I read things like this and it really makes me sad. I don’t agree with Steve Bannon or Rudy Giuliani on a lot of things. I also don’t agree with their equivalent person on the left. In fact I am skeptical of most “career politicians”. I really wish we could switch what politics is about. Currently we (meaning news channels and Twitter/internet folk) want to dunk on the other tribe and show them how wrong and stupid they are. Can’t we all try to find consensus and compromise? I know that I personally don’t have enough knowledge and experience to know what’s right for all people at all times. Life can be complicated. Let’s have some compassion folks.
> Can’t we all try to find consensus and compromise? I know that I personally don’t have enough knowledge and experience to know what’s right for all people at all times. Life can be complicated. Let’s have some compassion folks.
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.
Thank you for mentioning that this situation 'slows the political process down' while also speaking of the end-result as one that 'kinda works'.
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.
The US is also the global hegemon right now so any and all problems it has are at the forefront of most news. What an outsider may see as troubling, the average american isn't really batting an eyelash.
I also don’t agree with their equivalent person on the left.
Are there many, if any, equivalent people to Bannon on the left? My theory is that the core of Bannon is neoconfederacy: under all the nonsense he talks is the desire to see the North burn.
In fact I am skeptical of most “career politicians”.
Bannon is not a 'career politician'
dunk on the other tribe
Yes, the Democrats are corrupt, but to focus on that, at the present-day, ignores the gravity of what the Republican party has become: the 'other tribe' is, really and truly, fascist and seditionist.
but do they know who they vote for? (same question to the democratic voters)
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.
It's harder to characterize voters. For example, Democratic leadership is full of corporatocrats. So, strictly speaking, Democratic voters support corporatocracy. But it's more accurate to say that most Democratic voters support corporatocracy unwittingly, or collaterally. That is what I would say about Republican voters and fascism, also.
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.)
Thank you! I struggled to find an appropriate word there. I was originally thinking of Democrats who supported Bloomberg, but 'oligarchical' and 'oligarchic' seemed clunky. Then I committed the worst sin of letting my words choose my meaning, and switched to 'corporatists'... oops. Yes, let's go ahead an make it 'corporatocrats' and 'corporatocracy'
Not all, fair point. But enough that it feels to me like to credit them is like when some people defend the 'boogaloo boys' by arguing 'not all of them are racist'. Okay, but it doesn't inspire much confidence :)
It's totally reasonable to be sad about this. It pattern matches to a loss of free speech, and when society sees free speech being violated, it should evoke strong emotions (hopefully even more severe than sadness).
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.
I don't agree. I think that the harm caused by these loud demagogues (is that redundant?) is massively overblown.
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.
To take it away from this political moment for a second, do you believe it's acceptable to allow someone to yell, "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or do you think these people aren't actually yelling, "Fire!", and when we determine someone is yelling, "Fire!", those private institutions should still stop them?
I don't think private institutions, especially when there are a small number of extremely powerful ones that exert control over publishing, should be applying or enforcing subjective standards on publishing.
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?
Does, "This won't make us any money, and could further result in the company going under or otherwise severely being hindered in the market due to the negative backlash and resulting decline in business." count as a subjective standard that you believe a private institution should not be applying?
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.
This implies there's better logic than sheep logic, and that some subset of humanity is privy to it, which feels like the source of the problem in the first place; people thinking that they're better than other people and reacting to that feeling.
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.
Perhaps we should stick to what we in society generally agree on: the rule of law and equal application of it.
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.
this. Current outright banning and gagging will surely backfire.
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 point you're trying to make isn't actually one anyone (rational) is trying to disagree with. Obviously (IMO) differing viewpoints should be allowed to coexist.
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?
Terms of use are not legally binding, they are simply a courtesy.
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.
I don't think anything I said was related to legality, but I apologize if I wasn't clear about that. Agreements between people are definitely enforced by legal means, but agreements between people are also a moral question about honesty -- will you do what you said you'd do?
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).
This is not comparable because screaming fire in a theatre isn't an opinion, which free speech set out to protect. It is a dishonest argument to justify cracking down on dissent from my perspective.
The real insurrection was not the rioters. They were, as you say, very disorganized and barely missed their opportunity to massacre the Senate when they chased a security guard down a hallway, past the open doors to the senate chamber.
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.
The part this argument is forgetting is what agency a person has over how people use the stuff they've made.
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?
Do you believe in their right to incite violence like beheadings from Steve Bannon and ransacking the Capitol by Giuliani? Because that's what they've been doing. Maybe these were all "symbolic" pronouncements by them, but I sort of doubt it, I think they just didn't have the cajones for it and preferred to see some poor dupes go execute on it so they could disavow them later.
You know, this whole not liking career politicians thing... isn't it kinda like not liking career doctors or lawyers? Why would we not want people who have spent their careers learning the ins and outs of the political landscape to represent us? Would we really rather have an amateur? How well did that work out when we elected one president?
I don’t think that’s a good comparison. You’re comparing professions that people interact directly with and which compete in an open market. Except for local politicians, most people will never have the chance to directly speak with career politicians and their choice is very limited when it comes time to choose one after which you are locked in to their services. It’s hard to think of a good comparison because anything comparable is usually political in some way. I would like to see more transparency and sortition applied to government. It’s probably impossible to do away with the career politicians since they are specialists but 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. Basically solving the problem of politicians being so far removed from the people by bringing a sample of the people to the politician. Sort of like a jury during a trial.
> I would like to see more transparency and sortition applied to government.
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.
Because they do anything to cling to power and make sure their side of the isle wins and therefore their own seat. Career politicians are why Washington is so dirty.
While it is difficult to believe that power-seeking is entirely orthogonal to choosing a career in politics, just how do you envision things will go with politicians who are not experienced at actual politics?
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.
So your meet in the middle position is, just to be clear, that terrorists get to dictate the makeup of the civil service by threatening to murder anyone they don't like?
> So your meet in the middle position is, just to be clear, that terrorists get to dictate the makeup of the civil service by threatening to murder anyone they don't like?
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.
> So your hyperbole has estopped your criticism of Bannon's hyperbole.
“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.”
How in the hell do you get "someone more scientific" than Dr. Fauci, "an American physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984"[0] . Seriously, do you even pay attention to what you regurgitate?
> How in the hell do you get "someone more scientific" than Dr. Fauci
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 also don’t agree with their equivalent person on the left.
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?
That’s just it. A lot of people of all political persuasions are reasonable and rational. I don’t think the current administration is at all. I’m a generally middle of the road guy that has a general viewpoint of live and let live. The problem is we are letting fringe opinions dictate the narrative.
If we rewind back to 9/11 there were plenty of Truthers on the left spreading nonsense.
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?
Can you bring up a more recent example? More specifically in the last 4-8 years. A figure comparable in influence to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. 9/11 will be 20 years ago in 8 months.
Bob Graham is the highest elected official that has challenged the government's narrative on 9/11. He was a US senator, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and he led the joint congressional investigation into 9/11.
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.
Then why wasn't all this evidence shown to the courts. Guliani even said in a court that this not a fraud case, that is what the Trump admin does they lie to people on TV but since they cannot lie in courts they lost the cases.
Even Trump appointed Supreme court judges rejected these cases.
Many cases did end up in the lower courts and Trump lost. Guliani even said in court that this is not a fraud case even though on TV he says its fraud.
Even Trump appointed Supreme court judges rejected the case because there is nothing there.
How about Adam Schiff, whose lie that he had seen "more than circumstantial evidence" of Trump-Russia collusion was the cornerstone of the case for a Special Council?[0] We got a two year investigation into the question of collusion... which found no such evidence: "The special counsel found that Russia did interfere with the election, but “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.""[1]
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.
People are able to evaluate bias in others and propaganda they disagree with far better than their own biases and propaganda they agree with. No person or group should have the power to decide on their own what is "true"
>> 'No person or group should have the power to decide on their own what is "true"'
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.
> We got a two year investigation into the question of collusion... which found no such evidence:
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?
> 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"
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.
> 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."
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.
> I'd be happy to discuss any specific contacts that you find to be troublesome, though.
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.
You are downvoted, but I think you are correct on the Russian story. It was made up or at least severely exaggerated to save face in an embarrassing election defeat. I cannot understand how people can still believe this.
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.
Sigh... The question remains open. Large scale manipulation needs a large target audience and a message, propaganda should not be hard to identify.
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.
I swear people here haven't even read the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel Report on this matter. For example, the quote you used came from the Mueller Report. Why did you cite a press article about it? Because what you actually cited was a summary from AG Barr which I think (and I'm not the only one, see below) intentionally and misleadingly left out the first part of that sentence. Here is the full sentence, emphasis added on the part you left out.
"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]
In that clip, Olbermann is saying that people who have broken the law should be prosecuted for it.
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.””
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.
As an outsider, I've always understood it like this. The conservatives and right leaning people value individual rights and freedom. For example, they are against something like mandatory healthcare, because they might be perfectly healthy yet would have to pay to carry those who are not. Democrats and left leaning people on the other hand value a more general sense of freedom and health. They want to carry the weakest people because they believe that they could at some point be in the same situation, where they would have to rely on others. (Bare with me, English isn't my first language)
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 left champions the weak and downtrodden even if it means chaos.
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.
> The conservatives and right leaning people value individual rights and freedom.
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.
Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose and was resisting arrest as he was having a panic attack. Watching the full uncut video, the officers showed remarkable constraint in dealing with him. It's a sad story, but its not a murder.
To me, this sounds a lot like "both sides, both sides". Politics is going to be messy. There's a lot of fait-accompli-as-fiat. But while there are two parties, there is no inherent need for the parties to be symmetrical. There is no equivalent person on the left to Giuliani, because he's meaningfully facilitated illegal insurrection against a peaceful transition, while in power.
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.
Maybe there isnt. You could be right, but I was speaking in broad strokes. You cant say there arent bad faith actors on the left. I honestly dont care if there is someone on the left that is equivalently 'bad'. And trying to find those people illustrates my point. Again, I think Rudy G and Steve B are generally wrong and myopic. The point Im trying to make is that just because we differ in political leaning/opinion we cant let media/twitter/social media/ state actors amplify this. I have 5 kids(3 step and 2 natural) and I cant even get them to agree so how the ** do we expect the population in general to get there? We are all different, and not only is that ok its awesome.
> we cant let media/twitter/social media/ state actors amplify this.
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.
There are bad-faith actors on the left. This isn't just kids disagreeing though, this is one of your boys helping push the mom out of the house so the boys get preferential treatment. It is acceptable in times like these for people to make an ethical stand.
This is also the kind of thing we need to be able to talk about without getting caught in our feelings. I generally am just lamenting that this is where we are.
Can you point me to a source on how Giuliani "meaningfully facilitated illegal insurrection against a peaceful transition"?
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.
> Giuliani "meaningfully facilitated illegal insurrection against a peaceful transition"?
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.
> 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.
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.
First off, thank you for providing your sources. I wasn't aware of Giuliani's speech before you posted. Now, on to your points.
> 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.
There are a few assumptions in play here that have become so ingrained in how we think politically that they may as well be laws of thermodynamics:
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.
There is a categorical difference between looting your local big box store and attempting to overturn the results of a national democratic election through violence. Did you see the videos of the crowds shouting “hang mike pence” at the capital? The elected democratic mayors of the cities begged the crowds and the police to deescalate violence, and they sent help when called. The elected president of the US escalated conflict, was pleased when he heard initial reports of the capital being breeched, and he refused to send in the national guard to disperse protestors. The first back up that showed up to protect the capital police arrived despite trump, who had told the national guard to stand down. The call came from one of Mitch McConnell’s staffers who knew some folks in the justice department. These aren’t remotely equivalent situations. In BLM, the elected leaders made tough choices, suffered, and worked to end the conflict. Does it not reach you that the maga protests as a violent movement matter because (1) they have express the support of the president and the political power that entails and (2) they are quit literally a coup attempt, however farsical and unrealistic, aimed at the core democratic functioning of our governance structure? And (3) these weren’t isolated instances, similar events happened at like 6 state houses, earlier this year a right wing militia planned to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
The power matters, burning down the government is different than burning down a Wendy’s.
An important distinction I've also noticed is that the burning down and looting done in riots this summer was an act of spontaneoud anger and rage, not a planned event in order to create fear.
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.
> No one was planning the looting of a store three weeks in advance
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.
I would love a screencap of people organizing to specifically loot or damage one store specifically weeks or days in advance. I haven't seen any.
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?
No. Incorrect, because those riots came from the left. Again, leftist violence is always a spontaneous eruption of justified anger. Rightist violence, even from the lone-wolfiest of lone wolf attackers, is always planned and coordinated from above by coded messages from Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, or even Trump himself.
I'm not saying the Capitol Hill rioters should be absolved from their actions. Those who breached the capitol violently should be charged accordingly w/ the federal crimes they violated. I personally think Trump is also responsible for inciting the angry mob, and should face the according consequences.
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:
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?
> 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)
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
It’s a good point, NYPD defunding itself can’t be tied directly to insurrection, but certain factions of the movement can be, as I detail in another response in the parent thread.
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.
>But on the other hand, why would COVID cause an increase in shootings/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?
And yet heavy policing has not solved those problems. It's almost like you should take care of underlying issues that cause these things (community disinvestment etc etc).
Professional organizations, uncontroversially, regularly set limits on what kinds of topics can be considered for discussion. If I pitch a talk on homeopathy to the American Medical Association's next conference I fully expect them to reject me. Even if I was a fully credentialed M.D. - much less someone with just an undergraduate degree - I wouldn't expect them to compromise with me.
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.
Watch speech Bannon gave at The Oxford Union Society if you want to genuinely understand the arguments he makes. I think you'd be hard pressed not to find some of the points he makes compelling.
He probably agrees that the sun rises in the east that doesn’t mean we should say he and t are the same aren’t seditious. False equivalency will normalize the coup attempt.
Bannon’s system of beliefs is well published. And it is nightmarish and frightening. Not compelling in any form. He is pushing a modern Helter Skelter and is the worst kind of accelerationist.
Let me say for the record that I dont have compassion for the current administration. My 'sadness' is for the people we all live with and interact with. I am not a right wing person, but I dont have any problem with them. I actually would be interested in why they feel that way. Im also not a left wing guy. Same interest in their perspective. I am curious in general about people but Im also very introverted. I have a lot of questions for folks that go unanswered since Im a bit shy. Some of that comes from seeing social media posts where anyone who even questions a viewpoint is a target...
Unfortunately you don't get upvotes for being thoughtful and sensitive. You're being a "both sideser", you see. Apparently, this is bad. Pick your tribe then agree and attack, hate and defend. These are the only options that will win you attention and approval. Seeking to understand more deeply, and take a broader view? You're part of the problem!
This isn't an episode of West Wing. Thousands of radicalized Trump supporters tried to overthrow American democracy through a violent attack on Congress and the Vice President. These people aren't going to listen to you or me, they are in a cult where they worship the President and his rotating cast of confidants. Going after those specific people is the only way to turn down the temperature and prevent future acts of violence.
Sometimes I, too, wonder why we didn't just compromise with Hirohito. Was it necessary to fight them? Maybe we could have just talked to Unit 731 and just reached some consensus.
Are you seriously suggesting that Trump & co are in that league??
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.
Hardly, but once you admit that there are those with whom compromise is impossible and suppression permissible then the discussion becomes a matter of degree.
> 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?
I guess you forgot about North Korea? Or Iran? Russia? China? Trump only had 4 years in office, these others are dictators for life and have far more influence to spread evil throughout the world.
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.
Sure, ignore half of my comment and put words in my mouth (I said nothing about any form of punishment). I'm not defending or excusing Trump's actions, I'm pointing out that there are actually worse people out there and to say otherwise just makes you look like a hyperbolic fool.
"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."
> How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with?
How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?
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.
Can you make it difficult to make an illegitimate, illegal or violent plan on the internet while also not suppressing legitimate activism, or protests or even normal plans?
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
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.
> Here's an important question: would it be a good thing or a bad thing if it was very difficult to make plans involving violence on the internet?
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.
I made my comment in good faith. I wasn't "trying to say" anything in favour of censorship, or against censorship. According to the guidelines of this site you're meant to assume good faith (not that I really care that much).
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).
Good thing, of course. The internet has the power to amplify a small message into a massive one and can trivially be used for evil. There is an argument that forcing people to use private chats prevents this stuff from getting out in the open, but come on, the NSA has a back door in everything. There is more harm done letting those messages out into the public space where there is a chance of radicalizing more people, or at the very least making that sort of abhorrent speech more normalized.
There are plenty of reasons to use encryption that have nothing to do with kiddie porn. What are the good reasons to allow calls for violence? Or to keep carrying content which supports it? What is YouTube, or society, losing by blocking it?
Of course if you can be pinpoint, objectively accurate with your censorship of "calls for violence" then that's great (not being sarcastic). But the world doesn't really work that way.
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.
The problem is of course, who gets to decide what a call for violence is? I have seen people use "Come on down, it will be wild" as an example of a call for violence. On the other hand, you have people on this site arguing that "Defund the Police" does not infact mean remove all funding. Even when there is a NY Times published opinion with the title "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" ant eh second to last paragraph starts with "People like me who want to abolish prisons and police"
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?
We've banned this account for abusing HN with ideological flamewar and ignoring our many requests to stop. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're for or against. We especially ban accounts that have been using HN primarily for that, as yours has. That's a key indicator of bad-faith use of the site, and is obviously against the rules.
When this came up yesterday, someone raised the common objection "why not just ban all politics then?" If anyone has that question, the thread is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25711241
Dang, I grew up in Soviet Union and what I see in the last couple days looks exactly like communists doing in 30s (removing unwanted people from photos, firing from work, kids betraying their parents to authority, etc). While I don’t know the history of this account, I don’t think this comparison is far fetched and it is way closer than I thought I will ever see after coming to US 20 something years ago.
I hear you, but there are many ways of making the same point without breaking HN's rules, which call for avoiding flamebait, snark, name-calling and so on. For example, the way you've made your point here is well within the site guidelines. Also, please keep in mind that I didn't ban the GP account for that comment, but rather for a consistent pattern of breaking the rules and flouting our many requests to stop.
HN's guidelines are not ideologically driven. They're designed to help the site achieve its mandate of being a place for intellectually curious conversation [1]. People can't be in curiosity mode and battle mode at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way. (They probably can't be in curiosity mode and ideology mode at the same time either, but that's not really where we draw the line.)
When accounts are using HN for battle, smiting enemies, lashing out, and generally contributing to burning this place down, we ask them to stop, and if after repeated warnings they don't stop, we ban them. That's not because we disagree with them ideologically—we ban all accounts that do this regardless of what side they're on. It's because it's the only way to preserve this community and prevent it from destroying itself the way internet forums usually do [2,3]. The goal is for HN is to stay interesting, and scorched earth isn't interesting [4]. We've tried to be true to this core value from the beginning; it hasn't changed and won't change for as long as we can manage to keep it. We do get better over time at articulating it and iterating on the ruleset for keeping it [5].
Actually, the irony is that such accounts resemble the corresponding enemy accounts (and vice versa) far more than either set resembles the majority of users here, who are coming to the site in curiosity mode.
[5] The guidelines have changed a lot in the last year or two. For example, they used to say "Be civil", but now they say "Be kind". That wording reflects the intended spirit better. There are many other things like that, but none of them have changed the core value of the site—they're all an attempt to serve and preserve it better.
You do have to know something of the history of the account in order to really respond to our banning it. We wouldn't have banned it just for that one post, even though it obviously breaks the site guidelines by being flamebait and name-calling ('thoughtcrimes') and ideological battle.
I downvoted you because it's ridiculous to compare what companies do to what a state does. Private companies do not have the option of disappearing you. Your rights are between you and the state, not you and a company.
Until the companies being discussed have the right to use force against you your argument holds no water.
My reading of current events are that we are more likely headed towards modern Russia where journalists are imprisoned or murdered for not supporting populist ideals than we are headed towards some sort of communist state.
I mean Trump did everything in his power to become the next Putin.
Your concern about sending people to the Gulag is pretty far-fetched.
Hmm, well, is it possible that a corrupt fascist could ever take control of our government? If yes, it seems like it would be prudent to make sure we had avenues of free speech protected even from monopolies or duopolies that may provide platforms.
In the same way designating certain market actors (whether they are private or not) as utilities would stifle their free speech. The best examples would be the telcos, water, electricity and post offices. Regardless of criminal past or ideological stance, these entities must serve all members of society, with the only caveat being on the condition of nominal payment.
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.
I don't think companies would save us from a fascist government; if the government falls, everything falls. So, in the meantime, trust the government more than companies (which gives you a higher stake in seeing it and Constitutional protections don't fall) by tax-funding public platforms/news delivery networks that have to abide by the First Amendment. That seems like the only way to cut this knot.
Besides federated dark web anarchy, which is a nice thing to try in parallel.
Can you picture Congress funding any sort of public platform that would be used for porn and spam, and extreme politics of all kinds? That seems very unlikely to ever happen.
>> The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997.[18][19][20][21][22][23] The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson[16] and then called The Onion Routing project (which later simply became "Tor", as an acronym for the former name), launched on 20 September 2002.[1][24] The first public release occurred a year later.[25] In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[16] In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.[26] The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.[27][28][29][30][31] Prior to 2014, the majority of funding sources came from the U.S. government.[16]
It is interesting how strongly people have been blaming facebook for the worlds problems but as soon as tech companies start to clean up their services its suddenly too much use of power.
If it makes you feel any better, I blame Facebook for a lot of issues in the modern world, and I'm glad tech companies are finally doing something about some of them.
I think facebook has made the right call by cleaning up this mess but I do wonder if a corporation is the right one to be making these calls. Tech companies now hold more power than most governments which makes me wonder if we should start having public elections on who gets to run them. Or maybe they should be tied in more with the government. If someone starts inciting violence on facebook maybe it should be the job of the police to deal with this rather than some moderator sweatshop.
Facebook is the problem in a lot of ways (not all). Making hate viral to millions of people in a decentralized network is an innovation that I am not happy about. What to do about it I don't know and haven't heard many convincing arguments. I do think European style bans on hate speech might be a positive change. Europe has a lot of weird cultural things as a result of their imperialist and colonial past, but their recent experience with genocide and war does lend them some credibility in terms of how they have adapted.
I think they have mostly open societies with high quality of life and not many compromises in terms of "liberty". I equate liberty with overall quality of life, not the liberty of individuals to abnegate societal obligations. So bans on hate speech, and attendant penalties, I see precedent where little harm has been done but a lot of harm has been mitigated.
I wonder if the right answer to all this is some sort of parallel justice system with the responsibility to moderate things on the internet?
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.)
> Some people think that the companies have ulterior motives.
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.
"The platforms are attempting to limit their exposure to facilitating such actions"
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.
Wrong analogy. If someone got up to speak in Times Square, incited violence, and was charged with sedition, then the owner of Times Square is not going to be named in any charges.
The owner of Times Square relies upon the big advertising signs for their income. The companies that pay big bucks for those signs decline to renew their contracts, because those signs have become best known as the backdrop for sedition rants, tainting their brands. So the owner bans the best known ranters as a way of signalling to the advertisers that the problem is being addressed and they should keep spending,
"The owner of Times Square relies upon the big advertising signs for their income."
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.
I don’t think there is a perfect analogy. They are being given a venue (their profile) a distribution (users; eyes of consumers) in the millions. Maybe if Times Square allowed and played seditious content with advertising in it that would be apt?
The AWS banning is what really concerns me. It's a clear escalation. First it's the app level (breached by Apple and Google), then the infrastructure level (breached by AWS - although there are alternatives here. Next up is DNS, I guess? And after that, routing. The ultimate Internet Death Penalty.
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.
> 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.
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?
r/conservative r/conspiracy r/donaldtrump all come to mind as communities that (up until one was recently banned) complained about censorship while constantly banning users for providing debate.
Heck, I signed up for Gab and was almost immediately banned from the entire site after sharing my liberal opinion.
Interesting, I guess we're just talking about different populations of 'people complaining about censorship.' I never spend time on forums whose main stated purpose is political discussion but still hear a lot of discussion about censorship in my daily life, so I don't really jump to gab, r/conspiracy, r/donaldtrump, etc when I hear that phrase. I don't think I'd characterize those places as being the majority of people concerned about corporate censorship, though
> 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.
> 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.
This isn't about people having their civil liberties taken away.
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.
Indeed, no business wants to carry unnecessary liability.
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.
Certain topics are stigmatized for various reasons so lots of people don't want to be seen to complain about things because they would then be associated with the topic and get the stigma too.
I don't agree that it's 'just capitalism'. Just because I acquire a piece of private property does not necessarily give me the right to do anything I want with it.
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.
>>I don't agree that it's 'just capitalism'. Just because I acquire a piece of private property does not necessarily give me the right to do anything I want with it.
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 ?
There are instances where such freedoms are granted to individuals while on private property. However, it is limited to specific circumstances and only when a specific jurisdiction's laws require it.
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.
Hmm - must have been pretty hard to narrow, since its seems to specifically target shopping centers ?
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?
Access to legal counsel is in a special category. Law firms are expected to represent people accused of the very worst crimes in order to promote a just outcome. It's extremely disturbing that political actions which may be distasteful but could never be prosecuted as crimes in normal circumstances have become a justification to harass law firms until they refuse to represent a client. I say "normal circumstances" because I'm not sure how long it will be until we get show trials and mass convictions of political figures.
> Law firms are expected to represent people accused of the very worst crimes in order to promote a just outcome.
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.
Legal rights are distinct from ideals and principles. "Freedom of speech", for example, is primarily an ideal. It has some encoding in law because it is such a valuable ideal, but no one should conflate the two and think that the ideal of "freedom of speech" doesn't apply unless the law says so. The law is not an ideal.
Access to legal representation is similarly an ideal that can't be reduced to its partial encoding in a very flawed legal system.
If someone assaults me or otherwise violates my rights, but I can't file suit to defend my rights, then in practice I essentially don't actually have those rights. This is elementary.
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.
Sorry. I wasn't aware of anything involving Parler's lawyers. The mass harassment of lawyers (leading to withdrawal) that I'm aware of involved Trump's lawyers. Perhaps they were retained by a corporation (idk), but I would find the question of corporate personhood irrelevant because Trump could just have retained them personally if he needed to.
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.
> Sorry. I wasn't aware of anything involving Parler's lawyers.
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.
There is some advocacy to provide public defenders in civil matters. The reasoning is that financial damages can effectively deny liberty, even though the method differs from criminal.
That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.
Do you have reason to believe that it’s harassment that is stopping these people from getting legal counsel? Many of these people, Trump especially, have shown that they refuse to listen to legal council and will lie for no good reason at all, then throw their legal council under the bus if it seems like it will advantage them. There are many good reasons lawyers might not want to touch the current situation with a ten foot pole besides harrasement.
I'll give a few quick links, but a quick search turns up dozens and I think you're competent enough to search for yourself. You have public statements of "Yes, going after Trump’s law firms is fair game" and then you have the expected harassment and law firms pulling out en masse. Maybe the client's toxicity is a factor, but that should be the only factor.
If we start compelling lawyers to provide legal counsel to clients, what protections do we afford those lawyers? In several cases over the last election, Judges threatened lawyers with sanctions and loss of right to practice for bringing forth clearly baseless lawsuits and wasting the court's time.
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?
Who's being denied the right to legal representation? I'm not talking about individual lawyers refusing to represent people, I mean literally give me an example of anyone being denied the right to legal representation.
> Next up is DNS, I guess? And after that, routing.
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.
There was once a thing called net neutrality. As long as you had the means to operate a server, even a shitty old laptop in your mom's basement, you could have a presence online*.
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.
Ironically, if Trump supporter websites start getting banned at the ISP level they'll only have themselves to blame for their crusade against net neutrality.
I disagree. Five years from now, we’re all going to look back fondly at the time we were warned about AWS/EWS gaining too much power and thank each other that we heeded the warning.
At the very least, I hope this encourages companies to backup their Cloud data frequently and separately.
what’s being banned is systematic destruction of people’s willingness to believe facts in order to support a world view that is inconsistent with facts.
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
agreed. nothing novel about people lying to convince other people to do something.
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.
Exactly. These companies want to avoid government regulation / oversight. They are taking proactive actions to lessen the blame that would be assigned to them and thus (hopefully) avoid future regulatory action.
The problem I see is that they are walking directly in to oversight through their concerted actions. They are going to end up being labeled public utilities (identity, max comm, public market have already been labeled so).
I am not saying it is better or worse, but I would say not one of them wants to be regulated as such. So they are setting themselves up for a result they are trying to avoid. Perhaps it is unavoidable, and actually for the better.
They really aren't. Look at the alternative narratives pushed recently about how all the Founders were raging slavers.
Many, in fact, were not, even if some participation in the practice at the time. Look at the pushing of anti-Western intellectualism and rejection of the basic tools of logical reasoning, which trace their roots far back to the Ancient Greeks, for being the "Master's Tools" to ensure supremacy.
At the end of every disagreement is violence as the final method of conflict resolution. That these ideas are pushed, is just another log on the fire. Part of classical logic and rhetoric was teaching the ability to utilize them to defuse and avoid violent resolution of disagreement through reference to an objective or common reality.
You may not think the above poster has a point, but they most certainly do.
They may or may not have a point about whether or not some academic pursuits are fact based.
But their leap to "if X is banned and Y is similar to X and Y isn't banned then X can't be banned" is still wrong because it is not the similarities between X and Y that is causing X to be banned.
It is the fact that X is being used to inspire violent opposition to the government that is the source of the banning.
Or to make it much less abstract:
A bunch of people broke into one of the most important buildings in the US government, killed a police officer and wounded others who were trying to stop them, stole stuff including computers belong to high ranking government officials, broke stuff, humiliated the government, and had every appearance of being willing to cause physical harm to political leaders because of X.
X was supported by social media.
Social media hosts reasonably concluded that the government may cause them to suffer negative consequences if they did not do something to prevent this from happening again.
Because of Y, some people have gotten into fights on the internet and a few individuals have found their employment and social options constrained. The government is not nearly as interested in this.
It's getting banned because of the politician's fallacy, and people with conveniently placed levers capable of being pulled. Nothing more, nothing less.
The far right not-so-fringe elements led by the president tried to overthrow the government last week. If it had gone slightly differently they could easily have murdered a large chunk of the legislature.
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.
What I’m interested in is how many people here are applauding the banning while liberal voices like Glenn Greenwald, and the ALCU are decrying it.
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.
Even if those opinions call for murdering journalists? Like many countries in Europe, calls for violence should be illegal. It's also pretty easy to not care about these things if your are a white conservative male and not the target of these things.
A stronger element of the power structure is silencing another. It's simple as that. Look at the relentless pro-censorship brigading on most social media. Lots of money, power and influence is being applied here. If this was china or russia, we'd call it a soft "purge". They'd call it promoting "harmony" or "protecting the people". Not sure what we are going to call it.
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.
A broad swathe of unrelated people systematically manipulated into feeling a certain way. This has been going on since Bush 2.0's 8 years of assault on the truth.
I genuinely can't tell which side you're taking about, one, or the other, or both. I feel like there are crazy people everywhere, ranging from the hyper woke to honest to god nazis. But one group decided to storm congress (which I still haven't wrapped my head around, I'm mentally living in the beforefor times) and by supporting the rule of law I must now be on the side that's not that, even if I have to share the bus with the nutters who believe in "censoring" and thought policing.
Protests inside the Capitol building are actually surprisingly frequent. But why did the events of January 6th result in Congress evacuating their chambers, and moved to defensible positions? Something was different this time?
The US Capitol Police handled the situation weirdly and it got out of hand. I'm not sure why they let protestors across barriers and declined assistance from neighboring agencies. Some people read a conspiracy into these events. I just know this wasn't even close to the first time people were upset at congress and demonstrated inside forbidden areas. Nor was it the first time large peaceful demonstrations were marred by a few acts of violence.
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.
I have read many an article with words like "hallowed halls" and "sacred ground". It's just a building, and with enough dollars it can be cleaned up and repaired. What I keep coming back to was the intent to overturn an election with force by disrupting a critical vote on the election that was in progress. That's not clutching at pearls, that's a threat to democracy and the rule of law.
It's neither brigading nor a broad new historical trend. A lot of people (myself included) simply see this as an emergency situation requiring extraordinary measures, and are okay with censorship of the Trump campaign even though we're anti-censorship in general. If it were Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, or even 2019 Donald Trump getting deplatformed like this, I'd be strongly opposed.
You make a really good point. It’s basically the Streisand Effect. A bunch of people who didn’t even know who Steve Bannon is are going to go and find out now.
It won't be. These bans and policies have been going on for a really long time. It is just hitting the US now. It has been happening in India for far too long. Big Tech monopoly has gone unchecked all this while. At least I am happy to see my fellow Indians uninstalling WhatsApp and moving to Signal. The more such alternative services the better. This stronghold of Big Tech on what internet should be has to end and it will end.
Research actually backs up that deplatforming does reduce audience sizes for an outlet.
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 isn't independent research and I assure that the "left" has now much more political enemies than, say, 2015. It had an immense backfire effect, you just weren't able to quantify it yet.
I can see the benefit of deplatforming, but I don't see what the benefit of the AWS ban would be. There are plenty of cloud service providers out there, so little more than a temporary inconvenience.
All of them have pretty similar ToS to AWS. They really don't have that many options. And no, going bare metal is not great either - colo / ISPs can deny you service. (which if they're trying to be sneaky they may find out after buying hardware and transporting it)
I haven't seen the CEO of Parler release any such statement.
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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.”
Yes. Every time one platform gets banned the right wingers get more and more isolated, more and more relationships become severed, they get more and more lonely. Combined with pandemic quarntines this will be mental tortue and completely destroy them. They simply wont be able to ever come back from this.
> Research actually backs up that deplatforming does reduce audience sizes for an outlet.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
No Representative or incarnation of the Government is permanant either, yet there's so much uproar hhere about threats to $current_political_figure
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.
Steve Bannon is beyond the Streisand Effect. It only works when something obscure is banned. Everyone who might be influenced by Bannon already knows about him.
I think we can't reasonably be doing front page stories every time one of these things gets reported. It's going to keep happening. Different people have different feelings about that, but we've had thousands of front-page-thread comments on much more important stories than Bannon's dumb podcast channel. At some point we should just refer back to those threads. I don't need to see Bannon's culpability litigated on HN; we're getting to Politico levels of granularity here.
The story has nothing to do with Steve Bannon's podcast channel and everything to do with the sea change in how social media moderation policy is being interpreted and enforced.
But is it helpful for that discussion to repeatedly restart it for every social media platform in the sea? The specific details of the source article here don't seem to have added any new information; 100% of the comments I see would have fit equally well on "Stripe bans Trump campaign" or "Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler" or any of the other threads we've had over the past few days.
Which itself is clearly driven by the sea change in the climate of political violence in this country over the past four days. On which we've clearly spent the many thousands of comments mentioned in tpacek's upthread comment. Bannon got banned for being part of the same violent subculture that got Trump banned and Parler canceled. I don't know that there's more that can be said that wasn't already in the other topics.
Does this gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity though? Ie. Is it on-topic for HN? I don't get to make that decision, but I do think the bar for US Politics Article #5046 should be higher than "rendering a square on a quad".
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.
Bedrock cultural events (or signs of them) should gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity. IMO we downplay them only because of fatigue and denial and even helplessness. "Surely this is a one-off thing over one dumb podcast, not symptoms of a larger problem that I can avoid thinking about" or maybe "It's fine cuz I don't like that guy". And that's how we deathmarch into the next, for example, Holocaust.
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."
> I will admit that our comments sections sucks ass on these topics
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.
They can suck ass here and still suck ass way more everywhere else. I concur that HN is pretty much the best place online for these discussions, that I'm aware of, but I also think these discussions are far inferior to what is typical here. 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.
Sure, I would agree it sucks ass relative to what we can imagine.
> 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.
I think the enforced "wide-eyed curiosity" stance on HN is false and reflects the need on the part of the owners to preserve HN as a hub to market their self-improvement through making money ideology.
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.
There is a lot of truly vapid shit that has made it to the front page, and every time there's a person claiming it's off topic, and another claiming it's on topic.
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.
Okay, so, "we" are educated, tech/startup people. How do you want to enforce these standards? Sign up with a work email and submit a LinkedIn profile? That's just Blind with an extra step, and I think we all know the quality of discussion that happens there.
generational shift is always going to change the culture but we should attempt to prevent Hacker News from sliding into the general patterns of other social media.
We should talk about tech, we should talk about business, we should care about curiosity and shoot the shit without taking things personally.
I agree, if for no other reason than the repetition is boring. I don't see how members will stop submitting articles like this on their own: for some it seems to be a cottage industry to submit every piece they come across. How do you suggest HN address the concerns of members who consider moderating/curating/down-weighting such repeated submissions guilty of suppressing free speech and censorship? Particularly now, it would be perceived (as evidenced by so many comments) as part of the SV/Big Tech conspiracy to silence dissent.
YouTube could take its engagement algorithm down a notch, thus reducing radicalization by many orders of magnitude. Otherwise, it's just playing whack-a-mole.
It's very easy to find articles that find that suggestion/engagement algorithms for YouTube, and presumably Facebook and others, pushes people toward more and more radical (extreme) content.
> 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.
They could at least shortlist quality content and make only that content eligible for algorithmic recommendations, rather than seemingly all sorts of scraps like now.
I'm sure they can choose more than a few. Hire to scale that up. Probably wouldn't need to make it at the video level - flag the better creators first. For subjects without recommendations, let people search to find their next video.
The only reason tech companies are doing this is because the democrats have a trifecta and they want to be in their good graces in order to avoid regulation. It's not about decency, it's about power.
it's arguably the inverse of this. They're doing it because they don't feel threatened by a Republican administration any more. With or without specific regulation threats the workforces and often also leaders of these companies would have done it years ago.
As a liberal in big tech, I can assure you the primary motivation is that we are
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
Do you remember Russiagate? How half the country literally believed that Trump was a puppet of Russia, and that Russia had hacked the election. Hilary Clinton wrote a book about it. I will say that Trump should act with more tact and decorum, but just months ago CHAZ was a literal autonomous zone acting outside of the laws and authority of the city of Seattle. Nobody should have had their ability to communicate freely online taken away because of it, but fascists apply mental gymnastics to affirm one moral stance against another depending on the person commiting the crime.
When you say literally, I think you can't say "hacked the election"
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
Yeah, 3 years of fake Russian collusion and peepee tapes and a waste of a special counsel, followed by months of BLM riots where over 30 people died. And a literally insurrection in the CHAZ/CHOP where they actually tried to declare separate sovereignty from the united states and annexing land...I don't really take liberals opinions that seriously.
I'm less interested in whether that's true and more interested in the fact that a broader demographic of people now actually care about the soft power inherent in a private social media company that is the sole medium through which millions of people communicate their politics and receive the information and influence that helps form their beliefs.
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.
Or maybe they are doing this because an unprecedented (in the US anyways) social media coordinated mob was perhaps less than a few minutes away from capturing and doing god knows what to the entire line of succession of our government.
If I were them I would be scared of reprisals and would be in active dialog with the government pleading for help in managing the storm partially created by the social media platforms.
This started about 2014-2015 ish, but it really got going just after Trump's election in 2016. There is a leaked video from Google with mass crying post election, and the organization then vowed to prevent it from happening again. I suspect other tech companies were similar.
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.
And should Maxine Waters have been banned after she exhorted her followers to harass Republicans?
"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?
probably deserves at least some degree of moderation but still qualitatively different from calling for someone's 'head on a spike' in particular given that Bannon is speaking to an audience that has members who would likely take that literally.
But sure in general you're right, calls for harassment shouldn't be tolerated either.
The context for Maxine Waters comment was that a Trump Administration official had a bad experience at a restaurant, while that administration was in the process of separating children from families resulting in over 500 still being separated today. That administration official lied to the American public about this policy, and Waters felt that it was our civic duty to tell officials like them that in the administration wherever they go they should feel bad.
Note that at no point were these administration officials threatened with violence, just people telling them they're bad people.
Never heard of him (I'm from Europe and generally uninterested in politics), now I'm really curious about what did he actually say in his podcast and in fact am listening to it already. I seriously wonder how much generally pro-dem or apolitical people are going to find themselves Trump-curious or even Trump-sympathizing after all these bans and removals. I have almost no doubt there is going to be such effect, the only question is the scale. This is so obvious it almost seems a trap, like if president Trump himself had secretly ordered to ban him.
As a liberal and a person who believes in the milk of human kindness against all contrary evidence, I do have a problem with this overenthusiasm. When the trifecta becomes republican, will liberal podcasts be banned? There must be some arbitration. I believe flagging and moderation and proscribing individual videos is better than banning channels outright and deplatforming.
>When the trifecta becomes republican, will liberal podcasts be banned?
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.
No company or individual should have to carry rhetoric inciting violence until a court of law engages. Responsibility is not solely on the courts - corporations and people can make decisions on what is right without courts.
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.
Liberals own the media companies that are doing the banning. The government has no role in this. My claim is that if you don't like what the companies are doing, you don't like free markets. If you don't like that the government can change every 2 years, you don't like how American government works.
My point was that it is reasonable to be moderate in applying policy. When did I attack free markets or the democracy? Perhaps I am not as smart as you are, but please do not insult.
I am not insulting you, and I think you are smart. I'm saying that it's unreasonable to expect that banning people is a slippery slope unless you already think corporations and government have too much power, in which case the conversation becomes something entirely different and unbanning these people is not going to solve anything.
What interesting is how all these company act in the same way, why don't some company/platform took the opportunity to act the opposite to differentiate themselves ? I believe there is still large enough market for people who oppose this silencing.
Because all of their workers are coordinating these actions with one another. That also explains why most of the comments around these political issues have tons of absurd pro-censorship stances on places like HN. They're the same people.
interestingly I have had private chats with some Silicon Valley tech workers lately that find those bans and censorship repulsive but are too afraid to state this publicly.
I'm wondering if this is not the result of the ultra loud vocal minority once again?
The problem is that the pro-censorship crowd is openly using the internal open communication channels with full support and engagement from both HR and upper management.
Having numbers doesn't equate to having equal or greater power.
It's also because the old guard is no longer in control influential. The early internet was very libertarian, which included you're ACLU-left wing and right wing versions. Both of which hold free speech as one of our greatest strengths.
Libertarianism as I see it practiced by my rich friends and acquaintances is very much the corporate kind, and never the anarchic kind.
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.
Or... competition responds to other competition. If your competition fires 50 employees, you no longer have the pressure to keep an extra 50 employees just to compete with them. Same principle here, that's why all these bans are happening together.
The firms are responding to the same events and pressures in similar ways. It doesn't require coordination or conspiracy to explain that.
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.
From a naive game theorethic perspective, a cartel should not be stable. But if we look deeper we see that big tech has methods of punishing defectors, methods of punishing companies that "differentiate".
Isn't that exactly what Parler is doing? The reason it doesn't work is because network effects and collective action make businesses that try uncompetitive. Go against the grain and all of a sudden everyone you were trading with that made your business feasible drops you. If any other businesses try to support you in their place, they'll also be singled out and get the same treatment.
Consider this in context: No ban for fighting the wars in Iraq, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. No ban for torturing people or extraordinary rendition. No ban for mass illegal spying on Americans and lying about it. No ban for droning wedding parties or hospitals. But if you dare to suggest that a political party, that cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination and spent the last four years lying about how Trump, the only living President who hasn't started a new war, was a Russian agent, may have had something to do with a "coup" attempt which could only benefit them politically, then you are too dangerous and must be banned.
This is the crux of it all. Spend a second to think critically about what is going on outside of the news media echo chamber and it becomes apparent it's not about a moral stance, it's about controlling narratives and exerting power against their political enemies.
I’m curious what the legal liability is for platforms that host content that “incites violence”[1]
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.
Depending on the hosts knowledge, and the specific crimes of violence, and the exact relation of the content to the crimes — and concrete organization of a violent attack on a joint session of Congress in an attempt to coerce a preferred result in the tally of the electoral votes, to pick a not-quite-random example, would seem very much to qualify — there is a risk of criminal liability under 18 USC Sec. 2339A, Providing material support to terrorists.
No I think a violent insurrection in the Capitol was the tipping point. Up until then, all of the dangers associated with the rhetoric was theoretical.
That's the normalization of deviation in the real world at work. Less than a few weeks ago a suicide bomber blew up half a city block and it's already been forgotten because there is so much other crap happening.
That suicide bombing was really strange. It seems the person might have deliberately chosen a time when there would be no one around and made sure to warn anyone who might be in the area to get away before detonating the bomb. This would seem to indicate the person did not intend to commit mass murder, only property damage.
"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've seen the term "permanently suspended" several times already. Not a native speaker, could someone please explain to me the difference between that and "banned"?
The best I can figure it is this: 'suspended' has a temporary sense, 'banned' has a permanent sense. While 'permanently banned' is a tautology, 'permanently suspended' is an oxymoron.
On the other hand 'banned for [duration]' and 'temporary ban' have definitely been in use for a long time, which I personally have never thought seems wrong.
If those uses are in play, 'permanently banned' can actually be motivated for disambiguation.
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].'
As a native speaker, it's probably a distinction without a difference. Both sound more harsh than regular suspension and both sound less harsh than permanently banned. Neither one tells you exactly what they've done in terms of the amount of effort required to re-instate him if they change their mind. Both signal that they're unlikely to change their minds any time soon.
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.
In practice they effectively mean the same thing. I suspect they're going with "permanently suspended" now because they want to avoid people using phrases like they "banned free speech" or something similar to that.
To me, "suspending" sounds like something you do to accounts, and "banning" sounds more like something you do to people. In practice they're often interchangeable.
I agree. Also note that for something like a Youtube account there are records associated (e.g. media files, logs, followers) which "suspending" could imply the operator has not deleted, whereas "banning" seems more narrowly focused on taking away the communication privileges from user in question.
As a native speaker, I've seen it too, and it's just wrong.
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.
I think it is for emphasis and for clarity. It is to clarify that the ban isn't temporary. A ban could be revoked or it could have a time limit. Permanent means it can't be reverted.
I wonder if 'suspended' might also link to the wording within their ToS, so that's why they use ban vs suspended.
It works for the moment, but regardless of how you feel about the ethical debate here, the reality is that censorship resistant platforms will emerge to cater to the growing population of deplatformed/censored/banned/cancelled content creators and participants.
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.
It won't. Look at 4chan. It's one of the "free-est" platforms around and it's absolutely full to the brim of garbage that most people do not want to see. Let them build a cesspool for themselves, it's not going to draw a huge crowd as long as well moderated alternatives exist.
All these communications platforms with any significant user base editorialise, even *chan, Parler, darknet sites, etc ven the ones that say they don't. Otherwise they'd be flooded with spam, griefing, child porn, moderate or left wing opinions, etc. That's why spammers have always been advocating for maximalist 'free speech' rights for access to platforms. Given this, it's simply up to each platform owner to determine their editorial policy.
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.
The existence or the continued existence? Given that it's an island, Britain should be as good as new Zealand for covid. If it's not, the government has screwed up
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.
That's a good point, but we are supposed to have systems of credibility for that.
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.
People forget about the streisand effect. Forget about morality, is it even effective because it seems to cause the opposite effect and no one seems to care.
I understand and broadly sympathise with the sort of ~absolute freedom of speech outlined in the US constitution, but I am completely baffled by this recent push seen here on Hacker News and elsewhere that this freedom should be extended to in effect compel others to publish your speech. This is not in the US constitution, and is in fact completely unconstitutional (1st amendment protects against compelled speech). This almost seems like a push for speech without consequences, that no matter what you say everyone should be forced to provide you with services and support. This would be both unprecedented and also extremely unhealthy for society. It wouldn't even be conservative ideology, as at no point in US history has anything like this been the law, legalising compelled speech would be truly radical and unconservative politics.
You seem to be replying to a different comment than the one I wrote. I am not addressing any legal or constitutional issue.
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?
> I agree lies are bad. But lying is enough to 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.
Lying was allowed because it made Google money, and it would have been unqualifiedly allowed until the end of time if it hadn't started getting people killed.
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.
So what is the alternative, do we make all media completely responsible for the content that they carry in the same what that you tube is responsible for removing copywrite content that is posted?
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"!
This is the ugly truth. Big Tech has monetized hate since 2014 by guiding users to extremist content. Their algorithms were designed to create profit above all. The cost? Democracy.
Do not let GAFA evade responsibility just because they're scrambling to pull the plug after 7 years of digital sectarian chaos.
With BLM there’s an argument to be made that public policy backed by Republicans (and Democrats) created an environment where blacks are disproportionately targeted and harmed by police without consequence, resulting in the inevitable death of yet another unarmed black man.
With the capital riots, all Democrats did was win an election and every single resulting court case.
Plus the riots during the early days of BLM were stoked by the videotaped suffocation of a black man. No one was fanning the flames. The videotape itself did that.
With the capital riots you have Trump and his “team” manufacturing anger with lies. If Trump put country over ego and conceded, none of this would be happening.
You don’t think Democrats were pissed off when the FL recount was ordered to stop and Gore lost by 537 votes? Gore could have easily seized that moment to create anger and perpetuate violence, but that’s not the kind of country we want to live in.
Plus, it’s not like these bans are coming preemptively. Companies are sensitive now because people have died and political leaders have been targeted.
If after the Young Turks comments you had targeted political attacks on Republicans, then I can see your point. But for me the capital riots are far worse because they’re being actively exacerbated with the intent of threatening our democracy.
Are you asserting that Republicans controlled the cities and police forces in which "blacks are disproportionately targeted and harmed by police without consequence"?
* defunding schools in minority areas via how school funding is created
* war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing
* selling military grade equipment to local police forces
* supporting private prison infrastructure
* preventing open discussion of criminal justice reform despite having the largest prison population in the developed world
* sending drugs into minority communities via the CIA
* supporting police unequivocally despite evidence of wrongdoing going unpunished
... are all public policies and social policies that can lead to that outcome.
It’s not like cities “control their police departments”. Police are all autonomous with their own cultures and political beliefs influenced by a lot of rhetoric and policy and experience.
> It’s not like cities “control their police departments”.
All the things you listed (except for perhaps the selling of military equipment) is part of the policing responsibility of the states and local government. Those authorities have the authority and responsibility to "control their police departments"
> Are you asserting that Republicans controlled the cities and police forces in which "blacks are disproportionately targeted and harmed by police without consequence"?
No, not all cities, but certainly _some_ cities. Wether that is by design or by pure luck is incidental to the point that the Young Turks can blame the BLM protests on Republicans with at least some shred of plausibility and evidence. Sure, maybe it’s a cheap generalization that lets Democrats off the hook, but in some areas of the country the blatant segregationist racism of the 60s never died, and in some of those areas Republicans (and Democrats) have made direct or indirect attempts to continue that suppression:
So wether you agree or not, there’s a logical path that can be drawn from oppressor to oppressed.
But claiming the 2020 election was rigged or stolen or had massive fraud to a degree that would have changed the election outcome was never demonstrated in any plausible way in any public venue. There are no dots connecting the oppressor and the oppressed. The “kraken” was never released. It’s simply a lie started by Trump that’s led to violent consequences and unnecessary death.
If the Young Turks don’t blame BLM on the Republicans, the riots still happen. If Trump conceded he lost a fair election, no one dies. That’s the difference.
It's just a numbers game, there's more Dems here (probably 4:1 given the industry demographic) and so you lose the popularity contest on a topic like this which stokes tribal sentiments.
I've banned this account because it's using HN primarily for political argument and that is not what this site is for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
The purpose of this site is intellectual curiosity, which is not compatible with political battle. Some political overlap is fine and inevitable, but when accounts go way beyond "some overlap", we ban them. We have to or else the site will be wrecked for its main mandate. More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. But please don't create accounts to break the rules with.
Yeah the lying needs to stop. I'm not sure this piecemeal approach will work though, what if some right-winger starts a new social network and we're not able to stop it?
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?
So you don't want a Ministry of Truth? You want to leave something as important as censorship in the hands of Big Tech? What if a conservative starts a tech company? It could happen.
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?
This is the first line of the first paragraph of the Mueller Report:
> 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.
"Yet that's exactly what the Russian collusion narrative was. A lie."
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.
God is in a unique position as, by his very nature, is unfalsifiable. The “Democrats are behind the siege” claim, OTOH, is falsifiable. Sure, you could probably pull up some shred of evidence to put a Democrat behind the curtain, but there’s mountains more that put the alt-right behind this.
Politicians have been making false claims about the opposing party for centuries. Suddenly now Big Tech decides they have the right to pick and choose which lies will be allowed and which won't be? Pathetic.
How do you determine which speech incites violence? Posts about the BLM movement increased the likelihood of a small minority of people engaging in looting. The majority of protesters did not loot. Just like the majority of Trump supporters did not storm Capitol Hill. If individuals will react to information with violence, that is on them. Big Tech is not the moral or behavioral conscience of the nation.
Banning things left and right is inciting more violence than the content itself. They're making a lot of people desperate who were already extremely distrustful of authority. They don't need Steve Bannon to tell them that tech companies are trying to silence their movement, all they need is Hacker News.
These are opinions though. It may be untrue, but you're going to find yourself with a ministry of truth. "Who decides" who gets charged with the crime. These opinions can be entertained. After all, most trump supporters are clearly enraged by democrats.
So we've outsourced the parts the government can't do to companies who are essentially shadow actors doing their censorship all while everyone rushes to reply with the "censorship only applies to government" line.
Well the free market is more efficient. /s But not /s because I'm actually mocking people and dang should censor me(Don't do it this time though dang).
When a hurricane hits the coast, you'll find that a lot of people happen to board up their windows as well. A common set of pressures can provoke the same response from different people working independently. No coordination needed.
"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."
A channel called Innuendo Studios chronicles this tactic and many others in a series called The Alt-Right Playbook [1]. I found it enormously helpful to understand the mentality and tactics of a group that kind of doesn't make any sense.
Those are great points in the video - I've seen them employed by people who care more about winning than the truth irrespective of political affiliation.
You can't. People making absurdist statements like that and claiming them as "opinions" when someone rebuts them are the principle reason I stopped looking at social media sites (and I barely looked at it before then). If someone says, "The sun didn't rise today" and everyone else points out the sun in the sky, and their reply is "Well, that's, like, your opinion, man", it's safe to ignore them. Don't engage because they have tacitly admitted to being an unreasonable, delusional individual.
Exactly, and no Dem ever gets deplatformed for these incessant lies that lead to violence and death. Shows you it's all an excuse to purge Republicans (liars though they may be)
You are just lying. Guillani did not say "Democrats attacked the capital" he said, "Also, there's equal if not more responsibility on the fascists who now running the Democrat Party, who have imposed censorship on these people, who have been singling them out for unfair treatment since the IRS started going after conservative groups."
The same way he talks to you... with facts and evidence.
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.
It would really help if there were ages attached to our profiles. I'm starting to think there's a generational component to these values. Not that younger or older is better. I'd, just like to know why this became such a disconnect in the population, all of a sudden...
Guiliani said: "Believe me, Trump people were not scaling the wall. So there's nothing to it that he incited anything."
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?
Thank you for the vital context. “Democrats are to blame” -is- an opinion, but “No one who scaled the walls of the capital was a Trump supporter” is a statement of fact which can be disproven trivially (literally hundreds of photos of the hats and the shirts and the flags on the people scaling the walls).
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.
I believe you've misinterpreted Guliani's words. He is not claiming that they were not Trump supporters, he is saying that they did not scale the walls. By which he means that they did not have to sneak or break in because no one really even tried to stop them. That sentiment seems true on its face. Now whether the blame for that can be placed on Democrats is an entirely separate matter.
> By which he means that they did not have to sneak or break in because no one really even tried to stop them. That sentiment seems true on its face.
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.
> He is not claiming that they were not Trump supporters, he is saying that they did not scale the walls.
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.
This is the original statement: "Believe me, Trump people were not scaling the wall. So there's nothing to it that he incited anything."
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.
We have the responsibility to protect free speech rights, that is people's right to express their opinion publicly. The internet equivalent of this is to ensure that everybody (who has not lost this right at court) should not be denied access to the internet and setting up a webpage to express their opinion.
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.
The democracy and freedom of political views and speech in the US is now dead. It is like these days the Democratic Party represents the good guys and the GOP represents the bad guys. Anyone who agrees with some of the conservative ideology, or remotely disagrees with the Democrats will be alienated, labeled, draws anger, and eventually banned, silenced, fired from work and face retaliation.
There are a variety of YouTube personality with right leaning views that have built their entire reputation on the site. OAN, Fox, Shapiro, Peterson and more grew through use of YouTube and still do. And they do get labeled and have anger built against them - but they also label and build anger against others. That’s how things work on all sides.
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.
All these people at HN applauding these kinds of actions scares me. People seem to really think it's fine to kick Trump of Twitter, ban parler but have no issues with Iran leaders, north korea youtube channel etc.
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.
Not a comment on to the ban, but trying to gain perspective on the overall heated environment. I wonder, if there are more than 2 political parties representing different view points in Congress will that help in decreasing polarization?
The argument has been beaten to death so I’m probably not saying anything new to most people here, but two parties is the only stable configuration. In a first-past-the-post system, the smaller parties after the first two will be very quickly eliminated or consolidated (this includes the limiting case of no parties, where everyone is a party of one). On the other hand, if you have one large party it will eventually splinter due to internal discord and a lack of a common enemy.
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.
This is called [Duverger's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law) in political science. The effect is increased by how relatively small the US legislature is -- there are more members of the UK House of Commons than there are US Representatives and Senators combined! This makes it more difficult for third parties to develop in regional strongholds. (The US also doesn't have the strong regionalism that bolsters third parties in Canada and the UK, for that matter.)
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.
Yes, it depends on the voting mechanism and other aspects of how the government is set up, as other commenters pointed out. I was talking about the US specifically.
So many politicians are guilty of misrepresenting the truth or even downright lies; the last two Democrat candidates have been guilty of outright lies as well. Who will be the arbiter of this blurry line of truthfulness.
> Who will be the arbiter of this blurry line of truthfulness.
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?
My point is not that they were telling the truth, just that both sides tell blatant lies. And career politicians will have racked up a bewildering history of lies and mistruths.
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?
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.
Driving groups of people more underground to use protocols and services which are hard to ban is a good tactic overall? That will eventually put a bullseye on the whole internet.
As a brit, Fox news fascinates me. Because every clip of it I watch is so clearly opinion piece propaganda, they don't even pretend like they're reporting the news
Even our "equivalent", the Murdoch owned Sky News channel is nowhere near as bad as Fox news
We're about to get our own: News UK News (from Murdoch) and GB News (fronted by Andrew Neil) are starting, expressly on the Fox News model. It was thought until quite recently that the requirements for 'due impartiality' and 'due accuracy' in the Broadcast Code precluded expressly partisan TV news (unlike newspapers). But these two have been licenced anyway, so clearly not.
Ofcom explicitly can't take pre-emptive action around content issues - the offending content must be actually broadcast before they can do anything.
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.
In the recent years it seems every country had its fox news variant. In France it could be BFM (albeit quite lower in terms of noise, but still prone to mob level conversations)
So how did Sky News cover the US recent election? I assumed it would have been singing to the same hymn sheet as the rest of the UK media but I am open to the idea I was wrong?
Also a Brit. I occasionally go directly to the Fox News web site just to see their take, because I'm basically a conservative and have been a lifelong Conservative voter here in the UK. The main problem I have with Fox News is the lack of reflective self-analysis of conservatism or republicanism. There's no sense of trying to figure things out, to look at problems with a clear eye and then say what the conservative answer to an issue is, there's no attempt to course correct when things go wrong or in an unexpected direction. It's all about on-message heavily editorialised spin, omitting or heavily spinning anything that doesn't fit the narrative. As such, I find it almost completely useless to me. The news is incomplete and the opinion is uninteresting. They're really little better than RT.
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.
I agree, but its the same with the left media, the news are so highly politicized and opinionated that when comparing two news stories wouldn't be able to tell they are talking about the same event. One calls the other conspiracy theorists, the other is fake news, and everyone is applauding when their team is censoring the other.
The left uses a different style, so if you are more left leaning you are less likely to recognize it as propaganda, but you can analyze a few articles where you have some more immediate source (whole video, images etc), and both receptions. Propaganda isn't just lies, its omissions, shifting importance and focus, framing, use of statistics etc.
In the UK, Fox News had to cease broadcasting because it had breached multiple times due impartiality rules[0]. In the US, some are advocating for a return of the fairness doctrine.
Most countries have a broadcasting standards authority of some sort. If you claim to be a news channel, then some measure of accuracy is not an unreasonable imposition.
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.
For the time-pressed: The relevant "call to action" starts at about 2 mins. He's basically screaming a few minutes later. I don't think democrats are immune to this sort of thing, but I agree that this has really gone way too far at this point. Need to remind myself that this is Fox News - not some Peertube alt-right commentator. Quite scary.
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.
I don’t have any evidence, I have conclusions on behavioral patterns.
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.
If you really think about it, then it feels like "the right" has been losing over the last 20 years. Topics such as religion, abortion, gay marriage, healthcare, marijuana legalization, and police reform have all been going in the favor of "the left". I can't really think of any big issue that "the right" has championed, that they've actually won. They've won political appointments, but not ideological positions.
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.)
It has to play a part. Imagine using all your political capital championing those non-issues and not really getting anything tangible back in return. What a waste, it makes the Republicans look similar to the college racket, they sure took the votes (the same way college sure takes the money).
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.
You are downvoted, but it is often observed that rallying left leaning people behind a cause is much more difficult. Contrary to all the stickers we had the last years, it is indeed due to diverse opinions.
In my opinion that is a good property in general, just no for elections.
Evidence against the idea that the fringes are propagating revolt movements exclusively in alt media/networks like Parler. Foxnews has the same stuff, he was saying in no uncertain terms that the election was a fraud, and Democrats violated the constitution and that the people need to do something about it - no caveats.
It’s inferable if you look at micro-timeline of modern American history.
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).
>Should Fox News have their licenses removed, and be taken off the air & internet?
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.
Tucker Carlson was ruled to be not a credible news source in a court of law when he was sued for slander.
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."
It's sad that in a thread about the need to believe facts over lies, the one person who brings an actual well-sourced statistic is voted down. Maybe society really is doomed.
there is very litle discussion here any more; its pretty much tribalism by people who aren't honest about being naked tribalists. The irony is that despite the leftist ideas, the actual age is incredibly conformist and conservative; there is a conservative ideology and a conservative spirit, and its possible to be leftist and yet be hidebound or reactionary in terms of free speech or tolerance.
> Then the 99% are doing an awfully bad job at telling their peers they are wrong.
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.
The context around a lot of riots from the summer sits in my head pretty heavily. I don't like seeing rioting and vandalism as much as the next person, but I also recognize where it came from. I'm having a tough time reconciling the capitol storming in the same manner. The only similar emotion I have is pity toward people who were clearly lied to and who have insulated themselves from rational thought.
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.
> I also understood the anger last summer and found it difficult to condemn it
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.
There was no silence around it. The images were shown very readily and commented on openly. "Silence" apparently is a very squishy term, the media showed images of violence and unrest during the summer just as much as they did with the capitol siege.
Too many people are trying to rationalize the polarization of our society, focusing exclusively on the ends and ignoring the means.
Remember NPR's puff piece justifying looting? Or (I think) CNN's reporter standing in front of a burning building while saying that the BLM protests were mostly peaceful? (They were, but the not-peaceful bits were downplayed in an obviously biased way). There was another interview I saw where some guy was talking about the change they wanted to see, and peace and justice and so on, and was interrupted when in the background the crowd cheered when they finally managed to topple a traffic light (that traffic light never hurt anyone)
False equivalence. Looting commercial districts (while objectionable) is not the same as falsely claiming a federal election was stolen and looting the Capital.
The looting and rioting after the George Floyd incident (as a separate event from the peaceful protests) were not limited to commercial districts. Across multiple cities, government buildings and police stations were vandalized/looted. In an extreme case, in Portland, the federal courthouse was set on fire.
Also, the post-George-Floyd looting/rioting persisted for far more than a day. An example is the CHOP zone in Seattle, which lasted for 3 weeks before protesters were forcibly removed.
This doesn't absolve the Capitol Hill rioters either, but simply describing the BLM looting "looting commercial districts" downplays the amount of damage done. In my opinion, I think reasonable questions to ask are: over what period of time did the violence persist, what amount of value was destroyed, and how many lives were claimed during the looting.
> over what period of time did the violence persist,
According to BLM the violence against them has persisted since the founding of the country.
Rioting against being systemically killed for generations and destroying property because nothing else you do changes the system is absolutely fundamentally different than storming Congress because your cult leader and GOP officials have lied to you, you're dumb enough to believe it, and cause you to commit insurrection.
There is no comparing the two no matter how many times people try and draw up this false equivalence.
Neither the Senate report nor the Mueller report attempted to determine whether the Russian operations affected the outcome of the election, as your article indicates:
> [D]id those Russian efforts actually swing the outcome of the 2016 contest? ... Mueller's report does not attempt to answer this politically charged issue.
Indeed, that article explains quite clearly how it's not possible to say with certainty ("nowhere near enough") whether the outcome of the election was changed or not. You can't compare the impact of the stolen DNC and Podesta emails with campaign expenditures.
Perhaps the people who were looting commercial districts would have looted the Capitol if they were put in the same situation. Perhaps the people who looted the Capitol would have looted storefronts if they had been mad at what they represented. There's one way to look at it where you have a generalized trait of not caring about following the law when you're surrounded by a large group, a trait that some people have, and that can be activated whenever the right circumstances arise.
It's one thing to make a run at a pair of jeans when police are distracted to sell on ebay later. That's common petty theft. It's another to force entry into the Capitol when both chambers were in session along with the Vice President to certify election results. That's terrorism.
The lack of police amd national guard response to the Capitol siege is a direct result of the media coverage of the BLM protests- both the mayor and security officials didn't want to look bad, or make matters worse.
It is worth pointing out that, prior to this, right wing protests have actually been very peaceful. Protesting tax rates really isnt enough to rile up the radical elements. "Stop the Steal" apparently was, and definitely caught them flat footed.
Because destroying people's businesses and livelihoods is more worthy somehow than damaging a political symbol where the damage will be paid for by taxpayers as a whole? They both seem morally wrong to me -
The description "Damaging other people's property" seems applicable to both, or "equivalent", you might say?
In both cases rioting and looting are unacceptable and the rioters should be arrested, but
the BLM protests are based on legitimate political grievances while the Trump protests are based on a total fabrication and manifested as a literal attack on the foundation of our democratic intuitions. The philosophy behind the election fraud narrative is utterly unredeemable and should be condemned on its face.
> the BLM protests are based on legitimate political grievances
If you can claim the BLM looting, rioting and violence (and murders) which has been ongoing for months are based on "legitimate political grievances", you need to substantiate that.
The right wing fringes can equally claim to have legitimate political grievances with how they have been systematically dismissed, villified and represented in national media for the last four years.
I don't think it is reasonable - I am just explaining the psychology of how people can get swept up in the fervor of crowds. I am fully in support of arresting all who participated. But my point is that it is not reasonable to conclude that Trump's speech incited people to illegally invade the capitol, commit theft/vandalism, and assault officers. His speech literally had a line saying "peacefully protest". The vast majority of people hearing his speech did not break the law. So how can there be a conclusion that he incited people to break the law? Those who broke the law are independent humans who hold personal responsibility for their actions. Unless Trump explicitly urges them to commit crimes, charging him with incitement is wrong.
Alcohol makes some people aggressive. The right solution, for those people, is to not drink alcohol. And "but I was drunk" is not considered a valid defense.
Maybe the same standard should be applied to people who decide to join a mob, if we're assuming they're not dumb already before joining one.
On that note, what specifically from Trump’s speech was inciting violence? “March” != “Riot”
This is the section about marching to the Capitol.
“ And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today, we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections. But whether or not they stand strong for our country, our country. Our country has been under siege for a long time. Far longer than this four year period.”
All figurative language that politicians (and non-politicians) use all the time.
Joe Biden literally expressed a desire to physically harm the President, and dramatic, ecstatic portrayals of his death have been shared for his entire presidency.
It's looking like there might be a trial in the senate so we'll see if the "figurative language" argument holds up. Trump telling the rioters "I love you" after they stormed the capitol doesn't look too good in that regard.
Comparing what you're saying about democrats and Biden to what the president has been saying for years and all of the talk on facebook, twitter, r/thedonald, Parler, and Gab is being willfully ignorant. The results speak for themselves.
He said "I love you" in order to connect emotionally with the crowd as part of a message to tell them to go home. It's also just how he speaks to his supporters. He's not telling them that his loves them for having stormed the capitol.
You are engaging in the most disingenuous interpretations of his words.
And there is no willful ingorance here. I know the things said by randos on r/thedonald can often be pretty horrendous. There are horrendous randos everywhere. Just look at r/politics.
The things people in power have said about Trump and his supporters is also quite terrible, and the fact that they have power makes it worse.
Their opposition loses any credibility to attack these few 100s when they accepted the BLM riots and looting as peaceful. Either stop picking sides and come up with a meaningful solution or you’re contributing to the problem.
> the same standard won't be applied to those on the political left despite hundreds of riots being held across 2020
I beg to differ. Any time protests turn into riots, there are many who will jump at labelling the entire movement as being full of thugs and criminals. Your own words could be used to describe exactly how the BLM protests were viewed by the right. And actually, you yourself only mentioned "riots" without any acknowledgement of how there were far more peaceful protesters in that movement. Hint: the peaceful protests aren't as exciting, so they're not on the news as much.
So now am I supposed to feel sorry for the peaceful Trump protesters who are being mislabeled unfairly? Please. I didn't see a whole lot of diversity in those crowds, and somehow I think they are still going to be represented pretty well by their elected leaders going forward. Cry me a river.
I mean we’re talking about 75 million voters and likely about 150 million people in total if everyone was surveyed. The idea that you can say anything meaningful about all Tump or Biden supporters is basically zero.
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.
No, there’s no reason to think the sample size which votes is an unbiased reflection of the total sample. It’s very explicitly self selecting. Interesting area to consider though.
It's one of the most insidious problems with political polling - people who feel alienated and disconnected from society are seemingly less likely to respond to surveys so they inherently go undercounted. Kind of like the dark matter of the political world - we can tell that it's there, because we feel the effects, but we can't observe it directly.
You can sue for defamation. We need similar laws for politicians (yellow cake WMD claims) and news media (Fox News blatant lies) where the people responsible are legally liable for what they say if they can't prove the veracity of their claims in court and/or if what they say turns out to be fabricated. Jail time is a must in this case. You can't have free speech without honest speech.
And you wonder why people hate you? Feminism is about equality. BLM is about equality. They are not the people. They are ideas and ideals. The people who do or don't support them should not influence your opinion of the idea itself. If you don't treat people how you want to be treated you are a hypocrite.
no, people here want to censor the right out of existence. I mean come on, Fox News? Really? The bar suddenly lowers to a point that is indefensible. It's really obvious these days that its one-sided, to the point where I throw up my hands and not expect any fairness.
“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.”
Politics is the mind-killer. Even those of us who wish to be rational and practice rationalism, suck at applying the methods of rationality to politics by default.
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.
I'm not in the US, and I haven't visited the country in a very long time. But I'm casually curious about all of this, and have looked at US media.
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)
It only didn't end in legal action against Trump because of the procedural issues related to bringing charges against a sitting president. Barr made that decision, and chose to protect Trump.
Your video (apparently) shows a CNN producer who apparently believed the story was "fake", but that's not consistent with the actual facts we know.
I didn't find anything. I did show that Trump is surprisingly clean. Maybe because of lacking ability, but unusually clean for a president. Cleaner than Biden in case of Ukraine for example, even if Trumps dealings are self-serving.
Furthermore Bidens dealings are relevant to the US geopolitical ambitions and the censorship of it was a disgrace for the press. It keeps people uninformed, even if presentation of these issues is difficult for any news network.
What's the standard here? Reagan arming Contra rebels by selling arms to Iran?
Or are you comparing to the presidential campaigns for President? Are you claiming that Obama and Romney and Clinton colluded way more with foreign powers?
Or are you comparing with Biden, who profited in no way from his dealings in Ukraine?
If there was a way to indict executive overreach on issues like surveillance and propaganda for example, things that are actually important compared to utterances of certain persons, the numbers would look quite different.
Trump is as guilty of executive overreach, no questions asked, but the criticism is very selective.
politfact is not really a good source. Trump has some financial involvements that should be questioned, but this isn't really enough. Indictment doesn't mean guilty as I believe.
If there had been something, we would have heard about it non-stop.
Well, Trump had 6 key people indicted, including his lawyer and his campaign manager, on 81 charges and several convictions / guilty pleas. Clinton had 2 indictments and 1 conviction, while Obama and Carter had 0. Which administration out of these would you say was the least "clean"?
If it was truly irrelevant, Twitter wouldn't censor it. They even locked out the New York Post out of their account for posting about it.
Biden is in the politics for decades, there is more then plenty of pretty damning evidence to show that, at the very best, he doesn't believe in anything he says.
Yea. I haven't followed the "election theft" narrative too closely, but the active, seemingly-coordinated censorship of this story is probably the best case for it.
That's ridiculous circular logic. The story is valid because it's not being covered? Millions of stories are not covered by the news every day. A functionally infinite number of non-stories are not covered by the news every day. The non-coverage of a story has no bearing on its validity.
Your claim is also invalid on its face—the election theft narrative is being spoken about endlessly. Trump's claims are headline news every single day. A significant fraction of the population believe it. So to claim that the story is being "censored" is simply wrong on the facts.
First of all, it was not "not covered", but censored. The Hunter story is valid, simply because it's valid. The same media that decided not to cover the story before the election, confirmed its validity since then and decided that it was in fact news-worthy. Also the FBI launched the investigation into this.
Hate to be the person to point that out, but let's be honest with ourselves, if it was Trump Jr. who was taking pictures of him putting his dick into a pizza while smoking crack with random hookers, it would be probably retweeted by @jack himself lol.
This is the fundamental problem in the US. There is a large group of people on the right that think that pointing out the objective issues with Trump is being "biased".
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.
One of the most interesting things cable news networks do is compile clips of their competitors caught in acts of hypocrisy, self-contradiction, breathless hyperbole and blatant lying.
They can all do this to each other because they are all guilty of it. Cable news is a tower of partisan propaganda.
Social media has the exact same problem magnified 100 fold, because there is so much more content to cherrypick from. People only see the actions of extremists and attribute that behavior to everyone that doesn't agree with them.
Traditional media definitely has flaws, but rejecting them in favor of social media because of it is an absurd and incredibly destructive reaction.
This is not (as) true of most other traditional media, e.g. local newspapers to the extent that they still exist. But cable news really is propaganda. Fox used to be the worst offender, but now they're all that bad, though playing for different teams of course.
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.
It’s because the masses are trying to partake in serious discourse in a non-serious way.
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.
Well put. This political battle is being fought at the lowest levels of discourse that's barely above animalistic screeching while trying to tangle some of the most complex and nuanced topics; and the results are predictably ridiculous.
Sorry, but no. CNN, MSNBC, etc are far from perfect, but let's not pretend that "both sides are as bad as each other".
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.
people forget the dominionist gaslighting of Sarah Palin. Pretty much every republican is seen as mini hitler these days-the shit that was said about George Bush Jr for example.
> “Only in the US" is only what matters when discussing US politics.
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.
We're not discussing foreign policy but domestic politics and media as they are within the US. How the rest of the world judges them isn't relevant, and would be the same as someone in the US talking about how things are going in Zimbabwe as they look to us here.
The rest of the world is not a single monolithic group either so I don't see the point of your sweeping generalizations.
> How the rest of the world judges them isn't relevant, and would be the same as someone in the US talking about how things are going in Zimbabwe as they look to us here.
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.
Brilliant summary. Let's not pretend it isn't. Everybody would agree that it was cogent, persuasive and utterly compelling. Good to be know what world outside the US thinks and I like the cherry on top: 'reality is biased against Trump'.
The more cable news you watch the stupider you get. You can actually feel your IQ dropping minute by minute as you watch Fox or MSNBC. They aren't there to make you more informed, their sole purpose is to say whatever will keep you engaged long enough to sell you deodorant, prescription pharmaceuticals and pickup trucks. They are a Dunning-Kruger effect generator. Whenever someone mentions something they saw on CNN last night my opionion of them drops.
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.
I wish this wasn’t being downvoted. It’s so tempting to sit back and let the news networks do your thinking for you. In reality, just 10 minutes of news browsing a day will garner 80% of the news you need to know about.
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.
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 any media outlet that knowingly lies should be stopped. 3 strikes? 10 strikes? Some system, whereby they will lose the ability to continue if they do what Fox News does.
If lying was illegal the entire political system would implode. What if you punished Bush and Blair for their lies about "weapons of mass destruction"? How would that look? Of course you need to allow the good guys to lie, when they are working for good causes like bombing third world countries.
You can't very well let the fickle populace decide such important things without a little nudging.
Do you watch CNN? For about 2 years they had cnn playing on a tv near the break room, so as I refilled my water bottle, I got to see what cnn thought was the most important (Trump) news.
They spent a week on how much diet soda he drank. They had experts on saying why it could cause mental problems and that they should use the 25th on him.
They spent several days when he had 2 scoops of ice cream at a White House dinner, while his guests only got one scoop. I wish I was joking about this, but I am not. I sometimes wonder what Wolf Blitzer thinks as he’s commenting on some of these stories. Such a name, wasted.
Those are the two most comical, but the scary thing is all news is biased. Two sides of the same coin. If you don’t think so, I suggest you search out other sources. Why wouldn’t they be biased? News today is about making money, and cnn and others cashed in on the hate for trump.
I too remember the uproar of Obama wearing a tan suit. Or his mustard on a burger faux pas. And the weeklong intervention into the lack of an American flag on his lapel.
This is why I say both sides hide skeletons in their closet.
There's stupid reporting and there's malicious one. Yeah, nobody can stop them from doing commentary on icecream. But also that's not the issue here, is it?
This was during the first Trump is crazy, must remove him using the 25th phase. It wasn't just commentary, as this seemed to necessitate multiple days of coverage. I would say it falls closer to the malicious category because they have their agenda, like Fox news does too.
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.
> Do you believe Fox News should be banned/censored?
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.
I'm guessing here, but this likely doesn't remove bias. Could they simply refuse to air certain facts?
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.
> I'm guessing here, but this likely doesn't remove bias. Could they simply refuse to air certain facts?
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.
>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.
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:
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.
I'd argue the reason these type of people are pissed off is because they have been incessantly attacked for 4 plus years while watching the media turn a blind eye to anything that disparages any minority or "protected class." We spent 10 MONTHS watching riots every day. DC was BURNING in July.
Protesting electoral fraud is also absolutely required, even if I am extremely extremely sceptical that it actually happened.
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.
>Protesting electoral fraud is also absolutely required, even if I am extremely extremely sceptical that it actually happened.
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?
It hasn't been used in normal conversation before recently because we haven't had a significant political movement and officers of the US government who were engaged in acts worthy of the term.
That's an answer to a question I didn't ask though, because it was obvious.
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.
Sedition and treason are two different but related concepts/offenses. Sedition is plotting to overthrow the government or encouraging other people to do so. Treason is waging war against the country or helping a war-time enemy. Both can be federal crimes. And a seditious conspiracy can potentially lead to an act of treason if the plot is undertaken.
> 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.
That says "seditious conspiracy", not "sedition". I'm not saying it's wrong to call that "sedition" by extension, if you like, I'm just confused because I didn't get the memo on how the word is being used now.
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."
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.
Based on this definition (and ignoring others such as enumerated duties) the Congress has been involved with seditious conspiracy whenever they block passage of a bill. However, since that is part of the job, it's ok. What is NOT ok is for elected officials to incite dissent and encourage blockage of government functions... which many Democrats have been doing in the same way Trump did (via Twitter) for longer than we have had Trump. And which also let to riots with violence, along with occupying and/or destruction of federal and state buildings and property. And encouraged - praised! - by the very politicians crying about it today.
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.
Of course your causes are absolutely required and moral and just but those guys over there with their concerns, those we dont need to protect and claiming they are "violent mobs" is totally justified...
Both the rioting by BLM protestors and the rioting by the Trump/GOP supporters would be moral and just if they were in fact based on truth.
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.
No, they're pissed off due to whatever in their psychology. However, they're choosing to resort to violence due to lies being spread by Fox News et al. Other people were rioting due to truth about police actions. While all rioting is to be condemned, there isn't some symmetry between a scenario driven by lies and one driven by truth.
As Chomsky[0] I think rightly points out, the suffering and grievances of trump supporters is real, but unfortunately they are unable to correctly identify the cause of their suffering. Evidence seems to support this as deaths of despair have been climbing over the past few decades[1]. This is something I rarely see mentioned in left news outlets, instead we are told trump supporters are only motivated by racial hatred.
There were doctors, lawyers and owners of IT companies in the group that broke into the Capitol. I find it hard to believe they were driven to terrorism by despair and not entitlement.
Not everyone in the crowd had the same motivations, obviously, as with any crowd. I suspect a significant percentage were decent people who for for various reasons (likely rooted in the suffering your parent mentions) had come to inhabit Trump's alternative facts universe, and truly believed they were doing what was necessary to uphold democracy. I also suspect a significant percentage were various white supremacists, authoritarians and anarchists. Most of them were/are deluded too, but that's orthogonal to the human decency dimension.
It's real in some cases, but for many it isn't. Many of my friends are decently well off, own a home, with good jobs and support Trump. These people support him because they don't like paying taxes, immigration, BLM, wokeism, etc.
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.
I never ever heard anyone say that their grievances aren't real and that they are only motivated by racial hatred. I distinctly remember after Trump won the first election that all the talk on the left was about disenfranchised voters in mid-America vs coastal elites. I'm sure you remember that too. That does not backup your assertion in fact it refutes it. That they are all also racists is a different topic.
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 started a long time before they lost the election. If you didn't see it, blame your filter bubble. It started well _before_ the 2016 election.
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?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? Mainstream media censored Hunter Biden laptop story. They preemptively claimed that the election was 100% safe, and kept claiming that post election without any proof.
I can explain that one. Stick with me on this dear HN reader, as your gut reaction may be to trigger downvote, but I'm going to actually explain it for real, I'm going to tell you exactly why (I'm not going to filter it for everyone so it feels better or sounds better).
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.
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote. The part that scares me is this:
> 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.
One of the things I worry a lot about is that the main issue is that there simply are too many people and too little jobs. Like we can only legitimately support a small amount of workers in any field; if we have more it drops earning potential to near nothing, like in most creative or labor fields.
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.
Foreign competition is a choice (by setting low tariffs). I happen to benefit from it, but it seems a lot of working citizens don’t, and they want more protectionism than they got from Trump.
I'm not one of the economists that knee jerk reject protectionism, but I don't think it would help that much either. Trading partners won't accept tariffs without reciprocating. The US might be big enough now to get away with this to some degree, but that won't last forever, and tariffs would probably accelerate that reduction in influence.
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).
I think one of Trump’s biggest mistakes was (attempting to) wage a tariff war with Europe, instead of creating a larger coalition for an economic war against China.
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...
As an aside, what you wrote there also sounds an awful like why so many people in the UK supported Brexit and the Remain campaign was so badly handled.
Thats a sweet sob story and all but are we sure we're talking about the same people?
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.
These are genuine reasons to be angry but these people are angry for the wrong reasons. While their candidate, Trump, promised to change the political landscape he actually prooved even more incompetent than the former. There are 100s ofreasons which im not going to bother to mention here. He lost the elections for those reasons and also because he was not tearing down the establishment but the nation. I see people comparing BLM with the proud boys and that is the most dishonest thing to do. BLM were protesting about police brutality which affects us all. Proud boys were a rebranding of a radical group who was directly following Trump’s orders.
That's a fine theory, but it doesn't explain why the same people voted for him again once Trump neither fixed or took steps to fix any of these issues.
Sure it does. They're not done trying to burn the existing system down, they think Trump is acting against that system, and they reject the other establishment / system candidates (of which there are few regardless in a locked two party system that just practices flipping sides every few years). They also widely believe Trump would have enacted a lot more policies they view favorably if he hadn't been thwarted by the opposition.
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'm still not buying it. As you said, the actual changes Trump offered were but a pittance. And, the economy, well, that was actually Obama's economy he inherited and then destroyed with his tax cuts.
I'd gladly take Jeb Bush over Trump. Not that I'd actually vote for either one, but, at least Bush seemed competent.
All fair points, and yet even in the midst of this we saw white privilege at work this past week when the protestors were, for all intents and purposes, allowed into the Capitol.
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.
This is an interesting take that I have seen in my Facebook feed, media and Joe Biden about white privilege allowing the protestors into the Capitol building.
Could it be that this particular group at the Capitol didn't have any supposed proclivity to violence?
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.
So, you're telling me the response had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that almost all the 1/6 "protestors" were white, that that was just a coincidence? You're gonna have to provide more than "could it be," and "perhaps," if you want me to swallow that line.
Given the difference between the two types of protestors, Occam's Razor leads us to the obvious conclusion. Now, I say again, if you want to claim it wasn't white privilege, I'm still gonna need more than "could it be the case," and "perhaps."
Are you actually trying to make that claim or just arguing for the sake of arguing?
If you think I'm being uncivil, don't step out into the rest of the comments section, bud. I haven't called you a single name, or done anything, other than express incredulity at your position. I didn't even point out how racist it sounded that you were claiming one side was more prone to violence or less law and order oriented.
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'm talking about politeness and courtesy not name calling. Having a discussion and avoiding snarky comments so this forum doesn't devolve into Twitter or Reddit.
"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."
Okay, well, see ya then. None of those are attacks on you in any way. I'd advise you to grow a thicker skin if you want to participate on the internet.
I totally get what you're saying. I'm just pointing out that there are community guidelines here to create civil discourse that is not present on other internet forums.
Here is the text from the tweet that I had previously posted. Mayor Bowser goes on to say in her letter that MPD and their partners are well prepared for the event and didn't need further assistance.
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?
"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."
If you want to genuinely understand the other side and not comfort yourself by relying on simple slanderous slurs to do the work, this is worth at least an hour of your time:
To an extent they are, in that they elected him hoping to get something out of it, and he didn’t deliver much of anything useful. He conned them. Such is the way of politics sometimes.
I am very unhappy that Biden was the candidate on the other side. But I saw the alternative as fascism and sectarian violence. I predicted Trumps 2016 win and no one took me seriously. I predicted the rise to prominence of white nationalism and even the Cville event.
I think Biden is a terrible candidate but the alternative is worse. If there is ever a non racist non violent Republican party I will join it but right now everything is off.
In the case of Tuesday's attack on the Capitol, the crowd thought they were unheard because a group of Republicans and right-wing conspiracy nuts have told them so. They were being heard for the last four years, with a Republican President and Senate. But some Republicans, including Trump, had invested so much in the underdog victim persona they lied to keep it up.
Ahh, yes. The unheard such as <checks notes> CEOs, the sons of state supreme court judges, the wife of a US supreme court judge, retired millitary intelligence officers, general counsels, and state legislators.
If you truly think a mass of armed people stormed the capitol then you too have fallen prey to lies.
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.
He literally was carrying a spear with a flag tied to it. And if you're implying that a spear isn't a real weapon, the officer who died was beaten with a flag and a fire extinguisher, so I'd say a spear is dangerous enough.
So because some people at the entire rally were armed means everyone storming the capitol was also armed? I’ve heard that very same bad statistics argument used as to why trump lost the election.
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.
I don’t have any beliefs about this. A violent mob invaded the capital. Some of them carried weapons. I’m not claiming they were all armed or that they were filmed using the weapons.
Although they certainly did attack police officers. With flag poles, ladders, fire extinguishers, pepper spray.
Yup, and DC was also on fire, nearly burned down by reckless protesters in May! Maybe we should have a larger police presence in our nations capitol to prevent all these insurrections?
“As soon as they hit the fence line, the fight was on,” Sund said. “Violent confrontations from the start. They came with riot helmets, gas masks, shields, pepper spray, fireworks, climbing gear — climbing gear! — explosives, metal pipes, baseball bats. I have never seen anything like it in 30 years of events in Washington.”
You're trying to have an argument with someone else who has a different opinion than me. I've never said that BLM protestors are well within their rights to burn down buildings or that we shouldn't have police protect the nation's capital.
Not only do I not have these opinions, I haven't seen those opinions expressed here.
A bunch of people just invaded your seat of government, killed an officer, quite possibly had much worse plans than what they actually did which only barely got avoided because the elected representatives got to safety and a suicide bomber just blew up half an office block and you are going on about bonfires in this thread as though there is some kind of equivalency. And all that before we're getting into why they did all that: a pack of lies versus many many decades of actual oppression. Stop already and re-calibrate your sense of what is normal and what isn't, because if you don't you are at risk of becoming part of the problem.
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.
With all due respect, you don’t know anything about me. When BLM protestors burn down a Footlocker, I say they did something wrong. But I also don’t assume that all BLM protestors are violent. And I don’t assume all Republicans are violent.
But all the people who invaded the capitol? They all invaded the capitol. Let’s be clear about that.
For the people who did not storm the capitol building, sure, but a lot of jurisdictions have laws where everyone involved is responsible for the worst that the group does, so getaway drivers don't get off Scott free if one of their mates murders somebody during a robbery.
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.
Give me a time stamp. I JUST rewatched the livestream as people streamed in, it’s for a project I am working on. I did not see anyone armed. Maybe some were armed but it was not clear and irrefutable.
One. And you saw this guy on the tv and monitor you were glued to? Or you didn’t see this until after the fact.. on Twitter?
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...
What?
He said he watched them storm in and instead he provides something he saw after the fact.
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)
Not through the doors, but here's a window and a baseball bat, after breaking the window with a shield. https://youtu.be/SocnM1lHZB4?t=156
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.
Mobs have torn people apart with their bare hands. Once a mob gets going there is no way to know what will happen, it is like an avalanche. This one fizzled out for lack of targets, which is a very good thing because I don't want to imagine where it could have ended otherwise.
Whoa are you arguing that armed people DIDN'T storm the capitol? They were indeed armed and yes it was televised. Your inability to see what's in front of you willingly doesn't cause rest of us to be blind.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
These are the same bigots who believed Trump's racist lie of birtherism that he peddled for five years before even running for president. Trump tried to delegitimize the former president, like he's trying to delegitimize the incoming president. He's always been anti-American insofar as he is exclusively pro-Trump.
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.
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.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Please don't create accounts to do that with.
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.
No, no, no. I literally made an account to comment on how wrong this is. Both sides are biased ignores the little matter of degree. One side is completely unmoored from reality in a way that the other simply isn’t. One side promotes conspiracy theories and lies from the top down.
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.
It's clear the U.S. is totally Balkanized. The two sides are living in completely different realities. There can be no discussion between them when the claim is "My side is truthful and your side is full of lies."
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.
Rittenhouse, an 17 year old, carried a weapon across state lines to engage in militia activities and shot someone. He was not defending his own house or business. He is a bad guy, and what he did was bad. In the modern world, the state has a monopoly on violence, no roving militias are legitimate uses of force.
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.
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.
"The fact you used the "carried a weapon across state lines" line suggests that you may be consuming biased reports."
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.
I'm 100% in favor of criticality examining on a deeper level. I'm confused about how you disagree with me or how my comment is wrong. I'm trying to encourage people to listen to both sides.
I think what the above poster is reacting to is the distribution of news sources on this chart. It makes it seem like MSNBC and OAN are equal and opposite. I consume news from a great many of these sources. The only actual leftist news source I recognize on here is Jacobin. The New Yorker and MSNBC don't have a lot of content espousing the ideals of socialism and communism.
Meanwhile, you'll be hard pressed to find any daylight between the news sources in the "Right" column and Trumpism.
Bias measurements are relative to something. It could make sense for you to feel that way, because you and your social circles may generally be more left leaning. What is the definition of "center"?
The underlying problem with this whole idea of banning "seditious lies/libel" is that it's not strategically consistent. If you ban people (especially political leaders!) from complaining that the election was stolen, what happens is that the next election will definitely be stolen, and no one will be able to do anything about it. Then that whole political side throws their support behind some military figure instead of a reality TV star, and that's how the real coup happens and how democracy dies. Game Over.
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.
Even if corporations were to pre-emptively ban all speech that threatens to undermine the public faith in our elections, there is still a legal system which allows for complaints to be heard fairly. For all practical purposes, "How many people can you broadcast your message to" has effectively zero bearing on the strength of your legal case. Therefore, I don't see how banning seditious speech opens up an avenue for someone to actually steal an election.
I do agree that people react differently based on the strength of evidence, including via careful debate and deliberation. But the law (both actual law and the privatized law of Community Policies by the likes of Twitter) is a far blunter hammer. Attempts to ban "making false and malicious statements" will always come with plenty of collateral damage.
People aren't being banned for saying the election was stolen. People are being banned for saying the election was stolen without any credible evidence to support the claim. There is a very important difference there.
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.
I might wholly agree with you, but the real question is what happens next time. Perhaps the next claims of a stolen election will also be dismissed by the media and courts as "not credible", censored as "malicious lies" and dangerous "misinformation". How can y'all be so sure that you, or the public at large, will be enabled to tell the difference, when any and all debate about the claim of a stolen election will have been banned at the outset by an overt policy aimed at protecting "the public faith in our democracy"?
We need federally run elections or at least strong enforcement of federal election laws. Every voter that is required to present ID at the polls should be provided an ID or be provided a mail-in ballot. Every citizen should be required by federal law to vote.
And some other stuff I am not qualified to post about regarding secure voting systems.
I am Fox news viewer. Fox news has much greater diversity of opinion compared to CNN or MSNBC and some of it like say Tucker happens to be more on the loonie side but then some of the best criticism of GOP I have seen is from the Fox news. The progressive media all appears to be singing a very common elitist tune all the time.
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".
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?
> 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?
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.
I don't think anyone would say it was a "coup" per se, but they might say that it was an "attempted coup". To determine whether that expression is correct, we have to consider what the intended outcome was, and how things would have likely played out if the mob had encountered even less resistance.
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.
> 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 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!
I'm aware of precisely one left-wing outlet that was banned, and they intentionally use edgy humour that includes remarks about death and political violence which are (sarcastically) in favour of those things.
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"?
>There is no objective case for blaming it on anyone except the individuals doing it
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?
Unfortunately personal accountability vs accountability by group affiliation is a divisive subject between Left/Right.
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?
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.
Putting heads on a pike and making heads roll, are idioms for firing or dismissing accountable public officials. Unless of course something thinks he's a Hitler in training just waiting for his chance at the Fourth Reich.
Bannon said on this podcast that he would mount Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray’s “heads on pikes” outside the White House as a “warning to other bureaucrats.” This was a few months ago. I presume he has been saying similar things since then.
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.
"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.
I don't see an answer to the question I asked. All I see is variations of "It's a joke bro, relax!". (And that's 0/4 on HN when I've asked this question)
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?
So I actually don't think it's a joke, but I also don't think it's a call for literal heads on literal pikes. Just like it's not a call for a literal return to 17th century England. But we're living in a time where any hint of calls for violence will be taken that way, just in case.
Gonna need to ban a lot more people than Bannon if you're going to ban everybody who used figurative calls to violence and was associated with some group which engaged in violence. Especially given 9 people died in BLM protests last year.
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.
Yes, the standard should be applied to everyone. In my opinion, no one should ever suggest the murder of any other person regardless of whether they intend it as sarcasm, hyperbole, metaphor, or anything else.
It is up to the courts to decide if these things are illegal or not. Of course people should be held to the same standard. But there is obviously nuance in how a message may be recieved by others and a question of intent. A sitting president and conspiracy theorist trying to steal an election is different to a group of people protesting against police. Maybe there are grounds for prosecution in both cases, but that's not the point. There is a difference.
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.
Because the issue isn't purely against content moderation, it's that content moderation is not applied equally and even less so when those who should be moderated shared the same "values" as the left-leaning SV types.
> protesters showed up at Seattle's mayor's house and spray painted "guillotine Jenny"
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.
BTW, throwing this out here. I guess many republicans are pretty outraged at the moment with Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. Those companies feel safe because a democrat won the elections and they don't have to be afraid of reprisals. But what happens in three years when a new electoral campaign starts? How wary will these companies be of the chance of a new republican president? How much of their power will they use to prevent such a possibility from happening?
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.
Yeah but this one wasn’t about telling your partner they look good in that shirt.
We are talking about rhetoric that lead to an insurrection on the Capitol and the death of 5 Americans.
I don’t quite understand why every one of these events devolve into high reductive free speech or slippery slope arguments. What is going to take for the people start accepting some personal responsibility?
From where I sit I see a group of people not accepting responsibility for some truly heinous acts perpetrated by their own “tribe” (for lack of a better word), so others are coming in and cleaning up their mess.
If that’s unacceptable or don’t like how it’s being done, then perhaps the most disarming thing would be to accept some personal responsibility, grab a mop and start cleaning your room.. not “it was the Democrats fault” has Rudy put it
A situation that some term an 'insurrection' and others term a 'riot'. Trouble is, who's right? Who has the authority to make an objective claim on this?
For half-a-year before last week, those on the other side (the so-called insurrectionists and insurrectionist-adjacent) claimed that situations like the Minneapolis protests, the CHAZ, the Portland protests, the Chicago protests, the Atlanta protests, etc. (all together which ended in at least a couple dozen deaths and hundreds of millions in property damage) were riots and insurrections, whereas most media establishments (your NYTs and your MSNBCs) insisted these were 'mostly peaceful' protests.
Both sides agreed something was happening--they disagreed on what to call it.
In defense of the many who view the situation as a riot as opposed to an insurrection, it's hard to make the case for insurrection when (1) police waved rioters into the Capitol in places, (2) Capitol cops felt so unthreatened by the situation that they posed with rioters for selfies and (3) the Senators were similarly besieged (sans deaths) during the Kavanaugh hearings eighteen months ago... with no one (amongst Democrats) calling this an insurrection.
But, as Democrats are the victors, they will write the histories. So it goes.
> Capitol cops felt so unthreatened by the situation that they posed with rioters for selfies
Some cops, *white* cops, felt unthreatened. Black cops describe being called the N word fifteen times, and breaking down crying from the stress after the building had been secured [1]. One officer KILLED HIMSELF after surviving this riot [2].
I don't support the insurrectionists but they are far from being a tribe. If you listen to interviews with them there was a huge diversity of motivations. The crowd included anarchists, neo-nazis, rabid Trump supporters, constitutionalists, revolutionaries, people who honestly (but wrongly) believe the election was stolen, etc. The whole scene was chaos with no real organized tribal leadership.
There is an all out war right now from big-tech on conservative everything. Ushering in authoritarianism like its 1984. Parler blocked by iOS app store and google play, AWS removing their servers from its platform, youTube banning Bannon's podcast. There are plenty of people, groups, and politicians, for example the ayatollah of Iran, chinese state media etc that should pose far more of a threat to the world than some conservatives, but that doesnt support the Liberal narrative so they get to stay. Welcome to dystopia.
In response to right wing terrorism en masse attacking the Governor in Michigan and the US Capitol _one_ right wing podcast host with a history of calling for violence was deplatformed. Hardly an all out war.
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.
Another typical US approach to public opinion: cleanse the news channel of annoying opinion bearers instead of educating the masses to apply critical thinking and getting them acquainted with a larger spectrum of ideas.
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.
