There is no ministry being erected, just a bunch of private parties not willing to get dragged into the mud.

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).

No official ministry, but the private parties appear to be acting with a great deal of coordination.

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.

Google round earth conspiracy

Zeitgeist is not coordinated.

Those are some serious charges you're levelling. I'm assuming you have proof, yeah?

I really do think they have been visited by the FBI, who has warned them not to implicate themselves in ongoing plots to kill more people.

Really? Whats the evidence?

> These are opinions though

Help me out here, Hacker News. This guy thinks: "Democrats attacked the capital", is an opinion.

How do we even talk to this person?

"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."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre

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.

[1] The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPgDQkmqqM

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.

> it's safe to ignore them. Don't engage because they have tacitly admitted to being an unreasonable, delusional individual.

We saw last Wednesday that it's no longer safe to ignore them.

In my city every act of violence at BLM rallies was somehow blamed on white supremacist and Proud Boys by the local media and on social media.

We're fully post-fact now, and it's not just Republicans playing this game.

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."

That is an opinion.

Ok, I did. Explain to me where it says anything about lying is an opinion: https://bit.ly/39nLiwz

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.

He has something more powerful than facts, lies.

Opinions stated as facts are no longer “just an opinion”

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.

Erm, here is a photo of people wearing Trump gear scaling walls. https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/16/03/72/20463283/3/ratio3x2_1...