25,432 karma · joined September 23, 2015
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Should government really keep pharma companies from selling you pills that are filled with snake oil?
Should a government really force you to allow black people to eat at the same tables in your restaurant as white people? It's your business after all and it's private. You should have a choice on which customers you get to serve.
It's going to happen. These platforms are so large they encompass a signification amount of the communication market .. and I don't say that lightly. Look at how Facebook has literally gobbled up all its competition and now is pushing policies that make WhatsApp and Oculus useless without handing over full control of all your accounts and devices?
These companies ARE STATES! They may not look like governments, but the communication power they wield is stronger than many nations.
You can no longer just say "They're private companies" when you literally cannot buy a well supported Mobile device unless it runs Android or iOS, unless you have the skill, ability and time to run something like a PinePhone or PostmarketOS.
In which fantasy world is the consolidation of power ever good for a democracy?
If you cannot install an run your own software on a device, you do not own the device.
You cannot praise the removal of Gab or Parlor now and complain later when they take everything else from you. They can increase the Apple developer fees whenever they want. What happens when they start charging you $2,000 a year or $4,000 a year for the right to publish apps? What happens when the two big platforms decide no one can push an app unless their platform has full moderation.
What happens when Google and Apple, for your safety, say all user contributed content must go through their "spam" filter first for any apps?
This is horrific. You may not like Parlor, but it will not stop here. This is a dangerous place we are in and we should all be horrified by it. People are horrified right now, but they're focused on the wrong thing.
However, the platforms are too large to be allowed to moderate whatever the hell they want as they are now, while slurping up all our personal information and data. I think we need real reform, and people need to leave the big platforms and find better alternatives. I wrote about this last month:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/is-meaningful-section-230...
You have a very very low bar for what you think an attempted coup was.
The dude who fired the shot, are you really defending him? A man with no real reasonable threat to his life? None of the people in that shot were shown to be armed.
Honest question, what are your views on Jacob Blake? Do you defend him? Because he sexually assaulted a women who had a restraining order against him, ignored police orders to stop, got up after being tazed twice and reached into a car with children. The DA found the police were completely justified in shooting him 7 times in the back.
This is the double standard. If you say she had no excuse for getting shot, than neither did Jacob Blake, or Breyanna Taylor.
Peaceful protestors.
Were the BLM people who stormed city hall in Seattle insurrectionists? Where the Black Panthers who took the California State Capitol in the 1970s insurrectionists?
Stop with the bullshit name games. These were not rioters. They didn't set anything on fire. They should not have stolen or broken anything. That's wrong and bad and should be condemned. Those people should get federal time
But man...you have to admit...there is something beautiful about the peasants entering the royal court, and the town idiot putting his feet up on the table that belongs to the Hand of the King.
The villagers entered the royal court and the senators clutched their pearls.
America has had a long history of occupying federal buildings. This is certainly not unprecedented.
These people were not a coup or insurrection. They had no plan. There was no person with a new founding document they were going to read. They didn't bring in an armed force and take and occupy the capital.
The overreaction to what happened is fucking insane, especially compared to what actual Rioters where allowed to get away with for the past year. In May, DC was literally on fire from the BLM riots, and we didn't see this type of DoubleSpeak.
In the 1970s, armed Black Panther members took the California State Capitol and no one died.
At least one officer is dead (this changes daily so who knows) and one protestor (she was unarmed, that's a protestor, trespasser at best) was shot by sorry excuse of a Capitol Officer who shot wildly into a crowd (almost hitting the other Federal Officer behind her!)
Please stop making this about race.
If they weren't prepared for this: incompetence. But there are videos of people getting selfies with guards, and staying within the velvet ropes when coming in. Something isn't right here and no one is talking about it.
How has Trump violated Twitter's TOS on a daily basis? It feels like every policy that has been put up is typically put up specifically for Trump.
I don't see how people can post photos of Kathy Griffin showing a decapitated Trump head as being kosher, or CNN's Como saying violent protest is constitutionally protected, and claim Trump is violating TOS. It's hypocrisy.
but the solution isn't screaming at Twitter. The solution is using our freedom of speech and expression to start creating and supporting other services. I know that's hard, but at least in your personal life, try to use ActivityPub services and encourage everyone else to do so. Set up a Mastodon and Pleroma server and give invites to all your friends.
Now I have done this and on my personal server, like 20+ friends have created accounts and to day .. only one still uses them. It will take time, and really only you can take care of yourself.
Also, long-from blog. Follow any friends that blog with and RSS reader. Encourage everyone else to use an RSS reader. Why the hell are we using Twitter when you can follow the blogs and news sites with RSS? You can see which news sites have new articles, rather that letting Facebook and Twitter decide the order and type of information your receive.
https://freespeechextremist.com/media/d5a1870d-1c9d-45a9-be2...
There was also one on Steve Bannon's War Room too this morning towards the end.
There are multiple ones if you just search of the Capitol police literally waving people in.
You need to go back and look at the Stanley Milgram experiments. It's impossible to really know if you or I would murder the person in the other room if the person in authority told us to, but I suspect you probably would.
Pipe bombs were in the DNC/RNC headquarters and not done by this group.
They didn't have "guns, knifes and zip-ties" .. I think there were 4 charged with guns? None of them used them. The only person shot and killed was a Capitol Officer shooting blindly into a crowd, hitting a white unarmed woman, nearly hitting another Federal Officer. I wonder if he'll face charges. I wonder if that woman will get memorials in her honor. Did you know she was an Air Force veteran?
There are videos of the people in the capitol taking selfies with capitol police and walking around peacefully. Weird coup.
> Neo-nazis
I saw people who supported Tump. I didn't see any neo nazis. There was one man with a communist tattoo, and some fucking QAnon idiot with a racoon on his head who should go to federal prison.
If you really think this was some kind of insurrection, I feel sorry for you. It was nothing of the sort. It was pittance compared to the burning down of a fucking police station by BLM rioters.
"oh I'm so scared. The peasants in the village have made their way into the royal court and sat at our golden seats and found our candy desk!"
Anyone who broke or stole anything will face federal charges and will go away (and should). But classifying that entire group the way you have is disingenuous. Especially compared to the rioting and looting that's been endorsed and encourages as being good and righteous by the left wing media.
The media has told us setting things on fire by BLM is fine for months and now they're acting like 1/10th of that is the end of democracy.
> “But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
I agree Bill Clinton was outside of it, but he got in and they started their entrenchment. Prescott Bush spent decades preparing for his son to become the president, but it was his long term intention.
Trump started planning this in the 80s and his extended family are also much easier to listen to and less ... squawking. There's a good chance they'll rise despite all of this as another political family like the Kennedys.
Kennedy wasn't corrupt enough, and got taken out by his own people, and somehow to this day over half of the world believe it was just one guy with an axe to grind.
The actual undercarriage of what is going in is deep and complex, held by powerful people who will rip each other, and the peasants, in order to maintain their control and power.
Just look at how people on here are ripping at each other, accusing every Trump supporter as being a Nazi or fascist. I think back to the quote from Wargames about thermonuclear war .. the only way to win, is not to play.
If you think this way, you're deranged. This is how religion starts. This is how wars start. If a war started, the righteous would not prevail. They rarely do. Wars almost always lead to autocracies. America was a rare exception. I guess that time may be coming to an end soon.
Why dismiss everyone and then tell some people to go back to work with the process half broken? It's bad optics and it's a blatant ethical problem.
We're at an impasse because we're literally seeing the same thing and also seeing two totally different things. It's kinda amazing, and tragic. I'm sure you feel the same.
The Texas standing was always going to be an issue, yes. What right does Texas have to make PA enforce their own laws? PA can choose not to enforce their laws if they want. But Texas, and six other states, claimed this would have diluted their own votes for the Federal Government.
I do not believe the standing issue here, because there is literally no other court for Texas to sue in. This wasn't really an issue of standing. It was an issue of cowardice.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/facebook-politics-and-orw...
Ignoring? They practically endorsed it as a totally reasonable means of change! The fact that the Trump supporters didn't Riot and very few of them entered the Capitol goes to show the vast majority of those Republicans do believe in law in order!
If the situation was reversed, had Trump won and Biden was challenging the election, you can be assured DC would be completely on fire like it was back in May. The Capital Building would be burning right now.