I think the other important factor here is we are in a very vulnerable moment right now because we are in the midst of a transition of power. It takes time to transfer the apparatus and operations of state, and during this time there is a power vacuum that can be taken advantage of by adversaries foreign and domestic. Every state throughout history has struggled in these times.
The failure to secure the Capitol was in no small part due to how the President has run the state in the waning months of his term. His cabinet and administration are running a skeleton crew, he's acting erratically, and he's making false claims about election results and inciting crowds in a bid to stay in power. Whether one supports his policies or not, it should be abundantly clear right now that his actions and rhetoric put the country in further danger during this vulnerable time, and that perhaps he need not have access to platforms that make this easier and more convenient. It should be hard to dismantle the state, to whip people into a frenzy, to cause the damage that has been caused.
Big Tech leaders are selfish, cowards, clueless and just as vulnerable as the government leaders. They were interested in milking billions in Ads from these hate speech, particularly Twitter.
If I were employees at these big companies, I would raise internal questions - why wasn't this done earlier? What changed? The US Capitol riots is the specific moment that made them all wake up?
These are rhetorical questions. All big tech leaders appeared in front of Congress in last 4 years, and weasled and squeeked instead of prowl and roar. Spineless and immoral, speaking double speak to appease the board of directors and the shareholders. At some point, the world would be destroyed but we've created a lot of value for our shareholders. Reminds me of this [1]. Pardon my cynicism, open for your comments.
[1] https://twitter.com/Benioff/status/549339156854214656/photo/...
Remember, two things happened at once: the riots, but also the result of the Georgia runoff which indicated a complete shift in governmental control. One cleared the runway for the reaction to the other.
But I'm sure they have your best interests at heart.
This is definitely a moment that will define social media specifically and tech more broadly. Before Wednesday, social media was one thing, and after, it will be another. This is also a bit of a backlog being flushed; many of these decisions were likely made months or years ago, and only accelerated by Wednesday's events.
I see this a little like safety regulations - every regulation is written in blood. Perhaps soon so will every major shift in the tech landscape.
We need to deeply think about all this - allowing peaceful, objective, conservative opinions and policy (such as the Lincoln Project) while condemning hate speech, violence, white supremacy and other racist behavior.
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. " - Nietzsche.
But that’s the problem. Nobody trusts people in Silicon Valley or New York City to decide what those things are. These are people who have internalized ideas like “you can’t be racist against white people” which the vast majority of the country doesn’t share. And they certainly will not apply the same standards to people on the left glorifying violent radicals like Angela Davis. We just saw this happen this summer where the center-left media pretended for months that American cities weren’t on fire.
Your example proves the point. The Lincoln Project are basically fiscally conservative Democrats at this point. They’re not meaningfully conservative on any of the issues that matter to conservatives today: religious liberty, preservation of history, immigration, etc. And it’s not just an American thing. These issues are actually where the US right is increasingly aligned with the European center-right. Censors in NYC and SF would have censored a bunch of stuff people like France’s Macron have been saying lately.
But it's easy to provide real examples of conservative speakers who are experiencing no meaningful interference. So, replace The Lincoln Project with The Federalist.
The problem is that these are not conservative principles. This is just hate spewing, plain and straight.
Hate is an emotion, it is subjective. You might feel hate when you see or hear something, but it is not an intrinsic, objective quality of other people's words.
Without using these emotional trigger words, do you think the citizens of a country should be able to decide who visits them in their country?
To really drive this home:
1) Don't spread hate - there are obvious limits to this. Calling for assassination of public officials counts as hate speech. Saying something offensive is fine as far as it doesn't incite violence.
2) Have an intelligent, evidence based discussion, be respectful and we're trying to move the country forward. Not divide and turn to our own echo chambers. Come to a resolution through debate and concession.
And no wonder the right feels persecuted, because their beliefs are not necessarily hateful yet they are labelled as such by default. It's like drawing the line somewhere arbitrary and then asking the side whose beliefs are on the other side "why can't you discuss this without resorting to hate speech", and "stop complaining because your side is hateful" and "it's okay for companies to refuse you service because your ideas are hate speech and X-ist".
Few examples of acceptable "hate-speech" that falls within that acceptable line: Anti-white Racism. ACAB. Punch-A-Nazi.
Immigration is a good example. Cultural relativism has become broadly accepted among the progressive left. As a result, they increasingly can only see immigration as an economic issue. Preserving the country’s existing culture to them isn’t a valid reason, so they deem it “racist.” This is internally consistent to them. If culture doesn’t make a difference, the only reason not to have mass immigration is potential economic downsides, or limited infrastructure. Assimilation and the “Melting Pot” is increasingly coming under attack for the same reason.
This is totally incomprehensible to conservatives, who reject cultural relativism. They believe the success of a society is based on deep-seated cultural features and social reinforcement thereof. (I once had a Japanese person go through hundreds of years of Japanese history to explain to me why the country has less problems with corruption than many other Asian countries.) Within that framework, “we don’t want our community to change” is a completely valid position. At the very least, assimilation is indispensable.
The idea that immigration is solely about “cost/benefit” and “talent, policies, etc.” is an inherently liberal, and indeed quite radically liberal framing of the issue.
The International Convention on Civil and Political rights recognizes that distinct “peoples’” have a human right to self determination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination. That is, distinct identifiable groups have a right right to self-governance.
That is the basis for national borders as we know them today. But if distinct people have a right to self governance, it follows that nations have a right to control immigration for whatever reason they want, including the characteristics that make them distinct.
It’s wholly legitimate for a country not to take immigrants who they think might change the culture of the country, or not fit in, or simply because they don’t want to. It doesn’t have to be justified with some sort of economic analysis. It’s not “hate spewing” when the Japanese refuse to accept immigrants for no reason other than large scale immigration would change Japan’s culture. It’s likewise not “hate spewing” for someone in Boise Idaho to say “I like my society the way it is, and I don’t want people here who have a different history, political tradition, etc., especially when they’ll be voting on the laws that govern me.”
My family is from Bangladesh. My parents are fairly Americanized, but they really don’t understand some of the subtler things about American culture, like our anti-elitism and love of guns. In Bangladesh, the elite govern and there is no “glorification of the common man.” It was also disarmed by the British, so there is no gun culture. This results in hilarious arguments between my dad and my wife, whose family populated the Oregon coast on the wagon trails, who still hunt for food and hate the government for taking their homestead to build the pacific coast highway. Immigration inherently changes the culture and people are fully entitled to support it or oppose it, or support slowing it or increasing it on that basis.
But liberals usually can’t even see that dimension of the issue because they’ve internalized cultural relativism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
Also, you’re again painting the issue with a liberal brush by talking about “white persons.” That’s a viewpoint rooted cultural relativism—it overlooks that immigrants don’t differ only by race, but culture, political tradition, etc. It’s also incorrect: for example under the 1921 immigration act there was no restriction at all on immigration from Latin America, while it was restricted from every European country to an annual 3% of the existing population of people from that country. (Of course there was a racist element to it as well with the 1924 Asian exclusion act. But that confirms that there are two separate issue.)
I’m not trying to convince you of this point, I’m explaining why we can’t have folks in NYC and SF deciding what political ideas can be expressed online. American liberals have increasingly fully embraced cultural relativism, while American conservatives (and most ordinary people around the world) still believe that “culture matters.” Conservatives assume that culture drives societal differences, and, especially combined with a natural pessimism, are terrified of changes in culture. They also tend to live in the vast swaths of the country that have a low foreign-born population and fairly homogenous cultures. Ironically, as an immigrant myself it’s easy for me to understand someone in Idaho who is afraid of the culture of his community changing. Bangladeshis would feel the same way. Asians, in general, are not cultural relativists.
I’m an outsider, have no clue about the fine details, just watching the quarrel degenerate from across the Atlantic.
Usually this is when adults come in to break the fight, drag the screaming parties apart and ground all parties for a week...
Which terrorism does she support? Wikipedia only says that she supports BDS.
> She has supported confessed terrorist Rasmea Odeh, and called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the internationally designated terror group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. In addition to killing many dozens of Israeli civilians, the Brigade did enormous damage to Israeli support for negotiations with Palestinian groups. They were granted amnesty through a Palestinian Authority deal in which they agree to renounce terrorism. Then when Hamas took control of Gaza, they renounced the agreement and resumed attacks on Israeli civilians as Gazan fighters. Angela Davis considers them “freedom fighters” and called for Barghouti’s release, referring to him as a political prisoner. She maintains Odeh’s innocence, and claims her trial was unfair despite International Red Cross observation of the trial and a subsequent confession.
> She has supported confessed terrorist Rasmea Odeh, and called for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the internationally designated terror group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. In addition to killing many dozens of Israeli civilians, the Brigade did enormous damage to Israeli support for negotiations with Palestinian groups. They were granted amnesty through a Palestinian Authority deal in which they agree to renounce terrorism. Then when Hamas took control of Gaza, they renounced the agreement and resumed attacks on Israeli civilians as Gazan fighters. Angela Davis considers them “freedom fighters” and called for Barghouti’s release, referring to him as a political prisoner. She maintains Odeh’s innocence, and claims her trial was unfair despite International Red Cross observation of the trial and a subsequent confession.
One that groups like the NAACP and others have been warning about for years if not decades.
Lol the same lincoln project that said on Twitter they are now building a database of all republicans to chastise them forever? Thats peaceful all right.
There is more to it though: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/opinion/lincoln-project.h...
The exact same thing happened when radio was first invented, Nazism rose to power in tandem with mass media that allowed for direct manipulation of people's emotions on a scale that was impossible prior to that.
What do you think about this?
Minority, Women-Owned Businesses Get First Bid on New PPP Loans - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-07/minority-...
What about voices like James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo?
We are doubling down on this new era where we are experimenting with the thesis that Discrimination can and will create (long-lasting) Equity. With policies in place for decades like Affirmative Action in the US and BEE in South Africa I'm not convinced in the thesis. Corporations in the US have now went further with more Corporate Affirmative Action programs like Microsofts commitment to hire more Black employees which is being looked into by the Department of Labor as Discrimination (https://abcnews.go.com/Business/department-labor-investigati...). Microsoft is 4.5% Black employees so they are underrepresented as it is.
How do we have discussions on Race? Can Discrimination create Equity?
“The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” ― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
While Trump is technically still POTUS, he is now seen as trying to undermine the rightful, peaceful transition of power to the next president, and what's important is that viewpoint is not only believed by the left, but now huge swaths of politicians and the electorate who at least gave Trump tacit support.
Why shouldn't it be?
For 4 years they said "we won't suspend a sitting president because we recognize our role in society but once Trump's not sitting he's fair game for bans"
I mean POTUS threatened nuclear war on their _social media platform_ and they let it go...
-
It's quite simple, allowing sitting POTUS special privileges was a means to avoid limiting the reach of the American leadership to its people.
Well now Trump's a lame duck, and he was abusing the sitting president loophole to turn social media into a lightning rod for groups like the one that stormed the Capitol...
The math must have been very simple for them: give him 12? more days of increasing unhinged antics when he's already supposed to have started transitioning power... or don't.
tl;dr: It's no conspiracy that he was deplatformed right before the end of his term, the combination of the Capitol attack being triggered by him and the fact he was already on his way out was all it took.
You ascribe the timing part to greed, but it's even more easily easily ascribed to not wanting to censor the POTUS if possible while they're in power...
Donald Trump didn't suddenly become less profitable to Twitter after the Capitol attack, if anything he would have been more profitable. Note his "usual" account isn't even the POTUS handle, so it wouldn't have been affected by Biden's take over.
Um... yes? Isn't that the most obvious hypothesis? Occam's razor is a good rule for a reason. Abstract concerns about propriety and truthfulness are one thing. An actual assault on the seat of government is very much another.
Had they acted earlier they would have been punished heavily by the Trump clique, and most likely ousted by their own shareholders, to be replaced by executives that would have done precisely what they have done
Listen, civil rights and social justice are something to be discussed and struggled in the public sphere, which is not corporate life.
You US folks have this Corporatism so deeply ingrained that you are going to drag public discourse into an authoritarian organization where everything is ultimately determined by the Board and not by you. The Board will play along, as long as their interests align and it means free advertisement and good will. But you’re still asking “daddy, can I?”
You want to be political? Unions and party activism out of office hours.
I don't think anyone does.
From an outside-the-US perspective, the waning 47 and a half months of his term...
Trump is an unfortunate edge case and has set bad precedents that can hopefully be wisely washed away in time.
We need clearer and consistent norms in the digital space that are seen to embody the fundamental civic aspects of the nation from which this digital space arose. Such as equal access to certain things, the "dumb-pipes" model for the certain baseline trappings of modern society. Whether or not that means stripe here, I'm talking about the broader moment.
We don't want an escalating tit for tat of one bad thing leading to another. If the violence this summer had been dealt with more soundly, voices of leadership tamping it down instead of egging it on, it seems a good bet the recent activity at the capitol would have been more tame.
Similarly, we don't want to respond to a grasping, ineffectual, quasi-autocrat in the executive branch, with more effective autocratic tendencies in the techno-social sphere.
Even if Facebook, Twitter, etc, had banned all these platforms and politicians, I'm confident people still would have come out for the protest. Taking away people's ability to organize on mainstream platforms didn't stop the HK protestors from organizing against the CCP. The lack of online platforms didn't stop the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe. Even the Arab Spring, while often attributed to Twitter, happened in the face of mass censorship and Internet shutdowns.
IMHO the decisions to de-platform these groups will do nothing to put a dent in their political ideology, and will only serve to throw gasoline on the fire at a contentious period where many millions of people feel like they don't have a voice. And it's likely that peaceful discourse and political thought will be wiped out as collateral damage as a result of the decisions these companies are making.
It doesn’t need to work perfectly for it to be useful.
Btw do you know what doesn’t work? Appeasement. That only lets bad actors know that they can go even further. Resisting taking reasonable action for fear of violence is plain old appeasement.
The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.
Anti-whiteness crusaders can and frequently do go too far, but I object, strenuously, to the idea that mainstream articles about problematic whiteness are somehow comparable to anti-Black racism. That isn't true, and I think you know that.
> the one we created when we kidnapped millions of people in Africa and stripped them of their original culture
Nobody was kidnapped. Individuals were bought from already-existing African slave trade markets(markets which had been run by and for Africans (and Arabs), preceding any European commercial relationship.)
Although you may have used the term kidnapping liberally (& with some artistic license), it is fundamentally not true & very misleading.
In Africa, buying and selling slaves was widespread at the time.
I think the treatment of African slaves(& their descendants) in America is bad enough without having to exaggerate the origin.
I agree anti-Black racism is far more destructive. But I’m not trying to establish a hierarchy of the kinds of racism. I think anti-Black racism is far more destructive than anti-Asian racism, but as an Asian I’m pretty happy to see both kinds be deemed taboo in polite society.
We can’t have someone’s skin color being used in pejorative terms, and insofar as there are many people who think it’s acceptable, that only underscores why I’m tremendously skeptical of private sector censorship, where those people will disproportionately be in charge of shaping debate.
I think pejorative anti-whiteness is problematic as a communication strategy; it's counterproductive and you have to be steeped in a national conversation that only a couple hundred thousand people are having to understand how to take it (and I do not think that's true of anti-Black racism).
I also think that a lot of people selling anti-whiteness as an important doctrine are grifters.
But I also think it would be better for everyone if the term died out. I know it won't; Irish/Czech/Spanish people intermarry with German/Scottish people and their kids have no better term, I guess? But there's a notion that "if Black pride is positive, it should be positive to have White pride as well" which I think is deeply wrong. Maybe it was growing up along the South Side Irish parade route in Chicago that programmed me this way, but I see no evidence of European ethnic heritage being suppressed in the US.
I do not trust Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon to censor appropriately in the least. But that doesn't make it hard for me to evaluate these most recent decisions to cut off violent extremists! I'm fine with them booting Parler and DJT even though I'm less than fine with the idea of them evaluating all speech --- of course, that's one of the reasons 1A advocates so strongly support CDA S230.
This scheme was almost too successful when the tea partiers got elected and weren't fully on board with the real game plan. They were either assimilated or fell out of favor. Boehner's inability to contol them is why he was reduced to tears.
I think there is a serious mental health crisis in the US right now, and that the majority of Trump supporters are mentally incapable of acknowledging that they have been lied too, taken advantage of, and as a result are on the wrong side of history.
I have been having meaningful conversations with my family about this, and I feel like I am starting to break through.
Unfortunately I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to coddle the bullshit I see people posting these days in defence of this attempted coup and the resulting murders.
Perhaps a better person than me can be civil with these people, but I just don't give a fuck anymore.
"Stop The Steal" is just another flavor of conflating 1st amendment "freedom of speech" protections with a "RIGHT" to be on some platform or another, or to talk at some venue or another.
I dont think we need to infantilize Trump supporters. They are capable of evaluating claims made by the GOP.
People should have to take a Civics based test to vote. If someone wants to vote but fails the civics test, they should then immediately qualify for a minimum living wage job to go back to public education and get paid for getting at least an 80% grade at whatever grade level they're working at (obviously with either enrollment at lower grade levels, classification as disability if unable to learn or medically impaired, and similar options also on the table).
The goal would be to make sure that an EDUCATED and Civically Informed public, able to use Critical Thinking skills is the baseline expectation for a functional society in which the general people have the civic duty to be involved in the processes of self government and representative selection for representative democracies.
We have hundreds of historic examples here of how allowing the denial of voting rights for any reason is an incredibly slippery slope, and it is rightfully banned except in a tiny number of instances (felons) that still need to be rectified. And yes, the war on drugs is itself a successful voter suppression effort -- make enough things illegal, and convict enough people of felonies, and you can meaningfully alter the make-up of the electorate. This has actually happened.
The problem is what grade level?
1st grade: What country do you live in?
3rd grade: Name all 3 branches of government
6th grade: How is a bill made into a law?
9th grade: Who are your elected representatives and what are their positions on issues A, B & C?
...
PhD: Compare and contrast Hamilton and Jefferson's viewpoints on the Constitutional convention, banking and personal liberties and how they shaped and influenced US policy in the last 40 years (20 pages or less)
Countries have tried an aristocratic, ruling class and it doesn't work because it disenfranchises the masses and leads to a populist revolt.
These tests were also used in the US to disenfranchise minorities who couldn't read or afford to go to school.
Plus, I had a friend in college who was one of the 537 deciding votes in Broward county in 2000 who voted for Bush because "Gore was boring". He was smart and would have easily passed any civics test you gave him, but he voted based on personality rather than any specific issue.
Maybe that's the level you feel comfortable with? That's great until someone smarter than you comes along and thinks that the test is too easy and too many "uneducated" people are voting. I love history and politics, but I don't know everything and I know that there are tests that can be drafted that I can't pass. Are you willing to be on the outside looking in, willing to be presented with a test so hard you can't pass it and can't vote? Willing to be represented by officials that you can never peacefully vote out of office? How long until a narcissist decides that they're the only one smart enough to vote? That's unfortunately the fate of every country that's fallen into a dictatorship.
I see that you want an educated electorate but voting tests have been tried before and tons of innocent, smart, well-intentioned people get cut off in the process. Democracy is the only form of government we know of where we can meaningfully and non-violently express our collective opinion as a group. When you take a vote away from someone, they're left with a choice between compliance or violence, neither of which are good.
Maybe, the paid public education you mention would still be a good idea, just without the voting rights test.
If you think people are too stupid to vote, then you're not trying hard enough to ensure that they have the issues explained to them.
How easy is it to go from "you don't understand civics" so you can't vote, to "you have the wrong religion" or "you have the wrong skin colour" you can't vote.
This has been tried in the US before, many times; some were Federal, but most were state and county level. You should probably read up on it before pitching this idea anymore, because it has never been a good thing.
Also, it's Unconstitutional.
It’s the Democrats that say an ID to vote is racist, while saying an ID is not racist for things like driving, flying, buying alcohol, working, getting a firearm, welfare checks, and so much more.
It’s the Democrats that literally removed the signature requirement on ballots? (PA) What possible reason is there for this, if not to open the door for fraudulent voting, multiple votes per person etc...
Not a rhetorical question. Someone please help me understand the other side of this?
- Voting is a right, driving/flying/etc are not. Getting a driver's license is more about certifying your ability to drive than your identity.
- Signature requirements are tricky because they are very subjective. You're counting on the unbiased assessment of thousands of volunteers to determine if signatures match. That doesn't make it racist, but it's easy to imagine a poll worker intentionally or unintentionally disenfranchising valid voters. So the key question is, does it actually reduce voter fraud by more than the false negative rate?
Everywhere I've lived, the voter rolls and the voting process are designed in such a way that adding a free voter ID to the process would change very little. It's already very difficult to orchestrate fraud without detection.
The ACLU put out a fact sheet with some more details on voter ID: https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
Bearing arms is also a right, and yet there are all sorts of restrictions on the exercise of that right.
Without some form of ID or some one-time-use voucher that can only be obtained by eligible voters, how could anyone trust the veracity of the system? Honor system? Seems weak.
That would be lovely.
> If republicans were actually interested in election integrity and civic participation
I have no hope in this will come to pass.
This is very true. The same people who often argue loudly for privacy, security, are willing to have a hole in the election system, probably the more important of any of those things.
Up to now, it's been "well, there's very little fraud going on", as if that makes it fine to ignore. Showing ID to vote in our most fundamental democratic process is NOT a stupid or crazy idea. And it has become the rallying cry of the paranoid and conspiracy believers.
Fault the Democrats for letting themselves be accused of voter fraud in the name of not making it hard to vote (solution: give everyone the IDs they need, easily, as suggested), and fault the Republicans for using voter ID as a way to make it harder to vote (solution: stop being underhanded jerks).
And lastly, I have to fault the people who can't get their shit together enough once per 5 or 10 years (ID expiration timescale) for such an important piece of identification and key to so many other things. How do they get through life every day if they can't even do this one thing that infrequently? And sadly, how bad a situation is it that your party has to rely on these people to get you over the majority line?
So apparently it's not 100% effective at silencing complaints about voting fraud.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-...
Spell backwards, forwards.
The answer is "backwards"... except I told you to spell it "forwards". You fail. You can't vote.
Oh, and, yes: One wrong answer means you can't vote.
I got a whole test worth right here:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test
One more question:
Draw five circles that one common inter-locking part.
No matter how you interpret that, it's wrong, and you can't say otherwise without being lynched.
Evaluations are hard to make when all the sources you trust are lying to you.
The lies for profit charlatans basically get away with it. But I do not think members of Congress should. Every single one of those who voted on false pretenses to overturn an election last week, should be expelled. That is the fraud that has happened in this election.
There’s lots to criticize Trump about, but what you wrote is wrong and not in a minor way.
Here's the thing: How can you expect any one to believe on the one hand that for four years we have had an illegitimate president who is simultaneously a Russian agent and Orange Hitler...
and yet tell me that 2020 was a perfectly run election?
Are you telling me that patriotic Americans across the country would not due their duty to remove an illegitimate President by any means necessary (including fraud)?
I'm not even saying 2020 was stolen, but the cognitive dissonance in saying 2020 was legit but 2016 was not is massive.
(The US has interfered in other countries' elections before, of course.)
Yes, they engaged social media campaigns, although I don't think it was enough to influence the outcome of 2016.
But many people are convinced it was, and that believe that Trump has never been a legitimate president. Do you not think people would take steps to prevent an illegitimate president from winning re-election?
I don't want to infantilize anyone, but I'm not going to pretend that most Trump supporters are fully understanding the facts but simply coming to different conclusions. They are clearly and proudly ignoring the facts.
It's even worse than that: At least one analysis has shown that Fox News viewers were worse informed than people who don't consume any news at all.
IOW, Fox (and to a lesser extent, MSNBC) has negative information value.
Do you really believe that?
But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.
It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.
One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.
If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.
The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.
Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?
Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?
How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?
Curiously, crickets around that one...
> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.
So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?
> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.
Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.
Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?
> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history
Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"
Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.
But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.
Seeing a dozen news articles the best argument seems to be that the mention of not attending the inauguration was a call for violence. I don't buy it.
It's a soft signal, one that really you should be looking at the wider context of the last 4 years and especially the last few months, rather than just in isolation.
And to the mind of someone willing to use violence (such as say, those involved in the capitol riot), it becomes "hey guys, I still believe the election was stolen by those dirty libs and I won't be at this location, so if anything bad happens there, I won't be hurt. Wink Wink, nudge nudge."
We have seen what his base will do. There is no longer a time to discuss hypotheticals, they will storm a goverment office with weapons, they will kill people, they will use IEDs, and they will put the Trump cult ahead of America; because that is what they did, in a Western capital of all places.
s/bible belt/colorado
This is not about removing "hate". This is about removing political opposition.
The WalkAway campaign's FB page was removed, despite no violent content.
The Articles of Unity project has been deplatformed from Twitter (and I believe FB) for a while with no justification and absolutely no hateful content whatsoever.
Yes, there are many high-profile targets that seem easy to justify, but a much larger swath of those affected are completely unjustifiable.
I'm sorry if the conservatives can't understand the difference between BLM people yelling in the streets, and Trump people searching the capitol for senators and representatives to stop a Constitutionally mandated vote count. (Actually that was a lie, I'm not sorry. I don't give a mosquito's dick about either of you. I was just trying to be nice.) I'm done trying to explain the difference to these people, and I think these terrorists have pushed a lot of people off the fence with me. People are fed up. You don't understand the difference? You think too much of it's unjustified? Too bad. This is the way it's gotta be. We're not going to live in anarchy because conservatives and liberals want to play out crips and bloods on our republic.
End rant.
Edit: Man I'm getting old. That reads like I just told some kids to get off my lawn. But that's how I feel.
That is manifestly not the comparison being made. Antifa and BLM rioters burned down apartment buildings with people still inside in Kenosha. Over the summer, dozens of people were killed and there was billions of property damage (that's peoples homes and livelihoods, not just "stuff"). And Democratic politicians - including the VP-elect - provided bail for these criminals. Many democratic DAs in cities like Portland simply refused to press charges.
That being said, I abhor that Capitol police were attacked and that there were people who breached the Capitol with violent intent. But the deplatformings have gone well beyond the fringe few who actually engaged or promoted violence.
You seem pretty bothered by the street violence, I would advise you to stay away from the Capitol and instead report the street violence to your local constabulary. That's the best I can do for you.
If you have trouble understanding this distinction, that's OK. No one really needs you to understand it. Just stay away from them, and we shouldn't have any problems.
Ah, I see what you are saying now.
I don't think I agree.
> Just stay away from them, and we shouldn't have any problems.
Again, why are you talking like I have anything to do with that?
This. Violence, intimidation and death are the ultimate forms of censorship. Much more so than having to switch your digital payment processor or having to self-host your blog or social media app.
Germany decided after WWII that it was better to mass-censor Naziism than it was to let Nazis freely organize or spread their ideas again. It's not that Germany doesn't like free speech, it's that Naziism and free speech are diametrically opposed and forced to make a choice, they choose free speech.
It seems like a contradiction where censorship promotes free speech, but it all depends on your timeline. In the short term banning Nazis limits free speech, in the long run banning Nazis increases free speech.
When we give violent groups space to grow and organize, we're more anti-free speech than we realize because the capital riots are the inevitable arc (and only the opening act) for very small groups to violently oppress large numbers of peaceful citizens who love democracy.
1) The most radicalized are by Q. Which itself is a disinformation campaign, contributed to by government entities.
2) Bernie sanders brags about occupying government buildings. Would he be held to the same standard? OAC praised BLM protesters marching on the White House a few months ago, with Antifa trying to breach police lines and storm the White House. Should we throw her in jail for sedition. How about Pelosi that asked the army to ignore orders from Trump.
The US might be a democracy. But just because you can vote, does not mean you have any meaningful amount of power. The powerful cabal of corrupt politicians, and their rich backers, they have power. And they have been there for a very long time. They are almost impossible to displace. This breach shook them, because it was common, everyday people that did this. The same people that have had their livelihood destroyed, and have been hurt by all the COVID rules, rioting, trade deals with foreign countries, and so on.
Trump is great for democracy. At every turn he exposes the hypocrisy of the current system. He needles them, and each time they over react. Exposing all their flaws. The amount of backstabbing he gets just from the Republican party, is waking up millions of people.
Thanks to him, we found out how convoluted and non transparent the election process is. How biased the media is. How the Supreme court cowers to political pressure. And now how big tech is working in collusion.
All things that a democratic movement can help to fix.
Your whataboutism fails when I ask you how many police officers Bernie Sanders bludgeoned to death.
This is "what about"-ism. It deflects responsibility and puts the focus on other's behavior. In this philosophy for one side to accept that what they did was bad, it requires every single other person in the world to be perfect, which is obviously impossible and therefor insulates the person from criticism.
But, I'll indulge anyway.
Occupying a building is a form of civil disobedience, which in the US is a respected form of protest. I don't know what incident you're talking about with Bernie, but the results matter. Did he schedule the occupation of a government building that threatened the lives of elected officials and killed a police officer? Or was it a peaceful protest?
For AOC, was she praising the mass of peaceful protestors and what they stood for or was she praising an attempt to breach the White House? There's a big difference, so I want to be clear. If it was the later, then that is definitely dangerous.
But praising or bragging is a far cry from planning, persuading and instigating. Plus, Bernie and AOC aren't the leader of the free world. The President has a responsibility to serve the entire US, all 330M, regardless of who voted for him or against him. Bernie has a responsibility to Vermont and AOC to the Bronx. It's apples and oranges. If you want the highest public office in the country, you need to be held to the highest standards and not complain about how those with far less power might have acted.
Assuming the owners of said building do not want you there, occupying a building is at best trespassing and at worst breaking and entering.
Civil disobedience is explicitly breaking a law because you believe it to be unjust, with the full expectation that you will be arrested and possibly punished for your actions.
When most people talk about "protesting", I don't think that's what they're talking about.
i imagine the person relating this kind of action, practiced en masse since the 60s across civil rights, nuclear nonproliferation, environmental, LGBT movements with storming barricades, dragging police from windows and beating them to death, and literally threatening the seat of government did not actually intend to conflate the two sorts of events.
I think you're talking about privately owned buildings.
Always a rather arrogant phrase, but especially absurd now.
There was a point in time when the US was seen as having some degree of leadership, mostly because it's military power. These days I think it's seen by many as being a bit of a bully boy only useful in keeping some degree of balance with the other bully boys.
Let me ask for a quick accounting here - what is the evidence for this? My understanding is 100% of the gun deaths were from guns in the hands of law enforcement officers who were perfectly capable of defending themselves when pushed. There are a bunch of instantly iconic photos [0] with basically no weapons in the hands of protestors. They clearly didn't plan on breaching the Capitol or they'd have realised that they were all about to go to jail forever.
This is a not a mob out for literal blood.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/capitol-mob-deaths/ind...
If they had found a senior official I don’t think they would have been safe.
How many guns, bombs and zip ties? Was it even enough protestors to be called a minority who bought bombs? The press would love a few photos of people with guns storming the capital, because those that I've seen look like very poorly behaved tourists with souvenirs and selfies. Gallows happen to be a traditional prop at protests (eg, [0]).
> If they had found a senior official I don’t think they would have been safe.
Nobody feels safe when a protest gets out of hand, but that doesn't make it a fact that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America were about to be injured. It is entirely plausible that the mob would have screamed at them then been broken up. That is the most likely scenario.
[0] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tommy-robinson-leads-...
Stop and take a second to listen to yourself. Is there an acceptable numbers of guns, bombs, and zip ties that are intended to be used on the leaders of this country?
Lone wolves and troublemakers out to get Congresspeople exist. There might be a few in the mob. But the mob itself isn't made up of people like that. This is the same logic that was being applied to protestors all through 2020. It is hard to get away from the BLM protests being peaceful even with burning buildings in the background.
No one is saying that every member of that mob had intentions to kill. There is no doubt that some people in the mob did and they got shockingly close to having the opportunity to do it.
[1] - https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1348334770103660553
There are no pipe bombs. No guns. They do not deploy zip ties.
But I found one [0] leaves me comfortable in assuming a similar scene happened at some point over the week in Minneapolis. It would have ben a very scary time to be a police officer, the burning of the vehicles from 2:28 to 4:00 for example looks a lot like a threat of violence. Those protesters wanted to hurt the police.
The US has a pretty high tolerance for violence in its protests. If anything, I'd guess that rather than attitudes of the protestors the lack of police deaths in the BLM protests were because the police knew that they were going to be targeted with violence, and it caught them off guard coming from Trump supporters.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCPzQg3668g
PS. Also your video is a bit indistinct, I'm not sure it does show them beating a police officer who is on the ground
>PS. Also your video is a bit indistinct, I'm not sure it does show them beating a police officer who is on the ground
You can see them drag someone down the stairs in the first few seconds of the video and then you see them beating someone on the ground. One man is literally beating an officer with an American flag if you are one for symbolism. The next tweet in that thread shows a photo from above in which you can see the officer down on the steps and there is a reply that has video from a different angle.
It looks to me more like flag-holding-man throws it away to help someone get up, who then joins the protestors. The police officer in the yellow vest is under the arch on the right on the start, away from where the protestors are doing whatever they are doing. When a bloke in black gets up off the ground he joins the protestors too.
I don't think that is a video of protestors beating a policeman. If they were the video would probably have been more violent. I think the protestors might be helping the bloke in the blue jacket stand up at the start.
The intent of the mob is entirely comparable, at any rate. Protestors hurling stuff at police vs. protestors igniting stuff.
But that, at best, upgrades the scene from a mostly peaceful protest torching vehicles to a violent clash with the police officer. Violent protests are not unheard of. It doesn't justify the idea that anyone was trying to irreversibly stain American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America.
I mean, the fundamental argument here is that we shouldn't mix the actions of the people on the stairwell facing the police with the rest of the protest. That line of thinking applied to protests was roundly debunked in 2020.
Good question. We don’t know the answer because federal authorities have not held a press briefing on this incident.
> those that I've seen look like very poorly behaved tourists with souvenirs and selfies
Perhaps you should watch this:
> what is the evidence for this?
>
> ...this is a not a mob out for literal blood.
There's video of a large crowd of the rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence!" They erected a gallows with a noose outside the Capitol. There's video of people yelling that they came to get Pence and Pelosi. Squads of milita wore tactical armor and helmets, and carried not just assault rifles and handguns, but also flexcuffs. You don't get that stuff in the spur of the moment. They came prepared. Other rioters were carrying lead pipes and wooden rods. There was even one rioter caught on video carrying a literal pitchfork.
They beat one police officer to death with a fire extinguisher and injured more than 50 others. That is clearly a mob out for blood.
As for more evidence, for months in advance, Trump supporters filled Parler, Gab, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and many other social media outlets with detailed detailed discussions of plans to commit violence and in many cases murder at this event. NYPD and the FBI received a ton of reports from concerned citizens who saw this social media chatter. The insurrectionists talked about what weapons to bring, which politicians to target in order of priority, and so much more. It was reported that they had maps with them of the tunnels under the Capitol building so that they could cut off escape routes.
Freshman lawmaker Lauren Boebert tweeted Speaker Pelosi's whereabouts multiple times during the riot. She did not tweet anything which indicated any degree of surprise that the riot was occurring.
Jim Clyburn has two offices in the Capitol, one right next to the front doors and one way up on the third floor. It was reported that the rioters ignored Clyburn's obvious office next to the doors and instead made a beeline for the more secluded office on the third floor.
100%? Literally all of them? Every one?
I'm not looking for a metaphorical response here. Which parts of your response are backed actual evidence and which parts are assumptions based on your instincts and filling in blanks?
No one can take part in a group action and then claim they're not responsible for what the group has done. When people act as a group they have to accept responsibility for the group's actions.
actually, you're probably thinking of the four rioters who died. all of their deaths were linked to pre-existing medical conditions. but you were replying to remarks about the police officer who was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher. being bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher is not a pre-existing condition.
The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.
To be hyperfocused on the free speech or "big brother" aspect of these bans, not the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America, as well as overrunning the seat of power of the most powerful nation in the world, on national TV ... just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.
I'm sure a lot of the people at the capitol that day have the narrative running in their minds that they are the heroes of America democracy, but the reality is that there is simply no justification for any of this, that can be told. A smarter group of individuals would take all this on the chin, make penance in some way while staying under the radar to regroup and reconfigure their message/approach instead of citing private business overreach as some sort of justification for what happened