Nacdor

His point all along was "The laptop isn't a big deal, the censorship is". I don't know the details regarding Hunter Biden's business dealings or his laptop (although I've heard there is at least one ongoing investigation, possibly more), but the censorship is probably one of the bigger stories of the year. Twitter admitted they were blocking the story prior to fact-checking, and this decision was made by someone who had previously worked for the DCCC:

> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000?re...

Hard to confirm at the moment with Parler gone, but all the stories I've found seem to indicate he was mostly active on Twitter.

I think a more interesting (and neutral) approach for Greenwald to take would be to show that all of these prominent figures were most likely active on ALL social media platforms, yet only Parler has been singled out.

The story does confirm he wasn't there though, not sure if he had been released by then:

> Tarrio does not appear to have been present during the insurrection.

Glenn Greenwald has been investigating the planning of the Capitol protests and says "it was largely done on Facebook". So far he hasn't been able to identify a single person who was arrested and active on Parler:

> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero. The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.

> For those asking the basis for that last claim: I spent the weekend reporting on the removal of Parler from the internet, including reviewing lots of documents and interviewing people associated with the companies involved, including Parler.

> The article will be up shortly.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293

I would be more interested in hearing if all these prominent figures in the Capitol protests were active across multiple (or all) social media platforms, which often seems to be the case. If that is true, then it makes for an even stronger argument that Parler has been singled out.

Is it better that they looted and burned local businesses rather than confronting the politicians who were the architects of their oppression?

I'm curious why so many Democrats were allowed to encourage the BLM riots (more than 25 dead, $2 billion in property damage) without so much as a peep from Google, Twitter, Facebook or any other tech giant. Kamala Harris said "they should not stop" and helped with a bail fund for the people who were involved with them.

I think protest is a fundamental requirement of democracy, and as Chris Cuomo himself reminded us: protest aren't always peaceful [1]. It seems like a lot of Democrats are conveniently forgetting that all of a sudden.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...

This is a pretty vague announcement. What counts as "misinformation" or a "false claim" and who makes that decision? Will YouTube be contacting primary sources to verify all claims made in videos? Will they be relying on some designated "fact checkers"? Or maybe they're trying to tell us that ALL claims of voter fraud will automatically be deemed false without any form of review (this was the approach Twitter took with their labeling)?

> Ticketmaster has agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine

Live Nation is worth $16 Billion. This is like a person with a $100k net worth having to pay a $62 fine, basically an expensive parking ticket.

They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.

> Life-changing technology “discovered”: Air Fryer

They're just tiny convection ovens with a gimmicky name.

> if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject.

There was a distinct point in time a couple years ago where this started to happen. Before that, my YouTube feed was always a diverse selection of all the different topics I had ever watched. Now, if I watch one car review my feed is full of car channels. If I watch one political video it fills with politics. Nothing I do seems to affect YouTube's singular focus on whatever topic I've most recently viewed.

It's depressing to read this quote and then realize it was delivered in 1922, meaning our media has been suffering from this problem of extreme political bias for likely more than a century now.

A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.

> I noticed a substantial improvement in my health when I started putting HEPA air filters all over my house, and another jump when I moved away from a major road.

Same for me when I moved out of a stuffy old high-rise in Philadelphia. I had frequent coughs and wheezing, shortness of breath, and just lots of general discomfort with breathing. Every time I washed my car there was a thick black layer of soot covering it within a couple days, so I'm sure that was doing great things for my lungs. Also got a couple serious colds every year when I lived there. That was as a 20-something who never smoked, didn't have asthma and wasn't overweight.

Living in the suburbs now and haven't had an issue since moving.

I see pihole recommended constantly as a way to block ads.

> I understand DNS a lot better than pihole

Unless the mods did a survey this doesn't justify the title change. It's just as likely that more people are familiar with pihole than DNS, and if the mods don't know (which they don't) then they should leave the title as the author wrote it.

Why did the HN mods arbitrarily change the title of this article?

It's not the correct title and it's harder for the uninformed user to understand. If you told me about hard-coded DNS settings I would say "Ok, what does that mean and why does it matter?". If you said "Smart TVs ignore piholes" (the original title) I would know exactly why that's important.

> Those ethics were created from within a theistic worldview

Animals behave ethically/morally and they have no religion.

It's possible that ethics were first written within a theistic context but that has no bearing on how they were created.

It's really sad that philosophy isn't a core part of the US curriculum and I can't figure out why that's the case. We were required to read plenty of novels that attempt to be philosophical, but analyzing them was always a nightmare because it's completely subjective. Is this paragraph literal? Symbolic? Metaphorical? Nothing at all? In many cases the author never explains, so there's no way to know. Everyone is free to project their own opinions onto everything.

I still remember being extremely frustrated when our teacher kept telling us it was "ironic" that the most physically fit character drowned in Stephen Crane's The Open Boat (sorry for the spoiler). It wasn't ironic at all because he was foolish, and foolish people get themselves killed all the time!

Same, for all those reasons and more. I hate Facebook discussions along with any other site that uses this nested comment + magical sorting algorithm format (e.g. Reddit, Hacker News).

It's impossible to have a lengthy discussion about anything of substance on sites like this. The nested comment format immediately splinters every discussion into multiple "mini-threads" rather than a single coherent conversation. Each of those mini-threads splinters even further, making it impossible to follow anything.

Then the upvotes and algorithm fuck it up even more by pushing "popular" replies to the top while burying anything controversial.

Every thread is dead within hours, not just because discussions are fractured into a million pieces but because variety is prioritized over substance and the front page MUST have new content every time users visit the site.

On forums there were threads that would live for years, some have probably even spanned more than a decade at this point.

It's the 2-year, $35 million investigation that didn't indict a single person for colluding with Russia to influence the election: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

> But certain facts will never go away no matter how much denial they embrace. The sweeping Mueller investigation ended with zero indictments of zero Americans for conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. Both Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner – the key participants in the Trump Tower meeting – testified for hours and hours yet were never charged for perjury, lying or obstruction, even though Mueller proved how easily he would indict anyone who lied as part of the investigation. And this massive investigation simply did not establish any of the conspiracy theories that huge parts of the Democratic Party, the intelligence community and the U.S. media spent years encouraging the public to believe.

Was that before or after this:

> My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

It's pretty hilarious that you picked the Trump Tower meeting as one of the most incriminating parts of the Mueller report:

> The centerpiece of the Trump/Russia conspiracy – the Trump Tower meeting – was such a dud that Jared Kushner, halfway through the meeting, texted Manafort to declare the meeting “a waste of time,” and then instructed his assistant to call him so that he could concoct a reason to leave.

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

Facebook and Reddit are not publishers of news so that comparison makes no sense.

I think one of the root causes of this is the increasingly partisan behavior of the "mainstream" media. People are sick of having their opinions dictated to them, they're sick of media outlets that all push the same narratives 24/7 (Russiagate, anyone?), and they're desperately searching for any outlet that will objectively report "all the news that's fit to print" (as the NY Times likes to say).

In the past year we saw Andrew Sullivan leave New York Magazine[1], Bari Weiss leave The New York Times[2], Matthew Yglesias leave Vox (which he founded) [3], and Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept (which he founded) [4]. All of them had one thing in common that Greenwald summed up well: "The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles."

The mainstream media has created an information vacuum, and the spread of disinformation is a direct result of that.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-...

[2] https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/substack-a...

[4] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

> When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

> As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup.

I don't see how they suggest that at all. The fact that a couple tech unicorns managed to survive during the beginning of a major technology boom says absolutely nothing about the probability of any other startup surviving. That's like me winning the lottery on a Thursday and then saying "Always buy your lottery tickets on Thursdays!"

And didn't Bill Gates come from a very wealthy, very well-connected family that could easily support him for the rest of his life if Microsoft failed? If I remember correctly, his mother was on the board of IBM and got Microsoft its first major contract for DOS.

> violent and authoritarian points of view

I don't follow politics too closely, but I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars. He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

Is there a lot of violence I'm missing that warrants calling him "violent and authoritarian"?

The most shocking part of this whole fiasco is the way The Intercept's editors blatantly play favorites, allowing disinformation that helps Biden while censoring a legitimate story that hurts him:

> 4) Finally, I have to note what I find to be the incredible irony that The Intercept -- which has published more articles than I can count that contain factually dubious claims if not outright falsehoods that are designed to undermine Trump's candidacy or protect Joe Biden -- is now telling me, someone who has never had an article retracted or even seriously corrected in 15 years, that my journalism doesn't meet the editorial requirements to be published at the Intercept.

> It was The Intercept that took the lead in falsely claiming that publication by the NY Post was part of a campaign of "Russian disinformation" -- and did so by (a) uncritically citing the allegations of ex-CIA officials as truth, and (b) so much worse: omitting the sentence in the letter from the ex-CIA officials admitting they had no evidence for that claim. In other words, the Intercept -- in the only article that it bothered to publish that makes passing reference to these documents -- did so only by mindlessly repeating what CIA operatives say. And it turned out to be completely false. This -- CIA stenography -- is what meets the Intercept's rigorous editorial standards:

> "The U.S. intelligence community had previously warned the White House that Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation."

> The Intercept deleted from that quotation of the CIA's claims this rather significant statement: "we do not have evidence of Russian involvement."

> Repeatedly over the past several months, I've brought to Betsy's attention false claims that were published by The Intercept in articles that were designed to protect Biden and malign Trump. Some have been corrected or quietly deleted, while others were just left standing.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

> He has stuck by his claim -- despite the findings of numerous national and international intelligence community investigations and even a Republican senate investigations -- that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.

I think you're grossly misrepresenting his opinion on the matter. No one denies that Russia made some half-assed attempts to influence the election. Every country tries to interfere in every election. Hell, we even bragged about it at times: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

Even Biden himself brags about interfering in the affairs of other governments: https://youtu.be/FdHWU5jDQ2w?t=46

But did Russia conspire with the Trump campaign to rig the election or provide dirt on Hillary Clinton? No, and he's right for standing by that claim despite the immense pressure from partisan hacks who have effectively smeared him as some kind of Russian puppet. Your post is evidence of how effective that smear campaign has been.

> I don't think it's fair to say it was the correct choice.

It's absolutely fair and the Mueller Report proved Greenwald was right all along: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

> it's not like he works for MSNBC or CNN.

There doesn't need to be some grand conspiracy among liberal journalists in order for them to engage in the partisan censorship he describes. It's clear that most of them believe supporting the "correct" candidate is far more important than publishing the truth.

> "If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

Expecting them to prove a negative in a conspiracy case is laughably absurd. Mueller said that there was not only insufficient evidence for all claims, there was zero evidence for many of the others.

> As Mueller himself concluded, a reasonable debate can be conducted on whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation with corrupt intent. But even on the case of obstruction, the central point looms large over all of it: there was no underlying crime established for Trump to cover-up.

> All criminal investigations require a determination of a person’s intent, what they are thinking and what their goal is. When the question is whether a President sought to kill an Executive Branch investigation – as Trump clearly wanted to do here – the determinative issue is whether he did so because he genuinely believed the investigation to be an unfair persecution and scam, or whether he did it to corruptly conceal evidence of criminality.

> That Mueller could not and did not establish any underlying crimes strongly suggests that Trump acted with the former rather than the latter motive, making it virtually impossible to find that he criminally obstructed the investigation.

If you were innocent of a crime would you really just sit back and watch the government waste $35 million investigating you?

You're right, the Mueller report is what makes it true: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

> Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”

$35 million wasted on an investigation that started with a FISA warrant based on a phony report (Steele Dossier) commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign.