expression and all prefer the less-moderated corners of the internet. None of us have ever sought out control and grew up consistently annoyed at one-sided media outlets, even if they represented the perspective we happened to agree with at the time. If we still use reddit (most of us are falling off), it tends to be a small subset of niche communities that don't focus on meta-politics or have auto-banning protocols. These are the people I see complaining about this around me. Is it just because I'm not on twitter?
Heck, I signed up for Gab and was almost immediately banned from the entire site after sharing my liberal opinion.
> The reason they're upset is because they are not in control.
Do you notice how that starts me, as someone who is firmly anti-censorship, off on the defensive as you seem to view me as an insincere or stupid bad guy?
> I think in some ways they are like the people scared of change, and the once change has taken place they are scared of not being in control.
As a general principle I’m for the idea that we aught to allow free expression of ideas, especially online since that is the way to share ideas. Life happens very differently for people even just domestically in the US, and when our viewpoints come into conflict I’d rather understand what they have to say and talk about it. How is that possible to do when there’s a party in the middle that is able to determine what you’re not allowed to read? I'm scared of not being in control of that and thus censorship in general, not about having my version of truth be published.
It's so unfortunate we don't have that anymore though. I wonder who's responsible for that...
*Modulo DDOS attacks. Maybe Cloudflare et al should also be required by law to serve everyone regardless of content.
https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitaloceans-position-on-...
Other services include Twilio, Okta Zendesk, Sendgrid, Stipe, etc.
I’m sure some of my conservative friends would laugh if I told them this site makes me look like Regean in comparison to some others.
All good fun of course. I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion and ones I disagree with shouldn’t be hidden, but that itself is just my opinion.
As a result there’s been a wave of deplatforming of the voices that helped encourage that culture.
It is indeed unfortunate that this came to pass but it was a necessary response.
When you test the limits and protections, you ultimately change the nature of them. This is why you really want to avoid doing so in a free society because then you’re faced with the negatives of being forced to restrict freedoms to prevent that test from happening again and facing the threat of the next time someone trying, them having learned the lessons of how to test the limits much more effectively.
A good analysis article around _why_ technology companies are moving in one direction on moderation policy at once? Yes. Excellent.
As-it-happens news articles? Ehhh. Not as much. There are other places on the internet for that sort of thing.
Republicans getting their just desserts as viewed through the lens of the new normal of social media content policy sure gratifies my intellectual curiosity, for what it's worth.
That said, I will admit that our comments sections sucks ass on these topics which is perhaps reason enough to avoid them. But that's a reason I accept unlike "lol it's just one dumb podcast cmon."
Please tell me where on the internet you can get better discussion on these topics than here? This is one of the few places where these things can even be discussed by people with opposing viewpoints without instantaneous flamewar apocalypse.
> these discussions are far inferior to what is typical here.
Thats probably true, people here have political opinions and values but they aren't policy wonks. Perhaps there is (or could be) an hn equivalent for pols and wonks and they would have really invigorating discussions about policy and rarely flame each other because they were past that level. Then every so often someone would post something about programming a universal remote controller and they'd flame each other about technical topics and each others' ignorant opinions on how humans and machines interact.
> There might even be some interesting points being made about the role of technology in all this, but they're being drowned out by the purely political back-and-forth.
I'm just happy that people with different viewpoints are learning from each other. People with different viewpoints don't really learn from each other on most other platforms. They basically only learn to emulate the rhetorical jabs that score points.
But they recognize that reality sometimes intrudes into our money-making daydream, and it would be low IQ to ban political discussions. I am critical of the overall thrust behind HN, but they have cleverly convinced a lot of people that they are above average and I wouldn't expect them to do anything heavy-handed. So some politics will remain on HN.
I'm from Europe and slowly getting tired of this. It is not what I come to HN for. Not everyone lives and breathes America.
The tone of this place _should_ be curated. We're tech, we're educated, we're start ups. If we lose that, we lose our soul.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10419/...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/algorithms-take-ov...
https://theconversation.com/youtubes-algorithms-might-radica...
> Does YouTube create extremists? A recent study caused arguments among scientists by arguing that the algorithms that power the site don’t help radicalise people by recommending ever more extreme videos, as has been suggested in recent years.
why are you misrepresenting your sources?
Why aren't you reading the article? So many questions, so few answers.
content was the key word there.
Engagement algorithms are driving extremism. Outrageous, inflammatory, even seditious political speech is more "engaging" than reasonable speech.
So until we can reform engagement algorithms, we will indeed have to keep playing whac-a-mole. With uglier and uglier moles.
1. horrified by trump, always have been 2. aren't concerned that trump will unilaterally end our business if we oppose him anymore 3. are extremely concerned about american democracy and our lives, given the way trump has convinced almost half the country that the election was rigged, which has encouraged them to almost kill an entire branch of our government
AND BEAT ONE POLICE OFFICER TO DEATH WITH AN AMERICAN FLAG WHILE CHANTING THE MUTATIONAL ANTHEM
we in big tech are not robots, sir.
You instead have to say what people literally think/thought: that Russians hacked the democrats to release more emails and the like.
Nobody thought the russians hacked the actual election to change votes and the like, just that they influenced it illegally at the behest of the trump campaign
I was just out of high school during the Snowden leaks and have watched Americans who were at that time indifferent or considered him a traitor continue to spend time on these platforms over the years. The outrage then seems to have existed almost exclusively amongst the paranoid and those who have considered the effects of individual privacy in a democracy. This was always bound to happen, and it seems internally inconsistent to me in a capitalist free market for any individual to only now (post 2016) hold these companies accountable for perceived infringements if that same individual has up until now continued to use these platforms despite the public knowledge.
Put another way, if America's culture of public discourse had been of a higher quality back then, and our political apathy lower, this would not be such a surprise to as many people. It probably would be a non-issue, because we would have utilized any number of other readily available technologies for organization and communication to replace the products built by companies that exist strictly to create revenue for their stakeholders.
Throughout Trump's presidency they have been constantly fighting Trump since, rather than trying to stay in his good graces. So I don't buy that it's about power.
"Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere."
What kind of civilized person would advocate this type of behavior, much less a member of Congress? And why is this acceptable when Bannon's (admittedly nasty) comment isn't?
But sure in general you're right, calls for harassment shouldn't be tolerated either.
Note that at no point were these administration officials threatened with violence, just people telling them they're bad people.
Otherwise, you have to take this "are you daft" comment as assault
It's extremely dangerous, usually deadly, and that's why it's a crime.
If they incite violence perhaps they will
>I believe flagging and moderation and proscribing individual videos is better than banning channels outright and deplatforming.
That may indeed be a better course of action, though when you have habitual offenders, in this case bannons channel got 4 warnings, its a huge burden on you to keep checking each and every video, and the violence gets incited while you spend time checking.
Especially when the person is obviously saying it -“behead Fauci”.
Bannon has a way to get his message out - he has his own media organization.
Many people don’t feel like what Bannon is doing is right and don’t need a court of law to tell them. Courts of law defended slavery - people made decisions prior to the courts interference to change that.
Small government requires the ability of private groups to choose their own moral stances.
Both of these are the smart opinions to hold.
I'm wondering if this is not the result of the ultra loud vocal minority once again?
Having numbers doesn't equate to having equal or greater power.
This forum has been a place for corporate Libertarianism to flourish, and I have been here for a few years even though I am not the kind of user who gets alot of karma. I have never seen any very popular anarcho-libertarianism here, because it is not very profitable.
You're right that there's likely opportunity for some disruptive differentiation. That often comes from the outside rather than established companies, and also we tend to hear about the few successful disrupters and not the many, many more failures.
People been saying google/fb/apple is too big to compete, to me this seem like golden opportunity.
And I say that as a French dude.
It is going to end badly for everyone.
1 - I realize this can range anywhere from emotional calls to protest up to the “clear and imminent danger” doctrine. And the specifics of the “inciting” and context around it certainly matter too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claim...
Arguably, it took election results. Easier to do what is right when the wind blows the right way.
That's why valor only exists in the presence of opposition.
Facebook, Twitter, Google and AWS had 4-6 years to make the same choice made in the last few days. Yet they refused, again and again.
“YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel hours after Rudy Giuliani appeared on an episode and blamed the Capitol siege on Democrats”
At some point the lies need to stop.
Help me out here, Hacker News. This guy thinks: "Democrats attacked the capital", is an opinion.
How do we even talk to this person?
We saw last Wednesday that it's no longer safe to ignore them.
"They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
[1] The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPgDQkmqqM
Either he has it or he doesn't.
The problem is many people act like evidence doesn't exist - just like with voter fraud.
Adults can talk to each other and listen ideas and make up their own mind without Daddy Tech deciding for them what's right or wrong. It's called personal responsibility and it's theoretically the corner stone of western society.
When "bad" ideas are removed from the public eye... they grow underground. The way to fight them is to make them public where truth will prevail.
We're fully post-fact now, and it's not just Republicans playing this game.
That is an opinion.
That's not an opinion, it's a statement of fact whose truth can be evaluated. About the only thing that is even slightly ambiguous is how you define "Trump people", but given that essentially every person that has been identified in the insurrection has been shown to have documented pro-Trump views, what else would you call them?
So what about this statement isn't provably false to you?
The lack of -context- irks me far more than any other issue here - particularly when the context is so damning.
I’m always more frustrated with those with facts on their side when they fail to argue properly than with those who are wrong. Being wrong is easy - the burden of argument is on the intelligent - not the slow witted.
Are you actually serious? Did you miss the all the videos of the mob battling police? How do you think that cop was killed (hint: he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher)? Yes, there were some videos of cops basically giving up and retreating from being outnumbered, but to say "no one really even tried to stop them. That sentiment seems true on its face." is just bullshit.
That's an impressive attempt to rescue the statement, but he didn't say “No Trump supporter scaled the walls”, he said “No one who scaled the walls was a Trump supporter.” While in a formal logic sense, of no one scaled the walls the latter would be true, it's not something anyone basically familiar with spoken English would use to express that concept; it is what you would say to acknowledge that the wall was scaled and deny the people doing it were Trump supporters.
And, in any case, forcible entry did occur, both through positions on the perimeter surrounding the building (prompting the perimeter to be generally collapsed as the guards at other points were then surrounded) and at some of the external entrances to the building (of which there is video), and at internal barricades (in one case, prompting deadly force to keep the mob away from withdrawing threatened civilians.)
And in some of those cases, there were people known to have been Trump supporters involved.
So, it's both an implausible interpretation and even if it was what he was claiming pretty clearly false, too.
I have to say, if you don't recognize the ambiguity it contains, you don't have a strong grasp on the language or you were not reading what was written. He's either saying that they weren't Trump people or that they weren't scaling the walls. It's not obvious which one he means.
But lying is enough to get you banned?
All the discussion up to now was "there's no slippery slope, only calls for violence" will get you banned.
And now it's slipped to lying will get you banned?
It wasn't on Tuesday. It is now. Things are clearer.
The lies were frankly only the proximate cause. Bannon and his guests have often veered into the kind of violent rhetoric that begat Wednesday's assault on congress. Bringing Giuliani on to continue to inflame people makes it clear Bannon has no intention of stopping. So he's out.
Rest assured, though, lying will continue to be allowed except for this one lie for this one moment in time until this blows over. Google will be happy to let any content through as long as it makes money and they can get away with it without facing consequences.
Do not let GAFA evade responsibility just because they're scrambling to pull the plug after 7 years of digital sectarian chaos.
Will this not lead to all posts having to be moderated before being published? Do we really want to go down that path, and the inevitable removal of many open discussion forums that will be unable to effectively moderate content?
This is a very difficult problem but I don't think the solution is to hold hosting organisations either legally or morally responsible for the content they carry.
Where does this leave the voice of minority groups that for some reason are seen as "unacceptable" to the majority of the population?
Should a non-religious voice in a religious society be banned from talking just because they express it would be nice if women could drive cars?
Should we ban the gay person who talks about the shitty treatment they get when trying to get medical treatment just because they live in a primarily heterosexual society.
Should we stop a group organising protests against deaths at official hands just because they are really pissed off and there is some potential that official organisation may react badly to the protest.
Personally I find the language and behaviour of your president and his cronies to be completely unacceptable and frankly unhinged. However would you prefer them standing in public sprouting their rubbish where we can all hear them and point out the ridiculousness of their words, or would you prefer to have them hide away in private, able to say whatever they want with no chance of opposing voice?
I don't really know what the answer to this movement is. I know one of the answers is better education, teaching people critical thinking, but I don't know that this is going to be something that happens quickly. What I do know is that you can never win somebody to your point of view unless you actually engage with them, rather than just tell them they are wrong and cut them off.
To quote a song that escapes me at the moment, we need to "Keep on Talking"!
Imagine that all the news agencies actually spread the lie. Imagine that for the next 4 years of Biden's presidency, they would talk non-stop about election fraud, how he's illegitimate, and how there needs to be an investigation. Imagine that the opposition party appointed a special investigator who's sole mission was to take down Biden by uncovering fraud.
Now imagine that after 4 years, it turned out that all the evidence for fraud was actually based on lies, opposition research, or fabricated dossiers. The investigation found some other issues - but nothing that could take down Biden. Turns out they tarnished the presidency for four years for no good reason. You think apologies would be in order right?
Yet that's exactly what the Russian collusion narrative was. A lie. A four year lie perpetrated by the Liberal media, the Democrats - including very prominent leaders who openly lied to people's faces - as well as some members of the intelligence agencies.
So why didn't those lies need to stop? How would Democrats react if they had to deal with 4 years of fraud investigations, #Resistance, #NotMyPresident?
And let me be clear, I think these will be remarkably similar events in a way that's going to look almost comical in hindsight.
Imagine the outrage Democrats would have had if instead of being investigated, the courts had simply dismissed the Russian collusion narrative? If they marched, looted, and rioted with the courts entertaining the investigation, how bad would it have gotten if the Republicans of 2016 acted like the Democrats of 2020?
I'm sorry, did you not live through the entire Obama presidency?
The asymmetry that GP describes is real, and everyone should be wary about the way politics are carried out now.
That's false equivalency. There is 1000+ page report by the Republican led senate about Trump and Russia. It's highly suggestive that the senate was investigating him because of his and his associate ties with Russia. And Russia also interfered in the election to boot. No one knows the full truth yet and we may never know it.
As opposed to the election fraud claims from 2020: they are just baseless accusations from Trump that have no evidence to warrant further investigation and got thrown out of every court. If they turn out to be legitimate concerns, I'm sure the senate will investigate them.
BTW, most news media is overly dramatic regardless of which way it leans.
https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-el...
> The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion. Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016.
What part of this was a lie?
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/708850903/read-the-full-muell...
"On November 5, 2020, Twitter permanently suspended Bannon after he called for Dr Anthony Fauci to be beheaded in an episode."
It's good they finally pulled the trigger, but considering that Steven Bannon has been constantly putting oil to the fire on every single channel available, that point was very certainly much earlier.
I can't really see this being a big deal, Bannon's got enough wealth to make his own website.
With a physical location, "banned" sometimes implies they've been declared a persona non grata, and the police will be called if they return. Clearly that doesn't apply to an online platform.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/suspended
suspended = Caused to stop for a while; interrupted or delayed.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banned
banned = Forbidden; not allowed.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oxymoron
oxymoron = A figure of speech in which two words or phrases with opposing meanings are used together intentionally for effect.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tautology
tautology = Redundant use of words
And I would suggest '[permanent] suspension' may have connotations of a statement about reversibility. 'We have the ability to reverse this action [but we intend not to exercise that ability, ever].'
If you suspended someone and then said 'we're making your suspension permanent', it sounds like a 'cute'/think-you're-on-a-soap-opera way of saying 'you're now fired/expelled(/as applicable)'. Suspensions end. Even a suspension bridge for example is alluding to some temporal aspect, the natural outcome (gravity having its way) would be different.
Whatever form that innovation takes, I wonder if it will ultimately be the new standard and we'll all ultimately be on it and be facing the same problem again.
How come this person has not been prosecuted yet?
So you cannot tell lies on the internet? What happens to religion, then?
It seems to me that Trump is in the same position if you ask his devotees.
The existance of god is an extraordinary claim with no evidence.
At some point the lies need to be brought to court.
The cost of producing lies is way lower than producing real journalism.
I mean sure with Parler it worked because of the coordinated effort of Apple, Google and Amazon, but can we always count on that?
Wouldn't it be better to have a centralised authority that regulates these things, with the legal authority to shut down any service that broadcasts lies and evil things? Like a Ministry of Truth.
To avoid people lying to each other in private conversations, I think it would be best if messaging services would also fall under their control, how else could we stop people from texting conservative propaganda to their friends?
huge if true
If you say "Democrats have ignored certain classes of Americans and pushed them to the brink and this is the result" - it's a heavily editorial opinion
The press overall uses these types of editorial lies daily.
The Guardian today is Blaming the existence of COVID on Boris Johnson, unsurprisingly. To me it's a stretch, and basically a lie, but well within editorial distortions we can expect these days.
I'm not fan of either of those Giuliani/Bannon fools, but this kind of 'lie' I don't think is ban-worthy.
Youtube might be using current political conditions I think to go after those they don't like.
If Giuliani was on the podcast actively calling for further acts of sedition - like he was at the rally a few days ago - then it would be a ban for sure. But he's not, so it's not.
We are in a situation where all sides of the argument are essentially lies (to someone) because of how we have had events framed for us. Is the media responsible? Depends on who you don’t like. Is Pizzagate or Russiagate real? Conspiracies have flown in all directions.
Lie itself is a term that is more persuasive than falsehood. When i hear someone call something a lie i tend to ignore everything that person says.
Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Lie or falsehood? If you don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, call it a lie. I think using the term lie itself is a self-contained conspiracy theory. One is assuming that what they are hearing is not just wrong, but not worth investigating because the person saying it doesn’t actual believe it.
Even Fox news - after the election - was careful not to directly support Trump's false claims. Instead, they 'sympathized' with voters who 'felt disenfranchised' - which is a kind of indirect lie, but not a 'straight up lie'.
Even when facts are contentious we can still get the word out.
We absolutely need integrity in the system at all levels - which is why having a President that completely fabricates stories, it's a problem.
The press has been bending reality more since the election of Trump, which is why his presence adds to the toxicity - it just creeps into everything. It's why, despite however much some might agree with his policies, they come at an addition 'hidden cost' of the erosion of integrity in some of these systems.
We all have to play our part and try to be as objective as we can I guess.
The system needs integrity to work but it needs discipline to maintain it. Now it has neither.
Political pressure creates an us vs them mentality where reality must pass through a filter to get to the public and whoever controls this filter wins. This is the battleground of divide but it is also how we know what’s going on. This is why we have several versions of events and one’s belief in a version is entirely dependent on one’s political views, not evidence. Evidence is tacked on after the fact.
One thing I like to do is give people the benefit of the doubt. This helps me understand where they are coming from in their own words. Most people on any side of any discussion are decent and deserve to be heard.
Who needs to stop them?
By which authority?
Who decides what is a lie and what is truth?
Who cross-checks them when they're inevitably wrong?
By which authority?
Simple dismissals like this miss the point. Until there are some good answers to these questions, kneejerk censorship is no solution at all.
Stating falsehoods should absolutely not be grounds for censorship, even the private kind undertaken by hosting providers.
I am also not advocating for compelled speech.
Very soon, it will be impossible to buy webscale hosting from anywhere but a half-dozen providers. Should those providers be the sole and exclusive authority of what is or is not allowed on the web?
Airlines aren't permitted the authority to decide who flies and who doesn't. Why is AWS?
This isn't a constitutional issue, or even an American one. It's one about the place that censorship has in our civilization.
A tiny number of infrastructure providers should not have a unilateral ability to veto unpopular speech, especially considering, as we just witnessed, the definition of unpopular can change on a dime with the wind.
Today, it's Parler and Stormfront. What will become the target of censorship in five years? Ten?
Increasingly services are linked to our identities, and bans are lifetime. Will creating new accounts after political wind direction changes endanger one's data storage, email, contact lists, or hosting/publishing ability one day? How many individual people or organizations are really provider-independent and could survive losing all of their data at a host because they once belonged to the wrong faction?
Don't underestimate this risk.
Net neutrality could cover the above.
It is not our responsibility to ensure that every lunatic, child abuser or whatever can have their content promoted via content platforms.
Bannon routinely calls for violence - against members of all parties.
Free speech is not dead and this is not even a case of free speech. YouTube has banned other people calling for violence.
Companies can choose what to promote.
I think this is censorship. There is no viable alternative to Youtube and that is the main issue. If there was 3 services as large as youtube, I would have no issue with the exclusion from one of them but now there aren't.
Fuck big tech and their censorship.
There have been brief periods in time when there were more than two significant parties in the US. Just after the constitution was written is one — it didn’t take long for parties to be established. Another example was the time period around when the Whig party disintegrated and the Republican party was established. There was the moment in that fallout in 1856 when the Know Nothing party got a few electoral votes, on a platform that is a direct ideological ancestor of Trumpism.
My understanding is that the presidential system also tends to favor two-party politics. The Federalists and Democratic-Republicans formed from pro- and anti-administration factions during Washington's presidency, while the Democrats and Whigs formed in support and opposition to Jackson.
I think the questions is, would switching away from first-past-the-post system to something that fruits more parties help in decreasing polarization?
Do you mean this in the US context specifically or in general? There are plenty of countries with more than two parties and very stable governments.
Is there any proof that the rioters wearing Auschwitz Tshirts, carrying Trump and Confederate flags who were told by the President that he loves them were Democrats?
YouTube, Twitter or whatever are private property but they are increasingly being used for political discourse on both sides this would not be a probably except that the parent companies are very obviously partisan in they're application of "rules".
This is the old both sides are equal argument which is wrong.
Can you please give a source where a democrat President wanted to "find the votes by putting pressure on election officials or when he told violent protestors that they are good people and the President loves them?
How are we measuring this scale please? I'm uncertain.
Did Trump not tell the rioters that he loves them and that they are special?
I'm just showing an example where a Presidential candidate pretended to support a movement that had violent elements in it.
Said candidate repudiated their support after being elected, lying to his voters in the process.
No that is not the right example, do you have proof that Biden call the violent protestors that they are special and that he loves them like Trump?
In fact he and his running-mate have both played with this support to attract more votes.
You are literally grasping at straws here. Show us the proof where he said those violent supporters are special and he loves them like what Trump did. Biden has said that he does not support the BLM violence.
Where is the proof that Biden tried to "find" 11,000 votes by putting pressure on election officials.
What do we expect from a population of people that only hear these lies, day in and day out? They're going to react just like they did on 1/6.
Should Fox News have their licenses removed, and be taken off the air & internet?
[0] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fox-news-stops-airing...
That said, given the increasing irrelevance of broadcast TV, I don't see how removing their licence would achieve much.
A rallying call like that simply doesn’t work on Democrats, but god does it work on Republicans. I just don’t see any of this dying down at all, and the Republicans are always prepared to tap into this demo around election time (in two years time at the mid terms). They live for this.
Banning them just validated their world view. This is all going to get even bigger now, and they will head into the catacombs.
Sanders coalition is about the only grassroots group that came from the left and was swiftly rejected (twice).
The grass roots movements of the tea party took the Obama era super majority away, and fortified a Trump outsider run.
The boots on the ground every-man on the left is harder to rally, and thus far have not shown any ability to even dominate their own party (their platforms don’t even get taken up by the broader party, just parroted). Plus, if it were possible, there would be a voice in the mainstream media stoking this contingent (as in business has identified an obvious market).
The Democrats lack physical presence. It’s been an ongoing issue for us for a very long time. We had extreme issues with getting our youth vote out, getting our minority votes out. It literally took a black President to get that demo to show up, and for some reason they stopped showing up right after he was gone (for Hilary). The kids don’t turn out at all for decades now. Many could argue if we didn’t literally send out mail in ballots, the turn out would have been lower. Republicans don’t have this problem, so no, I don’t think a warcry works on the Democrats because we have been very weak on physical presence for decades now.
But in terms of madness, of course, all mobs are susceptible to this. Virtual turn out on the left is disproportionately high. The #metoo and BLM movements are clear examples of this. But again, the physical presence is lacking. The riots last summer were a blip and not coordinated, and led to zero legislation. I’ll concede #metoo inevitably entered into madness territory.
The Republican tea-party people have been practicing for years protesting in DC, and they have their physical turnout covered in almost every election.
If anything, I envy the right-wing’s ability to rally, and do not fear rally-calls on the left because we can barely show up for an election.
Also a quick google search showed that 75% of the Tea Party were 45 or older (back in 2012).
My take is that there’s a desperation behind the last 20 years or so.
Haven’t you wondered what would cause an entire segment of the population to take a deep dive with thinly-disguised racists and Russian trolls?
Even having a balanced budget hasn't worked out for "the right". When they've been in power, the budget deficit hasn't really decreased.
Perhaps this has made "the right" more desperate? Maybe they need to rethink their principles instead?
(I use quotation marks for the sides, because these really aren't issues that fit on a one dimensional scale. A libertarian could fall on the right, but still support "the left" on most of the above issues. Also, this is mostly US specific.)
The Democratic establishment is in danger of this fate in the long term as well. They are sure taking the easy money from the progressive talk, but if they don’t deliver, it’s going to backfire in 2-3 elections from within.
In my opinion that is a good property in general, just no for elections.
Rail all you like about it, but the republicans under Trump had both houses, got two judges, defunded a vast number of programs, won multiple issues in their identity wars, and donald trump got more voters to come out and vote for him in the second election
He got more votes, despite having a 40-45(?) approval rating (what I remember from 538)
The only “mistake” was riling up democrats enough to make them come out and vote more.
What are the repercussions?
There will be political roadblocks to see how much damage can be offloaded or dumped into a heat sink.
The republicans will regroup and then prepare for the Biden presidency.
So yes, you are right - madness was/is the superior political tactic. The better tactic survives.
Sounds like a good start. They have been involved in laundering terrorist rhetoric and incitement to mass attacks. Take the case of Fox employing Tucker Carlson.
Tucker owns Daily Caller.
Daily Caller published an article extolling the virtues of ISIS-style ramming attacks against protestors.
Fox News republished this article. The result was a spike in ramming attacks against protestors.
Fox gracefully pulled the article after complaints, no blow back since it wasn't their own article anyways. Nothing to see here, just entities paying each other and relaying each other's incitement.
There has to be at least a dozen people at Fox News that need to be imprisoned for their role in pursuing death and violence against political and cultural opponents. So yes lets do the steps you mentioned then move on to discovery so we can find out how execs at Fox measured success when publishing incitement.
Something you would have expected from the "liberal" media pre 2010.
US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed with Fox's premise, adding that the network "persuasively argues" that "given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes."
https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-karen-mcdougal-case...
It's the "any reasonable viewer arrives with an appropriate amount of skepticism" part that seems to be the problem.
Of course, 1% of trump voters may be giving the 99% a bad name.
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/533452-poll-18-percent-of-...
Edit: this post itself has swung between 3 and -1 over just an hour!
More data needed, but it could be an example of folks not realizing how hot the potato was in the first poll. And dropped it by the second poll.
We’re necessarily talking about an absolutely insane and unhinged group of people. It doesn’t mean that you can go around encouraging and feeding that level of crazy and not expect bad things to happen.
That's actually very common these days. The mainstream has no control over the fringe. In a similar vein, when anarchists in Portland tried to burn down the Federal courthouse, there was silence from much of the Democrat political establishment.
To be clear I don't ever want to see guns or explosives at a protest, nor do I want to see riots, but I also understood the anger last summer and found it difficult to condemn it when the people most affected were at their wit's end. I get the sense that last week's protestors were in a similar mindset, but their reasoning was highly flawed and easily debunked.
I'm sure anyone coming at this from a different perspective would see my view as hypocritical and I recognize that, but there's a feeling in my heart I can't shake about what happened last summer when it came to police brutality, one that can't easily be broken by a whataboutism.
No degree of injustice gives people ethical license to destroy the livelihoods of people who had no role in said injustices.
I found the media silence on the violence and destruction over the summer, as a means to further their political objectives, absolutely repugnant.
I equally condemn the Capitol Hill rioters and hope they all face long prison sentences.
Do not allow violence to be partisan. Whether it's attempting to burn down a courthouse in Portland, or trashing the capital building, laws and gov't are all that keep civilization together.
What about CNN? They are as biased as Fox News.
Sometimes, there just aren't two sides to a story, or more accurately one side is true and the other believes they had the biggest inauguration crowd ever.
The rest of the world clearly sees this. I'll openly admit to being a left-leaning liberal, but even my friends who vote right wing think that Trump is an embarrassment.
They can all do this to each other because they are all guilty of it. Cable news is a tower of partisan propaganda.
Traditional media definitely has flaws, but rejecting them in favor of social media because of it is an absurd and incredibly destructive reaction.
There seems to be some kind of law that the larger a media outlet is, the more partisan it gets. Which is why social media is like the Exxon Valdez crashed into Deepwater Horizon and caught on fire.
On any given day, two different perspectives agreeing to intellectually consider why the other side is objectively incorrect (as in, not just agreeing they are simply different) is a serious undertaking. If you casually take any topic, every single day, and allow people to do the thought experiment that one argument is more valid in a casual manner, you will 100% have to cut corners because you did not seriously approach the task. The most obvious way is you paint an enemy, or the notion of the other, an idea of a threat.
The average person in NYC really has no business having a dinner time objective discussion with someone from Missouri about gun ownership. Really the discussion should come down to ‘we have a lot space and gun culture in Missouri and it’s something we enjoy’, followed by ‘Interesting, it’s not the biggest thing here in NYC actually’. That’s about it.
But if there is an institution, I don’t know, let’s call it a fight club (the media), that says ‘you two at dinner, get ready to fight’, the two contestants will fight in an inexperienced way. Hair pulling, throwing rocks, no real jabs, conditioning, submissions, no fight experience.
It is not a casual ordeal to debate, and this is what the media is making people do.
We are not ready amongst ourselves to debate constitutional law and the rights of man, and the compromises needed to maintain society. It’s a serious thing to enter into that discussion.
The only take away I see in all of this is that there is a market for the un-serious, and there are some serious people (media) interested in that market.
Fox (to say nothing of the absolute swamp that is OANN or Newsmax) are an order of magnitude worse than the so called "left" channels (only in the US would CNN be considered a left wing news channel).
The reason that CNN, etc are "biased" against Trump is because reality is bisaed against Trump. He's just a terrible president, a lousy business man and an awful human.
Again, only in the US would that be considered a controversial statement.
And yes, all the news channels are equally terrible. This is not at all hard to find, but it may be hard to accept.
And only in the US would someone be so insular as to make such a statement :)
The US is still the largest economy in the world. As much as the rest of us would love to turn a blind eye when they elect an incompetent sociopath, unfortunately, we have to deal with his bullshit.
The rest of the world is not a single monolithic group either so I don't see the point of your sweeping generalizations.
signed,
A Brit.
Nonsense. Of course, people’s opinion of internal politics is relevant. If it wasn’t, we’d still have apartheid in South Africa, for example.
And no, the rest of the world is not a single monolithic group, but the vast majority of it (especially in comparable western democracies) thinks trump is a laughing stock.
The good news is that your cognitive function is not permanently lost, it can be quickly recovered by just turning off the TV and reading a book, playing with the dog or going on a long walk.
Yes, keeping up with current events is an important part of being a good citizen but there are quickly diminishing returns on that and it’s never worth sacrificing parts of your life and livelihood for.
I’d encourage speaking for yourself
Kind regards (Part of) The rest of the world
In Germany, we have the section §130 StGB in our criminal code: incitement to hatred. While it would be extremely hard if not impossible to get a TV station such as Fox News to be banned here, its hosts/mouthpieces/guests could certainly be sanctioned - up to actual jail time.
Also, our core media codex ("Medienstaatsvertrag") binds all broadcasting stations - radio, TV, streaming - to journalistic integrity and truthful reporting (§§6, 19, 51 MStV).
> What about CNN? They are as biased as Fox News.
I have yet to see a report that CNN broadcasts people that claim that the election was "stolen" or "manipulated". There is a massive difference between biased reporting and openly distributing lies.
Oftentimes that's all it takes. Pick the facts you report. You aren't reporting anything "false", but the truth isn't being depicted.
From what I've heard Fox reports that millions believe there was fraud. Not that there was actual fraud. I haven't fact checked this, because it came from a left leaning source and I believed it.
Not without risking violating the part about "journalistic integrity". Of course there was and will always be some sort of bias (e.g. the tabloid BILD is famous for being on the right wing), but it's nowhere near the scale of Fox News.
You may have missed it being in Germany, but for 3 years CNN, NYT, MSNBC, et al reported 24/7 that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election. The Justice Dept spent millions thoroughly investigaing that claim and it turned out to be all lies.
The bipartisan senate intelligence report clearly lays out connections between Trump's campaign and Russian intelligence, see page 27, 178, 527, among many many others:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
You are correct in that the justice department's investigation was flawed, it did not force Trump to answer questions under oath. However, we have Trump's own words: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you find Hillary's emails."
> The Justice Dept spent millions thoroughly investigaing that claim and it turned out to be all lies.
The Mueller investigation paid for itself in civil forfeiture ($42-46m) after convicting Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager of tax fraud, wire fraud and other financial crimes and got convictions of ten defendants. The only reason they did not indict Trump was in deference to a memo that the Justice department cannot indict a sitting president.
This led to the legendary response of ramen guy pointing out that the first amendment says exactly that.
Yes. Failing that let's do what was done to the cigarette industry -- figure out how to make them legally liable for the death they cause.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
ref: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66643-he-who-knows-only-his...
I don’t have a magic-wand solution to this (and I’d be surprised if such a solution exists), but we’ve just witnessed what happens if you let people argue endlessly in bad faith without consequence, and what happened was not good.
Perhaps your way is the least-bad outcome overall? I wouldn’t know, but you do not appear to have made that argument.
You are absolutely right that CNN is biased. They clearly are not trying to make it seem as though they aren't. The same with Fox, who are equally biased. However, only only of those outlets lets their reporters outright lie.
Now, it may be that I'm looking in the wrong places, but if I were to see lies on CNN in the same way as I see it on Fox, I'll be happy to change my mind, but right now I think it's pretty clear which one needs to be curbed.
Fox also allows comments on their stories. A lot of the real hateful stuff can be found there, and section 230 allows Fox to wash their hands of that. Perhaps Trump was on to something when he was campaigning to have it revoked? (the last part is sarcasm, of course).
Edit note: (this post has been downvoted into oblivion. I honestly have no idea which "side" have been doing the downvoting. I wonder if it's because the downvoters misunderstood what I was saying, or if they did understand and simply disagree)
You can't very well let the fickle populace decide such important things without a little nudging.
Some examples... Clinton Server Controversy Concluded years later nothing illegal took place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...
Mueller Report Concluded years later collusion did not take place (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/24/attorney-general-william-bar...)
I'm sure millions still believe everything they let these outlets of their choice pump in their brain and get them revved up. For me it's all garbage (political drama) ... not to waste my time on.
Ahh, the "both sides" argument. No, Fox News and CNN are not the same. The fact that you believe this... I'm not going to try to dissuade you. I don't have that much free time.
I think she would have been a really decent president, even though I think she has an unpleasant media personality.
They are angry because they lost and they are being told that they didn't lose. If you can be told that anything you don't like is the case then you will always be "unheard."
MLK didn't make this statement so that anyone who was unhappy could justify violence.
You can't just live in unreality and pretend you're a victim. Either you can't see it for some reason or you do see it and you're pretending you don't.
The anger is what got Trump elected in the first place.
> MLK didn't make this statement so that anyone who was unhappy could justify violence.
No, but it's a reflection of a common symptom, not a justification. Silencing begets violence _because_ it's all that's left.
The pen is mightier than the sword, but when you take the pen away, what are they left with?
Jobs. Opioid deaths. Suicides. Life expectancy. Standards of living. Manufacturing erosion. Lack of a future. Lack of wealth creation. Rural and middle class erosion. Education costs. Healthcare costs. Endless war. Shitty rotting infrastructure. Mismanagement of the US fiscal house by worthless political elites obsessed with their own petty bubbles in DC. A mediocre social safety net despite enormous government spending. Corporate-government-lobby coordination to endlessly pillage the people (eg per capita healthcare costs in the US being 2x what they should be). Being lied to for generations by the elite political class while things haven't gotten better for half the country for 50 years.
Everyone is starting to look around and ask good questions. Like, why do US taxpayers & citizens fork over $8.2 trillion (directly or through debt/inflation) every year, equal to ~40% of the economy, and have so little to show for it? Why is there no money in Social Security? What did they do with what should be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund? Why does nobody call them out on the lie that is the non-existent Social Security lockbox? Why do we keep burning trillions of dollars in the Middle East? Insert 487 other lies from the political class.
Trump got their attention because he brought up some of these lies - including the endless war aspect - and was one of the first leading candidates to ever do so. It's a similar reason why Bernie Sanders came so close to the Presidency twice, a large group of people on both sides are very angry and have had enough of the same old status quo (which the elites in power have an interest in perpetuating forever). Those trillions of dollars wasted in the Middle East should have been in a Social Security wealth fund, and some of it should have been put toward infrastructure.
Tens of millions of white people - those core Trump voters - are getting increasingly angry about all of it. Most of them probably have no idea what to do, so they're flailing for something different (if you're not an experienced fighter and you get hit in the face, your only capable reaction may be to flail). Those voters are not supposed to be upset about anything (so goes the fantasy social theory), because of their privilege. How is their privilege looking compared to a white person in Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Britain, France, the Netherlands or Sweden? I'd say many of them are increasingly worse off and they know it when they look around. Those standards are what white people in the US look at to compare their well-being, and that's where they start to get increasingly upset.
Michael Moore was right about what he said about Trump voters prior to the 2016 election, why they were seeking to elect him. Those voters wanted to throw a molotov cocktail at the system. And they were not thinking particularly rationally, angry people rarely do.
People tend to vote for radical options when they're desperate. One can think less of them for voting for Trump, say they chose wrong, shit all over them, call them stupid, mock them, call for their arrest or purging, call for them to be blacklisted, try to suppress their speech and so on. One can shake one's head and proclaim that if they only voted Democrat they could have all of those things they want (which also begs the question on how the Democrats screwed up so badly that they lost the poor and lower class white voter that they used to have). Those voters feel attention-abandoned by the Democrats - which is an ongoing mistake by the Dems - and Trump scooped them up by paying attention to them. They're angry regardless of anyone's thoughts about them, they're increasingly lost regardless, and they're going to get more so as time goes on and as things fail to improve, as their lot in life fails to improve. They're angry because their point of comparison isn't what some people think it should be, it's what they think it should be. White lower & middle class people are never going to bounce around happy because they're better off than a poor black person in the US (which is what the premise of throwing white privilege statements at them is meant to accomplish), that is never going to be their point of comparison no matter what anybody says to them; their point of comparison is going to be other affluent white people around the world (that is not a politically correct thing to say, of course, it's the actual truth of their perspective and what's really going on).
Telling people that they shouldn't be angry does not work, particularly when they've been dealing with decades of standard of living erosion and have little hope for the future being better. The elites have been conspiring against their interests forever at this point, it's little wonder they're staggering around in a daze with little clue as to what direction to go. It's a mistake for the Democrats to obsess over blaming and castigating those people, instead of focusing on convincing them, swaying them, educating them, peeling away voters and ultimately delivering real life improvements (the big part of that) if they truly believe they have a better path to offer for their future. The Democrats have power again (narrowly), and they need to deliver a lot better than they did in 2009-2010 with their mostly squandered super majority.
These people have been told that their trouble is caused by brown people coming to take their jobs, by affirmative action. They are told that the government is the problem, when in reality so many poor people in the South rely on government assistance just to survive. They look for a cause for their troubles and the right wing media hands them a false narrative.
How did white privilege allow them access?
I assume you have noticed how the majority of the people in the 1/6 "protests" were white, didn't you?
This was supposed to be a group of people who "backed the blue" and stood for law and order. Perhaps their guard was let down because of this?
Perhaps it was because the police response to mass gatherings has changed and become more lenient since the beginning of the BLM protests.
Interesting that you posted this link with the image of national guard members on the Lincoln Memorial steps this summer. I had read the an official, maybe Mayor Bowser didn't want this exact scene pictured to happen again because it looked bad.
Anyway, here is the tweet from the Mayor Bowser officially declining additional federal law enforcement to help MPD and their partners.
I don't think that Mayor Bowser refused to get additional law enforcment because of white privilege.
Are you actually trying to make that claim or just arguing for the sake of arguing?
That's fine, obviously we don't have to agree.
I do ask that you be a bit more civil though in our discussion.
All I'm saying is that if you're going to disagree with Occam's Razor, given the history of racial relations in this country, including the fact that there's an entire protest movement about police violence against non-white people, you've gotta bring something besides "could it be," and "perhaps."
If you can't deal with that, I'd suggest you avoid internet discussions entirely.
"I assume you have noticed how the majority of the people in the 1/6 "protests" were white, didn't you? "
"You're gonna have to provide more than "could it be," and "perhaps," if you want me to swallow that line."
"Are you actually trying to make that claim or just arguing for the sake of arguing?"
"If you can't deal with that, I'd suggest you avoid internet discussions entirely."
So I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
I'm not certain the context of why she begins her statement "To be clear". I looked at her previous tweets from the day and day before and this matter wasn't specifically addressed. The only thing I could think of is that a federal law enforcement authority wanted to get involved and she didn't feel the need?
https://twitter.com/MayorBowser/status/1346530358674792466
"To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD if such plans are underway."
> It's a mistake for the Democrats to obsess over blaming and castigating those people, instead of focusing on convincing them, swaying them, educating them, peeling away voters and ultimately delivering real life improvements (the big part of that) if they truly believe they have a better path to offer for their future.
What if there simply isn't a better path? Between automation and foreign competition, it might simply not be possible to return to an economy like the one we had post-WWII.
This is where everyone comes along to tell me about UBI, but I think this is not addressing the problem. A lot of people don't want to be handed free money, they want opportunities to work and improve their lives. A slower treadmill is still a treadmill. I wonder if it is simply impossible to provide that, and maybe the current reality is close to the best this is going to get.
I think maybe the best possible future is one where many (and eventually most) people live out their lives hooked up to an opiate IV and a VR headset.
I'm all for tariffs when there is some other goal that makes sense (for example I think tariffs should bake in the cost of environmental or other regulatory compliance we have that the foreign trading partner does not).
China’s not free trade anyways (not in terms of tariffs, but in terms of foreign businesses operating locally, and in terms of manipulating currency) so there’s only so much they can retaliate...
We also simply are too efficient to have multiple of a field any more too. We end up having one department store chain instead of four or five in an area; every market seems to solidify into 2 or 3 companies. Many jobs are virtualized to where those companies hire a fraction of humanity and have weak supply chains.
I think what will happen is just over time we will have less people. People will stop reproducing in sort of an equilibrium until we reach a point where we balance out to the economy's needs. I don't think it will be top down, but people simply cannot afford to have kids in a part time gig economy.
And he did take a few steps to fix issues, including on criminal justice reform and eg his executive order on healthcare pricing (how was something like that not in the ACA?). A pittance for sure. However if you're drowning and grasping at straws, those will do. The way the system attacked Trump for four years also makes them believe even more so that he represents the anti-establishment, that he would tear down the existing system.
Trump voters also liked his economy until the pandemic crashed it. They think he was at least partially responsible for it. Wages for the bottom 2/3 were rising at the fastest pace in two decades. That wasn't courtesy of Trump (it was due to a very tight labor market, which would have happened in that term regardless), however as President he gets the credit for it, that's how it always works politically. Absent the pandemic, Trump would have easily sailed to a second term via the electoral college.
Why did Bernie Sanders voters come back and vote for him so voraciously again after he (maybe) lost last time vs Hillary Clinton? Because they reject the Hillary Clinton & Joe Biden status quo, the never-ending cycle of sticking to the types of candidates and policies of the recent past that have failed.
Imagine an alternative election without Trump as a Republican: vote for system status quo conservative candidate (Jeb Bush clones at best, maybe we'll get some more war out of it), or vote for Joe Biden, one of the guys that put us into Iraq & Afghanistan for two decades, represents everything wrong with the past 50 years of American politics (which he was an important part of), is a pure establishment candidate, represents the entrenched political elites, and sponsored the human rights smashing 1990s crime bill. One helluva choice Americans get. Death by this, or death by that. Besides, people largely vote by partisanship (which is how you get prominent Democrat Congresspersons that will say Biden is guilty of sexual assault, and they still support him for President; or how you get his VP calling him a racist one minute and then gleefully joining forces with him and pretending he's not a racist the next minute; that's the nature of being a partisan). The vast majority of voters on each side will stay on their Republican / Democrat side; so if you're a Republican, your choice is Trump or a likely return to something akin to Bush's various terrible policies (the Bush money machine likely would have handed Jeb the Republican nomination in 2016, absent Trump). So as I said, flail it is.
I'd gladly take Jeb Bush over Trump. Not that I'd actually vote for either one, but, at least Bush seemed competent.
The Trump supporters who I am talking about have spent the last 4 years alienating their friends and family, bragging about their success, and making fun of those who are less fortunate than themselves. The Trump supporters who I am talking about have spent the last 4 years running people over with their cars, pointing guns(and shooting) at people that disagree with them, and now attempted to overthrow a democratic election.
Whatever filter bubble you think I am in is not as tiny as you might think. I have lived all over the country. I am from rural Michigan. I personally know conservatives and have close family that I deeply care about that are fully absorbed into the Trump cult. These are people who were upper middle class by the time the Bush and Obama administrations had come to pass; these are people that have destroyed lifelong relationships to maintain their allegiance with Trump.
I know the hardship is out there, and that I can agree with you on. However, the Trump supporters I know have more property and wealth than I could dream of.
It couldn't be that the "tech cartel" is concerned about a specific subset of speech designed to insight violence.
[0] https://youtu.be/lJ84xM8YPpw?t=271
[1] https://i.imgur.com/ceAwn59_d.webp?maxwidth=1520&fidelity=gr...
Explaining everything by race is also a dead end.
I am sympathetic to those who have been impacted economically. But, many of those who are despairing do end up blaming "outsiders" for their problems.
What I’m saying is both actions didn’t end with a good look and they both should be condemned
Edit: I seemed to have touched a nerve. I was rewatching video from people storming the capitol. They were not armed and they were all milling about without a plan. Even the lady that was shot was unarmed
Edit2: I think we are being hoodwinked. We saw lots of angry people storming the capitol out of frustration, provoked by false information fed to them. I don’t think the disinformation campaign stopped at the rally, I think it is continuing now. Everyone is being led to believe that the folks who walked in were acting the same as the Michigan capitol protest earlier last year. It was not like that. It was a bunch of people thinking they were going to make a difference and ended up not having a clue of what they were going to do. The orderly exit of most leaving the capitol building is proof of this.
I just ask before you rage downvote to pause and think is this the division they (those making the narrative of DC burning vs Capitol Siege) are trying to sow? Both actions are heinous and doesn’t look good for America regardless of how you try to spin it.
https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1347011413101998080?s=1...
Further, staying inline with the thread.. This is how we define “mass armed people storming the capitol”? Contrast to the three blazes that were going on around dc in may. Did those controlled fires mean dc was burning down?
I am challenging the narrative. Dc was not burning in may just the same as a large mob of ARMED people didn’t storm the capitol...
> One.
One example is what you asked for. It's not commenting in good faith if you move goalposts like that.
Look, I am currently combing all of the video from the event for faces in a bid to help identify people who were in the capitol. That guy was NOT on any live stream. This the original claim of “saw it from being glued to the TVs and monitors” is a false one and I challenged op to find an example in the stream that he watched. Instead he provided a photo op from Twitter. You yourself even cut off the part where i set the goal posts.
Regardless when I release my project this week you will see that no one was “clearly armed” as they walked through those doors. This was a travesty, but it is IMHO just one big false narrative like DC burning in May (the original goal post I replied to)
The link you posted before is a selection of the protests away from the building. I skipped through it and could not find any view of storming the building at all.
Is this what you were looking for? Or are you specifically looking for people who had their weapons in the open and visible to cameras and staff before even getting in? Because I don't think they would be that stupid.
And no, I don't believe the majority had any serious weapons with them. There is a decent number of people with padded gloves though - not something you normally take with you.
1) Bombs were left during the invasion. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-50k-reward-pipe-bombs-capit...
2) Weapons were recovered. https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/13-arrested-5-weapons-reco...
That’s weapons recovered. How many more were carrying?
Causation != correlation. I did not see any overt firearms or weapons on the people storming the capitol building. It will be hard, because it goes against your beliefs.. but I challenge you to find those armed people in the various live streams that captured the event.
Although they certainly did attack police officers. With flag poles, ladders, fire extinguishers, pepper spray.
I’ll leave it there.
My point is the narrative. Take a step back and observe and claim the wrong done by both parties instead of saying one is right and one is wrong.
But all the people who invaded the capitol? They all invaded the capitol. Let’s be clear about that.
This thread is about the youtube channel of one of the instigators of this insane action against your elected officials being banned. The BLM riots - which certainly had bad aspects - are off-topic and any attempt to drag them in here is simply whataboutism.
Seems like the mob was pretty well armed.
Not only do I not have these opinions, I haven't seen those opinions expressed here.
If there was somebody armed during this crime, they should all be held responsible for it
I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, in some circumstances, a group of people that commit a felony during which someone dies, can all be charged with murder, even if none of them intended to kill and only one of them actually did.
This is kind of controversial and not the case in all jurisdictions.
Jake Angeli carried a spear. Several weapons recovered from Eric Munchel.
I honestly cannot tell if you are being sarcastic here.
Claiming such protests are "violent mobs" is nothing new: https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/1300196044693741574/p...
Also note that some of the violence was instigated by the police: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/26/opinion/blm-p...
OTOH mobs in DC, Michigan were motivated by "masks=slavery" & "election fraud" both of which are completely imaginary, and EXACTLY one "leader" has been promoting it: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-longstanding-history-c...
Some of the protests that happened in the civil rights movement were indeed violent although this has been rather aggressively whitewashed in government approved public school classes meant to teach students the way to affect real change is to stand around with signs and sing songs and have racist white police officers beat you until you win (Kings flirting with communism and advocacy of reparations doesn't get much mention either). Ever hear of this guy called Malcolm X who wrote quite a bit about violence, he's definitely not somebody who could be allowed on social media. Race riots happened, people got beaten, some were killed largely by the police (just like in this most recent protest) but also by protesters (just like in this most recent protest). Did this delegitimize the civil rights movement? No, it was a noble movement, people just whitewash and dramatize it instead to prevent any degree of cognitive dissonance, and then compare modern day movements to the whitewashing to whitewash the modern day equivalents.
Back then like today, the degree of violence was greatly exaggerated, disproportionately by the media and by racist segregationist's. Protests are mostly a dull affair filled overwhelmingly with non-violent people and only the exciting bits hit the front pages. The extent of violence by Trump supporters too is greatly exaggerated, mostly by media and their political opponents. If one police officer dies and 4 protestors, the only reasonable reaction is a speech crackdown against those who blame this incident on democrats dubiously. Since obviously cracking down on the free non-violent exchange of ideas and advocacy of peaceful protest is what prevents violence from happening.
Point I'm driving at is that if the entire argument is based around the idea that any violence, or even violent mobs, delegitimizes a large movement than virtually all movements from BLM to the Civil rights movements to... whatever this is.... are delegitimized. Really the issue people have with the Trump supporters, above all, is that they're wrong and unpopular. As such they're a good test for exactly how much people REALLY support freedom of speech and the right to protest a cause that isn't broadly supported.
Lies and fraud implies bad faith, riots and coup being end goal.
The intent is different, so it is false equivalence.
But you can't compare people committing act of violence to perpatuate a lie at the greater expense of society to people protesting for civil rights. And no the people that stormed the Capitol building, which hasn't happened since the war of 1812 and was committed by a hostile foreign nation, were not 'protesting'. Sedition is not a right.
I've been seeing lots of people write things like this very recently. But honestly, when did you start using the word "sedition" and when did the word acquire emotional weight to you, as a dastardly crime? When and how do you think other people got familiar with the word?
If I'm being honest, my association with the word sedition before pretty recently was almost entirely a very dim memory of the Alien and Sedition Acts being mentioned in grade school. And an even dimmer memory that they were unpopular and probably unconstitutional.
It's not that I think it's necessarily wrong to use it, I just feel suddenly surrounded by people who are pretending that we all are used to using it and viscerally being outraged by people who commit it. Which feels weird since I can't remember seeing it in normal conversation in like 30+ years.
Maybe it sounds better than treason, perhaps because treason is a word right wing types like to use?
Is sedition illegal? Should it be? When did the consensus arise, if it did? The historical laws against sedition are not generally presented in a good light, in school, from what I can tell.
I'm not questioning whether the attack on the Capitol was problematic, but why sedition is the go-to term. I feel like there's an echo of the awkward term "collusion" that eventually allowed people to say there was nobody charged with collusion.
Here is the law against seditious conspiracy https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384
> If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
All my life, "sedition" has meant, as far as I knew, criticism of the government, possibly false criticism. Nor did I know of laws against it since around a hundred years ago or more.
Here is something saying sedition is:
"The federal crime of advocating insurrection against the government through speeches and publications."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sedition
Here is a part of the law that sounds like it's outlawing sedition even though it doesn't actually include the word: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385
The significance, ultimately, is I'm suspicious that someone is pushing this term because they want to turn around and outlaw criticizing the government and say Democrats asked for it. Or, even if nobody has that plan yet, that using the term carelessly could invite it.
How are we defining sedition though? Rebelling against society is one thing. I'm an old punk rocker. Did I break laws I didn't agree with? Yes, repeatedly. But I also accepted that, right or wrong, it was my personal choice, I made those decisions myself and if I faced consequences for it they were my consequences to face, not someone else's. There's a difference between sending a message and killing the messenger. I get the over all point you're making but damn what do we call it? This is way past protesting or rebelling against the government and society. We poked the bear but we didn't burn down the entire forest just to spite the bear.
Sure, if it were real.
I mean, if the Presidency was indeed stolen by election fraud, protests and rioting would be justified. But unlike the BLM protests, they were based on lies. Those lies did real damage, and they haven't stopped, so publishers are cutting ties with them to avoid further crime and terrorism.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/17/393646640/hands-up-dont-shoot...
Police response to violence in both cases is justified
These people are pissed off, simply because theyre being told to be pissed off. There is no nuance, culture is what we are told at scale. Its why everyones pissed off. Anger is the easiet engagement to bait and advertising based businesses at scale are powered by engagement.
You're seeing the fruits of 70+ years of conservatives telling their audience "Everything sucks now, and everything will suck more in the future, and those people over there are to blame for all of it".
This is the reason you're seeing so many educated, affluent people among those who stormed the Capitol - they're just really, REALLY pissed off.
Abraham Lincoln said that all controversies are about minorities and majorities, and that one of them must submit, or the government ceases. There is no alternative. And that if the losing states of the 1860 election were permitted to secede, it would be the end of self-rule, the end of democracy. And he decided that could not be permitted.
In the 2016 election, a majority of voters elected Clinton. They submitted to the minority because that is what the Constitution required. And they did it peacefully. Clinton conceded the day after the election.
Fast forward to 2020, Trump has gotten 2/3rds of the Republicans in the House to debase themselves. They are now a sedition caucus, selling these lies too. As well as several Republicans in the Senate. The lie that they are not the minority. And the lie that they do not have to submit. They can fight instead.
This is a non-insurable proposition, because the majority was never going to submit this time.
The message being broadcast for two months is: cease the government. That is why violence broke out in 1861, that's why it broke out last week, in the first violent transfer of power since then.
BLM riots vs capitol attack? Not at all the same thing. Not at all the same risk. And the whataboutism? Sounds like white nationalist nonsense to me.
This stuff has been thought over very thoroughly, a long time ago. It's not nearly as trivial as y'all seem to think it is.
People were open to evidence for some time, but none emerged. I expect people would react differently to claims backed with evidence.
And if there was any evidence, it would been have presented in one of the ~60 lawsuits that universally got shot down by every single court, appeals court, and the Supreme Court. Because they had no evidence.
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
The issue is people only ever consuming one side.
Both sides is a way to make yourself feel smart without critically examining on a deeper level what those biases are, how widely they’re consumed, and how seriously they’re taken.
Meanwhile, you'll be hard pressed to find any daylight between the news sources in the "Right" column and Trumpism.
Now I'm sure these ratings aren't perfect, but I believe they're more accurate than most people's hunches.
On the other hand, we have people that don't.
Clearly we need to listen to the Nazis and debate them in the marketplace of ideas. Is that somewhere in Narnia?
Anyone making the claim that his side is the side of truth and justice and the other side is the one of delusions and falsehoods is not looking for healing or reconciliation. He is in search of either total domination of the other side, or divorce, or worse.
The question is: do you think your side will be able to totally dominate the other side? Is it possible to totally dominate 75 million Americans who view your domination as something evil to be opposed, possibly violently?
It seems you're betting it is, and your side will pull it off.
Though I wonder: what is this confidence based upon?
Your side controls the institutions and the cities. What happens when the people outside the cities simply stop listening to what the cities and the institutions say? What happens when the media and academies and federal government can say whatever they like, but everyone outside the metropolises simply starts to ignore them and make their own rules?
This is the real problem with Balkanization: once the dialogue breaks down, everything else starts to break down after it.
Easiest illustration is that Rittenhouse fellow, a brave-ish kid standing for himself in one reality and a cold-blooded murderer in another.
Here is a really good summary from someone with two degress in criminal justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfAz851P8p4
The fact you used the "carried a weapon across state lines" line suggests that you may be consuming biased reports. It's not a crime to carry a weapoon across state lines. He also lived right on the state line and worked in Kenosha. It's not like he drove miles to shoot protestors in some city he has no affiliation to and portraying it like this is dishonest.
He also probably acted within self-defense as is covered in this part of the video I shared: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=648&v=dfAz851P8p4
For the record, I think what he did was reckless and dangerous, but the catalyst to this was the riots and looting. Right or wrong you'll find some people will react like this when they feel their neighbourhoods are under attack. You can't expect one group to be violent without some kind of push back from another. The same problem exists with antifa and BLM (not that these groups are a direct comparison). My point is these groups don't exist in a vaccum, they appear when they believe law enforcement and those in power are not doing a good enough job. You have to go a level deeper and ask why BLM protestors are on the street, and why are people are feeling the need to form militas in the first place? If you ignore the causes these events will continue to occur and likely escalate.
No, its clear. He was not defending his home or his business, he traveled 90 minutes by car to play soldier. It was not his neighborhood that was "under attack" and this wasn't self defense. He was not going about his life when someone threatened him, he went on a mission. He entered a dangerous area with a gun with full knowledge of the range of outcomes.
They describe how they come to a bias rating at https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-method....
Yes, the rules are the same regardless of which side an account is battling for. There's nothing worse for HN than accounts which have abandoned curiosity and entered here.
While I think, all platforms should have the right to censor whatever content they wish to, it always goes other way, platforms should also be free to have all sort of content including what I might think as a "lie".
All this mess will result into a better internet where people will figure out more "uncacelllable" solutions to propagate what people call "lies".
Just like Komsomolskaya Pravda. People who thought they were biased were clearly indoctrinated by capitalist lies.
Even our "equivalent", the Murdoch owned Sky News channel is nowhere near as bad as Fox news
Id worry that polarizing people would take no time at all.
They can decide that a person is not "fit and proper" to hold a broadcast license, but that's a fairly large hurdle to overcome (and it is, of course, judicially reviewable).
To be honest, this is how it should be. A presumption in favour of broadcasting, but with the ability to shut a broadcast down for repeated and/or egregious violations.
I mean these are the people who happily pushed and continue to push creationism because evolution (science) is a problem for them.
People are aghast today by how there’s a separate reality, but the human trials were done in public.
Creationism was the writing on the wall.
Lumping Fox in the same breath as both sides is not true.
The other side doesn’t include just “leftist” content, it includes the BBC, NYT, and apparently Jstor papers and Darwin.
Fox also actively prevents content that undoes its narratives. They argument is that “the other side does it.”
There’s no doubt that there is motivated reasoning and bad arguments in the normal news.
But Fox uses that as an excuse to give up altogether and just double down.
America is where it is because Fox News paved the way. You couldn’t give them enough credit for what they achieved.
If you go to conservative forums, you'll find the same biased clips of CNN/MSNBC that portray those networks as heavily propagandized.
Fortunately there are some decent conservative leaning news sites, such as The Federalist and National Review, but Fox News does seem to dominate. Even though I often find myself disagreeing with what the leftier US news organisations say as opinion, they're much better at actually delivering facts and presenting differing opinions with useful context.
To be fair, we have the Daily Mail over here. It's not as bad a Fox generally, but it depends on the topic. The BBC does definitely have a left bias, but it's pretty mild and they're really good on informative content. We do have The Economist though, which is our jewel in the crown of news and opinion IMHO.
The bottom line is though I even can go to the Guardian web site, and I might think they're off the rails a bit and missing context. Some of their opinion pieces are ridiculous, but I can generally trust their factual information. I can't trust Fox or the Daily Mail on facts. That really worries me because a movement based on or informed with extensive misunderstanding of basic facts, or worse with a disregard for the truth, is doomed long term.
Maybe the profit would make up for the pain - or one could indulge in a fantasy that the destruction would ultimately improve the human condition.
If my illusions were broken - even for a second - I would certainly die of shame.
Its hard to think about such dreadful things when you're on your yacht or golf course.
At this point, the reason for deplatforming is that someone accused a bad thing on the opposite party.
It would be ludicrous to ban anyone blaming the events at the Capitol on Trump and/or Republicans, even if you earnestly believe that's unfair.
There is no objective case for blaming it on anyone except the individuals doing it. Anything beyond that is subjective, and you get your hands dirty really quick (ie try arguing that the Scalise shooting - by a Bernie volunteer against Republican congressmen - is completely divorced from Bernie, but the Capitol events are completely tied to Trump).
Ergo this amounts to banning people - almost all on one side of politics, even if a fringe thereof - for saying things that appear to be untrue. Not even a hint of violence or a call thereto, just an opinion that is believed to be wrong.
Are we quite sure we're happy with people losing their income and livelihood and brand and platform, just because the tech companies don't agree with their claims?
Do you know how many smaller, left-of-centre groups will quickly get caught up in that once they join this discussion around unionising the workforce of the tech giants?
You may despise Bannon, and I find it hard to believe he's an earnest actor, but think through the steps for how this happened. He's being banned for an opinion, entirely separate from any risk to anyone, and to argue otherwise (ie an implicit call to violence against the blamed party) would open you up to the claim that blaming anything in the last week on Trump is a call to violence against the president and/or his supporters, and is thus equally bannable.
Is that reasonable? Should all opinions on this topic result in permanent banning and deplatforming?
Anyway I feel like this is a blessing in disguise, stuff like this can cause Tech giants to lose huge market share in the long term future.
It is good that people are forming other organic communities completely separate from Google/FB/Twitter.
It is already happening in India. So many of my friends uninstalled WhatsApp and moved to Signal. This is a real positive. The lesser the reliance on Big Tech the better for all of us!
Deciding that reality is whatever you "feel like" is how we got into this mess in the first place.
There are a few outlets left of centre caught in the dragnet, but so far the bans have got everything from Parler to Bannon to Trump to Trump's Campaign finances (Stripe) to Gab to...
It's hard to find a single lefty outlet which has had its finances attacked, let alone by a concerted effort of the five largest tech companies in America (and the world) within a 48 hour period.
I am no fan of Bannon's or anything of the sort, but try to explain what he just got disappeared for. What rule did he break? "Thou must tell the truth at all times"?
Freedom of speech does not equate with freedom of consequences.
And yes, inciting over the course of many weeks [1] an actual coup attempt that only does not end into a bloodbath because a Black cop acted as bait and led the mob away from the Senate chamber so that they could barely evacuate in time [2] should absolutely lead to consequences.
Steve Bannon should be happy he has only lost his Youtube channel and did not get arrested... yet.
As for Youtube, Twitter and Facebook: they are, as corporate entities, members of all our societies - incredibly powerful. Which also means that they have a responsibility towards the societies that allow them to exist. And that responsibility, in my opinion, also entails that people working to destroy society do not get access to the virtual equivalent of a planetwide PA system.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-d...
[2]: https://twitter.com/kristin__wilson/status/13482872159028469...
Obviously it seems that one of their targets was the VP, and I can't imagine they would have let Nancy Pelosi continue as second in line to the presidency. There was also the strong possibility of enough fatalities occurring that the Democrats would lose their majorities in both chambers. Perhaps most importantly, the boxes containing the electoral votes could have been captured and the votes destroyed, putting the constitutional process in uncharted waters.
So imagine the situation, where the joint session cannot continue, and Trump sends in his hand-picked troops to "secure" the Capitol. Congress has to amend the Electoral Count Act to clarify how the votes should be counted if the certificates have been physically destroyed. In conditions similar to those at the passing of the Enabling Act of 1933[0], we could imagine Congress deciding to fall back on the procedure outlined in the 12th Amendment for "if no person have such majority". Arguably that would be the correct procedure even without a change to the ECA.
The outcome would thus be for Trump to win the vote by 26 states to 24, maintaining his presidency through means outside the legal and constitutional order. That would naturally and correctly be called a self-coup or autogolpe, in my view.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933#Preparati...
I don't think we should be banning anyone. I'm very pro-free speech. I'm not a Conservative or a trumper. I'm a limey brit.
But I don't quite think I'd go as far as you have in the above quote. I think Trumps continued lies and the support of multiple other republicans encouraged and legitimised these actions.
Does that excuse the actions? No.
Does it make them criminally liable? Imho, maybe. Incitement is a thing.
But they certainly can't say "it's not my fault people listened to me". There is a very real need right now for republicans to look at the company they've kept for the last 4 years and do some soul searching.
That would be best for them and for the country even if I don't think failing to do some merits arrest or deplatforming.
This isn't a right/left spat. It's a moral fiber, truth vs lies question. What sort of person does a party member want to be and to be associated with?
No one, no matter their intentions, will ever be able to actually discuss any of these issues because we can't even agree on fundamentals like language and "permitted" words.
I believe what Bannon said is false. But at no point has any social media standard been "you must tell the truth", even if we just pretend there is some objective truth that everyone knows.
Easily a hundred million Americans have watched Trump lie AND be lied about.
But the issue here is that Bannon is being disappeared from YouTube for what, exactly? Speaking an untruth?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/twitter-bans-former-trump-advi...
We should stop pretending like this is about conservative ideology, it’s about creating an environment for violence with lies and repeated calls for violence coming from Trump associates. Nobody is calling for the deplatforming of John Kasich or Mitt Romney.
For years, the defense of these assholes has been “Oh, that’s just rhetoric, it’s not meant to be taken literally.” Well, we’ve just seen what happens when it gets taken literally.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Treating Steve Bannon differently is hypocritical and unfair.
> Well, we’ve just seen what happens when it gets taken literally.
Can you quote a specific person saying "go to the capital and break the law and commit violence"? Because I don't think you can find that evidence.
Does these people also have a YouTube podcast that was taken offline? Or are you trying to point a finger at an unrelated issue and saying, "That is also bad!!"
What you are doing is called whataboutism. We need to evaluate situations with their context.
Constantly pulling in new examples and "they did X which excuses Y" is a child's game. It's the rhetorical equivalent to "they started it!".
For example, I might say, "the BLM was responding to threats of violence from the cops" to which you might respond, "the cops were responding to threats of violence from suspected criminals". We could continue this chain forever, coming up with some other example and historical precedent. It's not productive.
We're here, now in this thread discussing this one event.
> Can you quote a specific person saying "go to the capital and break the law and commit violence"?
I assume you mean on Bannons show? Because there are tons of examples of what you've described in other contexts.
They're despicable, but it is easy to trace exactly how the mainstream rhetoric made this palatable to them.
I think people want to use these issues as a way of pointing out hypocrisy that only exists when you think in a culture war way. All nuance is dissolved.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes".
Now the generally understood figurative meaning of putting someone's "head on a pike" is "fire them in disgrace". But Bannon's ruled that one out in the first sentence. So I'm honestly at a loss as to what he meant.
Can you, as a "native-born American citizen", help me understand what his figurative meaning was here? I've asked a bunch of people on here who claimed "no big deal, it was a figure of speech" but they failed to explain what it means.
Explain the joke, please! I'm not trying to take those words literally. I'm just looking for a figurative meaning of "heads on pikes" that makes sense in this context. "Fire them" makes no sense at all. So what is it?
Regarding this incident Zuckerberg didn't ban him at the time because he said that Bannon didn't even violate his sites policy in regards to how many times you have to say things like this before getting banned. He reacted with a removal of the video. Zuckerberg was correct and for all the hate leveled against him he seems to be one of the only people who is resisting political pressure and fighting to enforce policy fairly and unarbitrarily.
An extremely broad amount of people will once or twice say something like this regardless of political affliation and the banning of Bannon here is mostly a mixture of hindsight and bias and arbitrariness. Bannon wasn't banned today based on an equally applied sober reading of social media policy, but because the capitol riots happened. Trumps supporters messed up a building and got themselves killed and that's being used as a pretence to treat other Trump supporters arbitrarily online for the greater good because they're just too dangerous.
If obnoxious stupidity had an event horizon, this would be it.
‘Infamy’: Chuck Schumer Compares Capitol Chaos To Pearl Harbor: https://www.dailywire.com/news/infamy-chuck-schumer-compares...
Do a search for these and notice how it's only right wing media reporting of them. Had Trump or republicans made such embarrassing comparisons they would be in every mainstream publication as being out of touch morons.
Many right wing folks have strongly benefited from YouTube and these platforms - including Trump. Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Prager U, Alex Jones...
All conservatives aren’t banned. This is a straw man. Bannon has called for violence many times - and violence has happened. No company is obligated to support this. He has his website Breitbart to continue his action.
If this were an “all out war” the others wouldn’t be benefiting from the YouTube algorithm of Twitter. It doesn’t seem like banning the open calling for violence is a feature of a dystopia.
How funny to have this coming from a country that advertises freedom of speech as its core values.
People with radical ideas and from the extreme ends of any spectrum deserve the be maintained in the conversation and deserve a voice. Always. The issue isn't they have a voice therefore banning them cannot be an acceptable solution. The large number of people that resonate with those extreme ideas are either in deer life conditions or massively uneducated. Why not start debugging the problem there?
Silencing voices is never a good idea. It's also quite a shame you allow Google/Youtube/Twitter/FB and other big commercial tech companies to decide on your behalf what is socially acceptable and what is not. These are the same companies training your brain with their apps to respond to their commercial interests.
Also, there is a gigantic space between demanding people to take any type of action and becoming violent. Maybe you should stop all Hollywood productions that involve people threatening/killing/inciting each other to commit acts of any sort of violence too.
Lastly, the American society, does cultivate from early days fanaticism. As a European that lived in US for the last 12 years you cannot not see this. Fanatical support for your local sports team, high school team, university, political party and/or faction, city and country is something that is being cultivated and developed from the youngest age. People take pride in bearing a label for generations the label being anything from political affiliation to sport team fans. Continuing the tradition is being perceived as more important than the ideals/ideas one stands for under that particular label.