Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

The truly bizarre thing about the "woke" movement is that they seem to have absolutely no conception that the stuff they're doing to others can just as easily be done to them.

see stuff akin to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

The right has nuance to it the same way the progressive left has nuance that separates them from the establishment left. I think Gab and Parler give a voice to some questionable characters. Parler, in particular, has some investors I’m not exactly a fan of. However the ecology of diverse platforms does fit in with traditionally enlightenment ideas around speech that I subscribe to. So I support them. Perhaps we disagree what it means to be thoughtful. I think that’s a fair debate.

Speaking to your point about echo chambers, I agree this is probably the biggest societal and technological problem facing us today. How do we get people to see we aren’t all that different and want to debate complex issues? Far right” and “Radical Left” are not terms that inspire debate and critical thinking. It’s almost as if society wants to dumb us down and lower the human consciousness.

> It seemed every American not on the left is called "far right" from where I am sitting.

What you are seeing is polarization. At the current moment, a lot of the Republican party has moved away from more moderate Republicanism and more towards Trumpism, which is a far right movement.

Fact is that more Republican Congress members voted to punish a moderate Republican like Liz Cheney for voting to impeach Trump, than voted to remove Marjorie Greene from committee assignments for claiming school shootings and 9/11,were a hoax and that California wildfires were caused by a Jewish space laser.

It's not that anyone who isn't left is now considered far right. It's that a lot of people who were more moderate Republicans in the past, have moved much farther to the right. There are more people on the left side of the political spectrum that moved father out too, but not enough to even nominate one of the far left candidates for president.

From my perspective as a German, you have the centrist democrats that swing quite a bit in both directions, and the republicans who swing from center right to "makes our local right wing extremist party drool"-right.

And yes it is a free speech issue when several companies that have left leaning cultures and leaders take concurrent actions to block a right leaning platform that mostly carries fully legal speech.

Your last line is absolutely correct: To make this obvious, this is not a free speech issue.

In the end, the lines we draw are often in the sand, and the legitimacy of these threats have to be weighed with the consequence of real world actions.

People storming the Capitol Hill building shouting these things posed a legitimate threat, but so do feminists shouting these things in rallies in real life, or the people burning police departments during the George Floyd protests. What we choose to condemn however, seems to be completely arbitrary to passers by.

All censorship of any speech is a free speech issue. My take is that it is sometimes justified to give consequences to speech that cause harm, but i don't think we should pretend its not a free speech issue.

Gab being Q twitter is probably related to this: https://twitter.com/beeeeeers/status/1358141547057848320

That said, mostly any platform that allows some kind of speech banned on mainstream platforms will initially turn into a hive of said banned content for completely obvious reasons.

> I've seen the same thing on so-called "patriot" live streams that also claim free speech absolutism but then ban you for saying anything they don't want to hear, even good-faith efforts to explain the motivations of the "other side."

This does sound sad. I've found a few places online where there are people of all manner of creeds and they're some of the best places. They usually don't contain wokelets or rabid Q people, which probably explains why they remain nice and interesting.

It happens to have a constitutional instantiation. That instantiation happens to be expressed as a restriction on the government's chartered power; this is an artifact of the process by which it was drafted, i.e. as part of a collection of proposed restraints on the powers federal government.

No reasonable person should confuse the very limited constitutional guarantee given to free speech with the norm itself.

After rallying against liberals being "snowflakes" and needing "safe-spaces", Parler ironically enough ended up being just that for the extreme right.

I might have missed that obviously during my five minutes of browsing there, as a result, if they really call for murdering Jews, could you provide a link to such resource - calling to murder someone is a crime in the US, so such link would be a good evidence for prosecution.

Gab looks like a version of Facebook that's mostly populated by Christian conservatives. Parler looks like a version of twitter that's mostly populated (or was, before) by Christian conservatives with a small side of some conspiracy theories.

Christian conservatives don't subscribe to the beliefs you think they do.

Did you ever wonder why you are calling others far right or far left? Why are you referring to other American citizens with those terms? Who is pushing those terms that divide the vast majority of normal Americans? Who stands to gain?

The fascist establishment elite are getting richer by the second, while the lower classes are calling each other insulting names and fighting amongst themselves.

There’s an old movie called They Live. When you watch it now, you can call it time shifted documentary.

If a person thinks that perhaps, maybe, there's 2 genders and not 700+, they should be prevented from civic discourse? That maybe we should not be providing chemical treatments to toddlers for gender reassignment, that's hate? If they believe that math isn't actually racist, but is an objective way of making sense of reality, are they racist? How about people who criticize Islam and argue that it is a fundamentally violent ideology? That lockdowns and "scientific" COVID-19 recommendations were harmful because Florida had fewer deaths per capita than NY or CA

Today, merely speaking any of these positions gets a person called a "transphobe" or a racist or a science denier. In addition to not convincing anyone and unfairly slandering the speakers, it destroys our ability to think as a society.

Socially "acceptable" speech has never needed legal protection (in any society, liberal or authoritarian). It's the offensive things that need protection from the book burners.

If we look at racist hate speech, people literally lecture that people who happen to look like me are "born into not being human", say the lives of people like me don't matter. We are told we should not speak and yet that our silence is violence. Trainings for "diversity" across a wide range of institutions have started segregating along racial lines, and the list goes on. During the Grievance Studies hoax, for example, one of their papers was sent back because it was too sympathetic and not sociopathic enough. Said paper advocated making white students sit on the floor and putting them in chains as a learning experience.

Yet open racism is fine, because the target ethnic group and sexual orientation are acceptable to the activist class.

Likewise, people who get kicked out for "transphobia" will often not be people who hate transpeople in any proper sense, but have policy disagreements where there are no win-win solutions. Yet anything but being completely on board with the activist class's 100% no limits pro-trans policy agenda is "phobia". The claim holds up as well as wet paper.

How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.

Said cultists insist on mantras of trans(wo-)men are (wo-)men in an explicit denial of biology that the best of our medicine can't alter: We just craft a facade that eases dysphoria to care for our fellow human beings. As Buck Angel put it: "I use testosterone to masculinize myself so I feel more like me." He's routinely called a transphobe.

This is basically the biology equivalent of flat eartherism or young earth creationism, but not subscribing to the creed is stamped hate speech. The mantra wouldn't even be necessary if its claim was actually true. Hell, it's arguably even worse than flat eartherism, since a human can't at a glance confirm that the Earth is indeed round, but TWAW/TMAM asks us to baldly deny the input of our eyes in everyday life.

It's not one side that has gone insane: Good chunks of both are open lunatics. Q at least is thankfully fringe, but even they've managed to get representatives elected.

The left is very supportive of hate speech, it just has to have the right target. There's abject, open racism against whites all day. Black people attacking Asian people is white supremacy nowadays.

probably correct that they censor based on conservative opinions. not correct that right leaning americans are conservative. all conservatives are right leaning tho. not the other way around.

They're not a free speech network, they're just a network where racism is permitted speech and anything they don't like is banned.

For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves.

Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.

Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep.

On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created.

> Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.

I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet.

Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of?

It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal.

Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway.

This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith.

Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground.

The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.

To any thinking person the left-vs-right paradigm is beyond stupid, but yet, it keeps persisting, even worldwide.

Actually, the parties are themselves to blame, as wrong-thinkers gets weeded out or re-educated.

If you look at actual policy Bernie, AOC, Warren, etc push (i.e. not the twitter crap they pile on to for virtue points) much less authoritarians stuff despite being "further" left because they all cut their teeth serving the interests of different demographics.

However, he has done a few things that I have sincere appreciation for. Primarily, we made significant gains towards peace in the middle east by negotiating treaties in the region. Another point in the win column (leading up the covid) was the economy. And the last major thing I cared about was reducing the US dependence on Chinese goods and labor (which are made so affordable due to inhumane practices).

Regarding authoritarianism, he has a mixed track record. He had a thing for executive orders, but he also let the states largely handle the civil unrest and covid in the manner they saw fit.

With that having been said, Trump was a Democrat for a long time, and was certainly not a typical political establishment individual. I find it difficult to attribute him to either party.

"They're fighters. When are we going to get a real fighter on our side to finally stand up to them?"

"Look, I understand being principled, but get real. They don't give a damn about principles and will break every rule to get their way. It's time to fight dirty like they do."

"Our side isn't perfect but they're authoritarians."

BOTH sides say all of these things. And they seem to think it's a joke when the other side claims to see it the same way.

How would you describe a militia that distrust the authority of the government?

Is that antiauthoritarian?

A strange charge of the "limited-government" party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_the_Rep...

>...your ideology extends from rules concerning which water fountain you can drink from...

The ex-Confederate, Democrat, southern states had segregated water fountains. On the other hand, here's Wikipedia's explanation of where Republican ideology originated:

>The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act,[11] which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The party supported economic reform and classical liberalism while opposing the expansion of slavery.[12][13] Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, slavery was banned in the United States in 1865.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_State...

On the levels that I am most knowledgeable about, the trend is roughly true. For example, Dems are the party of gun control while simultaneously militarizing police (a bipartisan effort). The moves to licensing and excessive taxation for what should be fundamental rights (e.g licenses to operate businesses, high taxes on your primary residence) is another trend that concerns me, but quickly goes out of the scope of what can be readily discussed on a forum.

My view is that both parties seek power on whatever levels they can get it. That's why I am for the abolition of political parties altogether, and a move towards a more direct democracy (public veto).

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...) has a pretty good summary of the issues. The voting machine claims were a big deal at the time; I remember a lot of news coverage about that the voting machine companies were owned by Republicans.

I think the 2016 fraud claims were about Russian hacking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...). (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2018/09/11/many-democrats-...) claims that many Democrats questioned the 2016 election.

> On the left I see claims of disenfranchisement done through legal means, which whether you agree with or not is at least something real and concrete.

I agree that disenfranchisement is an issue and am in favor of federal voting standards and protecting the voting rights of convicted felons.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/steven-pinker-jordan-peters...

In a so-called liberal state we shouldn't send people behind bars for political reasons, not even fascists. Sending the people that protested at the Capitol behind bars is being done as a result of politics.

It's similar to a No Trespassing sign; you can picket on public property (free speech), but doing that on private property (when marked with a sign that fit certain criteria, in most states) might get you arrested and charged with a crime.

In the U.S., the rights of the individual generally trump "public interest".

To see that it's actual weakness is enough to look at a few decades of history of China for example. They had single party for a long time, but were regularly on the brink of societal upheaval and even experienced few times very large changes, with a lot of people in power suffering as a result.

Nothing like that happened in two party system. When some people in US start to feel that they are manipulated by both parties (occupy, blm) you can see how they behave. And they are met with overwhelming force until they burn out and disperse again.

> I agree, but in a dictatorship the people are held back from what they could contribute.

Dictatorships are yet another thing, different than one party system. They limit people very severely just because they don't invest in any infrastructure that doesn't directly serve the dictator. And he is just one person (plus his most important people) and has limited needs and imagination. How much people can contribute depends mostly on what tools and infrastructure people are given. Even a completely free person without tools and infrastructure won't be able to contribute much because its the technology and economy around us that makes our work valuable.

> Perhaps they seem that way from far away, but the parties can and do change their positions over time and they compete with each other to please the public.

To see the bigger picture it's better to take few steps back so you can stop trees from occluding your forest. Sure. Two parties compete, they discuss, they change their positions, they seem to respond to what people currently want. But in practice most change is driven under the hood by influence and money not by the public discussion. And the public discussion is held just to explain away things. USA has for profit prisons not because people decided. But because someone with money and influence figured it might be a good way to earn more money, and pulled the right strings in the system of power. First you see the opportunity, introduce the change and then either keep it out of public discourse or just spin it as the best thing since sliced bread.

> A single party system may also respond to the people's will but since speaking your mind publicly is forbidden, you never really know who made a given decision. Someone may get blamed for it but you won't know if they were the true decider. That's why you see the same party maintain control, the top decision makers cannot be held accountable.

Most top decision makers in two party system stay hidden and unaccountable as well. Person who decided it's a good way to publicly market opioids was not elected. And you have no idea who are the elected people who were influenced to not be interested in this subject. If the decision turns out to be especially bad, you sometimes can find out who made it or at least who was chosen to be blamed for it because system of power drags this person into the limelight to punish them publicly. Same thing happen in single party system, where many former revolutionary colleagues had public trials for their wrong decisions (sometimes accurately, sometimes wrongly, but always very selectively, same as in two-party system).

> Mao is still revered despite causing widespread famine, for example.

What does that prove? US still reveres slave owners and native people slaughterers. Cult of Mao got stripped down a lot when Deng Xiaoping came to power. It was scaled back to the useful level.

> That's right, in a multi-party system the people can hold the previous admin responsible for any failures by electing a new party or individual. It's not so much about people needing an enemy as it is about acknowledging that all people make mistakes.

Two-party system is different from multi-party system. In multi-party system, the party that made the bad decisions doesn't get elected next time. People elect some other party offering some solutions and they have at least few parties and proposed solutions they can choose from. Offending party often has it's reputation tarnished so much that it dissolves. Politicians that formed this party need to join others, seek new alliances, come up with new ideas how to regain reputation. Actual change is possible.

In two-party system you just get few years of respite, before you are forced to begrudgingly let the offenders back into the offices and to again control your life by reverting many decisions of the other party.

> It's hard to get people to publicly take responsibility for their actions and it's next to impossible for that to truly happen when a single party rules.

Ultimately what's important is what happens, not who takes responsibility for that.

> In a multi party state, the losing party has a chance to come back and usually that involves some admission of error, otherwise the public may view them as stubborn. In a single party state, mistakes are either excused forever, or if you fall out of favor, then you have less chance to recover.

In multi-party state yes. In two-party state it's not a chance. It's inevitability.

The far right is general taken to mean ultra nationalists that attack minority groups. Every major social network has hate speech in their terms of service, and very few people complaining about censorship are complaining about enforcement of rules against actual hate speech.