ardy42

> Otherwise Twitter is interfering in foreign diplomacy and governments, be they legal, illegal, authoritarian or democratic.

> Twitter should not be making these calls.

Twitter should totally should be making the calls. If the CCP wants to put a big propaganda poster in my front yard "for diplomatic reasons," I'd tell them to fuck off. Neither I nor Twitter have any obligation to carry the messages of any regime.

If they want to do diplomacy, they can send a representative to the State Department. If their government wants to communicate, let it use mechanisms it actually controls.

> Clearly no agenda here. Twitter backing an illegitimate US backed tin pot dictator and denying the legitmately elected government a voice.

As far as I can tell, the group you're calling the "legitimately elected government" is that of the tin pot dictator that's run Venezuela into the ground and ran a sham election to cement its power:

https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-congress-socialists-con...:

> Maduro’s allies swept legislative elections last month boycotted by the opposition and denounced as a sham by the U.S., the European Union and several other foreign governments. While the vote was marred by anemically low turnout, it nonetheless seemed to relegate into irrelevancy the U.S.-backed opposition led by lawmaker Juan Guaidó.

The government there bribes voters with food handouts. Think of how bad things must be if you can be bribed with food:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55211149:

> The government may now be in control of the National Assembly but the low turnout was hardly a "win".

> Sure, there were people who cast their vote, some still clinging to the man in power, others citing their democratic right as well as many more fearful of repercussions like losing food handouts if they didn't.

> But for the most part, there's an atmosphere of resignation. Most Venezuelans I've spoken to this past week saw little point in these elections and decided there were better things to be doing on Sunday.

> The vast queues at petrol stations rather than the polling stations explain what you need to know about politics here - that Venezuelans just want to survive another day and for politics to just go away.

> Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture.

Or imagine they were psychopathic sadists, like the Affront in that Ian Banks novel.

> But a more long term solution without redistricting is to give up on the notion that states are equal. Just give more senators to larger states, and fewer to small states, and the current system mostly works; certainly better than now, and without the need for as radical an imposition as state-level redistricting.

Which is exactly what someone from a large state focusing only on their parochial interests would say. IIRC, the Senate being a place where all states are equal was a pretty important compromise when the Constitution was written.

>> When looting and vandalism are allowed to reign supreme, the atmosphere alone sets the stage for more violence.

>> Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.

By that logic, you should be blaming the police. Why did you stop tracing back once you got to BLM?

> I'm starting to think that the degeneration of society into a 1984-style dystopia may now be unavoidable. We need to take power back from big tech and we need to do it now.

Look, lying is bad, and there is no nobility in defending lies. It's pretty clear that something's broken with how people think about free speech when they make hysterical 1984 comparisons when someone makes it slightly less easy for a massively powerful authoritarian country to spread its lies. It's not just you, I see this all over.

I mean, 1984 was all about a massively powerful authoritarian government making it impossible for the little guy to spread truth. Comparing this to that literally turns the novel on its head.

>>> The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters.

>> How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?

> Here's a brief summary of violence that occurred in one day of BLM protests in the state of New York:

> 3 Buffalo cops run over ...

> Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.

So you're saying the increase in homicides is BLM protesters (or hangers on) murdering cops?

> The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters.

How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?

> There is no easy way to stop the Bitcoin network so if they really wanted to kill Bitcoin they would make it illegal to exchange Bitcoin. But then people would exchange it and just not report it anywhere, and they’d lose tax revenue.

But that would be good enough to kill it for almost all purposes. Unlike illicit drugs, there's very little natural demand for Bitcoin to motivate people to risk it if it were illegal, which cuts it off from deriving value from the legit economy. It's also not very stealthy, so it would not be very desirable for the illicit economy, either [1]. A network that only has die-hard ideological cryptocurrency dead-enders on it is dead for all practical purposes.

[1] Right now, it has some marginal use at the interface between the legit and illicit economies (e.g. dark net markets), but if it itself became illicit, I think that would stop.

Just so you know, this isn't reddit, and joke replies are discouraged.

I was looking for clarification about what "the information warfare campaign" was. I'm guessing it's some kind of post-hoc rationalization for a lot of Trump's bizarre statements and other distractions, but I'm not sure.

> The problem is that there is not clear enough guidelines for enforcing some criteria for what constitutes a new state. Thus we have a false positive like Wyoming, which shouldn't be a state with its minuscule population, and we a false negative in Puerto Rico, which is anachronistically governed like a colony .

Wyoming met the requirements when it was admitted, but its population hasn't grown as much as other states (e.g. no gold rush, etc). If you think this is somehow an incorrect result, what you're really arguing for is the abolishment of established states or periodically "redistricting" them in a way that would do more harm than good (given that states are more than just subdivisions for representative purposes).

> and we a false negative in Puerto Rico, which is anachronistically governed like a colony.

They've had many referendums on that question, and I think they voted against statehood until recently.

> Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly.

That was the problem with the Senate's supermajoriy requirements: basically the only thing holding them in place was convention, so they fall in the face of someone willing and able to make unsentimental tactical power plays.

IMHO, someone like McConnell would have behaved very differently if he knew his opponents could block him just as easily as he has blocked them. His apparent effectiveness is almost entirely a result of his greater willingness to hypocritically use then discard convention when it gets in his way. He'd never have gotten his tax cuts or judges if he wasn't able to bend the rules.

> Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent.

I think something like that could be a genuine improvement.

> and goring it’s own ox, ie harming the thing that those principles are attempting to protect

Do you have any references for that idiom? I'm finding surprisingly little with Google, except for a handful of hits that confirm it's not a neologism.

> I was under impression that the self-pardon story was part of the information warfare campaign. Is there any proof to the that?

Part of the what?

> Hello deadlock! Come on down!

Deadlock is not the worst thing, and the solution to it is not necessarily to remove as many locks as possible.

The actual problem in the US right now is that checks and balances are strong enough to allow one party to block things, but not strong enough to deter waiting until your party stochastically has enough power to get things done. This is exacerbated by having one party's ideologically committed to having the government do less.

In previous decades, stuff like earmarks greased the wheels enough to get things done (but an effective PR campaign against them got them banned). You could also fix deadlocks by strengthening the checks to force compromise among factions, like by coupling automatically expiring legislation with requirements for big super-majorities.

> Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copied from the British. And even that is more poorly executed than elsewhere, due to the political nature of judicial appointees, and esp. due to the tradition of direct elections of some judges. I'd say it's arguably worse than the British model it was copied from, not because the Brits were psychic geniuses, but because of the not entirely unrelated fact that the UK model is much more open to reform; it's aged better because it's less crufty. When lead by a dangerously populist government that might be risk, of course, but so far even populists have turned out not to do too much consitutional harm - might differ in the future.

That risk has been realized. Aren't the parliamentary governments of Hungary and Poland falling into "democratic" authoritarianism?

I'm pretty sure the US system was mainly designed to prevent that kind of thing, and put up democratically-derived barriers against it. The Trump presidency would have been way worse without them. Trump has been very effective at keeping his party in line behind him (even to the anti-democratic extremes). The things you complain about are mainly tradeoffs of that design.

> Why WOULD Trump pardon assange or snowden?

Because he has a grudge against the US intelligence community, so would enjoy using his power to piss them off:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-flynn-pardon-matters:

> The “own the intelligence community” pardons—pardons designed to offend and punish the intelligence agencies for their professionalism over the past several years and the inconveniences that professionalism has caused to Trump. A number of right-wing and civil liberties figures have suggested pardons for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, though Axios suggests that Snowden will not get a pardon today. Such actions may have a certain appeal for a president—who, like both Assange and Snowden—has a tolerant attitude toward Russian intelligence activity that benefits him and who does not care overmuch about revealing American intelligence activity to adversary actors. There has also been talk of late about clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the “Silk Road” dark web market—who is serving a life sentence in connection with a murder-for-hire scheme. This would arguably be more of a “own law enforcement” clemency, but the concept is the same.

> He pardoned a literal spy who was convicted of espionage of state secrets but he did not pardon Assange. Incredible.

Assange and Snowden remain unpopular with Senate Republicans, and my understanding is that he was told pardoning them would hurt his chances of avoiding a Senate conviction in his second impeachment.

He was also recently steered away from pardoning himself, his family, and some Republicans that may have helped the capitol rioters (and he apparently got the message), but who knows if he'll change his mind in the next couple hours.

> Almost every single thing on a computer is meant to be scrolled, so 9:16 is natural for desktop UI, web pages, documents, code editing, the works.

I tried that once [1], but it didn't work very well for me. The monitor was 1080p, and I had trouble with desktop UIs that assumed a minimum width of 1280 (so I'd occasionally get things like the OK button truncated). Also a lot of websites (including HN) kick into mobile mode when they notice a tall aspect ratio, which was also annoying.

[1] I got a 16:9 monitor at work (I'd ordered a 16:10, but IT did a substitution in their rube-goldberg purchasing process.

> All 16:9 is good for is videos, and I have a second screen for whenever I watch those.

Couldn't agree more.

> Phone trees are a well known and used method to broadcast information via the phone system.

And pretty bad at doing it. It's actually pretty funny to imagine someone trying to organize a movement via a phone tree.

> These "marketplace of ideas" zealots don't operate on evidence. No exceptions or qualifications to the sanctity of free speech exist. Free speech is a faith, and no such heresies are allowed.

I couldn't agree more. They also seem to have pretty extreme tunnel vision, and even seem to discard other First Amendment rights, like freedom of association and freedom of the press. Freedom of speech also means freedom to not speak, likewise freedom of association means freedom to not associate and freedom of the press means freedom not to publish. These are rights that aren't always in harmony, and need to be balanced if they're all to mean anything at all.

I think some of the zealotry is caused by something like "knowing just enough to be dangerous." It's easy to fall into zealotry if you only really know oversimple versions of one or two things. However, I think at least some of it is bad-faith argumentation, where grand invocations of "freedom of speech" are just rhetorical cover for shitty opinions they'd like to spread unhindered.

> it means that people deplatformed from FB/Twitter should also be deplatformed everywhere else, which doesn't sound like a great policy for freedom of speech or fostering a competitive marketplace.

That's actually a great policy, because FB/Twitter aren't super-eager to ban people for their speech, so the ones they systematically de-platform are usually doing something pretty bad. Note: I'm not saying they always make the right call 100% of the time.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Society is not obligated to give bad ideas an audience. In fact, it's doing its job if it filters those ideas out.

> I can't say that I know enough about that part of WWII, but yeah I agree with that statement. Which isn't to say that it applies here. Simply pointing out that stripping out context can lead to false equivalences is lazy, it needs to be shown.

Well, the key part is that the Axis was centered on the imperial ambitions of a a famous genocidal dictatorship that you've probably heard of. There's pretty much a unanimous consensus that that dictatorship was very, very bad and its allies were not much better.

Regarding the recent violence, here the context:

1. BLM is mainly against the police's pattern disproportionate killing of black people, often unarmed, and racism in general. While there had been looting and rioting, it's worth noting that from the very beginning there's evidence that these protests were actually infiltrated by violent agitators with other aims (e.g. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/illinois-man-accused-o... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/texas-boogaloo...).

2. The capitol attack was literally against the results of a free and fair election, and deliberately attacked some of the actual institutions of American democracy. There's also no evidence of infiltration, though such claims are now being made to deflect blame. And the riots often loudly expressed violent aims (e.g. erecting a literal gallows and chanting "Hang Mike Pence" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hang-mike-pence-chant-capi...).

> If most people live in the cities, I don't see an argument for letting rural areas have more than their proportional share of representation.

It does act to prevent the rural areas from becoming totally neglected hinterlands, help them implement polices that may be necessary because of the different conditions of non-urban areas.

That said, I do think the current bargain tips the balance too much, so I'm now in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, and giving the House an advise-and-consent role (in addition to that of the Senate), at least for judges. These smaller states can keep their extra representation in the Senate.

> Examples are everywhere, you just have to not be in a bubble and be open to seeing it. I could keep going but you tell me, do you need more?

If you strip out enough context, you can make any false equivalency you like. For instance: weren't the Allies and Axis in WWII basically the same? After all, they both used guns and bombs to commit violence.

> Really? How did past revolutions and terrorist attacks get organized? You realize most of world history existed before the Internet, right?

Yeah, of course. Broadcasting means one-to-many communication. Before modern technology, those things were organized using other kinds of one-to-many communication, such as in-person meetings, rallies, and through newspapers and other kinds of publications.

Movements aren't organized one-to-one like on a telephone, because that's a far slower way of spreading a message. It's also an unreliable medium, as the children's game "telephone" shows.

> I would love to see a source for this claim.

There's no source, but it stands to reason: Facebook has something like 2 billion daily active users and it its roots are in nonpolitical social networking (meaning baby pictures, etc.). Parler had something like 2-3 million daily active users at its peak [1], and most of them joined after the Twitter started putting warning labels on false claims of election fraud. Parler also billed itself as a "free speech" social network, which in practice means allowing things other social networks prohibit, which means its mainly gets users who want to post and read such stuff [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/tech/parler-downloads/index.h...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/right-wing-users-flock-t...

> If people had called one another to prepare this, would we say that the phone was responsible for the attack? And would we try to ban phones?

That's a moot point, because an attack like this can't realistically be organized via one-to-one communication. It needs a broadcast medium, which the phone network isn't.

> Moral of story: FB and Twitter can do whatever they want, because they have more baby pictures. Any new social network has fewer baby pictures, and therefore can be held to a higher standard, to the point that it will be obliterated before it has a real chance to compete.

Eh, not really. You're forgetting the other half of the equation: Parler's niche was the stuff Facebook and Twitter had either banned or discouraged (like false claims of election fraud).

The real moral of the story is: don't try build your social network from Facebook and Twitter's concentrated dross.

> Sounds like some serious mental gymnastics to me. And also not provable with any specific metrics.

It's not really, it just takes the concept of collateral damage into account. Should a billion Grandmas be denied their baby picture fix on account of a moderation team missing a few thousand users' insurrectionist and para-insurrectionist posts? Obviously not, since that action is high on collateral damage.

That said, Facebook obviously needs to do a better job here, and this is one more example of their foot-dragging causing problems.