> In general, sedition is defined as trying to overthrow the government with intent and means to bring it about; the Supreme Court, however, has been divided over what constitutes intent and means.
> These acts made it a federal crime to speak, write, or print criticisms of the government that were false, scandalous, or malicious.
It is frightening to me that so many U.S. citizens get their perception of reality through social media channels; that is to say they get messages that are amplified by algorithm with insufficient regard to refutability (and a requirement of evidence to refute or confirm.)
As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason and based on multiple sources of information that I consider reputable, I strongly believe this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does. Their sources include the content of speeches made by the President of the United States, news anchors and journalists of conversatively-biased news, and perhaps most importantly, peers they trust liking and sharing those same speeches and articles with them as a stamp of acceptance.
That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
One difference, of course, is that despite there being a significant number of ‘trusted’ sources claiming extensive election fraud - there has been near zero evidence presented by these same sources to defend the claims. That alone should be a red flag that the claims are mere assertions rather than statements of fact.
From my perspective, every article on Reuters included the phrase "claimed without evidence" in regards to election fraud. For me, trusting Reuters, that is sufficient information.
From a believer's perspective, articles mentioned affidavits, eye-witness testimony, court cases being filed, and important, trusted people saying something along the lines of "there is evidence the courts are not even considering!" Presumably if that same believer dug deep enough into individual court cases and affidavits and statements by the judges dismissing cases, they may have changed their mind.
But I don't dig that deep, and obviously neither do the believers. We are wired to our inclination of confirmation bias. When we are already programmed and motivated to find evidence of what we already believe, we do not tend to exhaust every option possible to validate it. We stop when we cross the smallest of hurdles of validation.
The utility of (and general lack of consequences for using) these dishonest rhetorical strategies is unlikely to go away as they are a culmination of the general obstructionist political environment of the DNC/RNC duopoly since (at least) the early 90’s.
I really don't trust Reuters, CNN, the NY Times, or whoever. I think people exaggerate and misidentify the source of their beliefs, but being honest about why you take a side is a better way to convince.
What I trust is that if Trump had serious allegations with evidence, that Republican election officials in Georgia would treat them seriously rather than debunking them in the midst of death threats. Or that some Republican judge, especially one of those nominated by Trump would have allowed a lawsuit to get traction.
Reading the transcript of the call to the SoS, and reading a couple of the legal opinions on one of the lawsuits, is worth more than a million news articles to me. Trump said there were thousands of dead people who voted; the SoS said there were two, in the face of people calling for his execution as a RINO. That's compelling.
I don't really spend any time on CNN, and NY Times requires me to jump through hoops sometimes to read articles, as I do not have a subscription. I'll take Reuters and AP News at face value unless there's something spectacular that needs investigating (which would not be the norm.) So unless there's a claim such as that all across the nation, poll workers, election officials, appointed judges, etc. are all coordinating a well-concealed attack on the integrity of an election... well conspiracy theories need considerable evidence. That is, I mean, they need evidence that is clear, falsifiable, verifiable. Then I have to dig deeper.
I also trust peers with a similar threshold. If none of my intelligent friends and family members with a history of digging deeply into fantastic claims believe the current fantastic claim, I don't tend to feel the need to do such digging myself. If one of them was suddenly making a grandiose claim, I would sit up and notice and have to investigate further.
I don't see any news source as having blanket credibility. In a wider context, I feel like the cycle of building and then strip mining a brand has been accelerated. As soon as there is credibility and trust, it's exploited. But also, I don't see all the different people who write for an organization as having much if anything in common. My favorite general news source at the moment is Bloomberg, but I remember one or more people who used to bring up a particular article as evidence Bloomberg was not to be trusted.
I choose things to read based on my perception of their average reliability, but I don't assume that something is true because it comes from a good source. If I did, how could I know the source was good in the first place? The causality goes from good articles -> good source, not the other way around.
I just don't think you can give anyone any benefit of the doubt. If you're not forming your opinions bottom-up, you risk getting drawn into a divergent reality like so many people these days.
I'm also reminded of how some people on HN like to mention the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect". You can't expect that smart people automatically know about any random thing, if it doesn't impact their life whether they are right or wrong.
I disagree. There's no way they would have changed their minds. It's just an excuse. A thin veneer of plausible deniability while they willingly keep their heads in the sand. The simple explanation is no one is that stupid, that fascist, but, maybe they are. Maybe this is the effect of a decades long campaign by conservative politicians & pundits to constantly gaslight America & try to keep the electorate uneducated.
Either way, people clinging to these obvious falsehoods are seditious at worst or useful idiots at best.
I don’t think most of them are fascist or extremely dumb.
People generally don’t like to change their minds on deeply held beliefs, and all the falsehoods Trump and Qanon are spreading have become deeply held beliefs for many of those people.
They end up supporting fascists but they won’t realise it until too late.
There's better ways to run an election with verification systems. Venezuela does it pretty well, probably because they know there's an invasion itchy trigger finger pointed at them.*
Poll workers for instance, get drafted from a lottery right near the election instead of a voluntary system so there's no way a team of confederates could scheme behind the scenes.
There's also multiple tabulating and verification steps. The ballots are both machine and hand counted. The people and machines are chosen at random and nobody could rig all the machines because nobody has access to all of them. Nobody can coordinate an effort for subordinates to rig them because again, the teams are formed via a random draft.
Test ballots get fed through the machines by teams of observers who get randomly assigned to polling stations for surprise inspections.
Furthermore the top 6 candidates independently verify the tally. They each get essentially an open book of the records. Statistical spot check surveys are done as a further confirmation etc. There's lots of international observers, etc
Every voter gets a copy of the ballot and a confirmation number that they can go and check the record of.
Maybe someone else can find a place where corruption in the tabulation could occur but it looks pretty airtight to me
* - It's worth noting I'm not saying anything about the outcome of the elections or the politics. Voter intimidation and disinformation could still happen, lots of objectionable things. But their tabulation of votes seems to be pretty clean. Dictators, if that's your opinion here, can stay in power without lying about the vote count by, say, deciding what makes it on the ballot in the first place. For an extreme example, this election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_German_parliamentary_elec... could have been exemplary - as clean as mathematically possible, and had the same outcome.
Strongly opposed as “fake democracy”, the proposal eventually did not go through (due to a very silly technical error from pro-Beijing side).
The rest is history.
After lots of subsequent development, just this week there was a mass arrest of pro-democracy lawmakers and activists [2], for otherwise the pro-democracy camp may have enough say in the election of the next Chief Executive, after the landslide victory in the district council election of 2019.
It's impossible to prove there was no fraud, however if there was fraud it's extremely likely someone would be able to find it, so the lack of evidence is reasonable enough test of the election's validity. Otherwise there can be no democracy other than direct public democracy.
I found the confirmation hearing on Wednesday to be very informative on this. There were countless objectors attempting to invalidate the Pensylvannia vote, all echoing each other on a variety of reasons including voter fraud. Republican house members made very convincing arguments on the floor that caused me to wonder what information I was missing.
The democratic house members who argued against the objections easily tore down their arguments. Their largest point with respect to voter fraud was that there were was actually _no_ legal action mentioning voter fraud brought up in the many many court cases launched by Trump's team. The reasoning being because lawyers can have their licenses revoked for intentionally lying about serious accusations and no lawyer was willing to put their career on the line for something they had no evidence for.
I respect everyone's views and consider myself to be somewhat moderate, but damn overall republican house lost a ton of respect from me that night.
If you want more details on the various court cases, I can recommend the "Legal Eagle" channel on Youtube, run by a trial lawyer from DC. This video is specifically on the minutiae of many election fraud court cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-nblE8ps2M (Not affiliated, just a fan.)
I might be convinced to be skeptical if judges say, woah this is damaging EVEN if those judges are Trump appointed, by the same token though, if a Trump appointed judge laughs Trump's team out of the court with a frivolous law suit, I'm doubly sure that there's absolutely no chance of fraud.
The RIGHT, people who supported/enabled Trump have said, nope - nothing to see, all's legit, got any better proof? Kemp for instance was a HUGE Trump supporter, Pence has no reason not to support Trump, yet now he's a "traitor" for doing his job. Seriously. I'd hate to play any board game with these people, you could never win, they'd throw a fit if they lost until you admit they won...
> My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does.
> That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.
Sadly, though I feel the same as you, this kind of mindset is a vanishing minority in the US, or so it would seem based on most allowed speech these days. One can daily find entire reddit threads about how one side or another is absolutely unreasonable, and one shouldn't even consider that the other side may have reasons. And this goes for all sides. For those of us who try to remain objective and rational, the only option is increasingly to remain silent or find safe spaces (ironically, from the very crowd that popularized the concept of safe spaces). That's the main reason I started spending more time on HN. I've written before, this is one of the few popular places on the internet where being rational and impartial is common, though even here that seems to slowly be changing.
You'll notice the exact same issues voting machines, ballots, etc discussed.
Any person of logic and reason will conclude there was election fraud. Both the democrats and republicans have had 4 years to prepare for it. But also reason and logic says that if both cheated then so be it. The national election system is designed specifically to be gamed. It's not just local voting that has problems - gerrymandering, voting suppression, etc., but the national election as well.
There is no doubt in my mind that Trump and Hillary cheated in 2016. I think the DNC's hubris underestimated Trump and that's why he won. I think this time, Trump's hubris cost him. I mean "china, china, china" gets old after a while.
Rational people understand that both sides cheated and the better cheater won. Only democratic political activists think there was no cheating and only republican political activists think we should overturn the election because of cheating. Rational people understand there was cheating and are willing to live with it because both sides cheated and the system is designed to make it impossible to prove cheating.
The ballots are lost in time, like tears in rain.
As I said in 2016, I will say it in 2020, let the better cheater win. If Trump and the GOP really wanted to win, they should have worked harder.
An yet in 20 years, no one has presented any proof of actual election fraud. However there are tons and tons of evidence that foreign powers like Russia and China troll and spread millions of fake stories to fool more gullible Americans. I don't recall a single democrat saying "the dominion voting machines are fake data!" And yet here we are with a President seeing election fraud everywhere with not one solid piece of evidence. Only accusations.
> An yet in 20 years, no one has presented any proof of actual election fraud.
And yet the media, academics, politicians, etc all bring up over and over. I wonder why?
> However there are tons and tons of evidence that foreign powers like Russia and China troll and spread millions of fake stories to fool more gullible Americans
Tons? Where?
> I don't recall a single democrat saying "the dominion voting machines are fake data!"
Also, as I noted, issues with voting machines were mostly a democratic concern in the 2000s due to the Bush victories. Voting machine problem isn't a new issue. It's been around for decades.
Agreed. Ours is a system of Darwinism. We provide a very high bar to clear to accuse someone of cheating and it's not often cleared. However, the opportunity is always there to fix vulnerabilities for the next election (see: Russian interference). You can't be mad if you lose, you just have to make sure it doesn't happen again (for the same reason).
You literally didn't read some combination of my sources, my comment, or the article you linked, and they prove you false.
The article you linked says that the ballots were processed "legally". I explicitly said that they were probably processed legally, but intentionally deceitfully.
The article says that a claim that was debunked was that the ballots were kept in "suitcases". I never claimed that they were - nor does my argument rest on that claim.
The article says that an Richard Barron claims that "No announcement was ever made to leave, for anyone to leave", which was not a sworn statement, and is directly contradicted by the sources I already linked: two sworn statements, and (at least) two articles by independent news stations, including 11Alive, which is one of the stations mentioned in the article you linked, and ABC News[1] - meaning that the Fulton County elections director straight-up lied - at which point, why should we trust anything else coming from the Fulton County elections team?
I'm all for transparency, verification, and audits, and think we need to ditch all electronics and go all paper, with tons of observation, but there's no there there in all this "fraud". If you are propagating this now it is because you have an agenda oblique to democracy.
"Gabriel Sterling, a top Georgia election official, said Friday that election investigators had watched all the surveillance video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta, not just the 90 seconds Rudy Giuliani's legal team showed in a Georgia Senate subcommittee hearing, and they found that the "suitcases" were regular ballot boxes on wheels and the vote count was supervised until the end. Trump's team is "intentionally misleading the public about what happened at State Farm Arena on election night," Sterling said. "These aren't magical ballots."
You're wrong. The accusations are wrong. Our judges, some Trump appointees, said the accusations are baseless. Stop buying into bullshit because reality is uncomfortable.
You can't break the site guidelines like that and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690702 regardless of how right you are or feel, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. You also can't use HN primarily for political battle [1], regardless of which politics you're battling. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
I've banned this account. 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.
It doesn't matter whether the containers were "hidden" or not as long as they were counted without observers present. This is pedantry to the point of intentionally avoiding the point.
You didn't read the other sources I linked, which contain sworn statements from two observers, as well as articles published by several news stations stating that observers (and news) were told to go home because they were done for the night. Resuming counting after observers and news have left is intentionally deceitful, and no rational person actually interested in a fair democratic system would claim otherwise.
> liar
Assuming ill intent. You aren't interested in holding a dicussion, just labelling. Typical anti-intellectualism coming from the political party that won the election.
> seditionist
Look up the definiton of that word before using it: "Overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order." Mind-blowingly false - I neither said nor implied any sort of rebellion. You're literally just using the worst labels you can think of, without any truth to them whatsoever, to avoid actual conversation.
> It doesn't matter whether the containers were "hidden"
Then don't write hidden? Just write 'ballots'. Or write 'ballots that were sealed because the counting stopped, but then re-opened when the counting resumed'.
> You didn't read the other sources I linked, which contain sworn statements from two observers, as well as articles published by several news stations stating that observers (and news) were told to go home because they were done for the night.
Yes. Thats what the video in the tweet said. Thats basically what I wrote when I described what the video said.
> You aren't interested in holding a dicussion, just labelling. Typical anti-intellectualism coming from the political party that won the election.
The source that you cited contradicted your claim of 'hidden ballots'. You are a liar.
> The source that you cited contradicted your claim of 'hidden ballots'. You are a liar.
This is false. You need to also look up the definition of "liar" - it exclusively refers to intentional deception. I did not intentionally deceive you - I just thought that they were hidden when they were not.
You're zero for two while acting in the most malicious way possible. Perhaps try taking a step back and not only looking up words before you use them, but stop assuming the worst about people who disagree with you.
I've banned this account. Creating accounts to do political flamewar is not allowed here, and will get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
The onus is on your side to show how this election was stolen. All of your rhetoric about the left hating trump is not evidence of any fraud. One could’ve said the same things about Hillary Clinton in 2016, who’s been reviled by the right for decades.
Innocent until proven guilty. If you are claiming an election was conducted illegitimately then you are accusing multiple election officials of fraud. This requires evidence, something the Trump legal team didn’t have.
I know elections aren’t court proceedings. But if you believe the results are unfair, then you’re implying some crime took place, namely fraud. You can prove that in court with a preponderance of evidence or beyond a reasonable doubt, but Lin Wood and Rudy Giuliani haven’t managed to do either.
> The results (not the overturning) of elections must be believed to be fair with almost certainly, especially by the losing side.
According to whom? What will make you think this is fair? To me it seems like the only way Trump supporters and Trump will be convinced of the results is if they say he won.
Alright, what do you want? Specifically, what will it take for you to believe the results of the presidential, senate, house, and local elections are legitimate?
So, you're asking your opponents to prove a negative. That's not how election law (or common sense) works. You want to contest the result, it's up to you to provide the evidence strong enough to uphold your objections.
The rule changes weren't reason to toss out votes. That quibbling that was shot down by judges. In particular, the rule changes were neutral with respect to any candidate.
Your objection about the rule changes is, of course, that it allowed more of the wrong kind of people to vote legally. It's naked anti-democratic BS, attempting to masquerade as a valid concern.
The constitution clearly says the election shall be held via methods as prescribed by the state legislators.
Disagreements between branches of state government should have defaulted to the legislature, but didn't in most of the states in question. Especially true in PA, where the legislature specifically voted against implementing the same rules that the court then imposed anyway.
Even worse, they ignored Alito's court order to segregate ballots. (Which admittedly ended up being a moot point, other than showing general non-compliance.)
So yes, I think the rule changes are a reason to disqualify either votes or an entire election.
>It's naked anti-democratic BS, attempting to masquerade as a valid concern.
That's a political opinion, not a legal one. Which makes it the legislators decision, not the state court's.
That's nice. It doesn't mean the results were fraudulent. And it doesn't mean tossing out the results was legally justified.
The judges properly disagreed with your absurd conclusion that it was "a reason to disqualify either votes or an entire election." That was far too large an ask.
The question was adjudicated to a conclusion. That you do not accept the conclusion reached doesn't mean a conclusion was not reached. Your acceptance isn't necessary for the result to be the truth.
I think these guys are genuinely concerned, which is sad because this means they are completely off their rocker. Check out this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25695661
Complete nonsense that somehow manages to stay somewhat intelligible.
Where the onus lies is dependent on who you are and what your goals are. If you occupy an elected office, and you want people to believe that you were elected legitimately, then the onus is on you to convince the people of that, if they are skeptical. The burden of proof is not on them to convince themselves that you were elected legitimately.
If you're arguing in a court case that the election was conducted illegitimately and should be overturned, then yes of course you are correct that the onus is on you to make your case, and there will be a somewhat high standard of evidence required.
If you're trying to convince some random person one way or another, then of course the onus is on you to provide arguments, and the standard of evidence is basically whatever can be convincing to your audience.
What will make you think this election was fair? To me it seems like the only way Trump supporters and Trump will be convinced of the results is if they say he won.
If the local election officials wanted to convince me they ran the election fairly, they would have had to have allowed observers to do their job without imposing any restrictions on them that would impair their ability to observe. If that means equipping every worker and observer with personal safety equipment suitable for use in a lab that researches ebola, so be it. Outside observers are absolutely critical.
That is not the only thing, but that is the big one for me.
Of course if Trump had won, I would have trusted that the election was not rigged in his favor by Democrats even given the restrictions on observers, because I don't know of any plausible reason why they might have done so.
If we agree to flip a coin for $20, and you obstruct my view while you're tossing the coin, you can be sure you're not going to get my $20 no matter what you say afterward, unless you have earned quite a lot of my trust beforehand. Of course if it comes up the right way for me, I will be happy to take your money. Do you think that's unreasonable?
There is far too much opportunity for the election workers to cheat for me to trust them if they aren't closely observed, no matter what they say afterward. That's why observers were put there in the first place.
If the elections workers are not good at cheating, they may leave behind evidence, but a lack of evidence would not be convincing to me, because not all forms of election fraud will necessarily leave behind evidence, and there is too much opportunity for them to get rid of it.
So you think hundreds of thousands of ballots were out of view and somehow swapped with fake ballots giving Biden the win during the counting process. And that this coordinated fraud got past everybody because an election official was watching from too far away, say 20 feet instead of 6 feet. And no hard evidence of this conspiracy anywhere exists, but it totally happened. Is this your position?
>So you think hundreds of thousands of ballots were out of view and somehow swapped with fake ballots
I think probably several different kinds of election fraud took place because observers were too far away. If election observers are 6 feet away, they can't read the letters written on a piece of paper, so can't tell if an election worker is, for instance, allowing someone to vote multiple times and crossing off some other name instead, or accepting a ballot with a signature that doesn't match the voter's records. If election observers are 20 feet away, they can't even tell if there's any writing on a piece of paper, so election workers can let through blank mail in envelopes, or switch papers around, or put papers in the wrong box, or pull papers from a box into the wrong stack.
>coordinated fraud
Do you think it's implausible that a group of people that have all been selected at some level by democrat politicians, who have a deep seated hatred of Trump, would have some difficulty coordinating to engage in illegal activity?
>because an election official was watching from too far away
No, election observers were too far away. I do not trust election officials in these controversial areas, because they are, at some level, there because democrat politicians want them to be.
>And no hard evidence of this conspiracy anywhere exists, but it totally happened.
I don't know if it exists at this point. Some forms of election fraud would be very easy to get away with carrying out without any evidence remaining. How would you ever know if an election worker got two mail in envelopes, one obviously fake and the other real but from a part of town that goes heavily republican, took the inner contents of the fake one and put it in the good pile, and took the inner contents of the real one and put it in the bad pile? If an observer couldn't tell it was happening, how could anyone find out after the fact? How hard would it be for a box of invalid election materials to never be found again? Do you think the FBI is rummaging through the garbage of all of these facilities?
>Is this your position?
Allow me to turn it around on you. Is it your position that it would be unjustified for the democrat election officials and workers to cheat to make sure Trump lost, given the list of things they (I assume sincerely) believe about him that I posted above? (Owned by Putin, elected due to russian interference, climate change, women's rights, racial hatred, border separations, voter suppression, undermining democracy, etc etc)
Yes it would be unjustified. Election officials and workers would not risk their personal livelihood and jail time just to see their candidate maybe win. And if they would I believe they wouldn't have stopped at just the president, but would have given House Democrats more seats. Then again this is all based on your delusional demonization of poll workers and election officials with no basis in reality. It honestly sounds like you've never voted in person or even volunteered to work at a polling center.
Trump cheated in 2016. No one could doubt he would try to cheat in 2020. Why would it be unjustified to cheat to make sure his cheating didn't succeed a second time?
How are these people risking their livelihood any more than any other group engaged in criminal activity, like people cooking the books for banks? Why would they expect the democrat local district or city attorney to come after them? Why would they expect their fellow lifelong committed Democrats to turn on them, ever?
The officials in these cities could only influence the elections for us representatives that represent their congressional district, which are seats that Democrats always win anyway. They could only meaningfully influence Senate races, which many believe they did in at least two states, and gubernatorial or other statewide races, of which there were none this cycle in the 6 contested states.
> tell me how the right could possibly believe anything else.
On the one hand we have only the word of a known liar and his band of sycophants. On the other we have the sworn testimony and/or judgments of literally thousands of election officials and judges, including from states with Republican legislatures (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona). Maybe the "right" should get out of their bubble and join everyone else.
Wow you have means, motive, and opportunity. Now all you need is this pesky little thing called evidence of any such fraud occurring. It’s a big roadblock though, understandably, no one has managed to produce anything of note that could be accepted in court or any reputable investigation.
If I were arguing in court, you would be absolutely right. The only thing you are missing is this pesky little thing called me arguing in court.
I don't have any reason to believe it would be possible to prove in a court that election fraud took place at this point, outside of confessions. That doesn't mean it didn't take place, or that it isn't reasonable to believe it took place.
It turns out there are places outside of court that care about actual evidence. Like in science, history, or reputable journalism. I know you don’t care about that though, so I wish you good luck in life.
> We have much more than the word of Trump and his "sycophants".
Prove it in court or shut up. Seriously, it's that simple. Don't spam us with links and tell us to "look at the evidence". That's what the courts are for.
If Trump is so certain that he's right, he should say all he's saying under oath. Surely he's brave enough to do that right?
You can choose to believe in shadowy conspiracies of "Democrat officials" and "left-leaning Republicans". That's your right. But compared to that complex story, "liar continues lying" is far more likely.
I don't think you read my comment. My point is not to prove anything in court, or to argue that anything related to the election can be proved in court. It is to argue that it's completely reasonable for right-leaning people to doubt the integrity of the election. Probably you are aware that a lot of crimes are very difficult to prove in court. That doesn't mean they didn't happen, or that people should not believe they happened.
>Don't spam us with links and tell us to "look at the evidence".
I did neither of those things.
>That's what the courts are for.
I have no standing in court to sue anyone over this.
>If Trump is so certain that he's right, he should say all he's saying under oath. Surely he's brave enough to do that right?
I don't know or care how certain Trump is of anything. I know many on the political right are certain, for excellent reasons, that the Democrats were motivated to bias the election against Trump, and had the ability to do so, and so many on the right are not going to trust the results.
>But compared to that complex story
Is cheating in elections really a complex story from your point of view? It happens all of the time across the globe.
>"liar continues lying" is far more likely.
Can you point out something I've said that relies on taking Trump's word for something?
> That doesn't mean they didn't happen, or that people should not believe they happened.
Sure. But in this case, a known liar with a lot of motivation to lie is alleging the crime. And there's no evidence, even though you'd need thousands of mostly ordinary people to coordinate the crime and subsequent coverup. If even one of them breaks ranks, everyone else is going to jail. Look at it completely objectively: taking out the names, parties, policies and so on, if you were a betting man/woman, who would your money be on?
> I know many on the political right are certain, for excellent reasons, that the Democrats were motivated to bias the election against Trump,
Here's the problem though. The only way, the only way, they'd be 100% convinced the election was fair is if had Trump won. They simply won't entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, most voters aren't so enamored of their guy as they are. If you refuse to accept, without violence, the result of an election as fair unless your candidate won then it's not a democracy.
> Can you point out something I've said that relies on taking Trump's word for something?
This whole election fraud this is a Trump invention. He knew he was going to lose and sowed the seeds well in advance. He's sued dozens of times and lost nearly every single case.
> Is cheating in elections really a complex story from your point of view?
Across multiple states, parties, officials, and judges? With no leaks, no whistleblowers, no emails or texts? I'm not saying it's impossible in theory. But in this particular case, when it's a known liar making the allegations, color me skeptical. If Trump had a history of probity and honesty in his past conduct, I might be more inclined to listen.
>they'd be 100% convinced the election was fair is if had Trump won.
Maybe some would. But I'll tell you, if the democrats wanted it to look like they were running a fair election despite their vitriolic hatred of Trump, they could have done quite a few things differently. For one, the measures they put in place to reduce the spread of the coronavirus were an absolutely unprecedented obstruction of the ability of observers to watch the process. An election observer should be able to see everything every election worker does as closely as the election worker sees it. If they wanted the other party to believe the results, they would have found some other way.
>This whole election fraud this is a Trump invention.
How does your assertion that Trump said election fraud first mean my statements of fact rely on his word for their validity? Can you answer the actual question I asked? (You can't)
>He knew he was going to lose
According to the official tallies, he lost by a combined total of 42,976 votes across three states (if AZ, GA, and WI went Trump, it would have resulted in a 269-269 tie). How could anyone have known he was going to lose, unless they were part of a coordinated effort to fix the election against him?
> the measures they put in place to reduce the spread of the coronavirus were an absolutely unprecedented obstruction of the ability of observers to watch the process.
The mask isn't supposed to over the eyes, only the mouth and nose. Do you have any concrete examples of "unprecedented obstruction" and their effects? Or evidence that it didn't affect both sides equally? These are just random insinuations.
Also there's a bit of karmic justice here, because if Trump had taken the pandemic more seriously in the first place maybe there wouldn't have been all these restrictions. Or maybe he deliberately sabotaged the response so he could blame the restrictions for affecting the result later. (See? It's so easy to make up accusations).
> An election observer should be able to see everything every election worker does as closely as the election worker sees it.
Do observers generally get closer than 6ft to workers? Even under normal circumstances that's considered personal space.
Also this would require a conspiracy among hundreds if not thousands of election workers to have any effect. Without a single person blowing the whistle.
> How could anyone have known he was going to lose,
The polls had him losing WI by a far larger margin so that was a hint. The WI race being so close, and the history of the Republican party's treachery in that state is more an indicator of a failed Trump steal. I don't believe that is the case either - it's more likely that it was bad polling.
> Can you answer the actual question I asked?
You haven't presented any facts - only vague accusations. What is there to answer? You're a concern troll. I'm done responding to you.
To be fair if you put Trump under oath he’d get himself charged for perjury by the evil democrats. Really the only thing he could’ve done is incite a mob (this may be too sarcastic for HNs taste but screw it, HN has no taste upvoting baseless right wing conspiracy garbage)
> As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason, I strongly belief this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
I have the same views. There are actually some "They stole my election!" people on HN, so maybe they'll read this and reconsider their "reality", but Biden won by several thousands in the 3 disputed states, to pull off voter fraud to swing that many votes require a lot of work, and probably a lot of people, and the problem with having many people is that it's hard to keep something like that secret. And if they were going to steal the presidency, why did some GOP candidates in those states still win seats, why not flip enough things Dem so that the "tyrants" have a comfortable majority?
I think Trump's "They stole it!" proclamations are a scheme to keep his base heated so they can donate to his retirement fund, although yesterdays "We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue!" (only for him to take the limo back to the White House) probably goes beyond that, that was an incredible "Release the hounds!" moment.
It's infuriating that a significant percentage of the country doesn't listen to reason, haven't even looked at how flimsy the court arguments that Team Total Landscaping have made, but are just screaming everywhere "I know the truth, and the truth is, they stole it!". Then again, many probably would get lost in the first paragraph if they tried to read any court filing. (Not being insulting, but hey, someone must've thought years ago "why spend money to educate children if they're just going to vote you out.".)
This is turning to a rant, but it seems the seditionists in congress who are also still claiming voter fraud without evidence (like Cruz or Hawley) just want to keep the Trump base very very pissed off, and very very motivated.
> it seems the seditionists in congress who are also still claiming voter fraud without evidence (like Cruz or Hawley) just want to keep the Trump base very very pissed off, and very very motivated.
Or they want to keep the crazies on their side, rather than being turned on suddenly the way the insufficiently strident (e.g.,.most visibly recently, Pence) have often been. Still had the effect of contributing to radicalization, but the intent may be more avoiding becoming a target.
A lot can happen in 4 years time for an obese elderly man with a history of heart problems, a covid-19 infection, a terrible diet, and a very stressful travel schedule.
The odds that Donny dies of natural causes before 2024 are not nothing. Trying to position yourself as the inheritor of his base is a savvy political move (despite my personal horror at such a callous idea).
> If he's impeached and convicted he's prohibited from holding office again.
Technically, that's not necessarily true: if he is convicted the punishment can consist of any combination of removal and bar from holding future office. In theory, he could be removed but not barred on conviction, though that seems improbable and, AFAIK, every actual conviction in an impeachment trial (most such trials have been of federal judges) has resulted in both removal and bar.
The cynic in me can't help but notice that all these platforms are suddenly growing a backbone now that we know Democrats will control both the executive and legislative branches.
I think it's impossible to say. The fact that the capitol got stormed the same day as the democrats won control means it's impossible to disaggregate. It might be a cynical move by Facebook but is it also a cynical move by Betsy Devos? What difference did democrat control make to her?
Resign in the last 2 weeks of his presidency when their jobs don't really matter, make the transition process marginally more complicated by leaving, avoid having to take a stand on the 25th amendment, and they can start trying to rehabilitate their images by pretending they were shocked by the administration they've been a part of for 3.9 years
For cabinet members resigning, it helps them avoid being part of the decision to invoke (or not invoke) the 25th amendment. Betsy can say she resigned, rather than be faced with the decision to remove a President from office. So while not linked to Democrats at all (she was 2 weeks from losing her job anyway), resigning was politically safer.
> What difference did democrat control make to her?
In her case a bigger factor is probably that Trump has also fallen off the grace of a lot of Republicans. The guy is done. He's still massively popular and a threat given his popularity amongst pretty fanatical groups of people, but as far as raw, democratic power he lost his election by a pretty decent margin, and lost the House/Senate for Republicans.
A lot of people who sucked up to him and his rhetoric must be realizing it's time to suck up to someone/something else. He's always attracted an uncomfortable amount of media attention and now that he can't attract political power to remain in office he's a liability rather than an asset.
The difference for me is that these companies are blaming it on the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters. However the rhetoric was no different on the morning of the 6th than it was before that. They are simply judging it based off the fact that the violence inciting rhetoric actually resulted in violence this time. If the rhetoric was the problem, these platforms should have acted much sooner.
> What difference did democrat control make to her?
Nothing imo. Before it was probable that there could be careers and jobs outside of the presidency. With these moves it seems like Trump decided to make his bed with the worst of his base and a lot of people have finally decided that it's a bridge too far. Last-minute attempts to distance themselves after playing along the entire time.
I don't think you know who DeVos or her family is. Her family owns the largest private military in the world. They don't need jobs; they aren't going anywhere. They are going to continue shoving billions of dollars of government funds into their pockets.
They will be standing right there to fill key cabinet roles for the next Republican administration.
I think we're agreeing. A lot of people hitched their wagon to Trump as long as it was printing. His supporters attacking the US capitol means that they finally have to make a choice to either stay or cut ties so that they can be there to fill cabinet roles in a Rubio/Cotton/Cruz administration rather than a Trump Jr. one.
The fact the capital got stormed has more to do with the Trumpist sympathize of the Police, then the protesters themselves. If the were a "normal" police reaction (say midway between BLM and this, like in Hong Kong), they would have never gotten inside, and this would be a non-story.
Going after Trump fans is just center-left back-slapping, and all the worse because ignoring the police partisanship is extremely reckless and irresponsible.
Our civil liberates will continue erode for no good reason, and our institutions will be no safer. Replace the police with something else they're not afraid to hold accountable. If there is to be a monopoly of violence, it must be held only in (small d) democratic authority.
Yes. They had to fallback because they didn't have enough police there. Then there's videos of masses of people trying to push their way past masses of police at the entryways to the capitol building. Including rioters using pepper spray.
Police on the ground were overwhelmed. Congress was asking for help. Rioters that were screaming stuff like "Hang mike pence" got to within a hundred feet of the the vast majority of the leaders of our country. Local governors asked permission to intervene from the man that incited it all - whose political opponents rioters were bearing down upon. Permission that was denied.
The more I think about it the more fucked up it all is. January 6th could have been fucking devastating for the country. And lots of people don't seem to really give a shit. We're one step removed from a banana republic.
I think their argument is there's no way in heck that security would have been underprepared if it were some other group protesting. Maybe they were lulled into complacency because this is the "Blue lives matter" group, maybe it was sheer incompetence. Hard to say.
This doesn't explain why the Governor of Maryland was prohibited from moving its troops into DC by the Pentagon while Senators were begging for backup; and why it took Pence, who was in the middle of the siege, to make the call.
IDK anything about the pentagon, but as for why Pence's call would have more gravity than Senators is fairly obvious: he's the second-in-command of the executive branch of the government. Emergency military mobilization is much more the prerogative of the executive than the legislative branch.
> IDK anything about the pentagon, but as for why Pence's call would have more gravity than Senators is fairly obvious
No, what happened was the Senators called Maryland Gov Larry Hogan who has command of the MD National Guard. He mobilized his troops but he needed permission from the Pentagon to move them into DC. He didn't receive authorization for over an hour while the Capitol was being overrun.
This is a separate issue from Mike Pence. This isn't about Pence vs. Senators; the question there is why wasn't Trump the one to make the call? Where was he in all of this in defending the Capitol. Reports are that he was reveling in the chaos, and making calls to Republican senators to lobby them to take more time and raise objections to the electoral certificates.
That is true, but the chain of command for a decision like this isn't that large - in the long run a company is dominated by economics, but you still have to understand that those decisions are implemented by people.
Given that the dow jones closed at a record high while the confederate flag was flying in the capitol building, I think that shareholders are quite happy
One thing I've learned these past 4 years is that most Americans don't "care" about much until you start shitting in their backyard. Democrats or not, I think there will be an outcry of "social media did this to us" and legislation will be used to get this "behind us".
The cynic in me says, this is why changes or repeal of section 230 is possibly dangerous in that government officials already have the big social media sites under control but don't want any one springing up who is not; control being their definition of what is fake news and such.
Now an interesting consideration, for both supporters and Donald Trump himself. What happens if he is effectively locked out of all the big social media sites? Does a site which lets him on suddenly catapult to the top or does it get shouted down by pressure originating from the users who are on the sites which locked him and his supporters out?
I mean we are in a unique situation where by a very public official is being locked out of his accounts because of his actions and his supporters are being similarly locked out. That has never happened before and its both awe inspiring and frightening all at once.
I'd rather think these platforms suddenly realize the keyboard warriors they've been entertaining (as in, hosting) on their platforms are actually capable of carrying out brutal violence...
Just because someone votes for Trump doesn't mean they aren't sick of his incompetence/dishonesty/corruption. It just means they prefer him to the alternative.
Him bringing EC faith into the open, actually hurts GOP for decades if the EC is removed, they'll never win again. It's been a very very long time since GOP has won popular vote. Their entire future rides or dies on the E.C. unless they can become a big tent party, and regain people who have left the party.
Do you legitimately not know the differences between these various groups? There is a lengthy process that takes years to become a citizen and only citizens can vote. There are a variety of legal options to come to the US to study, work, and live without becoming a citizen.
Certainly not legally (until they become citizens), but their children can when they turn 18, and said immigration has been happening for many decades.
And we got to the heart of the issue. The problem for these people isn't immigrants. It is the "wrong" immigrants.
A first generation American is no less American than a 4th generation American and an overwhelming majority of us are the children of immigrants if you go back far enough.
Because there are so many dog whistles used when talking about this issue that usually are just a stand-in for racism.
These accusations are belittling and removing agency from people on multiple levels by saying democrats import immigrants, that immigrants who become citizens shouldn't have a say in how this country is governed, and that immigrants vote for democrats for any reason beyond their political policies.
How does it remove agency from Democrats to suggest that their party supports immigration of certain demographics for their own political benefit?
How does it remove agency from immigrants to point out that, as a group, they have tended to vote for one party over another, and to speculate that said tendency will continue in the future?
Why is easier to believe that Democrats have somehow coerced millions of immigrant (children) into voting democrat, and not the much simpler reasoning that immigrants vote democrat because republicans are quite openly anti-immigrant?
The idea that democrats are somehow acting nefariously for adjusting their policy to meet the demands of the citizenry is sounds completely asinine? What do you think democracy is? Republicans lost because they have bad policy. Complaining that the winning side acted in bad faith for listening to their citizenry is anti-democratic. If you think citizens shouldn't be listened to, then why not just skip to authoritarianism?
>Why is easier to believe that Democrats have somehow coerced millions of immigrant (children) into voting democrat, and not the much simpler reasoning that immigrants vote democrat because republicans are quite openly anti-immigrant?
I'm not sure who or what you are arguing against. I haven't seen anyone suggest immigrants were coerced in any way, or that they vote democrat for any reason other than preferring their policies.
>The idea that democrats are somehow acting nefariously for adjusting their policy to meet the demands of the citizenry is sounds completely asinine?
The "nefarious" behavior alleged in this comment thread is bringing in immigrants because they know they'll vote overwhelmingly democrat once they can vote (and same goes for their children, who would not have been born in the US if their parents had not been allowed in).
I didn’t say it removed agency from Democrats. It removes agency from immigrants because it treats them as reactionary pawns that don’t have any power in making decisions about their own lives and simply follow the whims of the Democratic Party.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Does it remove agency from people to note how demographics vote? Those people can be making their own decisions about which party is better for them, but still overwhelmingly pick one party, and it seems fine to me to point that out.
Indeed, but great-grandparent's assertions that said votes are reliably democratic are nonsense. Cuban-Americans tend to vote Republican (ask Marco Rubio), there are plenty of other Hispanics who vote Republican (ask Rafael "Ted" Cruz), and in fact, in the 2020 elections, Republicans have picked up votes in all sorts of immigrant communities (all the more remarkable, in my opinion, because it's hard to think how much less welcoming the party could be to immigrants).
And some of the most rabid Trump supporters are recent immigrants (cf the Epoch Times' role in the last years, or the fact that one of the arrested Capitol rioters, Yevgenya Malimon, mother of an Oregon Republican party official, needed a Russian interpreter at her arraignment).
Think of other right wing voices in the US: Peter Thiel (first generation immigrant), Ron Unz (second generation), Roosh V (second generation).
Meanwhile, one of the key demographics for Biden's win in Arizona was high turnout among — Native Americans, the Final Boss of non-immigrants.
>Indeed, but great-grandparent's assertions that said votes are reliably democratic are nonsense.
They seem pretty reasonable to me, having looked at the numbers.
The Cuban community is the only community of fairly recent immigrants of which I'm aware that doesn't reliably vote for democrats, on the whole. Outside of Florida, their votes do not make Hispanic votes in general swing toward republicans.
Hispanic votes for republicans may have increased this year, but they are still absolutely nowhere near 50/50.
My understanding of the Epoch Times is that it's run by anti-CCP Chinese, and not very representative of Asians in general.
Listing single individuals is not relevant when the topic is how a community votes.
> Hispanic votes for republicans may have increased this year, but they are still absolutely nowhere near 50/50.
Sure, but I find it remarkable that they increased vote share AT ALL while running on a fairly explicitly anti-Hispanic immigration platform.
> My understanding of the Epoch Times is that it's [...] not very representative of Asians in general.
But apparently quite influential in some language communities.
I'm not arguing that recent immigrants do not, overall, predominantly vote Democratic. But I think that behavior is not nearly as immutable as this discussion suggests. Many immigrants (a) come to the US in search of economic opportunities and (b) have somewhat more conservative personal values than their US-born peers. So they should be quite amenable to some flavors of Republicanism.
Is that necessarily a cynical take on things? Seems actually pretty rational on their part to do that to avoid a potential backlash by the Trump-led government. It was probably a good play that led to a better long-term outcome.
This is not an original idea/thought that I have, but feel repeating it is vital:
This whole censorship crusade that the Facebook, twitter & now reddit is on is a dangerous precedence we are setting for our society. Whatever they call it, this is censorship.
Already due to AI suggesting similar contents on services like Facebook & Youtube and the design of sub-reddits on reddit, we have living inside echo chambers. Atleast users have an option of searching for different contents on the platform. It's a bit easier to come out of the echo chamber. Now, by pushing people off the platform, echo chamber platforms are coming up like parler & rumble. The divide is widening.
I am not sure what other options are there, but censorship is the worst option.
Like you listed above there are lots of options still available, that's not really the limiting factor here. I believe a more subtle and harder barrier to overcome for posting controversial Internet content is going to be the credit card companies or payment processors. They are much fewer and if they refuse to do business with you you'd have no means to pay for any service you might need. Except, of course, for cryptocurrency...
EDIT: One option I think you forgot is using one of the existing hosting providers but hide the web service under a TOR hidden service. That way people can't track it back to your hosting provider to complain about the hosted content (and you can use encryption of the content that is decrypted on the fly when being served by the web server) if you worry about the hosting provider doing some scans of customer content tho that seems very unlikely to me.
I mean net neutrality prevents the ISP one from being an issue, which means making the hosting provider should be the end of that.
The payment infrastructure doesn't really have a good solution. Visa/MasterCard are famously quite puritan, most sex workers (e.g. OnlyFans, porn actors) get paid in direct deposit (form the websites) and are paid (by clients) using bank details (not cards, nor in most cases paypal like processors, it's one reason Patreon toned down the sex work they allowed). So yes, one would have to do that, create your own bank and stuff. But banks, like Tier 1 networks, seem to generally "peer" with anyone, but I am not clear if that's a requirement of legislation or not.
You're not sure what the other options are? You've seen it.
Which is worse, censorship of people calling for the violent otherthrow of the democratically elected government. OR what we've seen this week - people literally overthrowing the democratically elected government of the US.
Oh and by the way- when the MAGA hat wearers have taken over, sure as hell they aren't going to be defending your right to equivocate between the people violently overthrowing democracy and the people not allowing a violent overhtrow of democracy.
I don't know how many people need to storm the capitol under the instructions of the loser of a recent election before you stop thinking the people commenting on it are "hysterical".
incompetence does not overwrite intent. They were gathered there and committed political violence for a specific reason - to halt the peaceful transfer of power to the next administration.
And they left after a lockdown was already in-force and they were removed from the premises by force.
What was the intent? Do you know or are you assuming?
I think if their goal was to actually take control of the capitol things would have gone much differently. I find it hard to believe this was anything but a protest.
Five, actually. Officer Brian Sicknick died as a result of wounds suffered during the conflict [1]. Details beyond that are still hard to find. This after Giuliani demanded "trial by combat" from the gathered mob. Hard to believe he will face justice though, given that Trump plans to pardon everybody and their mother.
> I don't know how many people need to storm the capitol under the instructions of the loser of a recent election
Not OP, but I will stop thinking people are hysterical if they can provide a single shred of evidence that the people who stormed congress were "under the instructions of [Trump]". A tweet, a video, anything that proves the storming of congress was a pre-meditated move by Trump to stop the electoral count.
Saying "oh, well Trump didn't come out and say it, but he chose dog-whistle terms that activated his sleeper agents" isn't going to cut it.
Also the part that is rich is the implication that a rag tag handful of protestors have the ability to overthrow the government just because they broke into a building for a few hours.
He consistently encourages violence and when his followers do something bad he usually refuses to say it was bad. So sure he only specifically said to march on the capitol while the election was being stolen inside, but his response to the storming was not "this was bad, go home" but "we love you, go home".
The man knows how to guide a crowd. He has responsibility here.
There were 2-3 guys with pistols between congress and the mob. It only would have taken a minimally organized armed group, or even one person with an AR-15 to inflict casualties on congress and/or take it hostage.
> Many scholars consider a coup d'état successful when the usurpers seize and hold power for at least seven days.
They didn't seize and hold power for any time whatsoever. They had no plan. They had no organization. They did not execute a plot in any way. They were rioters. There was nothing close to what could be constituted as overthrowing of the government.
Not interested in a pedantic argument. The initial comment implied an overreaction to this incident. The president incited a mob to attack Congress. The mob was beyond anyone's control for several hours and there very easily could have been bloodshed. The president declined to condemn the mob (or did so with obvious winks and nods).
What am I missing? Are you suggesting there was no reason for alarm?
I'm saying that the phrase "people literally overthrowing the democratically elected government of the US." is hysterics. That is not what happened.
Also there was bloodshed.
I don't care about what this president does because he's a repulsive child.
Is there reason for alarm? Sure. The Capitol Police were negligent in planning and performing their duties. There was not a sufficient lockdown and security protocol for the physical items. Probably all sorts of other things. These people committed felonies and should be punished.
But this was not a revolution. Our government was not overthrown.
Have you watched the videos of the occupation of the Capitol on Wednesday? The rioters who broke in were chanting things like "Fight for Trump!" and "Find Mike Pence!" presumably to kill him. This of course shortly after Trump himself had tweeted that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution" while he surely knew that rioters had broken into the building. How the f*** can you say it's hysterical to call that an attempted violent overthrow of the government?
"Censorship" comes from the roman word, censor, which was an office of the Roman government in charge of regulating morality.
IOW, censorship has always specifically meant government restrictions speech. It is only recently that censorship has been broadened to include no-governmental actors, and that broadening is not universally accepted.
The concept that no company be allowed to enclose the commons has existed ever since the concept of the commons existed; and the Supreme Court has ruled both this and other times that if a private citizen or company encloses the commons they're bound by the same First Amendment that the government is, for the same reasons.
Read the actual case and not the Wikipedia summary.
The ruling only applies to restrictions on public rights of way (in this case, meaning the public easements over otherwise private property).
Supreme Court has ruled both this and other times that if a private citizen or company encloses the commons they're bound by the same First Amendment that the government is, for the same reasons.
No, they haven't. SCOTUS ruled that in limited circumstances, private property can be treated as a public commons if the property owner holds it out for general public use. Following the mall cases, many malls began restricting the acceptable uses on their properties, which is why you don't get harassed by political activists every time you go to the mall. (In a nutshell, open mall spaces are now designated as transit spaces rather than as general use spaces, and thus the entire lineage of SCOTUS cases no longer apply to privately held malls.)
Powerful lobbies shape our laws according to the interests of corporations. "Public Squares" have largely moved to privately-owned internet platforms. And there's no way to have a "voice" on the internet protected by the first amendment because no matter what you have to go through a private corporation that can decide to cut you off at some layer in the stack, even if you self host.
It's further fanning flames as well. Censorship is a coarse option and bound to inflict the collateral damage of instilling in the reasonable a sense of voicelessness. Beyond setting a precedent and creating something that can be used against us, we're creating more people we seek to deplatform.
Question, can I go into /r/conservative on reddit and post anything I want? Or do the mods limit what can or cannot be said there? Curious your take on that? Maybe we should just end moderation altogether. I'm curious what dang would have to say about that.
Now, not that this magically justifies it, but it is censorship made by large companies on information that is viewed by a large number of U.S. citizens. The content being targeted is important and relevant.
The content is misinformation about the integrity of the federal government, the election process, the thousands of individuals involved in maintaining the integrity of the election, the merit of every individual's vote and every eligible voter having their right to vote, the election representing the will of the people rather than being overridden by courts and legislators and so on.
This information is coming from a propaganda machine, a disinformation machine. And that machine includes President Donald Trump, complicit members of the Senate and Congress, various state and local legislators... that is to say powers of government with a vested interest in maintaining and expanding their power over people through means of manipulation.
> Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, fake, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets. In the absence of neutral and objective information, people will be unable to dissent with the government or political party in charge.
I'm generally against the idea of banning subreddits because they just move elsewhere. However, if this is going to be the official stance of Reddit admins, I encourage them to take a look at /r/sino and a few other communities that regularly violate the rules.
Exactly. When a group move out of Reddit, it's no longer their problem. They can't be blamed for whatever racist/terrorist stuff is posted on donald.win, as it's not on reddit
It may be shocking, but sometimes companies try to make decisions that benefit them in the long run. Even advertising companies! It makes sense that a toxic environment will turn off people in the long run, and most well intentioned people (ie the majority of Reddit, Google, or FB employees) want to run a platform that adds value and is not a cesspool.
The realities of staying in business sometimes override that. I don’t think we should consider it a default.
>It makes sense that a toxic environment will turn off people in the long run, and most well intentioned people (ie the majority of Reddit, Google, or FB employees) want to run a platform that adds value and is not a cesspool.
I don't think this is supported by the evidence.
The evidence: the current state of Twitter, Facebook, etc. None of them have the necessary level of moderation and until they do, they will continue to be cesspools.
Which is pretty much the reason that my use of Twitter and Reddit is pared down to super specific niches because once you leave your bubble and go to #general it’s an absolute dumpster fire.
If they could actually rein that shit in I would use it more. Just having the tools to filter that stuff out of my feed would honestly be enough. TikTok is pretty much where I go for discovery now because it learned really quickly to not show me any political content.
I don't think it's clear those communities are cesspools, while agreeing there are toxic waste dumps in each of them. I also think it's hard for an outsider to look at these giants and generalize our opinions to evaluate their internal priorities.
Then it shouldn't exist in this form. Either create a social network structured in such a way that it can be moderated (not my job to figure how) or make them illegal.
I realize I probably didn't make this clear, I don't want to ban user-generated content from the internet, merely that you need to show some proactive moderation and that there needs to be meaningful consequences for inaction. Hate speech is not the same as free speech and these are private services that should be held to a minimum standard in the same way restaurants have to pass a health inspection.
It's hard to predict if continued advertising will hurt them. Building a toxic community, if you're trying to build something that will last, is going to hurt a company.
We'll see. Parler (two years old) in particular is especially young. I'm not sure if Gab (four years old) has the funding to survive another few years. Voat lasted six solid years before running out of cash, so that's going to be my approximate benchmark.
Parler might outlast both if politicians keep moving to that platform. In that case, I might be wrong. TheDonald.win is way too focused, though.
Parler in it's current form probably won't survive the next spree shooter or whatever it causes. It's way too traditional in it's setup as a "normal" US company. The only sites that survive these kinds of things need to be decentralized and find hosting and cloud services from non-traditional sources.
Deplatforming works. A few people follow to other sites, but most don't. It also becomes harder to attract new cultists if one is shut out of major services.
Yes, it is one of the methods used by Russian government to silence the opposition. Though the platforms are usually privately owned, they all 'independently' decide that some content can't be allowed on them.
This is not true. Russian government does not dictate FB and YouTube (which it does not own), and they would have to force ISPs to block these sites if they wanted to ban the content. I doubt ISPs would ban them themselves.
Do not be so fast with 'not true' claims. Russia has at least three social networks, each with audience bigger than russian audience of Facebook and Twitter combined. All three remove anti-putin groups, etc.
the third one is Moi Mir (https://my.mail.ru), an extension of by far the most popular email service in Russia. Mail.ru corporation actually owns all three of them.
VK absolutely does remove anti-putin groups and events. [1]
You can't attack other users on HN like this, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules. Burning this place down is not an option.
Edit: given that your recent comments have been this shockingly abusive:
... I've banned your account until we get some reason to believe that you want to use this site as intended. That level of abuse is deeply not ok.
No, I'm not siding with liars-fascists-traitors. We'd ban any account that posted this way. Being right doesn't give you any excuse to behave like this, and no matter how wrong your enemies are, it doesn't give you the right to destroy the commons. It's not in your own interest to do that either, but that's another story.
As has been so often quoted on HN, "The 'Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." I see no reason for things to be different this time.
I've been having this argument more and more lately. People keep coming around to "surely, we must prevent *THIS* content?" and every time the answer is no. Somehow, we seem to be forgetting how free speech benefits us all, but only when it is categorically FREE and there are not exceptions "just this one time"
Why just the other day, I had friends blow up on me for daring to suggest that a particular type of bigoted speech should remain legal.
The free exchange of ideas is a prerequisite for a just world. You cannot build one without it. If you place limits on the free exchange of ideas, "just for this one really bad kind of thing", then you have forfeited your own future ability to resist WHEN - not if, but WHEN - a good and true idea is wrongfully labelled harmful and banned by the same mechanisms.
Every single authoritarian regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. Every last one.
You, like a lot of other people, confuse free speech with "but mom, the other kids won't let me play with them!". Actually the only threat to freedom is trying to imply that a company or any other association or institution ought to be compelled to host someone else's speech.
Being able to kick the idiots out and not compelling other people to amplify their nonsense is a basic mechanism of any society that wants to function.
Also the free exchange of ideas isn't a prerequisite for a just world, it's the consequence of a just system. You can "free exchange of ideas" yourself into a gulag if the population is dumb enough. Exchanging ideas is a process that can go as wrong as it can go right, it's a process, not a set of values.
What built the just institutions you like in the US were semi-aristocratic founding fathers, I went to school in a school system that was built in Prussia, colloquially called "a military with a country", and the civic code in France was written by Napoleon. People in Singapore are prosperous because Lee Kuan Yew had his wits together, not because they enjoy a lot of free exchange of ideas.
It's sane and capable elites building lasting institutions that afford you the luxury of free exchange of ideas, even if this offends the egalitarian myth that is popular in the US. Sorry to say it, but mom, pops and Donald Trump being able to post on Twitter doesn't built functioning states.
An underlying issue is the formation of the digital world - what once was a town square is now a (ex.) Facebook page, or network of Twitter followers.
The mechanism of communication exchange have changed so rapidly, that compelling companies to abide by free speech is a tough legislative decision. Yes, they’re corporations and can decide who to have and who not.
But an emergent phenomenon are people using these services as their lens to the world. This was obvious in the last election, red or blue, it was obvious whose side big tech was on. They were not unbiased, as I think they should be.
I’d say just as AOC wanted to get a list created of trump political supporters/affiliates (not general public, but a stepping stone away) and essentially cancel them, the same rhetoric is used to ban forms of speech. “It’s for the better”.
Another reason for controlled speech is a patronizing one, that “you’re head/emotions can’t handle X form of speech”.
Let people decide what they want to see. If I want a censored Twitter, or Wild West Twitter, let me choose. Though I understand the impracticality of forcing this on a corporation.
The only thing banned should be what is illegal. Let legislatures and judges determine it.
We're so used to communicating online that we can't even see how absurdly powerful the tools at our disposal actually are. Posting on social media isn't like chatting with your friends at the bar - it's like shouting into a colossal, ear-shatteringly loud megaphone aimed directly into the ears of billions of people. A system like that probably shouldn't even exist, let alone be put in the hands of every person above the age of thirteen [1].
You wouldn't say I was being censored because MSNBC decided to air Morning Joe instead of my hour-long documentary about how the moon landing is fake. They simply aren't obligated to grant me the power of their massive communications network if they don't like my content. In what I can only call a massive failure of judgment, Twitter, Facebook etc. have outsourced their editorial decision-making to algorithms designed to maximize their profit.
This is not the same as making speech a crime. You still have the right to speak your mind, with your own voice, on any street corner you want. You can even print out fliers if you can convince anyone to take them from you. That was true before Facebook, and it will be true after they're gone. Now if the government tries to threaten this form of communication, I'll be right there with you protesting.
But on other side of free exchange of ideas we have this idea of cancellation, which results from freedom of speech + freedom of association. As part of freedom of speech, we can also use that speech to narrate moral perspectives of whether some speech is good or bad.
Freedom of association also implies the right to choose not to associate with people due to characteristics like religion, race, wealth, etc.
Some people have made laws outlawing discrimination based on some of those characteristics. This is a kludge, with all kinds of annoying implications.
The classic argument in favor of unconditional freedom of association is, "If some companies are refusing to deal with some group of people for stupid reasons, then they will get outcompeted by other companies who don't have such prejudices and can therefore hire cheaper workers or charge higher prices."
This argument works less well when certain extremely valuable services (some would call them "essential") are provided by a small group of huge companies, and entry by new competitors is very difficult.
The solution I would favor is reducing those barriers to entry. Ideally by repealing laws that I think are unjustified in the first place.
In particular, for these social networks with their network effects, but also have something that sucks (be it "they use dark patterns", "they ban people for bad reasons", "their 'feed' algorithm is bad"), why can't someone create a "better network" that acts as a new interface to the old network, but also has better features or has additional members that aren't part of the old network?
My impression is that it would be "against the site's terms of service", and there may also be allegations of copyright violation, and that anyone who made such a thing would eventually get sued. Well, could we change the law so that the site would have no standing to get sued?
I think that, fundamentally, the principle would be, "If users can use a site through the site's interface, then they can also use it through someone else's interface. The site is free to try to detect the difference and block people who do this, but cannot get the law to punish anyone." So the site can either play cat-and-mouse with those developing better interfaces, or they can improve their own interface enough to keep their customers; in terms of banning people, they could either fix their banning practices, or just gamble that those who care enough to use the alternate interface are a sufficiently small group.
No right is absolute, because there are areas where exercising one right might infringe on another right.
Everyone has a right to their life, which is one of the most sacrosanct rights, but in self-defence you might still rightfully kill someone else. Those intersections of rights are always a fine line to walk on and you have to be careful so it is not abused. Just putting one right above the other can never be the solution.
Also freedom of speech has its limitations. Defamation is one case where I guess most people can get behind.
I think one could also make the case here, where there is a real danger that democracy can be lost.
I'm going to skip over defamation for now, both because I'm not a lawyer and because it's slightly more complicated. You can tell that's different because nobody preemptively censors defamation - it's a suit brought after-the-fact and then argued. Skipping it...
No. If "real danger Democracy can be lost" is your measuring stick, then whatever "Democracy" you have in charge is free to defend itself against any speech that may fight it. It's free license for the government to shoot down dissent and not reasonable.
Think of it this way. There is a lot of harmful speech which, in a perfect world, we could prevent. But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused. The benefit of preventing [harmful speech x] is not worth the cost of granting the government the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.
Would child porn, trademarks, advertising regulation, nutrition labels, and threatening letters be more interesting examples?
> But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused.
Why can the same argument not be made for, say, food regulation? Or in most countries, for some weapons regulation. All of these could be easily abused to some very powerful, political ends, yet they very rarely, if ever, are. Most abuse of such laws actually comes from companies skirting them.
>the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.
Nobody is arguing for that - that the government should be an arbiter of truth. Instead, the argument is that the principle of an absolute right - which cannot ever be overridden - is insufficiently justified. I have some scholarly work from philosophers of law cited in this comment if you're interested in this point of view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757
Ultimately, I do agree with you - but not on the basis that free speech should supercede all other rights, but because the (capitalist) state cannot be trusted, and has a worse track record with censorship over other kinds of regulation. This is because I do not have faith in the populace to decide such regulation.
> Somehow, we seem to be forgetting how free speech benefits us all
In normal times, I would agree. Philosophies and ideals like this effectively discourage people from taking action. That makes a lot of sense during times of peace when our asses aren't actively on the line.
However, these are not normal times. We are facing a threat that might just overwhelm our society and rob us of our way of life. We must act now to neutralize the threat or risk going extinct. We can sort out the ethics of it all later.
So you're okay giving someone else the power to declare something "a threat" and sacrificing your rights to neutralize it? China is perfectly happy to declare all kinds of opinions threats to their way of life and disallow them from being spread. What's different?
You are not thinking it through. An imperfect analogy to help make the point: You can't put a backdoor in encryption "just for the good guys" because there's no way to prevent that backdoor being used by other actors. Similarly, you can't put restrictions on speech "just for the really bad things" because there's no way to prevent things being labeled as "really bad things"!
"Encryption" is not a place or a thing. It's a fact of nature. It's a mathematical truth. Anyone can take advantage of it once it's been discovered and disseminated. That cat cannot go back in the bag.
The US government is a unique thing that we risk losing control of if we don't act now to defend it. Social media platforms are single things or entities that can revert policies once a situation de-escalates.
I imagine that a lot of the people making these calls at these companies would like not to have to do it this way but feel they have no choice. I believe they would be happy to resume business as usual when they're not worried that a violent movement will overthrow their government. Until then, could you really see yourself sitting by, doing nothing, and hoping for the best while watching these maniacs use your platform to organize their movement?
> can revert policies once a situation de-escalates
This is rarely observed. See all of the legislation and policies that have remained, and even expanded, after 9/11. Politicians tend to make laws, not remove them. See the tax code for a good example of asinine infinite expansion.
Maybe reddit should completely end moderation then? So progressives and liberals can take over /r/conservative and post anything they want without fear of being banned? No more 'flaired users only'?
because that's ALSO censorship, no?
Also, who's stopping you from starting a reddit competitor and saying whatever you want? You have ZERO rights to THEIR customers, their users, etc.
I mean, can you go to the local news station and get on the air whenever you want? Because they aren't saying what you want to hear? No. They control who they put on the air. Social media is no different in this aspect.
You're thinking I'm upset specifically about reddit banning the group because that's the article I posted it on. That's sensible, and on me somewhat for not being quite clear enough.
I'm upset at the broader topics that are always brought up when articles like this are posted. I also have an opinion about what reddit should or shouldn't do, but the post you're responding to is not it.
The irony of people complaining about free speech and censorship when this happens is if you post ANYTHING even remotely against the current narrative in those subs you will be immediately banned by mods. You can literally quote trump word for word in /r/conservative and get banned if it happens to go against today's collective reality.
Rules for thee but not for me is the modus operandi and Wednesday was just an extension of that.
It's one thing for a mod in a forum to ban someone, as it sometimes only represents the opinions of that mod, and maybe be backed by rules (and trends)
It's another thing for social media to do it. although they are all private companies, they remain a very global big force, that do not have reach only in the US, but are global and can do the same and affect many countries and politics across the globe.
Soon, if not already happening, politics will be pushed to one side or the other.
And it won't be for stopping hate speech, it will and it is so that they can make even more money.
On the bright side, I am an optimistic person, and since they dared block the president of the USA, maybe be they might not flinch anymore at blocking pedophiles, hitmen, terrorists, and all sorts of vile users on their platforms.
For the same reason that the government banning something is worse than when a private company does it.
Because one party has way more power and ability to actually ban someone.
Kicking someone out of my house is less powerful/effective at preventing speech than being banned by a subreddit, which is less effective than the website banning you, which is less effective than a bunch of websites banning you, which is less effective than the government banning it.
The more effective a ban is, the more careful we have to be about it. Because if the government bans you, that is going to have very significantly different consequences than me not letting a friend in my house.
No, the government banning something is meaningful because they have the monopoly on violence. Reddit admins banning a sub and reddit mods banning a user is the exact same thing, it's just moderation of a private forum. Forcing private companies to publish pro-genocide speech, for example, is anti-freedom, not pro. If we're going to force reddit to publish pro-holocaust speech then all moderation everywhere must be banned as well, including on this very forum, to be consistent. I for one think this forum benefits greatly from active moderation, however.
> is meaningful because they have the monopoly on violence.
Yes, they are more effectively able to censor it. Correct, thats my point.
> is the exact same thing
I described specifically what the difference is. The difference between them is that one is more effective than the other. Do you at all recognize how different methods of censorship can be more or less effective than others?
For example, would you seriously argue that every single grocery store in the world, banning all people who want to raise their taxes, is the same thing as a random person kicking a friend out of their house?
Obviously, the two things would be different. Even though the grocery stores are private businesses, there would obviously be a problem with them making it so people who want to raise their taxes are no longer able to buy food.
>I described specifically what the difference is. The difference between them is that one is more effective than the other. Do you at all recognize how different methods of censorship can be more or less effective than others?
Of course some censorship is more effective than others, but the idea that banning a subreddit is morally wrong because it's somehow "more effective" (by some metric) than banning a user (which apparently is OK?) makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
>For example, would you seriously argue that every single grocery store in the world, banning all people who want to raise their taxes, is the same thing as a random person kicking a friend out of their house?
Reddit doesn't have a global monopoly on internet forums though. Websites like the Daily Stormer still exist. Your analogy is not really applicable to this case. And even if Daily Stormer didn't exist, private individuals have never been legally obliged to signal boost and publish hate speech at any point since the US was founded that I am aware of. That would, ironically, violate the 1st amendment.
If the size of influence of the entity limiting speech is the issue, then would a mod of a very large subreddit banning a user be worse than a comparatively smaller, private social network de-platforming a user?
I guess my point is more so where do you draw the line? Legislatively-speaking? By the size of the community?
It's one thing to my favorite dictatorial mod to do one thing, but a reddit admin, to do another thing?
You are free to create any website you want, if you can find hosting to support your message. The internet still is mostly free and wide open.
An audience though is something you earn, these networks have EARNED their audience. What you're wanting is the equivalent of walking into the 7 o'clock news and demanding to be put on the air so you can tell everyone about your goat's birthday party on Saturday.
Seriously, nobody cares about your goat's birthday party. ABCD news has ZERO reason to put you on the air, you have zero rights to their audience, or to a platform at all.
Platforms like twitter/facebook/etc are NEW. It's an EARNED thing, as long as you're a good global citizen you can keep participating, when you go against social norms you get cast out, like pretty much every civic organization in the history of the world.
Town Drunk, sex offenders, felons, etc. all cast out for going against norms. Should they all get equal platform time to defend themselves 24/7 and everyone is required to let their content go across their feed on social media? How's that not also authoritarian, sounds a lot like communism to me...
The state seizing control of private business communication channels and forcing it open for everyone regardless of their message whether it's a birthday party, or terrorist organization recruiting message.
it's not just reddit, i'm talking about social media in general getting too involved in politics, but only when it suits them and only when it is trendy
I just checked out http://thedonald.win/ and it has gotten a lot more extreme since it was moved off Reddit. I think it would have not gotten as extreme if it were in the Reddit ecosystem still.
Groups becoming more extreme when they exodus is fine and part of the calculus. The reason to take it off of Reddit is to prevent more followers from joining up with them.
Stormfront is extreme and everyone knows about them. (Literally a white-nationalist website). But without a foothold on Reddit, they lack the ability to gain followers.
When LUE was banned from GameFAQs decades ago, they just formed up their own group (G00Ns, Something Awful, etc. etc.). They were no longer GameFAQ's problem, and GameFAQs no longer had to deal with its members slowly becoming indoctrinated by an group bent on posting pornography on video game forums where children were active. The rest of GameFAQs got better.
Ditto with 4Chan when they kicked the Gamergate people off to 8Chan. 4Chan got better, though the Gamergate dudes grew more extreme.
It's the Amiga effect. The smaller a group is the more radical the membership.
Having thedonald.win be a cesspool isn't all bad. If someone is on the fence and goes to check it out their first reaction is likely to be of disgust, especially if the userbase is hostile to "noobs" because they're paranoid about infiltration.
It is most visible in communities that are shrinking, especially if they were originally very large. Moderate members slowly filter out for one reason or another until only the die hards are left.
In the early 00s, the LUEsers were a subforum of GameFAQs. Their official name was "Life, the Universe, and Everything".
They got their notoriety by posting pornographic images all over the site, notably on Pokemon forums where children often came to discuss the game. It was a silly meme ("Mods are asleep, post Tub-girl" or whatever). But their memes were beginning to harm the site.
The LUEsers cried "free speech" and bemoaned the moderators for attacking their memes. Eventually, the admins shut down the LUE-subforum entirely (though with a "Grandfather clause", so that old LUEsers can still talk with each other, but newbies couldn't join their forum anymore).
> Groups becoming more extreme when they exodus is fine and part of the calculus. The reason to take it off of Reddit is to prevent more followers from joining up with them.
Is this really any better than religious idealogues burning books that aren't its Bibles, lest people get tempted to reject their faith or question their ideologies?
Or North Korea blocking any information about capitalist successes, lest that cause their citizens to question the communist / fascist ideologies they've been exposed to and cause more followers to switch?
Pretending that there aren't other opinions because you're worried that people can't properly evaluate and weigh the evidence / ideas is a weak excuse for censorship.
Of course, I should mention that I do not support many of the prevailing sentiments in r/DonaldTrump - but we should be better arming individuals with better critical thinking and believability weighting abilities, rather than resort to censorship.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain.
"Censorship" seems to work pretty well around here in HackerNews.
When someone's opinion becomes violent or unhelpful, the mods around here will delete their post, curtailing discussion and making this area more reasonable for overall discourse to move forward.
There are unreasonable opinions and unreasonable people out there. The only possible weapon online groups have to combat unreasonable people in a discussion forum, is censorship.
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But sure, feel free to use the decades old arguments of "unmoderated speech" from the days of USENET. Some of us have been around long enough to see this argument style play out over-and-over again.
Again-and-again, the only USEFUL discussion forums are those who are run by good moderators. "Censoring" Spam, pornography, doxxing and yes, censoring calls to overt violence in the real world, is incredibly important to keep online discussions safe.
Cutting out hateful groups is _effective_. Its the weapon of last resort, but given what we've seen this past week, it is a well warranted move. It is no different than a moderator coming around here to delete spam.
Given the deontologists and consequentialists have not quite reached a definitive answer, I'm not sure how everyone would agree with this definition of "more ethical".
I'm willing to bet it'll go the same way as Voat. Except Voat actually had a diversity of topics to discuss when it founded (although it turned to garbage in a few weeks), this website is laser focused on one demagogue.
They had access to a much larger community on Reddit. This way you have to try to find the site, and you won’t just have it appear on your /r/all or front page
Less right-wing extreme, yes, but it is not filled with left-wing extremists. As someone that has literally never been in the US and consider himself very left-leaning, the leftist echo chamber that reddit has become disgusts me. Posts that just say "Trump should be impeached" gets literally 50k+ upvotes. Any attempt to show any wrongdoing by a Dem gets downvoted and banned.
You're not wrong. Fortunately, left-leaning circle jerks rarely kill people or incite violence so I think society tolerates them much more. It's not like the USA has a real violent left-wing like there would be in the communist revolutions of yore.
Put your finger on the Median Republican line and it either moves left or stays put. The political divide has not been the republicans.
In the last year that changed for many reasons. The republicans have now moved. That political divide is now much larger. That 'more extreme' that you've noticed is because the political divide has shifted.
I dispute this assessment, it’s a drastic simplification and the comparison only starts in 1994, which is after a heavy swing in America to the right throughout the 80s and 90s. If anything, what the article shows is a regression to the long-term political mean, not a move left.
A great example I happen to have favorited on YouTube, check out the healthcare debate in 1971 [0]. It’s essentially Medicare for all (D) vs practically Obamacare (but from an R).
>I dispute this assessment, it’s a drastic simplification and the comparison only starts in 1994, which is after a heavy swing in America to the right throughout the 80s and 90s. If anything, what the article shows is a regression to the long-term political mean, not a move left.
It shows the political swing over 25+ years capturing clinton, bush, and obama presidencies. We see that during bush and clinton the democrats were quite stable. Only at around 2011 did the graph start seeing a shift where 2017 has the democrats having moved far left on average.
This data is available from other sources. The other reality is that I can personally see it. The democrats used to have a strong moderate base, they are gone.
There are many many people writing on how the political divide is so bad that it feels like never before.
The reality is that Obama(first black president) was doomed to identity politics. Which has created this much division.
>A great example I happen to have favorited on YouTube, check out the healthcare debate in 1971 [0]. It’s essentially Medicare for all (D) vs practically Obamacare (but from an R).
Not available in my country. 1971 is much to old to properly compare to today's political climate.
Same. I've long worried lurking there was going to cause more harm than it's worth (for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism) but the ability to predict what happened this week so easily and warn people about it who considered going was well worth that risk.
Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)
Yes and it's always been contentious, and as the Internet integrates itself more and more into our lives, the questions about which layers of the network stack ought to follow which principles are worth continually focusing on.
I've been on the Internet since 1994, and it has always been the case that if you made a sufficiently odious pest of yourself over a long enough period of time, that someone would contact your university, employer or ISP, and you would lose your account, or at least your access to Usenet.
You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.
This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.
This is why *chan websites have gotten so popular. Being anonymous in everything you post is refreshing. Short of posting illegal content, almost anything goes.
No, anonymity is refreshing because a world where you are always on the record with your most formal identity with everything you say runs largely against the ways humans develop their worldviews: by trying on certain opinions, sorting themselves out, and participating in low stakes interactions where they can make mistakes and learn with minimal consequence.
This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.
Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.
In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.
This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).
Are they popular ? They may be infamous, but I feel most of the brain matter has been evacuated from English-speaking boards a decade ago and they at best sustain their existing demographic.
Yes the "point where you passed far enough" is another way of saying there is contention, I'm not sure what your point is. If it was a zero or one state, there is no contention over it.
It's as old as any "service" has existed, nevermind internet.
If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.
What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?
You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?
You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.
(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)
That's not really true. The early-ish internet saw plenty of, say, communists peering with Hayek libertarians inside Exodus cages, and other such unexpected arrangements. You also had LUGs, lan parties, BBSs and IRC channels that had very diverse users, but tolerated, and even thrived on, offensive speech and trolls. The community's glue was love of the technology and the medium, with political, ethnic, or other tribal interests being anywhere from completely unimportant to secondary.
Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.
Not to mention many of us would be quick to identify the people in the logs as fucking crazy people, only to realize we're reading words written by our teenage selves.
When I worked at an ISP years back, if we had a DDOS attack against a customer the way we handled that was to drop all traffic incoming towards that customer's IP at our external peer level (meaning the bigger ISP we were getting most of the external Internet from). That was necessary so all of that DDOS traffic wasn't eating from the bandwidth available to all other customers that weren't being DDOS-ed. But it also meant that the DDOS-ed customer was losing all Internet access (which wasn't really much of a change considering that they were receiving a DDOS that filled all their allocated bandwidth).
Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.
From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.
Back when I was a kid the red-headed step children of the Internet were the warez, neo-nazi, « revolutionary » (read bomb-making), spam and snuff sites. I'm probably missing a few categories. And that's just the contentious stuff. There are things that even the most zealous free speech maniacs would have a hard time convincing themselves should be allowed even a modicum of publicity. Child porn is the most blatant one.
So you're literally using banning child porn to justify banning political discussion: exactly what free speech advocates predicted when censorship hit the internet.
Everything to do with warez for one, even sites that didn't directly host IP-infringing content, would very often get the boot because it's a huge hassle for hosts to deal with the amount of trouble these websites generate.
> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.
I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.
If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.
I worry about all of that as well, but the problem with your last point is you are opening the door for network providers to be the arbiters of what is considered radicalization or not. They shouldn't be the decider of that, our laws should. If the FBI tells them to shut something down with a legal order, and our society has concluded it is just, so be it.
In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.
Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.
Eh, curation and moderation is a valuable service that many are willing to pay for.
The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.
If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.
I agree with you, my argued solution to most of the problems surrounding the Internet is regulation which will create emergent conditions to incentivize decentralization. The design of the Internet got us about 90% of what we needed, but we need our government to close the final 10% of the gap to realize the full benefits of the thesis of the Internet, much like anti-trust laws are a pre-requisite to realize maximal benefits from capitalism. (Not getting into an argument about that here, it's just an analogy in this very narrow sense of regulation leading to outsized benefits.)
I haven't thought much about the lower level network stacks but I think social media platforms of a certain size ought to have certain legal requirements to do things that incentivize interoperability or allow competing platforms to emerge (perhaps non-commercial ones.) Primarily things around APIs and data formats.
Yep pretty much. If you support this, you should know that if this ever gets legs despite its surface level appeal you will see a lot of people not supporting it, because it's exactly the kind of thing that led to Cambridge Analytica. So that'll be a good time to truly ask yourself which side of this tradeoff is the one you want to make.
The big historical problem with this approach isn't "the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations" making unfair decisions (not to say that this couldn't be a problem now or in future). It's that governments (both good and bad) have pressured those companies behind closed doors to censor content governments don't like but which they haven't (or can't) go to the trouble of making illegal. This creates a huge accountability gap - these are government decisions in reality but can't be challenged in the same way they could be if out in the open.
Yes my argument isn't one based upon history so much as a recognition that the stable state of our society seems to be destined to terminate in one where most human communication is mediated by the Internet not physical space. So whatever power structures, incentives, and ethics we lay down now are likely to echo far into the future, if not forever.
>If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.
The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).
There was this blogpost a while back which I can't seem to find, suggesting that the division is between:
* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.
* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...
In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.
I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.
I agree with your position with one caveat. The people in the former category view democracy not merely as a set of values, but as a set of -their- values. If you do not share their values, then you are against democracy. Ironically this is diametrically opposed to the core concept of democracy - its much more like theology. Adopt their dogma, conform to their orthodoxy, or you are an infidel.
As an excuse for banning T_D and a bunch of other right leaning subs at the same time, and then blatantly ignored ban-evading r/ChapoTrapHouse2 for months. When they finally took them down for ban evasion, it was an excuse to ban another giant wave of right wing subs.
EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.
Reddit has its moderation oddities but claiming they target the left more is bordering on silly. r/WatchRedditDie is a great catalog of politically biased moderation.
No, it was the other way around. T_D was already dead. The mods had already locked it and moved to thedonald.win. Banning it was meaningless, they just did it to make the /r/chapotraphouse ban look more fair.
Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:
I must have misremembered. They were flagrantly violating some rule for months, and the million variants of the sub name were part of it. But you misremember too. T_D had not been "locked", unless you're talking about the quarantine in which case you make it sound like the same people that did it as moved to thedonald.win. Meanwhile r/ConsumeProduct and r/GenderCritical were huge losses, with no actual rule violations to cause them, aside from a few AHS brigades.
No, people weren't allowed to post submissions there. That's what I mean by locked. I guess I should say "restricted mode" instead. From wikipedia:
"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."
Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.
So, what I said then. You were making it sound like the same people jumped ship as implemented those policies, and in fact they were the opposite sides. And restricted mode isn't locking; everyone can still comment, there's just a whitelist of who can make new top level posts.
Indeed. On reddit, r/chapotraphouse was also deleted a while back because it was (AFAIU) a casual tankie forum that didn't mind calling for violence, or at least insinuating it
If the projection makes you feel better. Groups are removed on the basis of that behavior, not where they lean. You'll never show an example suggesting otherwise.
The bulk of the right wing doesn't, either. Your bubble is showing. If the right wing weren't so frequently excised from the public sphere, it might be easier for you to see the saner parts of it — but the private censorship we've been seeing cuts with a blunt scalpel. I think it's better to expose the worst of it to public contempt, rather than isolate them and let them fester together.
The right wing is all over the public sphere. I have a pretty good idea of what they're saying and supporting despite having a lot of the usual suspects blocked on Twitter. I have no idea what you think the "saner" part is, but the saner part is no longer in control.
Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.
Offer a more useful one if an obvious one comes to mind. Because the common denominator among banned far-right communities on popular forums has been the aforementioned characteristics.
A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.
The private companies would very much like to allow them, as they pay their bills and are a big customer. They are choosing not to allow them because they are being strong armed by a part of the political establishment that considers the spread of the information this websites want to share as dangerous for the country or its citizens.
So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.
You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.
You're oversimplifying this as well as constructing a strawman argument which implies it's a simple issue. It's not. You are on Hacker News, do you think people here are think that the framing you make is objectively the singular one that has any moral standing?
I see. So if, for example, the phone company were to spy on your private conversations, and determine you are not a person they want to be associated with (say for example, you talk trash about their CEO) - if they were to terminate your phone coverage, we should just accept it in light of their property rights? It's not an analogy to imply ISPs are exactly the same, but property right supremacy when it comes to infrastructure is not a simple question.
OK, so what about if you are hosting public conference calls they can join about how much their company sucks, and they cut your phone service? Analogies are a stupid form of argument, but I'm trying to surface the problem here somehow. (In this analogy they're not the conference call provider, they're just the phone service provider which enables you to use the conferencing service over their lines, if that wasn't obvious. They're a pipe.)
Alright, so then you'd be OK with some phone company, that has a monopoly on a certain geographic area or town, banning anyone who has made a public social media posts that is critical of the company?
I wasn't advocating any particular position in my previous comment.
But to answer your question, no, I would not be OK with that. Utility companies (in the United States at least) are typically contracted by cities to provide service, and regulated by a public utility commission as well as various laws. I assume denial of service over social media would violate a number of regulations or contractual obligations. And I agree with that.
Now if you're really asking whether or not various service providers should be regulated as utilities and obligated to provide service to everyone, that's a much more difficult (and vague) question that I don't have a easy answer for.
The point is regulating them is very specifically society stating "your property rights do not overrule the factors that led to this regulation." Which is the argument being made as worthy of consideration. Regulation that makes such coercion possible starts out as an argument like the one here. Saying these companies ought not to be able to censor people in a certain context despite their property rights isn't saying they should be arrested or something, it's saying we ought to regulate them.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.
Is there proof they had actual IEDs? Zip ties are bad, but they're not in the same universe as IEDs. If they had IEDs I'd be way more open to the idea of characterizing this as terrorism, and all that comes with it.
Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.
Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.
I think you can stretch the definition of terrorism to meet them (the congress was evacuated in fear, it influenced political events) but the lesson of 2001- is that any dilution of the term of terrorism is no free lunch, and we ought to understand what will happen if we endorse our leaders treating something as terrorism vs another form of illegal act.
That's an excellent expression of my concern. Also, people who agree with some but not all of the ideas held by "right-wing terrorists" suddenly become terrorist sympathizers, and their friends "associate with known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers". Imagine the context you've heard those phrases in on the news, and what you thought was okay when it happened to those people.
Yes, given this and the actual reality of the situation, I take the stance that we ought to respond to claims of terrorism around this (by our leaders, not individuals) with ridicule and derision, despite any merit, given how dangerous it would be to allow this to be treated by the authorities as a moral justification for a domestic War on Terror.
As reprehensible as it is, legally they absolutely are. Remember how country clubs didn't / still don't allow woman, african americans or jews? Common carriers (stores, hotels, etc) are treated differently, and is very much debated. (ie can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.)
>can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.
It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.
If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.
Your first sentence implies I am speaking with a time traveler who doesn't realize they just fell out of their time machine 50 years in the future :) It is definitely not legal to bar people from your business based upon race.
Yeah I'll admit I didn't follow it completely and didn't care enough to investigate. I'm sure it'll bubble up here if it does with more details just like when they got nuked from Reddit. Arguably sites like this one are a good way to gauge the true robustness of the Internet - given the situation this week they clearly now are in the realm of law enforcement, but up until these rather insane events to me their continued presence was an existence proof that speech on the web is still in a good place. Now if they get taken down I won't judge it too harshly against that thesis since they basically fomented a theoretical insurrection by the letter of the law, even though in practice the "coup" turns out was never a real threat given how ridiculous things went once the dog caught the car.
You may be reading too much into what I wrote. My standard here is simply that I think if a website is literally organizing something which explicitly, literally, supports violent overthrow of the government, then I'm going to yield to the legal system to enforce whatever laws exist to properly regulate that speech. I don't have a strong opinion beyond that since I am not a lawyer. My point is that if the mechanism to enforce those laws includes SSL or CDN interference, I won't include such interference on the list of things I'd be concerned about in my bucket of "corporate interests mediating acceptable global speech."
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but in the US, the current standard for free speech (Brandenburg v Ohio) holds that literally advocating for violent overthrow of the government is constitutionally-protected free speech. The bar that you have to hit is incitement to "imminent lawless action." This standard of free speech is much higher than most of the rest of the world.
That makes sense - I appreciate the info and upon first glance that seems like a sane standard. (Beyond being ignorant on the legal aspect to this, my phrasing lacked the specificity in that what was going on on TDW, especially ex-post, was clearly organizing such imminent action at a specific time and place. I'd suspect the standard you mention would have been met.)
Thanks for this clarification. I am also still confused as to why Trump himself has been the target of all these tech/social media platforms. As far as I can tell he has not incited violence - imminent or otherwise. Yes he has made exaggerated/false claims about the election, yes he has not condemned the criminal acts of the capitol rioters, but as far as I can tell he has not encouraged or incited violence. And each time I have asked this question of friends or on HN, I've not received a substantive answer.
The exact words that Trump used in his speech on Wednesday morning was something along the lines of "we're going to march down to Congress and tell them what we think." By itself, that is not damning, and would (and should!) easily be protected speech.
However, context may tell a different story. It was known to anyone who follows Qanon conspiracy theories that Wednesday was one of the days of the predicted coup (of course, virtually every other milestone in the past two months have had the same prediction and came and passed without incident). It is totally reasonable to assume that some of the crowd at that rally were Qanon believers ready to participate in a coup, were listening for the magic words to start the coup, and took these words to be them. I actually expect some of the investigations to uncover people who followed this exact chain of events. In short, that people took his words to be an incitement to imminent lawless action is a conclusion that I expect to be substantiated by facts.
But even that is not enough to say that Trump fails the Brandenburg test (and this is why my personal legal knowledge starts getting shaky): it's not enough to say that people were incited; you have to demonstrate that Trump expected (or should have expected) that these people would be incited by those words. And... honestly? I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the knowledge of what happened later, it would now (to me) be willful ignorance to suppose those words would not be incitement, but I'm not sure I can say that the same is true merely hours before it happened.
On Wednesday night, I watched a livestream with several lawyers talking about what laws were and weren't broken [1] on Wednesday. When it comes to Trump's legal woes, the main phrase was "matter of first impression": no court has heard a similar enough case for there to be any guideline on how the facts and the law should be interpreted. Does it matter that it's the President saying these words? Does it matter that he is seeming to endorse attacks on another branch of government? There's no precedent... we don't know... and we can't predict.
[1] Definitely no treason, and it doesn't look like anything qualifies as felony murder in DC or federal law, although this was obviously before we knew a police officer died. Definitely sedition though!
The argument is that leaders ought to have an understanding of which way they're blowing the wind - their own personal thresholds have little bearing on how far the people they're speaking to will go unless the take a hard stance on where that threshold is. In this case, Trump at the very least failed to articulate beforehand where the line was, and it was very clear the line not being clear was a big problem.
A secondary problem seems to be selective recognition of this: people are easily able to see the potential second order effects of Trump's rhetoric and react to it, but the same levers are not being pulled as actively when other people take similar rhetorical risks that have plausible deniability as contributing to violence for the reasons I mention.
He has repeatedly condemned the criminal acts of the rioters, but his words tend not to be broadcast on mainstream news. You can find it on OAN, RSBN, Golden State, and other conservative channels, however.
Impressionable readers should be aware that the initial supposition ("the only violence was caused by a group of antifa...") is acutely counterfactual. Rioters have largely been unshy about documenting the experience on social media and many have been identified, including prominent alt-right community members such as Jake Angeli, the face-painted viking-looking guy known as the "QAnon Shaman", and Baked Alaska, who livestreamed the damn thing.
"Suppose further that about 100 people actually passed the barricades (which were inexplicably opened by the police, by the way, video evidence shows) out of the estimated 40,000 at the rally. If that is the case, is it really fair to shut down major pro-Trump websites?"
That's assuming that all parties involved are concerned about fairness.
These website clearly radicalize some people. I too lurk from time to time on thedonald.win and far-right subreddits, you can see that over there reality is completely distorted, calls to violence are constant and they just feed off each other's insecurities, fears and hate.
Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.
Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?
Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.
Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.
These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."
You claim "nothing good comes out of these places" - that's a strong claim to make. Here's my argument: having this stuff out in the open does have benefits.
Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization:
- It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do.
- Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction.
- Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.
If you're sufficiently motivated by the prospect of disarming an insane conspiracy theory in the minds of someone you care about to actually want to read and understand it, you [i] can certainly seek it out on obscure cult websites without seeing it recommended in your favourite social media feed and [ii] are potentially better off getting it second hand complete with rebuttals.
The people with slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs certainly exist in huge numbers, but they're the reason why such places are so harmful; they're much easier to radicalize than deradicalize, and they're the ones getting the content recommended to them or being swept along by the enthusiasm other people who share some of their views seem to have for it. And it'd actually be easier to understand their justifiable grievances if they weren't encouraged to connect them to pizza parlours or Jews.
Say the investigation of the recent riots and deaths discovers that people connected and planned on the sites you are talking about. Would that move you from your current position? It seems like it would take what I've said from a claim to a simple description of reality.
Thinking you are not susceptible to becoming radicalized just shows you are basically at the kindergarten level of understanding how such radicalization works. Those least susceptible to radicalization are those who fear it for themselves the most, since they understand their innate flaws as human beings and their susceptibility to it. Nobody is immune to it, and the mass radicalization of normally good people over these past 4 years ought to be evidence enough that ignorance about the danger is widespread. (Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to it and only other people are - the people who say that I believe the most are the ones who have gone to hell and returned to tell the tale.)
It's happening on pretty much all sides simultaneously. Most people believe that escalation is a means to an end. It's not, resolution is made through mutual understanding and not vilification.
I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.
I loved it actually. Its was invigorating—like a cold shower. But this was years ago when I was in my 20s.
I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side".
My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer.
[1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.
> for example, by letting me inadvertently slip into extremism
You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.
I disagree, as someone who observed this site as well as everything else, I can tell you at least for me my prior was heavily influenced by the shift in tone, sentiment, and desperation I observed there relative to the usual din of more front-facing social media grifters.
Oh, I think that’s just a convoluted way of saying you lived in a bubble.
It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).
What bubble are you referring to? Saying it was obvious now doesn't say anything about having good predictive ability. My recollection is up until about Monday, most people were asleep on this. And then around Tuesday the zeitguest was this was going to be a dumb clown show. The number of people claiming that violence was inevitable and the capitol was going to be stormed, outside of the obvious circles, was in my experience marginal.
I wasn’t trying to offend you. Everyone lives in a bubble or several.
My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).
These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?
It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.
But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?
Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)
I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.
I live in the US. The specific thing I am talking about here is a) the expectation the protest would turn violent and b) the expectation that the protestors would storm the capitol. This thread is already too deep and I'm getting a bit burned out on responding to everything here, but in general my own bubble (point taken, no offense intended) implied the former was unlikely (through the eyes of centrist Republicans) and the latter was a fever dream but never actually could manifest in reality.
Oh, I see. My bubble was well aware of how violent these people are and were going to be. I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy. These are the people whose ancestors (adults and children) had picnics while watching men being hanged in the early-to-mid 20th century.
And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.
Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.
> I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy.
Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.
30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?
Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?
daniel957, the point of a discussion website is to have discussion. If you'd like, we can talk about my comment and try to see if we can find any agreement or not.
It is true that 30+ people died, some of them from police, some, of them from being shot and murdered (chop/chaz/portland), some by other means. It doesn't change the fact that many people died as a direct result of ongoing chaos and anarchy that was largely dismissed as justifiable by the most prominent news organizations and pundits (cnn, nyt, wapo). Two wrongs don't make a right, we need to disavow all violent protests across the board and stop with double standards.
No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.
And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.
But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.
daniel957, I deleted my comment because of YOUR passive aggressive response to whistle to the moderator. Nothing I said was threatening, harassing, or otherwise outside the scope of a discussion on a very sensitive topic in this country.
This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.
You’re not required to have an SSL cert behind cloudflare anyway, CF provides the cert the browser sees. You then put a self-signed cert on your origin and CF will accept it.
> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet
Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).
It is definitely true. There are hundreds if not thousands of right-leaning voices that have been silenced on left-leaning platforms like YT, Insta, Twit, & FB.
I’ve yet to see a single right-leaning voice that was silenced for being right-leaning. Without exception, every one I’ve seen silenced was for calling for violence, using ethnic slurs, or otherwise violating the site’s ToS. It seems possible to me, even likely, that if more right-leaning accounts are being banned then it’s because more of them are breaking the rules.
Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.
Because I respect the rights of private property, I have to allow social media sites to post rules at the entrance explaining what you’re allowed to do. As long as they enforce those rules evenly, then you know what you’re signing up for when you register an account.
I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of:
“I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!”
“Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?”
Would you respect the right of a restaurant to kick out a black family? After all, it's private property.
Suppose it's a white family but they're wearing MAGA hats and the restaurant denies them service. That's nearly acceptable among a broad swath of the population today.
Now suppose it's your mom wearing a MAGA hat (you may not like that she wears one but it's her right, no?) and she gets denied service in a Starbucks. Maybe someone gets violent with her and knocks the hat off her head. Maybe the server spits in her coffee. All of which has happened. Are you still comfortable with "private property"?
Suppose you wander into a restaurant wearing a "Biden-Harris" T-shirt and they say "Get out!" Are you okay with that?
I could keep going, but you get the picture. We can't have a "freedom for me, not for thee" attitude. It has to be universal.
In every one of those cases, I support the nonviolent person. But still, we were talking about social media, not the physical world. None of that addresses whether the right is more or less likely to break the ToSes of social media sites.
In practice, those big firms are more tiptoeing around right wing then around left wing.
Also in practice, there is way bigger outcry over right wing reedits being banned then left wing reddits. Each time reddit banns a bunch of subs, there is discussion about right wings ones - including on HN. Nobody cares about left wing subs being banned, that discussion never appears.
For the record, I am fine with both left and right reddits being banned right now. But I have yet to see free speech advocates to fret about toxic leftist and feminist places being closed.
We need a name for this, when USA conservatives are so sheltered from political thought that they can't tell the Left from the Centre-Right. Lots of leftist stuff has been censored in 2020, yet one repeatedly encounters this blissfully ignorant sentiment.
Well, it depends on who's the One True Left. Most TERFy folks also identify as left wing and structure their arguments around historically progressive concepts like anti-essentialist conceptions of gender, but they're already kind of on the chopping block.
Memes are mind viruses and a robust immune system built from exposure and defeating of them is a good protection from the bad ones, but a good way to prevent being infected by a mind virus is to just never enter places where most people are already infected.
Repeated exposure to things you know to be false or to bad arguments has been shown many times to shift your beliefs towards those false beliefs. It effectively wears your mind's defenses down. This 'repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth' idea is a Trump specialty: 'Crooked Hillary', the wall, voter fraud, etc. Re: extermism, the far right's arguments are bad but if you're not actively exposed to counterarguments/lived experience it's easy to fall prey to such bombastic arguments that cities are crime ridden shitholes, BLM burned down everything, urban voting is rife with fraud, etc (not to mention even more harmful dehumanizing memes about minorities that further ingrain negative sterotypes). They offer a facile, comforting (to white suburbanites) view of the complex, often unsatisfying world that is easy to lower your defenses to.
Yep, I totally agree. I've always said that you can prove anything if you ignore enough facts. Law of Propaganda Design.
Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.
If you wonder why they are threatened consider parler and the things people post there.
Please forgive the language it is verbatim and I think threats of violence are more offensive than bad words.
> You had better be ready partriots! It is go time very soon. We must attack all central communications to big cities are democratic cities. Fiber optics telecom bridges supply routes we can starve those motherfuckers to death. The people are ready it is time.
>We got to give it until Monday but after that partriots we must take the fight to them, make that rally look small. Load your magazines gather your things it's time to go and take out the sorry bastards.
While we worry about the very legitimate question of what the limits of free speech are and how we ought not to create a situation where anyone serves as the gate keeper they are planning to kill us and install an autocracy.
I am of the potentially unpopular mindset that we need to get our hands dirty to preserve our freedoms from these people. Worrying about being a gatekeeper when these people gladly, and openly, threaten our peace and lives is ridiculous.
Let's shut them down, shut them out and generally rebuke them. History shows that higher order ideals generally need to be preserved with actions when words have failed, and make no mistake we are past words with these folks.
I agree but there are 300 million in the US. The actual insurrectionists are like... 200 people? Maybe 2,000?
Shutting down anyone talking pro trump in the whole country will have downsides, and just make them more angry. Prohibition isn't an answer that will work.
Hopefully sending all of the insurrectionists to jail will help.
There are actually more like tens of millions of people who support replacing our democracy with autocracy on the basis that they believe we are stealing their country from them.
You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.
I would also note that there's been plenty of talk of violence against conservatives on left-leaning platforms, Twitter especially but many others. These people are never called out even if they talk about "rounding them up and putting them in camps" and similar Nazi-like talk, even killing them seems to be permissible. I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.
> You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.
Do they also condemn or apply moderation to violence being advocated? Or is it condoned? Honest question, I have not even remotely invested enough time (nor do I plan to do so) to understand this facet.
> I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.
I agree that such messages should be taken down and condemned just the same.
I'm saying that violence is not condoned on the Parler platform. I was a moderator for a while and this is quite specific. You can get on there and say Trump is an idiot or Trump is a saint and you will not be silenced. But you can't say "so-and-so should be killed" that's a total violation of TOS and will get you removed from the site.
I'm not familiar with Parler, but places like that in general, people just find the closest of threat / incite that passes moderation. And everyone who frequents there knows what is implied.
My personal "favorite" of such: "this country is not safe for you". Not a threat, just stating a fact.
The people screaming "Free Speech" are well aware of the content and viewpoints espoused by sites like Parler and T_D. The fact of the matter is that they are supportive of people being killed and white supremacist autocracy being installed.
I don't know what "T_D" is, but Parler doesn't "espouse" anything. It was founded as an alternative to the social media companies that are de-platforming right wing voices. That doesn't mean more than a tiny percentage on Parler are "supportive of people being killed". Actually I'd like to see some examples - have not yet seen anyone there advocate for violence. Parler actually does remove such postings so if you see something, report it.
> It was founded as an alternative to the social media companies that are de-platforming right wing voices.
"de-platforming right wing voices" is such a bad faith interpretation of what's happening and I'm getting really frustrated that the right continues to pretend they're being censored.
You can have different opinions on plenty of political issues. Taxes, healthcare, abortion, gun rights, military spending, education spending, etc. Arguing in favor of low taxes, eliminating funding for public healthcare, banning abortion, etc. will not get you de-platformed.
What gets you removed is racism, bigotry, and inciting violence. Of course, nobody thinks they're racist. Even Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer denies being racist.
T_D === /r/The_Donald. It's since migrated to thedonald dot win; however vile the content, one of the virtues of the censorship-resistant open web is that we're able to keep tabs on what they're discussing. They were extremely unsubtle regarding their plans for the 6th; if anything, we're lucky that it didn't result in even more violence.
I agree, that it's unfair to (a-priori) castigate free-speech-absolutist platforms; there are good-faith, civil-libertarian reasons for them to exist. Nonetheless, they inherently act as a moth-flame to specifically those people that are banned from more mainstream platforms; after all, what motivation would non-controversial communities have to migrate? I absolutely the right of such platforms to exist, but from Voat, to Gab, to now Parler, in practice they quickly skew towards conspiracies and "hate speech" and the like.
I consider SSC's heterodox "Culture War Thread" [0] to be the canonical case study in this pattern: "It's very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse... But once you remove all those things, you're left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that's the scariest thing of all."
Ah, okay, thedonald.win. I have read some of their stuff and I didn't see anything "vile", nor did I see anyone calling for violence, but I haven't read the site in the last few weeks.
I will agree that "Voat" is a nasty place, but I'm not comfortable with shutting them down either, or cutting them off from pay processors and certificate authorities. This kind of game tends to come back and bite one in the ass. It's the old "First they came for xxx and I said nothing".
I recommend digging back into TD.W posts from the 4th and 5th; while most content wouldn't pass a strict test of an explicit threat, their clear intent was not to protest or express dissent, but to prevent vote certification from taking place, along with the usual invectives about "helicopter rides" and "Day of the Rope", etc.
The line is very tricky, as to what constitutes colorful metaphor, vs. explicit calls to violence. (My favorite satire on this dilemma: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA) Regardless, the emotional energy and goals of that community on Jan 6th was extremely clear: to alter the due process of law by threat of force.
All that said, I'm quasi-absolutist on free speech issues, for the slippery-slope reasons you describe. Free speech doesn't end at 1A: it's a cultural value as well. Yet, it's also a tall order to enforce that value proactively: if a newspaper is not obligated to print every letter, should Twitter be obligated to let everyone have an account? There's a good argument for a "digital commons", and regulating tech giants as utilities; but the balance between an individual's freedom to share offensive views, and the freedom of service providers to choose to whom they offer service, is extremely murky.
"BREAKING: Apple is currently threatening to ban Parler -- the free speech alternative to Twitter -- unless the service enacts draconian censorship policies demanded by left-wing Big Tech oligarchs, according to two sources familiar with Apple's threats."
That's the danger in going to such lengths to shut down disagreeable viewpoints. People say "make your own website", but that becomes a race to the bottom when we start politicizing server hosts and ISPs. When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone, and now you don't know what they're thinking. Meanwhile you're actually tyrannical because a monopoly on information makes the mass 80% believe that everyone thinks like the MSM, which isn't true, then everyone is surprised when it turns out there's lots of people who don't support the establishment.
What other options do you have if you can't educate or have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories? It's like trying to pull someone out of a cult like Scientology.
Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.
That's not up to you. Real intellectual discourse isn't your way or the highway. You, like anyone else, has the potential to be wrong, and you're probably wrong a lot more than you think you are. If your arguments don't sway people, that's neither your failing nor the failing of those you are trying to convince. When you censor people, that only emboldens them, and proves to everyone that yes, there are people who want to censor discourse.
Yes, you are inherently fighting in support of the establishment if you are censoring ideas that the establishment doesn't support. You can't have it both ways.
Violence is one thing, but you're also lumping in violence with conspiracy theories, which in turn constructs its own form of orthodoxy. This is why I don't support censorship to such a degree that it invades the public space; all it does is promote a religion of some kind, whether it be Christianity or "the science is settled". By the way, violence only ever seems bad when it goes against your sensibilities. If violence supported your world view, statistically speaking, you are likely to justify it. America was founded on violence, and lots of people throughout the political spectrum believe that the violence was justified. If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery.
Let's stop pretending that we're against violence and admit that we're against violence of certain agendas.
> If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery.
I intuitively get the point you are trying to make (sovereignty, "government has a monopoly on violence," yadda yadda), but I don't think it reflects the real, both contemporary and historical, systems of slavery.
Chattel slavery in the antebellum South's relied on extrajudicial violence. International sex trafficking is inherently violent. Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict. Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?
> Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?
I think you're making a false comparison. There's at least 2 different kinds of unfree regimes, the first being monarchies and dictatorships that use force in a top-down manner to control their subjects, and the second being the system of mind control which enslaves people by feeding them simulations that convince them that they are sufficiently free and safe. The latter version of an unfree regime still benefits from creating a form of slavery, but it's slavery of the mind. Imagine a civilization comprised of figurative Uncle Toms of the system. Sex trafficking is concerning, but it's a form of slavery that can only work in the 21st century by staying underground
> the second being the system of mind control which enslaves people by feeding them simulations that convince them that they are sufficiently free and safe. The latter version of an unfree regime still benefits from creating a form of slavery, but it's slavery of the mind. Imagine a civilization comprised of figurative Uncle Toms of the system.
I'm a bit confused by the figurative language used here. Did you have a specific example of this, or is this a hypothetical? I think this type of thinking has its, but I think it's important to contextualize it. For example, you can say that a gambling addict gambles against their will, but I wouldn't say that they are enslaved to gambling institutions (unless I was purposely being hyperbolic). But I agree that many systems of slavery had a degree of self-regulation among the enslaved.
> Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.
My framework is this: violence is a necessary part of slavery, because to a certain extent enslavement requires the enslaved to choose between continued slavery or extreme violence/death. If you remove state violence from the equation, slavery still usually exists, and often flourishes due to the lack of a countervailing force. In "top-down" situations, where a system of slavery has implicit or explicit state support, the state doesn't have to explicitly enact the violence itself, it can simply declare a certain segment of the population "extra-judicial.
I think authoritarian, low violence states like Singapore have numerous human rights issues, but I wouldn't go so far as saying that the entire body politic is enslaved.
But those two states account for roughly half of the total world population. According to your link, the US has 400,000 enslaved peoples, which is still less per capita, but the US is a lot more developed than India and China.
From the linked source:
North Korea has the world's highest rate of slavery, with about one in 10 people enslaved, followed by Eritrea (9.3%) Burundi (4%), Central African Republic (2.2%), Afghanistan (2.2%), Mauritania (2.1%), South Sudan (2%), Pakistan (1.7%), Cambodia (1.7%) and Iran (1.6%).
In retrospect, I should've said "violent conflict OR extreme poverty"
There is no proof of material voting fraud or irregularities, for example. If you believe otherwise, you are fabricating a reality. If you communicate these lies to others, you are contributing to a disinformation campaign.
Um you can't prove something didn't happen .... when in fact it didn't happen. How is this not common sense. It's not suddenly fraud when the worse president in American history loses an election.
> Um you can't prove something didn't happen .... when in fact it didn't happen.
I think you can, to a certain degree. For example: by making the mail-in system more trustworthy, or by eliminating it.
My country (Chile) only uses on-site voting and no one alleges fraud because we know that it would be incredibly hard to steal an election with this system. The system is transparent, votes are counted publicly the same day of the voting.
The electoral service is one of the few public institutions that I deem competent and actually trust in my country, and I think I'm not alone.
To be honest, now politicians are trying to impose mail-in ballot system, but that not the electoral service's fault. That's idiot politicians trying to ruin something that works.
This idea of massive voter fraud isn't something that had entered the conversation until it was used as an imaginary defense for someone who has been unable to accept any loss or defeat or even apologize for any mistake he has made. (He also used it when he won, of course. But it is a unique construction that has been manifested into being by him.)
This is a man who, in what any normal person, could admit was a mistake when tweeting about a hurricane having effects in Alabama. Instead he doubled down, tripled down, forced federal employees to make statements that he was right. He even drew sharpie on a map to extend the prediction cone because it didn't show what he said.
There is a clear pattern of behavior here.
Additionally, those who are alleging massive voter fraud in public did not make those statements in court, because it would have actual consequences. Every state certified their results, including those with republican leadership.
So you either have to buy in to extraordinary claims of all kinds of (in many cases provably false) of voter fraud and a massive apparatus (Deep State) working against Donald Trump or accept the much more obvious and plain result.
If you listen to the call with Georgia, when the Secretary of State pointed out that they had investigated several of the claims, Trump's response was that the investigators were either incompetent or actively working against him.
To me it seems that the real core problem is that people believe in their own imaginary realities that are in disagreement with what's considered to be objective facts (let's keep solipsism aside please), and not the speech (ability to communicate ideas) itself.
I mean... why is it that if someone tells me that Sun rises in the west virtually everyone just ignores this as an obvious nonsense, but when someone says... a more nuanced but nonetheless proven-false controversy (I'd intentionally refrain from any examples - even the ones that were already provided - to avoid even a possibility debating any of those), some don't outright dismiss it.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, and maybe it's simply not possible with humans - but I still hope for a society where (argh, okay, let's invoke Godwin's Law) the next Hitler won't happen not because of some speech laws but because simply no one would listen to the lunacies seriously.
How is it strawman? Those are actual real world actions people commited, because of their opinions.
Not even month ago. Ignoring yesterday, there was plan and attempt to execute Mitchigan governor last few months. There was Nashville boombing, likely due to whatever conspiracy theory that man believed.
Even Elliot Rodger had opinions largely from incels chans.
Let me use another scenario. 1969, Brazil. Members of a revolutionary group kidnapped the US Ambassador. After that, and a few other incidents, the government used the same argument you presented to review and approve contents of newspapers, magazines, radio shows, movies and correspondence.
Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?
The very same situation has happened across all of South America throughout the 20th Century.
They may be referring to the first statement, which in my experience doesn't seem true. I've never heard conservatives, Republicans, or Trump supporters argue for a one party state. That may be my failing, however.
> “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.
What do you think it means when you lose an election, and then try to disrupt the democratic process with the goal of having the loser of the election retain power?
> "Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people."
Who exactly is "they"? Anyone who disagrees with you? Anyone who votes for a Republican candidate? Trump supporters? Some subset of Trump supporters who say the election was fraudulent? What about Trump supporters who say the election MAY have been fraudulent -- do they also get silenced?
This is a slippery slope. You either have freedom of speech, or you don't. Muzzling people who have ideas you consider dangerous has a way of blowing back in your face; in fact it almost guarantees violence, when people feel they are not allowed to vent.
The people who literally stormed the capital earlier this week, some of whom brought equipment like zipties with the intention of kidnapping/hostage taking. Those specific people who we all literally just saw doing the thing on basically every TV Channel while some of them literally livestreamed themselves doing it. This is in no way ambiguous at all.
This isn't about perspective. You are the one actually saying lies. Don't try to turn this around into some thing where it just two equal opinions. It is truth vs lies, and you are choosing lies.
(Sorry for the delay but I've been swamped since this conflagration.)
Posts like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691491 and many others you posted in these recent threads are not acceptable on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We ban this sort of account, regardless of which politics they're battling for. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
Please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political battle—it's against the guidelines and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), again regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
They are people who put bomb in RNC and brought one to capitol a day before yeasterday. They includes nashville bomber and whoever organized Mitchigan terrorist plot.
They are also proud boys starting fights. It is not like US would have shortage of organized political violence lately. It is pretty easy to find "they".
The Nashville bomber was one guy committing suicide and he even warned in advance.
The Michigan kidnapping plot was about 5-6 idiots who did not represent some kind of farflung organization.
The Proud Boys have not started fights, to my knowledge. They have marched peacefully down the street holding U.S. flags and the like, and been violently attacked by antifa elements. They show up at left wing/antifa demonstrations but don't attack; they fight back when provoked. They've been demonized by left wing news as "white supremacists" ironically even though their leader is a black guy.
So when you say "it is pretty easy to find 'they'", you need to support that statement. It's pretty easy to make stuff up, too, and I believe a lot of people are being censored on the basis of hearsay and madeup nonsense.
Look at history, it’s just one damn tragedy after another and all without the supposedly super powerful influence of internet filter bubbles and radicalization. The internet isn’t the problem, this is just what humans do. Every age has blamed their problems on the latest technology while being willfully blind to the problems within their own minds. You can’t fight this with censorship or gatekeeping or trusted news sources, trying to force your beliefs on other people just adds to the misery because you’re flawed and ignorant too, everyone is.
But those tragedies happened after series of radicalisations, pretty often after groups intentionally spread lies and hate, when people closed themselvea into bubbles and so on.
Pretty often the new technology was the vector by which those came, simply because bad actors seem to be quicker to take advantage of new technology.
Also historically, censorship and gatekewping were overall succesfull strategies. I am not saying that it is good thing to do all that much, there is danger in overdoing it, but historically it was effective in suppressing viewpoints.
They’re successful only because they are accompanied by physical violence. If we go down this path again prepare for a repeat of history at the hands of those you give this power to, it’ll probably take a few hundred mega deaths before we learn our lesson again.
The problem is not just that the people deciding what gets edited/blocked could, at some point in the future, be Nazis or Stalinists or whatever - bad people censoring the good to make their propaganda be the only thing that's heard. That's bad, but the real problem is this: You can be wrong. You can be wrong when you're absolutely sure that you're right, and you can be wrong on things that really matter. Be very careful about blocking "wrong" viewpoints, because you can be wrong about what's "wrong".
Note well: I am not at all saying that Trump supporters are right. I am saying that you are not omniscient enough to be qualified to decide what should be blocked. Nobody is.
What I would prefer is removing moderators, aggressively fighting bots, and putting reasonably neutral parties in the moderation position.
The second part of that is hard/expensive, but it is a path forwards to some level of discourse between the people using these subreddits and everyone else. Driving these communities to different sites means that people get in much stronger filter bubbles, that's probably not a good thing.
To take the example of /r/conservative on reddit right now, the subreddit currently bans anyone who says anything at all critical of Trump, and mostly only let's people who have a history of saying supportive things talk. That's not good for reddit, or the country as a whole. But if reddit just removed the current batch of moderators and those rules, and had someone enforce some reasonable standards of discourse but not enforce politics, I think it could turn into a force for good.
To put it in your own terms, my preferred solution is to try and make it possible to "have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories", instead of just making it so those people go fabricate their reality elsewhere.
A problem that has demonstrability arisen with even neutral moderation is that, no matter the moderation criteria, a vocal subset of those who are affected by that moderation will still complain loudly about being censored. This applies even to moderators removing death threats and calls to violence. There are many examples of complaints that doing so is censorship even though it is hard to make a good faith argument against the justifications for removing such posts.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect solution, I'm sure you're right there would be complaints, and I'm also sure that no perfect solution exist. It's just not that easy to deradicalize people, and it's just not that easy to deal with people actively attempting to deceive and radicalize the public. I do think it would probably be a superior solution to what is being done right now, where there are even more complaints, and you get increasingly "strong" filter bubbles.
Incitement has been a limited carve-out from the First Amendment pretty much from the beginning. Stating a political view is different from threatening your opponents with violence.
I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.
> When you completely shut people up, that doesn't mean they're gone
It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say).
Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".
Admittedly, I don't know what you're getting at precisely. The dark web is certainly an alternative, but it's not exactly a viable one. Tor is basically the manifestation that every right can be abused in some way, especially with low moderation.
Think of the availability of decentralized services that are hard to ban as a pressure relief valve for good and bad things. If we we ultimately make it to hard to share legitimate things those things go underground long before they go away.
If we look and find that freenet and tor hidden services are only full of kiddie porn, drugs, and crazy we haven't swung to far towards censorship.
Right now the crazy is right in the open and hidden services are only for things that are actually already illegal like child porn so it is premature to suppose we are being too restrictive. Based on the fact that we almost lost our democracy we probably need to Crack down more on the hate, lies, and inducement to violence.
When you have to go somewhere secret to hear someone suggest we need to massacre some jews we may be approaching an actual balance.
Wikipedia was threatened for having B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD on a web page.
ISPs are frequently threatening to disconnect customers who serve files, and sites that are large enough to have their own connectivity have had this for 20 years.
"Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner of the referenced comments. "
Except in this case, this isn't a copyright violation. I have never heard of a case of a website being shut down by an ISP for advocating violence. If that was the case, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter or any social media platform wouldn't exist.
> Moreover, they've gotten threats from their ISP that they have to delete certain posts or be shut down. (which seems scary to me)
Agreed - though I find it's more of a headache than scary. On end, I don't like the fact that increasingly internet infrastructure is acting as a de facto judge in deciding what speech is and isn't allowed. I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.
I'm much more accepting of platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et. al. taking down groups and banning members than I am of infrastructure providers doing the same. The former kicks people off of large communities, but people can still put together their own websites. When it gets the the point that I might not even be able to serve plain HTML that I wrote myself, because nobody will even let it go through the wires that's when I start thinking utility regulation in ISPs, DNS, etc. is necessary.
Cloudflare's CEO was very humble when taking down sites. When talking about taking down the Daily Stormer, "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet... No one should have that power.” [1] I largely agree, though I'd offer the caveat that something needs to have this power but it should be an institution like the courts rather than individuals in corporations.
> ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent
But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company?
It's actually a serious and legitimate question. Freedom from speech also means freedom from compelled speech. A government can't pass a law to make a Mom and Pop shop sell a certain magazine. And corporations enjoy the same freedoms: I'm very confident that the government could not pass a law forcing Twitter to overturn bans. And ISPs possibly have the same freedom from compelled speech.
I'm no lawyer, but I think the distinction is in utilities. The postal service, for instance, can't just refuse service to people they don't like. Same with power companies. I'm not sure how phone providers and ISPs fit into this. But I think it may be useful to have ISPs, payment providers, and maybe also DNS and DDOS protection providers be considered utilities. My basic measuring stick is that putting HMTL and CSS out on the internet should be protected akin to the ability to send letters through the mail.
Democracies usually protect the freedom of initiative too, but it's a different protection, with very different exceptions, and companies usually have it much more restricted than speech.
They're granted immunity from lawsuits from the government because they're a dumb pipe, but then they censor/promote as if they are a publisher.
A business can't sue facebook for allowing a BLM riot to organize on its platform that destroyed their storefront, and similarly they have no recourse when said business gets a facebook page deleted because they complained about it.
Yes. If you were running a news stand, should you be sued if one of the magazines you're selling ends up inspiring a riot? If you refused to sell a certain magazine should people be able to sue you or otherwise force you to stock their paper?
Freedom from compelled speech is the default. Requiring people or organizations to host speech is the exception, and is limited to things like utilities and cigarette health warnings.
Making Facebook or Twitter a utility is very coarse grained. They would have to allow all legal speech. They wouldn't be able to ban users for nudity or porn, or explicitly espousing Nazism (actual Nazism, not the much more expansive post 2016 definition of "Nazi"). Both of these things are legal in the US, and a utility would have to permit them. If social media is made a utility, then social media is going to become 8chan.
That's why I think it makes the most sense to apply utility status at the infrastructure layer not the application layer. Social media companies can still moderate, people on the fringes can spread their message on niche applications or on sites they build themselves.
If you carefully remove the half of the news you don't like, and your users are most of the country, sure, you deserve antitrust scrutiny. Why are we pretending that Facebook is some slack-jawed Ohioan that doesn't know exactly what it's doing?
It ends where we decide that it ends. There is no slippery slope here. The protections for political speech and the cultural values around speech are incredibly high friction surfaces! If anything the slope is towards free space and historically, any curtainments of it have been temporarily.
> I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.
I don't emapthize with the ISPs here. Internet access has become a utility which is required to participate in many parts of the economy and society. Utilities should not be allowed to refuse to service someone who is using the service legally.
If someone is hosting illegal content, that's a different story.
A smart Republican would nave realised that big internet companies are against him, and would have made plans accordingly.
If Trump had been competent, he wouldn't have attacked net neutrality, he would have said net neutrality is a wonderful idea, and extended it to other layers of the protocol stack.
He would also have got on board when people like Elizabeth Warren talked about breaking up Facebook and Amazon.
Actually yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action. Not saying what happened on /r/donaldtrump actually met that criteria (that's up to a court to decide), but the precedent to silence people (by the government no less) is definitely there.
What gave you that impression? Moreover, what do you mean by "the freedom of speech principle"? It can mean anything ranging from "you can literally say anything you want and the government should protect you while doing so (eg. punishing companies that refuse to transmit your speech)", to "most speech, excluding a laundry list of exceptions like hate speech, copyright infringement, defamation, heresy, certain ideologies, etc."
Following the arguments put forth in the rest of this thread, it is possible to support free speech while still arguing for exceptions and being against free speech absolutism.
Such an argument against an entire whole does not logically follow from the given argument that specific exception should be made.
Of course. But the problem lies in what constitutes crime. Few years ago, interracial marriage was crime. Should ISP's be shutting down forums where couples can find the social safety that they long for?
Would you support the silencing if leaders of the Augusta Civil Rights Riot were using forums, or Reddit, or FB, to organize themselves?
There is a reason why freedom of speech, without any limitations, is so valued in the free world. Those in power will always use "crime" and "think of the children" as tools to sway the public into weaponizing the government.
Ah yes, the "free world" that is the USA. Sorry, as a German with "plenty" of limitations on free speech (from denying the holocaust, to "insulting") I can't empathize too much.
Imagine a situation where people are credibly planning an armed assault on, say, Citibank, in public forums.
Do you believe it is OK to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of the domestic terror is the seat of our government?
Let me use another scenario. 1969, Brazil. Members of a revolutionary group kidnapped the US Ambassador. After that, and a few other incidents, the government used the same argument you presented to review and approve contents of newspapers, magazines, radio shows, movies and correspondence.
Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?
I never heard of thedonald.win and took a peek over there just to see what a cesspool of banned users looks like.
JFC. It's a circus of terrible thinking and baseless anger over there. If that site is getting a lot of traffic, you folks who consider yourselves above such things better start fighting for what is actually true and good, because what is not true and not good is exactly what is festering over there, and if they don't get their vote, they WILL get violent again, just see how they attacked Lindsey Graham at the airport just now for breaking rank on principle... and sweeping these folks under the rug will not eradicate the cancer
I don’t think it’s irrelevant. Keeping it off Reddit means that less gullible teenagers (which are a large percentage of Reddit’s user user base) will come into contact with it.
OP likely posts to the site regularly. An thinks the site is an excellent place full of patriots that just so happens to want to stop an evil ring of pedophiles that just so happen to be filled with all of Trump's political enemies.
you mean to tell me a well known place that crazy people congreate and organize to plan treason and insurrection in plain sight gets more traffic when the President calls for the overturning of a democratic election... who would have thought
I love doom scrolling as much as the next guy, just make sure to get some mind bleach. Find a nice fiction podcast or take up electronics. Both sides will consume your mental health if your not careful.
Our Fake History -- it's a historian deep-diving into various historical myths, their origins, and the scholarly consensus around the truth (at least as we understand it).
I can't give you much context, sorry. I just shared the numbers to save others from googling.
Hacker news is 6500 globally, and 2600 in the US, if that is any kind of context.
Alexa is one of the oldest analytics companies to publicize top rankings for websites. Today was the first time I noticed they've been bought by Amazon.
You can look around their top 50, (which they are calling top 500 for the clicks) for global and country level web traffic here: https://www.alexa.com/topsites
> one of the top websites in the US in terms of traffic
There's something odd going on with their traffic. I've been on the front page of Reddit and thedonald.win at the same time, and either virtually nobody on that site reads the articles or the upvotes counts are being massively inflated: the upvote to pageview ratio is waaaay lower on thedonald.win then I've experienced on Reddit and HN.
> Also, please don't judge me, I just have a morbid curiosity to see what these people are talking about and how they think.
I read thedonald.win daily too. It feels like r/watchPeopleDie, some sort of morbid curiosity. Currently they're claiming Trump's concession video yesterday was deep faked. Very entertaining and scary at the same time.
I have the same curiosity but it is more about being worried that the balkanization of the Internet will have serious negative outcomes down the line, such as what we saw 2 days ago, except progressively worse.
Everyone IMHO should be peering into other bastions of thought
For reference, this is higher than infowars (#507 in the US) but far lower than Breitbart (#72 in the US), to name other, um, right-wing conspiracy-promoting sites.
This is also lower than amazon.ca in the US (#354), apparently. That probably says something.
Yeah, this is a win. You can go to this guy's party at his house. And I don't have to worry about the guys at his party wandering into mine. And vice versa.
To stretch that analogy: all is fine, except for "this guy's" neighbors, they are in for a terrible night. And when the crowd at "this guy's party" is heated up and collectively starts harrassing people on the street, it gets even worse.
My point: Fine indeed, as long as they "stay there". But they won't. This goes for any online community: it has effects outside of that community.
This is actually crucial. When I go to see cat pics, I don't want to discuss whether Evil Jew Bankers Are Stealing America's Future.
It isn't an offence thing. It's just ... boringly dumb. It's just like I'm not going to start a conversation in this thread to review my basic backstitch.
The last place I worked paid hard-earned money during a recession to migrate their properties off of CloudFlare because they were providing CDN services to the Proud Boys and the CEO had made some equivocal statement that they didn't think it was their responsibility to police content. It's an interesting topic and possibly a genuine slippery slope about what sort of responsibility service providers have over their customers use of their platform. It's one thing for dangerous content to be hosted, moderated and monetized on a platform like facebook. But what about just caching it blindly?
You're joking, right? I for one am proud of Cloudflare for taking a stand against cancel culture, because one of these days it could hit you or me and I want to support people who will stand in behind me in the name of free speech.
I think it's disingenuous to say "cancelling" is an invalid tactic and more than saying violence is an invalid tactic. Cancelling Nazis is as acceptable as shooting them by thousands was in the 1940s. I don't think it's at all unreasonable for us to be able to draw a line at what kind of speech we consider harmful. And saying the line is Nazism is an easy starting point.
Seeing how they call for war, killing people, and overthrowing the government daily if not hourly I can’t imagine why CF continues to provide them services. Truly, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I mean you probably will on some of the *chans but it’s pretty freaking bad over at TD win.
I'll say it out loud: though I despise Trump and mourn the damage he and those enabling have caused, I spend more time online looking at pro-Trump, conservative and Republican focused material than anything else. I downvote none of it, even the legit crazy/scary stuff, and in the rare cases I comment, it's carefully worded to be neutral or even sometimes conciliatory, though always honest.
It scares me that many people feel the need to apologize for openly admitting that they looked at material from 'the other side'.
More often, people will refrain from posting their actual, perhaps nuanced views entirely, due to the fear of being judged/attacked/whatever. Didn't Paul Graham write an essay about that?
My wife was writing a research essay to present to our local Toastmasters group, which she is a relatively new member of. She was going over the talk with one of the senior members, one on one, on zoom, and she mentioned, in passing, that our family is going to delay getting the Covid19 vaccine a couple of months, because we've been exercising (essentially) phase 0 (extreme) lockdown consistently since last March. We can do that because we're blessed with the ability to work and (for our son) go to school from home.
The person my wife mentioned this to just lost her shit, and went into a verbal rampage about how to delay getting the vaccine is akin to being an anti-vaxer, how it was immoral to not get it as soon as humanly possible.
To be clear: If any of me, my wife or son came into contact with other human beings with any frequency, we'd get the vaccine as soon as possible. We're not afraid of it.
But others need it before we do.
However, that 'nuance' was entirely lost in an emotional, knee-jerk reaction which reminds me of so many other things we see today.
Was there voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election? I'd bet my life on it; that there was at least a single single incident of fraud. Did that fraud in any way change the outcome of the election? Of course not.
Apologies for the tangent.
I want to encourage everyone to consider looking carefully, deeply and compassionately at what 'the other side' writes and says. It's not easy to do, but I believe it's a necessary, critical work that all of us need to honestly engage in.
Are you asking, at what percentage DO the tolerant actually flip to become the intolerant? This is a good question, though probably impossible to answer with any precision.
I fear that it happens a lot more frequently than most people are willing to admit.
I don't know if those Donald sites are good for that. That is the small Q-anonish minority that was at the capitol. Most of the discussion is not exactly tethered to reality.
I don't think it's entirely fair to suggest that thedonald.win represents the 70 million Trump voters. It represents the attitudes of a few million of the weirdos, distorted further by roleplayers/trolls and international infiltrators.
Your average Trump voter is just a normal Republican. They voted for Trump because there was an R next to his name and defended him because he was on their team. The Democratic voters would be no different if the dems ran an equally ghastly candidate. (They obviously have not done so, and I am not making the claim that's random. I'm not saying 'both sides are the same' in this post.)
It might be useful to understand the thedonald.win crowd, but it ain't 70MM of your countrymen, Americans.
I thought the race for Washington State's Insurance Commissioner was pretty instructive on this point. No one serious from the Republican party ran because no one really objects to the existence of the current guy, so the guy who ran with the R next to his name was, not making a lot of sense in the voter's guide. (He was going to hire 168 people to do his job, 1 hour at a time, among other things that didn't make a lot of sense). He still got 35% of the vote.
You'd be surprised that Trump supporters are outside the Republican realm. If you spent 5 minutes on TDW you'd see they hate most establishment Republicans. This isn't new either, it started with Ron Paul and then the Tea Party movement.
I'd say overall the majority on TDW are leaning more towards libertarian than conservative. Certain things like freedom of speech, 2nd amendment rights, limited government and spending are shared ideals. Other things like pro-marijuana, pro-life, Christianity are depicted and respected but differ between supporters and less popular then the ideals everyone agrees on.
Calling people Nazi's is a great way to dehumanize someone, but not really a great way to win anyone over because it's not an argument.
The only fascism I see is the censorship going around.
How are they Nazis or fascists? Most want limited government, and no censorship. Trump supporters don't own the media and aren't silencing people.
I don't see why you have to attack me or my account. You're the one calling people fascists and getting flagged. I just wanted to point out that name calling gets you nowhere.
I don't think ISPs should be in the business of deciding what content is allowed or disallowed. If there's illegal content, that's a different thing. But politically disagreeable content? Infrastructure and utility services should not be permitted to make decisions about that even if they are private entities. And I extend this to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. since they all are so big that their ability to censor and control speech is comparable to a government's power. And if you can't exercise speech on those platforms, which are now the public town square, then you effectively don't have that right. Put another way, they are utilities and should be regulated/treated like a public entity.
the people on these communities creates their alternative reality. selectively avoid news/information that can burst their bubble. its the same with /r/politics. both living in massive bubbles with complete opposite realities.
the difference is that r/the_donald is more violent. They cordinate gatherings, "attacks", a violent protests.
r/politics which is liberal bubble is more peaceful but both these communites censor opposing views and is dangerous to democracy
Isn’t it strange that you have to make a disclaimer like “please don’t judge me?”. Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump, should you automatically be ashamed of that?
(It’s easy for me to say ofc, I have no horse in this race)
I don’t paint every Democrat as a supporter of the violence and property damage that happened over the summer.
I think the vast, vast majority of people believe in non-violent protest and giving people room to express their views and hurt and frustration in non-violent ways.
I think politicians and the media is largely responsible for trying to paint groups they don’t like with an overly broad brush, and we should outright reject that as Americans.
The political flame war has to stop. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are in fact reasonable, kind, loving people who still believe in America even if it’s no longer popular to admit it.
The challenge is the fringe voices are amplified a million times more than the center-mass.
I read an interesting Twitter thread last week on how housing policy in SF is basically totally dominated by 6 people, private citizens, who scream down anyone who would dare to offer an opposing view, and are successful in setting policy with these tactics. I don’t know if that’s fully true, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
There seems to be a poll floating around that 45% of republicans supported the storming of capitol hill. Of course polls can be twisted to deceive, but if we take that at face value, that is not a small "fringe"?
My personal poll of around 20 Republicans found only a single supporter. Sure that's not scientific, but that's such a difference I doubt the number is that high.
> Their worst right now is much worse than expected, I would be ashamed to be associated.
This doesn't follow. Trump has been promoting violence since 2016. There have been multiple attacks carried out by Trump supporters. Most Republicans think the election was stolen thanks to Trump. Anyone who was surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to the blatantly obvious signs that have been on display nor to the repeated warnings by many, many people saying this is where things were headed. I'm in no way surprised this happened. Why were so many other people?
It does follow if you think that most people that voted for Trump didn't actually think that Trump means most of the things he says. Which matches up with what Trump supporters say in interviews regarding Trump's stance on topics that even many of his supporters don't agree with. They will generally say something like "yeah, I don't agree with what Trump says about X and Y but I vote for him because of Z".
And to be fair their stance is not totally unreasonable. On both isles of the political spectrum most voters for some candidate ignore at least part of what the candidate says _and_ does. No candidate perfectly matches up with what you think should be done, that's normal and expected, democracy isn't perfect. A part of this process is trying to guess what the political candidate really thinks/believes vs what they say just to gain political capital. All people living in a democracy learn to do this early on. I guess for many Trump supporters they guessed that even with all the seemingly violence inducing rhetoric it wouldn't end up with a mob assaulting a federal government institution. Mistakes were made. :)
My point still stands. Anyone surprised by violence from Trump supporters have not been paying attention for the last four years. All the warning signs have been there. You've got documented evidence of Trump and his followers setting small fires for four years and half the country shouting "HEY WE'VE GOT A FIRE!" suddenly people are surprised that the building is burning down around them? Mistakes were made, the President and supporters everyone has been warning about do the thing everyone has been warning about and try to stage a coup. Oops!
lol. That has to do with comments like, "Wow, look at that comment's downvotes!" not asking about guidelines in relation to votes. Of course, there is room for interpretation on this one.
It's a little strange indeed -- the US is at a very polarized time, where discussing such a mainstream thing as supporting Trump is treated like a breach of decorum by some. Very surreal in some ways.
That being said, identifying that the support for Trump is about 50/50 does not _really_ tell the right story here with thedonald.win -- this isn't a representative of the ~half of us in the US who voted for Trump (or would if we voted)...it's a representation of a small, extreme culture, part real and part just trolling.
I doubt OP would have apologized quite so hard for watching Fox News. Fox News's editorial content is somewhat to the right of the average Republican voter, but not by nearly as much as thedonald.win -- that's something that represents mainstream Trump voter (aka Republican voter) worldview.
There are plenty of Trump voters (Republicans in general) who would actually find the contents of that website abhorrent. I would say these people represent a minority (albeit a large one) of Trump supporters.
Which is fine when the leader in question ignores those minority opinions.
The problem here is that the leader is going out of his way to specifically engage and this minority group by committing as many atrocities as possible.
"Upvote if you still believe Trump will be our President for the next four years. People are forgetting this man is a genius and has always been ten steps ahead. Now is no different."
This is one of the top threads on that site RIGHT NOW. Its easy to judge someone participating in that discussion.
Approximately 23% of the US population voted for him. Typically I don't like this arguement, the rest of the population would probably have voted along much the same proportions as those who did.
> the rest of the population would probably have voted along much the same proportions as those who did
According to Pew, the non-voter block is much less white, less educated, and poorer than the voting population. You can probably make several cases for which way that block breaks, but I would certainly not say they would vote proportionally the same as voters.
Whatever you assume about how they would have voted, they didn't “literally” vote.
And the assumption that people who choose to vote have an equal distribution of political views to those who choose not to vote is ludicrous; people who, if they voted, would only vote for someone who isn't a major party candidate are going to be vastly overrepresented among nonvoters simply because they are more likely to feel participation is futile; it would be less inaccurate than assuming equal distribution—but still inaccurate—to assume every eligible nonvoter is equivalent to a vote against at least all of the major party candidates.
I don't think this is true. It's been shown over and over again that the more people who vote, the more likely Republicans are to lose the election. This is why Republicans have gone all in on their disenfranchisement efforts.
They're downvoting everyone who is pointing out that Trump did not win the popular vote. This is frustrating given it is absolutely relevant, even if it is somewhat of a nitpick; the statement that "half of the US" voted for anyone is genuinely misleading.
>Isn’t it strange that you have to make a disclaimer like “please don’t judge me?”. Quite literally 1/2 of the USA voted for Trump, should you automatically be ashamed of that?
I dont have a horse in the race neither other than stock market.
It's not that strange. It's why elections are supposed to be confidential. Public opinion is always going to shift. During Clinton's reign we had the clinton crazies who hated him. George W bush? Did anyone like him? Obama derangement was readily labelled racism. Now Trump derangement is very strong. Biden will have his haters, that's coming.
However, the derangement is real and even the illusion you're for trump will gain you hate.
Yes some people are under the mistaken impression that there's anything good about Trump and therefore suprised when he doesn't seem to care for the future of our democracy and our country even a tiny bit
Nitpick: 1/2 of the US did not vote for Trump. In 2016, of the eligible voting populous, only 54.8% voted in the election. Of them, the popular vote was lost by Donald Trump, who got around 63 million votes.
So even winning, it doesn’t really need to be that close to half of the U.S.
Not to say that isn’t a sizable chunk or anything.
I'm an active reader of threads on YC, and maybe I'm just lucky but I have yet to see anyone spouting MAGA based conspiracy theories. I did get downvoted one time for saying Trump invented the term Antifa (Which is absolutely true. I did a google search by date to verify.) but that's as close as I've seen.
I think you got downvoted because the term/group Antifa has existed in several forms since the 30s, it was a movement started in Germany in response to the rise of the SPD between WWI and WWII.
That I did not know. I just know no one was using the term online before trump started calling the BLM protestors antifa. (However, there was a single tweet with an #antifa hashtag 2 days before trump used the terminology. I figured he saw the tweet and it inspired Trump to pick up the term, but now I do not know given the historical back stop.)
Not in the Trump train themselves, but there are definitely a lot of libertarians on here who believe in absolute free speech - a position that is seen as borderline ridiculous from an European (specifically: German) perspective.
That's refreshing to hear. I'm not pro manipulative speech (and manipulative news), but in the US free speech is seen as a very strong positive culturally, regardless where you are on the political spectrum.
We'll see if that attitude changes once the US has a one or two ethnic/cultural genocides that was preceded by a lot of hate speech against said ethnic/cultural groups.
That is to say, the US attitude towards free speech is not somehow the result of some very wise collective, it simply hasn't had the history to affect its attitude towards it in the same way that European countries have.
Ask a Native American (or one of dozens of other groups whose vilification enabled their oppression and murder), or maybe read a history book? We Americans aren't less experienced than Europeans; we're just more committed.
How many Americans today are aware they (well, their ancestors but that does carry responsibilities to younger generations) are guilty of mass murder and ethnic cleansing? And how much of that genocide was preceded of much hate speech? (how much were the free speech protections a factor in said genocide)
I think you may be right that ethnic genocide alone may not be enough to change a whole population's opinions around free speech rights, that there may be additional factors required such as general awareness of how bad it was to engage in such acts and what contributed to those acts.
I am not Native American, but perhaps I can answer your questions about USA culture in general. Lots of people know about the genocide in an intellectual sense, although that doesn't affect their politics and they don't appreciate reminders.
Free speech protections weren't obviously relevant to the genocide as it has occurred, although it wouldn't surprise me to learn e.g. that a native counterpart to Frederick Douglass had been silenced unfairly. As for speech in the other direction, the worst things were said (and done) by the "greatest statesmen" [0] so I doubt that corporate speech codes would have been much help. If it isn't too presumptuous of me to observe, it's unlikely that such things would have done much to slow down Hitler or Mussolini either.
Popularity does not imply morality. 46.8% of people voted for Donald Trump (not "quite literally 1/2"), a man who is a known fraud, morally bankrupt in business and personal life, and who has shown himself to be incompetent in office. People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.
That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.
Hopefully the wonderful moderators on this board reprimand you for posting political flamebait and attempting to use hacker news for political or ideological battle.
> a man who is a known fraud, morally bankrupt in business and personal life, and who has shown himself to be incompetent in office.
Are you talking about donald trump or joe biden?
> People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.
Using your logic, those who voted for corrupt biden should be ashamed as well.
> That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.
Have you taken a look in the mirror. People like you are what's wrong with the country. Extremist and blind to their own faults.
We had two choices this year. Maybe I'll phrase it in a way you can understand. On the one hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male" and on the other hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male".
People like you whine about rich privileged corrupt white males all the time and yet are slaving over a rich privileged corrupt white male.
I'm rather tired of the "both sides" rhetoric. One candidate refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. One candidate has a history of racial bias (Central Park 5, apartment zoning, Judge Curiel, etc.). One candidate openly asked for and received aid from a foreign nation. One candidate built up a mob and pointed them at the Capitol in an attempted coup.
On the other hand, one candidate lost a son to drug overdose. One candidate had debunked conspiracy theories regarding their other son's interactions with Ukraine.
Do I think that Biden is perfect? Gosh, no. Do I think he is a good person? I don't know if it is possible to be a truly good person while holding any high office. Do I think that Biden is a better person and a better choice than Trump? Absolutely.
That's what Republicans and Trump supporters say too. You are tired of it because it's true.
> One candidate refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
Neither candidate committed to it. The DNC was going to do exactly what the RNC did.
"Hillary Clinton said in a new interview that Joe Biden should not concede the 2020 presidential election “under any circumstances," anticipating issues that could prolong knowing the final outcome."
> One candidate openly asked for and received aid from a foreign nation.
Are you for real? Biden and his son's ukraine, russia, china, etc endeavors are just as bad or worse.
> One candidate built up a mob and pointed them at the Capitol in an attempted coup.
Right. And no rioting from biden's side.
The only people who think like you are brainwashed political zealots. You are part of the problem. The only difference between you and a tea party or trumpist is political party affiliation. That's it. And it doesn't really matter because DNC and RNC are ultimately on the same team. They serve the same master. And it isn't the american people.
But whatever, you do you and keep up the good fight.
I may be mistaken, but you sound like the type who cries about "privileged white males". But man, you sure do love Biden.
Trump cheated in 2016, did he not? The republicans have been cheating for many decades (legally in some cases, illegally in others), necessitating the voting rights act, have they not? Is voter suppression not cheating?
At this point, why bother? The damage was done years ago and these groups have already largely jumped ship to their own self-hosted platforms.
Doing this now makes me think their leadership are all cowards, at best. It reveals that leadership knew this step should have been done a long time ago, but failed to act due to fear. Had they left it alone, at least we could have all bought into this BS notion that it was due to fairness and a belief in free speech.
I say, cowards, at best, because what would be worse, is that this is entirely motivated by finances. That none of this is done for a concern of the well-being of our state, but because it is good advertising.
So it begins. We'll remember this period with shame and regret. Our compulsion to righteously award the state and massive unelected corporate tech powers to censor and punish our enemies will be looked back on in shame. We are sowing the seeds of chaos. 2001 vibes all over again.
If they used a privately hosted forum, should that forum owner take some of the blame? Would about IRC server operator? What about an iMessage group? Most of this was probably made discoverable by google searches. Should google take some of the blame?
I don't understand why we have to blame the means of communication and method of discoverability rather than the, most likely mentally disturbed, people. Claiming that a very small group of unsane people bust into the capitol is some fundamental problem seems hyperbolic and reactionary to me.
If someone used my forum to organize terrorist attacks then I should be held accountable.
If google searches, facebook groups, twitter recommendations, and subreddjts drove people towards content that radicalized them and continued to reinforce that radicalization then those companies should be held accountable.
I used to work in biomed, and if an algorithm I wrote resulted in people dying I would expect to face consequences. I don't see why the largest companies on the same planet aren't held to a similar standard while pushing for "engagement".
> You say this after the president of the United States has incited a seditious, violet mob to attack the Capitol because he's a sore loser.
By this logic pro-BLM democrats (including some high level pro-BLM politicians) incited numerous violent mobs over the course of 2020 to attack Seattle and Portland and usurp rule-of-law. But when it happened then the protests were "fiery but mostly peaceful" because "collateral damage is okay if it is done in the name of grappling with racism". Now that the other side has gathered to protest what they see as injustices, it's "a coup" and "terrorism" because of the bad actors who postponed congress for a few hours despite the fact that the vast majority of the people at the protest were peacefully protesting.
BLM was protesting the injustice of systematic oppression that results in black people bejng murdered by police. 93% of the protests were entirely peaceful. In the other 7%, it is not clear if the violence was instigated by citizens or police.
On the right, you have people who storm the US fucking Capitol building while they are confirming the next POTUS. They were trying to disrupt the federal government. Some of them had zip tie handcuffs and were reportedly looking for VP Pence.
If you cannot see the clear daylight between those two things, and insist on reducing it to “violence on both sides”, then I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills.
> On the right, you have people who storm the US fucking Capitol building while they are confirming the next POTUS.
Could you directly address that time back in June when armed BLM protestors stormed Capitol Hill in Seattle and kicked out all the police for a month?[0] Why does that event get a pass in the context of this conversation?
Why should we consider it a tragedy that people were occupying this building? I certainly don't see any reason to, just like I didn't see any reason to consider the occupation of the two police stations (and destruction of one) a tragedy.
The symbolism is what's important. This building, the largest and tallest and most ornate of all the government buildings in DC, is the beating heart of the US government. To take it over is to strike at the very heart of the government, and to have one branch taken over by instigation by the other branch, it is horrific. Because the consequences are a collapse of this society. With no functioning US Government, the United States cease to be united. It's an existential symbol, and that's why terrorists attempted to target it on 9/11 and why terrorists targeted it this week.
CHAZ was awful, a complete failure for everyone involved. Police escalated during protests, then when it got too hot, they pulled a LA Riots style retreat. Protesters became violent and undercut the moral fiber of their message, going from patriots to criminals very quickly.
My understanding was the police decided to withdraw from the area due to the intensity. It looks like the Seattle people rejected law enforcement, but weren't trying to overthrow the government.
Not all violence is equal. Overthrowing the US federal government because you didn't win is very different than CHAZ. Both can be disgusting while acknowledging that FEDERAL INSURRECTION AND ATTACKING DEMOCRACY IS WORSE THAN CHAZ.
I was in agreement with you until the final paragraph in which you basically attempt to rationalize why protestors breaking into the congress building are somehow much worse than the protestor behavior during CHAZ. A bunch of protestors kicking police out of your city block for a month is an affront to democracy every bit as much as protestors disrupting a congressional meeting for a few hours. In a democracy we obey laws and protest peacefully if we don't like something. Breaking down rule of law is never acceptable.
The reason they are different was in original intent, and what outside factors influenced the transition. They both turned into shitshows. The DC shitshow was 100% the fault of the people present and the strongman authoritarians who incited them. The CHAZ shitshow must be blamed on a number of actors, including the protesters, police who were present, etc.
I didn't say it was 100% because of systemic racism, just largely attributed to systemic racism. If you need a citation for that, just look at BLM movement in 2020.
There are thousands of sociology and history faculty around the country who study this for a living, publishing hundreds of peer reviewed books on the topic annually in top university presses. The research has been ongoing and clear for decades.
This is a bit like saying "citation needed" for "the mitochondria is the workhorse of the cell". You just sort of gesture broadly at literally an entire field that studies this stuff.
It takes almost no effort to look up some faculty member at your alma mater who studies crime, race, and policing, look up one of their books, and check it out.
One bit of feedback - your response comes off as a little aggressive. Even though I agree with you, I felt a little defensive when I read your comment. Maybe something like "this is pretty well studied, with lots of publications. Here's an overview that I think is particularly good and representative of the consensus. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-cap..."
Nate silver is the laughing stock of that entire community, including many of who repeatedly beat his predictions over and over and over. Anything that clown puts out is a joke.
This is... not true? I listen to some of his podcasts, and he seems to be pretty grounded in his approach. Do you have a specific criticism of his process?
(Also, this article was not written by him. That kind of diminishes your point, unless you argue that all authors on 538 deserve your disdain by association?)
It's literally on his website, and yes it's true (about him, no idea about the other people on his site). There's a lot of drama and such in that entire space, and I've spent many months following it all and listening to many different viewpoints from different people in that space. Each election/primaries cycle it's the same story over and over, Nate silver is cringingly wrong, states the opposite of truth as fact. On the other hand, you have other groups of people/companies who are like an order of magnitude quantifiably/verifiably more accurate, and they all make jokes about his "predictions." Basically he made a baseball algorithm, sold out, and now uses his influence to do what he's paid to do, support an agenda, just like CNN/Fox and other super biased news sources.
Yes I've wanted to say this, that in legal terms systemic racism can't be proven, but I've already kicked the bee hive enough. PS not saying racism isn't real, only that it's not as clear of an issue as everyone acts like it is.
Ask yourself honestly. If BLM or an Islamic American group had done the same thing yesterday. How many deaths would there have been? I'm guessing we'd be counting in percentages not fingers...something like 75% dead, 25% captured/in prison.
For doing the SAME thing in the SAME location.
I know, it's hard to prove, here say, but you know it's true. Snipers would've been out in force. Cops were high fiving and letting these people in. National Guard was told to stand down. Police were taking selfies with confederates holding flags in the People's building.
This was a desecration of democracy and the rule of law in America. Everyone responsible needs at least 20 years in prison. No exceptions. Trying to disrupt our republic should have some consequences, no?
It is not a clear issue, because it involves very subtle but crucial changes in attitudes from authorities to people of different categories.
However, from my understanding, the research all seems to be pretty directionally consistent - minorities in the US receive worse treatment from the justice system. Here's a good overview of why the statistics might be under-reporting the size of the impact: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-cap...
Also, there are more white people than black people. So? Black people are something like 5x more likely to be arrested in a traffic stop. It's not the same at all.
There's a difference between attacking the Capitol and attacking a Pizza Hut. There's also a difference between a protestor throwing a firework at a courthouse and taking tactical gear and weapons with a couple hundred buddies into a legislature.
This equivalence between BLM and the mobbing of the Capitol is confusing to be because it's so obviously a false one.
> There's a difference between attacking the Capitol and attacking a Pizza Hut
What's the difference? In both cases the stated goal of the protests was not to "break stuff" so if that ends up happening, is that the protest's fault?
> There's also a difference between a protestor throwing a firework at a courthouse and taking tactical gear and weapons with a couple hundred buddies into a legislature.
What about armed protestors forcibly ejecting police from a section of the city and setting up a police-free zone?
> This equivalence between BLM and the mobbing of the Capitol is confusing to be because it's so obviously a false one.
It's not equivalent, just similar. In both cases peaceful protesting of perceived injustice is the stated goal, and in both cases bad actors go renegade and break down rule-of-law.
The Pizza Hut isn't in the process of processing Electoral College votes for the next president of the United States. Disrupting the delivery of pizzas is not in the same category as disrupting the selection of the president.
This wasn't just a riot. It wasn't just a protest. Wasn't just an attack on a building. It wasn't just some vandalism. It was an attack on the last step of the presidential election process.
The purpose of the protest was not to breach congress and stop the processing of the Electoral College votes. A small minority of protestors decided to do that. If we are going to do that and say the entire protest is bad if contained a few bad actors, then in order to not be hypocritical we need to condemn any BLM protest that had bad actors, including the one that resulted in CHAZ.
Or, you can recognize the right to assemble and protest while condemning non-peaceful protesting. I personally unequivocally condemn the violence that occurred in both BLM and Trump protests. I also support the right to gather and peacefully protest, for both BLM and Pro-Trump supporters.
I note the delicious irony of saying "a small minority of protestors", though I suspect that the irony will be lost on those who would benefit from thinking about it.
Still, I see a difference that matters between a small minority trying to take over a police station or destroy a Pizza Hut (bad enough, and worthy of condemnation) and a small minority trying to interfere with the presidential succession (much worse).
There is also plain hypocrisy in both camps, when one camp riots, the other camp pretends not to understand that there is festering anger from injustice.
But every time, whenever one camps riots, they feel justified
and righteous, and the opposing camp, feels enlightened as to
and justified in retaliation.
WOKE is bad.
EXTREME privilege is bad.
Finding common ground and coming back to our senses might save us all.
When you use words such as seditious and mob, I want to remind you that words have power and that those words don’t unify but rather tend to divide and amplify hatred on both sides.
There were many instances where protests got out of hand this summer and courthouses and police stations were destroyed; entire city blocks were taken over and those responsible enacted and enforced their own laws. The actions weren’t referred to as sedition and most media outlets avoided words like mob, treason, etc.
Of course, don’t take my statement to mean I condone ANY case of violence, rioting, property damage, etc. (And in all cases those responsible and those inciting violence should be held accountable) but being consistent and avoiding charged language when depicting civil unrest would go a long way to heal the country rather than to divide it.
I don't disagree the problem is the left has so many examples that this hypocrisy is just excruciating to me. You literally have people creating lists to blackball anyone who supports trump, praised and lauded by some political people high up on the food chain. I rarely ever see the left actively support an ACTUAL view of "unity," and believe me, I truly look for it by looking at all opposing views on my social media, on people I disagree with, etc.
> You literally have people creating lists to blackball anyone who supports trump
Like the way Clarence Thomas's wife made lists of people not loyal to Trump to be fired?
"Axios first reported that a "well-connected network of conservative activists" is drawing up lists of officials they perceive to be anti-Trump, who are then flagged to be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists."
This is about the protests over the summer, not the recent insurrection. Yes, I'm calling it that. I think functionally it matters a bit more if the USAG is using words like "sedition" compared to media outlets or internet posters.
> There were many instances where protests got out of hand this summer and courthouses and police stations were destroyed;
The white supremacist terrorists's goal yesterday was to prevent a formal certification process that's central to the transition of executive power. Many people were armed and prepared for violence: multiple IEDs were found, multiple people had body armor, multiple people had loaded firearms & extra ammunition, people brought a guillitine, people were shouting chants about killing senators & reps, multiple people had zip-ties or handcuffs. That is sedition.
Unlike BLM protestors, the terrorist's intent was a coup: they wanted to undermine a democracy's most important legal process. BLM wants to use legal means to revolutionize the country's public safety, primarily via re-allocating city and state police budgets to programs that have effective track records of increasing public safety and not ending in the murder of Black people.
You're either being willfully ignorant, or arguing in bad faith.
Calling for your people to all organize outside of the capitol building, claiming that the election was fraudulent without providing evidence, and then telling the active terrorists "we love you" should be sufficient evidence for you.
You are making assumptions on what was in President Trump's brain from a few short tweets. The white house is on the opposite side of the mall as the congress building. How do you know he wasn't saying "we love you" to the huge turnout of people gathered around the Washington monument right near the white house? How do you know he was specifically praising the tiny minority of the protestors that broke into congress?
The President is responsible for his words and actions, not solely his feelings and thoughts. If he can't effectively communicate his intention to the point he 'accidentally' whips is supporters into a seditious frenzy that makes him unfit for office.
Romney, American Elections, Press "enemy of the people", American 3rd world country, Republicans Fighting/Boxing, Fight Bad People, Pence and Constitution, Congress addressing assault on country, Walk down to Capitol with me, Show strength and be strong, Demand congress do the right thing lawfully, March over peacefully and patriotically make voices heard, Integrity of elections and country, Country under siege, blah blah
and it's had a tremendous impact that we got rid of catch and release we got rid of all of the stuff that we had to live with but now the caravans they think biden's getting in the caravans are forming again they want to come in again and rip off our country can't let it happen as this enormous crowd shows we have truth and justice on our side we have a deep and enduring love for america in our hearts we love our country we have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls together we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people by the people and for the people our brightest days are before us our greatest achievements still wait i think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody until i came along had any idea how corrupt our elections were and again most people would stand there at nine o'clock in the evening and say i want to thank
you very much and they go off to some other life but i said something's wrong here something's really wrong can't have happened and we fight we fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell you're not gonna have a country anymore our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun my fellow americans for our movement for our children and for our beloved country and i say this despite all that's happened the best is yet to come so we're going to we're going to walk down pennsylvania avenue i love pennsylvania and we're going to the capitol and we're going to try and give the democrats are hopeless they're never voting for anything not even one vote but we're going to try and give our republicans the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help we're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country so let's walk down pennsylvania avenue i want to thank you all god bless you and god bless america thank you all for being here this is incredible thank you very much
But you are more right than wrong, he could easily have channeled all that energy into something truly horrible just by saying “It’s the Socialists! Let’s get the bastards!”
This is like people who think judges are dumb and apply the law mechanically and strictly as written without any room for context or nuance.
The fact is there is a history of Trump supporters turning violent after Trump rallies and speeches. It’s an established pattern that requires willfully ignoring to contend he has plausible deniability.
It's no different than BLM members burning down cities. There's this sort of thing on both sides which don't represent the larger group.
Also, FWIW, I don't support anything remotely close to storming building, but people on the left certainly are quick to blame when I've watched exact same thing happen over the last year or two.
The beauty (and horror) of a lot of Trump's incitement is he always does it implicitly as opposed to explicitly. It's not about quotes and verbage as much as meaning and intent.
That being said, his incitement Wednesday was actually pretty explicit. From the Times: Trump said "If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore" before urging supporters to go to the capital. Sounds like a pretty powerful incitement from a sitting President.
Just because he followed up with "peacefully" later doesn't negate him saying 'fight like hell'. I mean, most of the problematic things Trump has said have been followed/preceded by things intended to make them look less problematic.
I wasn't intentionally leaving anything out though, I took that quote directly from the Times.
> Please cite me tweets/descriptions of where he incited anything.
It's not gonna happen, because it didn't happen. I've asked everyone I know to cite the same thing, and no one has been able to. Of course, that won't stop the narrative, because truth has become irrelevant.
EDIT: I find it amusing that even the people that have responded to you so far, still haven't actually cited anything yet.
Here's a video that he posted after the events at the capitol that was deleted where he keeps suggesting the election was stolen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcfcTB9-S2s
Terrible examples, the 3rd one was after the event, the first one literally isn't inciting anything unless you have a sheer irrational hatred for trump and only see things through an incredibly one dimensional, emotional POV where he can't even scratch his chin without it upsetting you.
Because I've already done this for so many other people that I'm exhausted. Go f*cking read the speech yourself. What did he think would happen when he asked his supporters to "talk to their representatives" literally as they are voting? Go have a nice cup of tea?
They are sea-lioning. They are going to constantly ask for "evidence", and then when provided for it, act as if it's biased/false/non-existant and then restate the question. The goal is to put all the labor of the conversation and gathering of sources onto you while they just get to reply: "I don't believe that, the MSM is biased, show me another source".
Are you claiming specifically biased-right-wing <insert journal name> isn't biased? MSM (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC) is 10% as biased (to the left), Fox (probably 50% biased to the right), etc. Least biased is probably Reuters, AP, and PBS, and maybe NPR.
Local news is usually not so biased either.
But Washington Times, Breitbart, Random Youtube Vlogger, etc...none of those can be trusted. That's why they're never linked to on Hackernews, except maybe in comments, I'd imagine.
They're basically tabloids. Good to cross-reference with Snopes or Politifact if you are curious what's true. Personally, I like to read multiple sources and google a topic to get a better picture to see other 'takes'. Only way to not get bubble/group think.
“We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol,” said Mr. Trump. “We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
I'm going to presume the WSJ did their work properly and you can watch him say those words in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X0KIYInLHc - that's a 70 minute long speech claiming (not in the exact words) "we have been defrauded!" and then saying those words. Make a less-than-intelligent, not-shy-to-use-violence (should I cite the demographics of Trump voters for you?), crowd mad and then tell them "We're going to go there and give them a piece of our mind.", geez, what do you expect was going to happen?
No, he never uttered "I want you to go there and beat up the cops with anything you find, break the windows, vandalize the building, and terrorize those lawmakers so they put me back into power.", he's smart enough to never explicitly say things that will get him in trouble, just like the 11780 phone call or asking Comey to back off from Michael Flynn.
"And after this, we're going to walk down there, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down ... to the Capitol and we are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women," Trump told the crowd. "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."
He told people to go to the capital, "take back our country", and you can't do it with weakness, you need to do it with strength. That seems pretty straightforward to me. And he did it all while fanning the flames by repeating discredited conspiracy theories that he knows plays to the people in attendance.
“I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be when people realize that this is a policy that they defend"
"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." - Maxine Waters
Notice how this is advocating the use of free speech? Notice the lack of violent words like "attack" "battle" "combat" "fight" etc? Do you notice just how different this is than the rhetoric employed by Trump, Guiliani, etc. recently?
“I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be when people realize that this is a policy that they defend,” Pelosi said during a press conference. “It’s a horrible thing, and I don’t see any prospect for legislation here.” - Nancy Pelosi
Definition of uprising
: an act or instance of rising up
especially : a usually localized act of popular violence in defiance usually of an established government
If the left-leaning subreddits were also promoting hate, misinformation and violence then they would be banned too. It's not favouritism, the "one side" that's being targeted is the side that's breaking the platform's rules.
They literally tried to put double standards in the rules[0]. But realized that was a little bit too blatant and backtracked after. "the rule on hate (...) does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority "
Those are at worst unsubstantiated, and contain truth like how Russia interfered in the election and Trump's campaign accepted their help. Totally different than something like "the election was rigged", which was tested and failed in court, but still gets shouted from the rooftops, leading to dangerous outcomes like what we saw in DC.
>Totally different than something like "the election was rigged", which was tested and failed in court, but still gets shouted from the rooftops, leading to dangerous outcomes like what we saw in DC.
Yes, that was untrue, ridiculous, and in the end became dangerous. I'm pointing out the usual hypocrisy on both the left and the right when it comes to their own pet causes.
This article was written clearly before the Mueller report was disseminated to the public, and quotes William Barr's letter of the report which we now Mueller took great exception to. I don't think it's a great resource at this point in time.
Here is my money quote from the report:
> If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.
Of course there was obstruction from Trump - he has the personality of a mob boss. That doesn't shock me. I'm talking about owning up to the fact that he legitimately won a fair election in 2016.
> are you seriously claiming Trump won because of Russia?
That Russia helped Trump is generally agreed upon. Was it the only factor in his win? Of course not.
But your whataboutism here doesn't hold water. Sure, there are subreddits that commonly exaggerated the truth about the Russia thing. Should they should get banned, since r/donaldtrump got banned for supporting violence? The two issues are so very different. I do not see hypocrisy in this case.
>That Russia helped Trump is generally agreed upon.
It is only agreed upon when you don't talk to people outside of your own echo chamber. In 2016, people were just shocked that so many people could vote for a loathsome person like Trump. Dems were unhappy and looked for someone to blame, except themselves for running such a weak candidate. 2020 was just as fair an election, and Trump got even more votes than 2016.
>Sure, there are subreddits that commonly exaggerated the truth about the Russia thing. Should they should get banned, since r/donaldtrump got banned for supporting violence?
What is the standard? Misinformation is OK? Anyway, I don't think an argument here will change anyone's views. People will eventually realize that the Dems have been conning their supporters for quite a while now.
No one is being censored. You’re perfectly welcome to go on 4chan or breitbart or parler or even other subreddits or just build a new platform. No one is entitled to use other people’s resources and effort to have their views amplified without moderation by those people offering that service.
Edit: every time I post a comment like this here I get downvoted. I’m not complaining, downvote away. But I have to wonder if the folks downvoting realize how much this site is moderated and how much they’re actively participating in it.
> But I have to wonder if the folks downvoting realize how much this site is moderated
This site currently doesn't ban people just because the post is disagreeable. I've managed to respectfully discuss inflammatory topics here before, even though I'm usually the one with the unpopular opinion. On reddit people just get downvoted to oblivion or banned on sight if they post anything that offends the sensibilities of the group.
> "We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”
From the post itself. The subreddit was banned for breaking ToS. I'd expect the same on this site if I were to repeatedly call for violence.
This argument isn't valid when literally 80 million people support a different idea. At some point when a platform gets large enough it's egregious to shut down so many views especially when any rational human can see the reasons are incredibly biased.
I take it you don't remember what life was like before the Internet was a thing.
A major city would have approximately four local TV stations with any kind of news organization and two newspapers. Maybe you'd have CNN if you had cable, which a lot of people didn't have. I could guarantee you right here that none of them would platform extreme viewpoints, and the country was much better off for it. I guess if you lived in NYC you'd have a few more options, but they were still pretty limited. And none of these were interactive in any way we'd recognize: maybe, at the most, you'd get a letter to the editor published if you got lucky.
The idea where anyone could say anything and be given a massive platform on an international social network that most of the population uses is a very, very new development.
Algorithm-driven social media where anyone can post whatever is actively harmful to our country. Right now, if you view any YouTube videos about WW2, you'll start getting videos "explaining" that the Holocaust was a hoax in your recommendations. If you're thinking about getting into hunting, and you look up gun reviews on YouTube, your recommendations are going to fill up with "Stop the Steal" and QAnon and other boogaloo propaganda. This is the kind of behavior that, if allowed to continue, will absolutely and utterly burn down society.
Sorry, I'm not talking about Reddit specially. The cultural pendulum travels back and forth so one day, sooner than you think, the people you disagree with will make the editorial decisions for the major social media platforms. If you want to make it the rule that it's fine for platforms like that to remove their political opponents, by all means I just suspect you or your children will regret it.
You didn't address my point. What about undermining the concept of ownership? You're saying that if I produce a website I should not be allowed to control what is posted there? Who is going to enforce that? I suspect you or your children would regret that sort of thing as well.
I think you are missing the point because you are thinking too short term. Reddit likely won't exist/won't be as popular in a decade or two, the current owners would still own it but it won't be part of the cultural zeitgeist in the same way. Think AM Radio, Cable TV, Friendster or MySpace. Instead it will be replaced with something else, that something else might not even be called social media, and that thing will be controlled by people with a different political ideology than who currently control Reddit.
I don't know how old you are but do you recall the mid to late 90s/early 2000's in the US? Back then we had to fight so shows like South Park could be shown on cable television (a private platform) due to the fact that the general consensus among the population was that content like that offended their personal and religious values and should be prohibited. Those exact people won't be in power again, but people similar to them almost certainly will. Moves like this hand them a weapon to use against you.
Taking your South Park example, how would that work in your fictionalized world in the 90's? How does it get shown on TV and when?
There's no way your idea makes any sense. It's impossible to implement -- unless of course we have no private ownership and the government runs and pays for everything but I feel like that would be even worse.
Cable TV didn't want to run "offensive" shows because their advertisers wouldn't pay to advertise with them if they did. So who's going to pay under your plan? Who's going to pay to host all this on the Internet?
How are they being censored? They are perfectly fine to host their community elsewhere, and no one from the state has kicked in their door and hauled them off to a black site.
This and other comments you've been posting (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25688419) have been breaking the site guidelines egregiously. That's dismaying and disappointing. We ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so please stop doing it.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and only post when you can keep that standard. Yes, we tell everyone else (including ourselves) the same thing. There's no exemption for being right, or feeling strongly. Nor does it depend on how badly other people behave.
Thank you. To reiterate, however, tolerant societies should not and cannot tolerate intolerance.
People promoting the “election fraud” lie, or supporting the insurrection/coup attempt are undermining democracy and are borderline seditious. It’s not okay to spread that lie, and if not ban, HN should at least officially condemn those false and odious beliefs.
Right now I believe it’s our civic duty to make clear that those beliefs are unacceptable and anti-democratic and will not be tolerated.
I don’t know if you really understand that an armed mob attempted to take hostage members of Congress in order to stop the certification of the new, legitimately elected President.
What do you believe? If supporting that isn’t the line that someone should be condemned for crossing, and shunned, then what is?
HN - your silence is complicity. How do you think people of color feel reading HN comments where folks argue how racism isn’t really a thing or was “solved” in the 60s? Do they feel like people are being kind according to the guidelines?
What does it say about you if you ban me for what I said, but keep the racists and folks who wouldn’t mind seeing Trump get three or four or five more terms, because I’m honest about my beliefs but they hide behind junior-high level verbal wordplay?
Content moderation is a form of free speech. You don't get to tell others what to do just because of your wayward political views. They taught us this in elementary school.
I agree - but as I've said above at some point, at some certain size, moderation goes very quickly to censorship when you go deleting the largest platform by far for one side to discuss things, when they're NOT actually doing anything that thousands of other subreddits do that aren't banned.
No matter how you try to shoehorn it in there, it is not censorship for someone not to provide you a platform. Your viewpoint and perspective is free to be shared on several other platforms. They're not as big? So what? Your right to speak is not "your right to audience the size of your choosing".
When people (especially children) can't abide by social norms they are shut down. Maybe that is a time out in the corner. Maybe it is being asked to leave the party. Reddit, Twitter, etc are no different. You go to their house, you abide by their rules. If you don't, hard to be suprised when they show you the door.
The solution is probably something along the line of preventing unverified content to be published to millions of followers, but that would kill their business...
The way people blindly defend this simplified notion of Free Speech makes it seem as though they believe it is some kind of universally guaranteed right that is like a law of physics. No, we enjoy this luxury of debating the ethics of free speech because we live in a society that permits it. Right now, that society faces an imminent threat from violent insurrectionists. We need to prevent them from organizing and carrying out their plan. I don't care if it wades into questionable ethical territory. This is not the time for a nuanced debate. This is the time for action.
Free speech is not the protection of the speech you don't mind. It is the protection of the speech you vigorously hate. The speech you don't mind needs no special protection. To borrow a quote from Scott Alexander: "But then someone else says “Well, if they get their exception, I deserve my exception,” and then someone else says “Well, if those two get exceptions, I’m out” [...] Civilization didn’t conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless they are actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all."
I'm all for acknowledging the problems of free speech but I don't like the emergency powers argument either. It's far too easy to sacrifice your virtues, whatever they might be (sacrifice some privacy to catch terrorists, sacrifice social progress to pump the economy).
Also lets forget that in the summer of 2020, there was nationwide protest that included arson, looting, and violent confrontation with police. Almost all of it coordinated on the same social media properties.
> "We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”
This is what they were banned for. Find me evidence that /r/BLM and its moderators were doing the same and I'll gladly cede the point.
Knee-jerk reactions are always the appropriate response and have never gone bad afterwards. Its important to act fast without thinking of the consequences because the stakes are so high. Optics and sending a message right now is everything
imo with such a doubling down on politics and partisanship, reddit is limiting its own audience. just visiting the front page for me is enough to dissuade me from using it with all the cringy center left takes being used on every subreddit and filling the home page.
why are subreddits like “photos” or “pets” littered with “orange man bad” posts?
Well I suppose after inciting a mob to storm the parliament it's entirely defensible his group gets the ban. I am generally not a fan of banning political groups based on their stance alone but this one is getting dangerous.
For what it's worth, there were a few other bans yesterday:
* The top moderator of /r/conspiracy (just gonna quote the SRD thread: "At times this mod would spam over 100 pro-Trump posts a day, deleting their posts and spamming them over and over until they got the response they wanted, all while banning dozens of people per post. Anyone that openly challenged them or Trump would be immediacy banned.") [0]
So let me get this straight: It was fine when violence was insighted during the Arab Spring, but now it's not ok? I'm British and live in England so have no skin in the game, just amazed at the double standards by the major social media companies. On second thoughts perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised.
Violence is permissible only when you have no other option: no votes no representatives, no reliable elections, no fair courts etc. When America (or any other country) lacks those then the people can and should take to the streets. But we're not there. We have people inciting violence because they lost a fair election (by a wide margin). They had their chance in the battle of minds, at the poll booth, in the courts and even in the senate. They've lost fair and square.
And they've always had this power. It's only become problematic in the past few months when white supremacists and their sympathizers felt pressure of being marginalized off of major platforms. It was never a problem before then.
At some point, this is soon going to backfire a lot and get a lot more harmful and uglier (for the people and the country). I’m kinda tired of every platform suddenly having the courage to do something while some of these platforms should’ve done a whole lot more over the years before the elections.
All these actions also seem to further fuel the beliefs that all the people who (partially or fully) supported Trump are being suppressed and beaten down by conspirators on the other side.
I don’t know the answers, but collectively humans of the last couple of decades have not figured out how to deal with misinformation in the Internet age. I wonder what the results of any trials have been. Shorter memory recall makes it seem like polarization has increased and gotten more violent.
Twenty years from now we won't talk much about Donald Trump. However, every time we do, the sacking of the US capitol will be the top thing we link to his presidency. Probably the only thing. For many of his supporters, the only thing they will be remembered for is their support of him.
Reddit isn't stupid. This is still sinking in for many, and for those ahead of the curve they're doing everything they can to disassociate themselves from any hint of support or enablement as quickly as possible.
If that's all you believe he'll be remembered for then you are willfully ignorant. Under his administration he has:
1. Brought black and hispanic unemployment to record lows.
2. The DOW tied the record for the most consecutive all-time closing highs in a row.
3. Signed the biggest package of tax cuts and reforms in history.
4. United States is a net natural gas exporter for the first time since 1957.
5. Reduced illegal border crossings.
6. Improved relations with North Korea.
7. Promoted equitable and fair trade deals with a host of countries like South Korea, Japan, and other Middle East countries.
8. Signed the Right-To-Try legislation that allowed for patients to explore experimental treatments that have not necessarily been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
As I was saying, this is still sinking in for many. I'm not saying these things won't be listed in some encyclopedia page, obviously history will give a thorough account of his time in power.
However, children who are born this year won't be spending a lot of time in history class covering Trump's mundane policy victories in school. They'll be looking at the bullet points, and the first one will be about his incitement of a mob to sack the US capitol and shed blood in his name.
Something tells me that internet-fueled political division isn't going away just because social media sites are starting to crack down and Trump is leaving office...
Ban everyone who disagrees with you and audit users who “MAY” have voted for Trump? That’s your solution?
It’s quite sad that even HN is turning more and more into the likes of /r/politics. Quality discussion is basically down the drain on any thread that has any hint of politics. What comes after banning these people with your “internal auditing team”, re-education camps for the half of the country you hate?
Reddit are front of the queue of people who were warned and ignored the problem for years because of page views. This stinks of bolting the door after the horse has bolted. Now /DonaldTrump is likely going to shrink we can close it.
You know what scares the shit out of me, to use your phrasing? The people on that site murdering me or overthrowing the government, so that they seize power and elections end or become irrelevant.
“The free Internet” has value, but it’s not the only thing that has value. When it conflicts with other values, then there has to be a nuanced resolution.
"We can guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech." Idi Amin.
This year I have barely spoken more than 30 minutes to someone in real life, per day. If my interactions over the internet were to be as they say curated, I would effectively be silenced.
I was a frequent reader of r/dt a few years back, as the top poster was. There was nothing in particular there, no trend, that was any more terrible than what I could find in my bookshelf. Deal with it.
> drag you deeper into the rabbit hole of extremism
This is what banning /r/the_donald and now /r/donaldtrump did. It doesn't stop the users from believing what they believe, it just further isolates them in an echo changer while simultaneously reinforcing the belief that the liberal media is "out to get them".
But crucially, it also makes it much more difficult for unwitting people to start discovering it. The point is to slow the spread, not to reach the people who are already there.
The idea that the only way to protect unwitting people from falling into some undesirable line of thinking is to limit what they see to the desirable line of thinking seems doomed to fail. Either discourse works and you expect people can be made to come to their own sensible conclusions or discourse doesn't work and every change from the norm must be subversive. I.e. tucking it away doesn't guarantee it ends up less visible to people it just guarantees it will be less visible to the system tucking it away. People are still going to share ideas that don't agree with the majority opinion but now those hearing have zero tools or experience for dealing with such claims.
Memes as viruses seems apt. There's a fine balance between exposure leading to herd immunity, and pure isolation making the entire population susceptible to being swept up in a collective insanity once a novel one emerges or re-emerges from generational turnover (eg Marxism or Nazism.) Anyone pretending like one or the other is a global maximum is wrong, and pulling us closer to something non-balanced creates risk around the worst case befalling us in that regime.
The obvious question in this analogy is if there's anything akin to a vaccine. Well, when it comes to bigotry, I think having people you care about in your life that are in tribes or groups being demonized by bigots is just that. And a society of liberal norms of the free exchange of ideas and democracies acts similar to a culture of hand washing and cleanliness in a society where people are free to interact with the sick.
> simultaneously reinforcing the belief that the liberal media is "out to get them".
These people are brainwashed. No concrete action normies take can convince them. They have to decide to get better and ask for help. And we must help them, without judgment or scolding, when that happens. But at some point, you have to stop a policy of appeasement because it doesn't work. They'll just keep pushing and taking more and more.
Leave it alone. Reddit did the right thing early on by minimizing /r/td spam on the front page. Aside from that I'm convinced there were no problems posed by /r/td or /r/donaldtrump aside from those invented by the small, vocal minority of pearl-clutchers complaining that someone somewhere on Reddit was posting things they disagreed with.
An interesting thought exercise is if the whole thing which happened would have been avoided if they were allowed to stay on reddit. They were driven to another site, and I can say for sure the level of extremism was unchecked in comparison by their own community at that point. On reddit, they at least were exposed to more formalized community moderation as well as regular influx of more level headed people who often tried to talk sense into some of the more extreme members. I think some good faith efforts and ground rules were in place on the new site, but a lot of this insurrection shit seems like it would have gone very differently on a more public facing reddit subforum.
Would you take down posts around organising an attempted coup? Where is the line? I'm asking because I see both sides but err on your side but I also know it's a very suboptimal solution.
Note that Fox News remains the most-watched cable news network - though online, it ranks after CNN and NYT (and possibly others, depending on the metric).
Because Fox is the primary "mainstream" news source for conservative viewers. There are many more left-leaning news networks so their viewers are more divided. The majority of remaining news channels/networks/etc. have liberal bias.
Viewers have various options to choose from (eg CNN, MSNBC, Fox, Newsmax, ...). The divion CNN+MSNBC vs Fox (in terms of, say, viewership or ad revenue) seems to be roughly comparable to what you'd expect from voter demographics.
If, say, Newsmax rose to prominence and we'd see more fragmentation on the 'right', or CNN and MSNBC were to merge, and we'd see less fragmentation on the 'left', what would that change?
Just looking at the "AllSides Media Bias Chart" there are more "major" sources that are left-leaning than right [0]. The chart includes top sources by traffic. I mean this doesn't calculate all traffic and determine if in general left sources are more viewed but it's a start.
That’s a very subjective chart and by their own admission doesn’t even try to compare for honesty or credibility. Most of the two R columns routinely run fake or highly selective coverage to a degree which only Democracy Now and certain HuffPost writers approach.
There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.
This desire to present a false equivalence is understandable - it makes it easier to avoid acknowledging a major schism in the country - but the misrepresentations requires are a disservice to their readers. Just the fact that The Economist is listed as leftist to the same degree that The Post Millenial or NY Post are listed as right wing tells you how interested they are in accuracy!
> The AllSides Media Bias Chart is more comprehensive in its methodology than any other media bias chart on the Web. While other media bias charts show you the subjective opinion of the one person who made it, our ratings are based based on multipartisan, scientific analysis.
> and by their own admission doesn’t even try to compare for honesty or credibility
I don't think this matters in the context of the point I was making.
> Most of the two R columns routinely run fake or highly selective coverage
Hmm, so this further reduces the number of quality right-leaning sources. Seems to further prove my point. Remember, the chart shows sites with the most traffic.
> There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.
Maybe, but it doesn't matter in the context of my point. Also, if they are clear about their biases it shouldn't matter, unless presenting outright lies. Many left-leaning sources try to come off like they are objective. Also:
> A leading New Yorker writer omits crucial facts to run interference for Joe Biden against serious allegations of corruption in Ukraine, writes Joe Lauria. [0]
Many left-leaning sources were also guilty of this (twitter going so far as take down the tweet from the NY Post as "hacked information" even though there was zero evidence this was the case, and Facebook de-prioritizing shared link of the same).
This is my opinion and based around some examples I've seen, but I believe that conservative sources have a tougher time making money, because people will attack their ad-partners for supporting those companies. I'd like to see where this happens to left-leaning sources.
There's a reason you're reacting to my comparison of these people to ISIS, rather than suggesting that ISIS recruitment videos be permitted. ISIS represents something "beyond the pale", so obviously bad that it's okay if we censor it because it's dangerous and seditious.
You object to the comparison because it's an attack. We all know ISIS is bad, so the only reason to comparing these people to them is to make it seem like they're bad too, even though they're trying to say a lot of reasonable things if someone would just listen with an open mind!
Obviously, not everyone on r/DonaldTrump is down to invade the capitol. I'm sure there are plenty of people who support ISIS that don't support their violence either. No group is homogenously made up of cartoon villains. But that doesn't mean we need to be fine with the recruiting grounds for their most violent sects.
To be clear, your rhetorical position is the exact same as mine. You're perfectly fine with the exact same censorship you're ostensibly criticizing. You just want the line to be drawn somewhere else.
It is certainly looking that way to me. At least ~80% of them. They're all going along with this bullshit apart from a few more principled ones who are in it for the money/ self enrichment only.
I think it's unfortunate that you feel this way, especially if it's without any evidence. I wouldn't say that 80% of liberals are communists and socialists. I think this mentality will only further the division between sides.
I don't believe most conservatives agree with his rhetoric, they just like his policies for the most part. They probably don't even like him much, they just dislike the direction the democratic side is going enough to vote for him.
> I don't believe most conservatives agree with his rhetoric, they just like his policies for the most part. They probably don't even like him much, they just dislike the direction the democratic side is going enough to vote for him.
"I don't care for Hitler's rhetoric, I just voted for the Nazis because I think he has some good ideas about infrastructure and I like his jobs plan" doesn't exactly come across as sympathetic. Especially not after it becomes obvious where the trains are going.
If you're a conservative or a Republican who supports Trump for his politics alone, or because he was the R and you hate the D, the moral thing to do as of January 6 is to disavow Trump entirely, and look for another candidate who supports his views, or perhaps consider supporting a third party. Not to dig in and continue making excuses for him and his supporters.
Can you be upset and disavow what someone says but still support them? The instant someone says something "bad" they should be just thrown out?
I don't agree with a lot of what Trump says, but I don't hold him accountable for others' actions unless he specifically called for violence which I don't think he did in this case. He does say some questionable things, but has always disavowed violence on both sides.
Obama has promulgated lots of anti-police rhetoric, and there are some who would blame him for certain attacks on police. I disagree with things he said, but would not blame him for any of that.
If you truly can't see any relationship between Trump's rhetoric and the behavior of his extremist base - particularly with the conspiracy theory of the 2020 election being stolen from him - a conspiracy theory he continued to spread at every available moment and which provided the impetus behind numerous incidents of violence leading up to the events at the Capitol just days earlier - then we may be at an impasse.
As far as I can tell, Obama is considered "anti-police" simply because he supports BLM, but BLM have legitimate concerns about police violence and systemic racism in law enforcement, and voicing those concerns doesn't make one anti-police. I have yet to find an "anti-police" statement made by Obama which condemns all police and calls them all evil, that is at all equivalent to the vitriol or paranoia in Trump's rhetoric.
It seems like a false equivalence drawn between the two.
There are people out there that are crazy, and will use anything to justify their actions. Unless he called for a specific action, I don't see how he is to blame. It would be setting a bad precedent to blame or punish anyone that said something provacative that is not explicitly a call for inciting harm/violence. People need to be held responsible for their own actions.
I believe Obama used carefully picked statistics to say there is widespread racism in the police. There are likely racist people/cops, but I don't believe there is evidence to suggest widespread racism.
The media is more left leaning than 1) the median of the population and 2) the media was 20 years ago.
I think 1) is what's driving the "media is left" feeling. It is left compared to the median of society. To many people (not just on the far right), that feels like the media pushing leftist views/narratives/agendas.
Among the first few pages in many of my books are recommendations for other similar books from the same publisher, and not infrequently the author himself cites related works.
I agree. Why would you think that I thought the free Internet is the only thing that has value? That's a nonsensical position. My point was that if a company shuts this down with an SSL cert hack of some kind, it may be just or even backed by law enforcement, but it exposes a vector for suppression by corporations of the Internet that I had not considered before and we need to understand the high order effects from that.
Just yesterday HN had a link to an article on plaintext HTTP for the modern era. I'm not condoning illegal/dubious attempts to silence dissent, but loss of an SSL cert doesn't really suppress anyone's ability to communicate.
You're wrong to the degree SSL becomes a requirement burned into browsers, which seems highly likely and is partially true already for certain domains. Unless you're going to argue that being forced onto the non-web is not suppressing your ability to communicate, but if so that's a tough argument to dig into here.
edit: I should add here the thought exercise is that you are participating in speech that is legal and ethical but are overruled by SSL cert providers and are unable to get a root signed cert from anyone (or whatever other means of preventing SSL.) In that case, even if you are not hard blocked, having your speech be passed around the internet in cleartext also seems like it affects your ability to communicate in a negative way.
1) Browsers no longer let you (easily/ 2-click) override some ssl errors, and the overwhelming trend has been to start treating a lack of https similar to an ssl error, as far as ui goes.
2) Is this practically any different than saying newsgroups, or even bbs(?), still exist, so those avenues for free speech are viable remedies for being otherwise suppressed.
1. seems unlikely. I don't think there's any mainstream browser that presents http://myrandomsite.whatever/ as an SSL error, in the same way as, say https://google.com/ having an invalid certificate, nor is there ever likely to be.
To your first point: Firefox still lets you easily override a ssl error with 2 clicks. Go to the site, click "Advanced" and then click "Accept the risk and continue". Using the most up to date version of firefox on MacOS, Linux and Windows.
That's why you create some sort of police, have them look at those places, and watch if anything leads to some real world movement.
You should also watch it for damaging lies, and have a judiciary system that makes them fix any damage those lies create.
What you don't create is a paraestatal censor authority empowered to cut any information it wants out of the internet. (You don't create an estatal one either, but that's not what we are talking about here.)
This is like hearing someone at a bank saying they were scared a masked robber was going to murder them, and responding “were you scared of the customer who came in before them murdering you too?”
The terrorists who stormed the capital on Wednesday have a history of violence and connections to various far right extremist and terrorist groups. They came carrying weapons, zip ties and bombs. Don’t pretend there’s no difference between the two groups.
And the last 6 months of race riots? I'll take a few smashed windows and pictures taken in congress over tens of millions in burned and stolen property, assaults and murders in basically every city in the country. "Only my side's political violence is acceptable." That's what I get from facebook.
The BLM protests — the overwhelming majority of which were peaceful [1] — stretched over 6 months and involved thousands of events and millions of people. After all that… 19 people died [1].
The terrorist attack yesterday exceeded a quarter of that death toll in a matter of hours.
I don't know how to explain that invading our nation's capitol with the intent of capturing and murdering politicians is different than breaking into a Target.
I appreciate you taking the time to tell me how to think. I know what I saw both locally and on TV. You can give me as many bubble-filtered thoughts as you like, but you're trying to convince me that I saw and experienced something that I didn't see and experience.
Let me know when I can't get my wife's medication again because right wing ""terrorists"" smashed up my pharmacy, or when parts of my city are completely off limits for violence, or when one the teachers in my school district gets arrested for assaulting somebody filming them burning a car. I'm not losing sleep over congress getting delayed for a couple of hours. I'll keep my perspective that all political violence is bad, and that I want little to do with politics in general, but one side of extremists in particular has caused more problems for me than another.
"Your argument amounts to, 'when a customer enters the bank, it's okay.'"
Just because two groups have opposing political aims doesn't mean they're equivalent. One attempted to take our nation's capital by force, the other attempted a sit in.
Show me literally one single source that indicates the Women's March people were out for blood. Were there any casualties? Injuries? Was there even any fighting?
Show me one source that proves that the trump supporters were “out for blood.”
The point of the protest was not to “take the capital by force.” That’s cartoonish and unrealistic. The point was to express disapproval of the election results. Where do you get your information from?
Sicknick died as a result of a blood clot in his brain. His death was not the direct result of any protestors actions.
Show you a source that says the people who murdered someone were out for blood? You say he died due to a blood clot in his brain, but the police statement says that he died due to injuries sustained while physically engaging with protestors, and a homicide investigation is open.
Not literally everyone was there to take the capitol, obviously. But that was the point for many people. This was entirely predictable. See [1] [2] or especially [3], wherein someone back in December describes exactly what ended up happening.
Why bring guns and zip ties if you're not there for violence?
> Why bring guns and zip ties if you're not there for violence?
Got it, so you have no evidence they were out for blood. It’s just a bad faith assumption on your part, ignoring that people often carry weapons for good faith reasons. Ignoring that no one was attacked with said guns except for the protestors.
It has not been proven that Sicknick was murdered. He died due to a blood clot that happened while he was on duty.
I never claimed the women’s March storming of the capital were out for blood.
Ashli Babbitt was killed by law enforcement. If law enforcement was not deployed it’s not clear there would have been any deaths. If law enforcement were deployed on the women’s March Storming of the capital, maybe they would have injured or killed protestors as well.
But regardless, the actions of the maga protestors did not directly cause the death of anyone. Doesn’t matter what you want to assume about their guns, you can’t deny that.
Your original question was whether OP was scared of the Women’s March murdering them. The implication is that by some important metric, the sit in was indistinguishable from the terrorist attack on Wednesday. You haven’t provided any evidence for that, other than telling me that it’s bad faith to presume violent intent behind the armed people scaling walls and breaking down doors.
We haven’t even mentioned that many of the invaders came bearing Nazi symbols and/or were members of known violent groups like the Proud Boys. I suppose that it’s unfair to presume that someone wearing a 6MWE shirt isn’t coming to be peaceful?
Obviously it’s impossible to prove conclusively whether or not there would have been deaths without law enforcement. But there are multiple accounts of them assaulting journalists. What do you think they would have done had they made it to the floor of the Senate without police there?
What, exactly, do you think the zip ties were for?
I will concede that a medical examiner has not confirmed the officer’s cause of death. But signs point to him being killed by one of the terrorists, so I’ll continue to describe it as murder until evidence arises to the contrary.
> Your original question was whether OP was scared of the Women’s March murdering them.
Yes the point of the question was to tease out what concrete differences there were between the two to justify fear of murder in the second case. It seems like his fear is more based on narrative and assumption of bad faith than any direct evidence of intent to “take the capital” violently. The violence was perpetrated against the protestors, not by them.
> But signs point to him being killed by one of the terrorists, so I’ll continue to describe it as murder until evidence arises to the contrary.
You should assume innocence until proof of wrongdoing. Anything else is illiberal.
Except what you’re saying is false. Democrats overwhelmingly condemned the riots and violence during the BLM protests. But most protests and protestors were peaceful and they supported those ones.
If everyone is going to knowingly twist facts like your post does, there is no point in even trying to debate.
Snopes: Campaign staffers for U.S. Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden contributed to a bailout fund for protesters arrested after the police in-custody death of George Floyd.
Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage — which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. That's looting's most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.
> Biden has publicly stated his opposition to the cash-bail system, referring to the practice as a “modern-day debtors’ prison.” However, no evidence exists to suggest that donated funds came directly from the campaign.
You do realize posting bail isn’t excusing the punishment?
And Biden repeatedly condemned violence and the rioters. He and the other prominent dems did not spend months encouraging them.
And that NPR article is some rando, not a Congress person or anyone else important. Why did you even bring up some rando? If that’s the most relevant person you can find then you’re providing strong evidence against your case.
>You do realize posting bail isn’t excusing the punishment?
There is no need to excuse or not excuse. People’s words are rarely as enlightening about their value system as their actions. By promoting the posting of bail for those arrested during protests in which much harm was caused those that promoted that bailout show that they are interested in continuing those actions. If Democrats such as Sen Harris held as a value the true problem of process as punishment and the unfair cash bail, there was plenty of time before and after that point in history to promote it. By choosing that point in time they actions spoke louder than words as to what they value.
I’m glad that the president elect has spoken against cash bail although it seems to be a subject out of his federal expertise.
NPR and particular parts of the organization are ostensibly nonpartisan but are in such alignment with Democratic Party positions value-wise that the assertion of nonpartisanship is a distinction is without a difference. I write and think that as a lifelong listener. By promoting “In Defence of Looting” when they did it was clear that it wasn’t a random book review but an editorial statement of what behavior was acceptable and a dramatic non-denunciation of extra-legal actions taken by people peripheral to the protests of the period.
Would you be willing to wager something about some concrete action a Biden administration could take about cash bail that would indicate a care for the topic outside of the quadrennial BLM protests? It might be a block grant to assist municipalities in decreasing cash bail or a regulatory restriction on funding that encouraged the same, or some other class of concrete action that wasn’t just words.
Fiy, California had repeatedly tried to end cash bail. California’s senator, and the 2nd in command in Biden’s admin, has also advocated abolishing cash bail. Are you seriously telling me you think the only reason you think the Biden admin cares is political points on the left during BLM protests?
> Why not pay attention to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who came to DC to protest but had nothing to do with the storming of the capitol?
Because they didn’t break into congress? There’s a special type of attention you deserve when you form a mob and storm national legislatures (as seen on TV!), and neither the peaceful protesters from the Trump rally or BLM did that.
There is a fundamental difference between storming the house with the intent of stopping a democratic process (the confirming of the next president) and marching to it to deliver a message.
I sincerely hope you don't mean this to be comparable. Beating police with batons? Stealing their riot shields? Spraying them with mace? Stealing property from the capitol?
You and I both know that if all the folks did yesterday was go into the Capitol and march and chant in the halls, they'd be framed as deranged lunatics who might've gone a bit too far - not domestic terrorists. Show me the video evidence from the women's march where they coordinated a group to push into the police while yelling for "fresh patriots" to come to the front line and push back.
The left was basically allowed to freely enter the Senate building, in an attempt to sway the ongoing confirmation vote of a scotus justice, and met little to no police resistance, and it was celebrated by the media.
Replace "confirmation" with "certification", and "scotus justice" with "president," and what's the difference, politically?
the left portends to have authoritative insight over the intent of others... based only on their biased perception or desire. And that is precisely the problem.
You just did it to me.
The media does it depending on whether they want "mostly peaceful protests march" or "attempted violent coup."
There is no honest way to suggest that the events of this week are comparable to the events surrounding the protesting of appointments.
I will note however, that you're subtly changing the topic when you change your argument from the protests about the appointment of a judge to the "mostly peaceful protests".
Again, this is bad faith. You are just moving the goal posts to try and suite your argument.
Edit: I conflated the womens march with the protest about the appointment of scotus judge.
> You're right, the women's march protests were far more dangerous.
This is beyond bad faith, this is an open "fuck you" to anyone that dares participate in this discussion. To shut it down, to make any sort of dialogue impossible.
And you say the left wants to censor, what a laugh.
The only "bad faith" going on here is the left's pathetic attempt to shut down any mention of the political violence that they have been encouraging and celebrating for the last 4 years and the 6 months of nationwide rioting they've cheered on.
As if smashing doors and climbing through them while armed guards tell you not to with congress fleeing on the other side is not "directly threatened".
The absurdity of these arguments is astounding. What's worse, they seem to be thinking that they are making sense and that there is some global conspiracy on the left to "silence them".
The rest of the world is standing in awe and shock at the US.
In this false equivalence you're trying to make, did the people in the women's march come with zip ties to kidnap congressmen? Did they come to interfere with the electoral process? Did they steal? Were they violent?
How are they not equivalent? Both were organized protests intended on occupying the capitol for the sake of airing out their political grievances. What truly harmful action took place that was caused by the protestors? Be specific.
The only difference that in can see is that during the 1/6/21 event, the police were called in. They attacked and killed 4 protestors.
Maybe you don't know that 60 Capital Police were seriously injured, 15 remain in the hospital, and one is confirmed dead from the attack.
Maybe you don't know that of the 4 rioters that died, one had a heart attack (unconfirmed), one was shot and the others were trampled (by the mob).
Maybe you didn't know that congresspeople from both sides of the isle hid in closets and under desks, terrified and afraid for their lives.
Maybe you just didn't know these things, and got them wrong. But when confronted with them, you aren't going to say "oh sorry I was mistaken." You will respond with whataboutism and other deflection, to preserve your worldview that this wasn't a mob and Trump didn't do anything wrong, etc.
Which was OP's point. This isn't a good faith discussion. You are either ignorant of the truth (and will respond poorly when confronted with it), or you know the truth and are cynically lying about reality to win a rhetorical game.
This is the nature of all bad faith political discussion, which is why I (try to) avoid it all together.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about me for someone claiming I’m arguing in bad faith.
Maybe you don’t know that the police officer who died, died as a result of a blood clot. Not as a direct result of any action by the protestors.
Those police were doing crowd control. If they were not deployed there would have been no on-duty injuries. Was law enforcement deployed on the women’s March protestors?
> Those police were doing crowd control. If they were not deployed there would have been no on-duty injuries.
"The Bank security guard would have never been hurt if they just let people steal the money and take hostages."
> Maybe you don’t know that the police officer who died, died as a result of a blood clot.
This is beyond bad faith, this is insulting. And i'm not going to participate anymore. I just hope people like you die out before this country is irrevocably harmed, and your children don't carry your sickness to a new generation.
> "The Bank security guard would have never been hurt if they just let people steal the money and take hostages."
can you explain this analogy? What are you assuming the protestors would have done if the police weren’t deployed?
> I just hope people like you die out before this country is irrevocably harmed, and your children don't carry your sickness to a new generation.
This is a pretty radical statement. I’m actually a center left liberal and you’re wishing that I die simply because of a fact I brought up that refutes your narrative. Can you substantiate your claims that I’m causing harm to this country by citing facts? How did you get this radicalized?
Well I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve been cordial and rational in my reasoning and interactions with you. Why does the mention of the fact that the officer’s cause of death was a blood clot provoke such a strong negative reaction?
You're pretending that your "rational" arguments are anything other than bad faith.
It's difficult to take anything you say seriously when you can't admit that the actions this week are not the same as the women's march.
This is game that the rest of us are tired of being subjected to. The results of this style of thinking has just borne fruit thanks to the continued lying and obfuscating of the President and his gaggle of sycophants. The world is not confused about the dangerous actions that just transpired.
The fact remains that 4 unarmed protestors were killed, at least 2 were directly killed by capitol police. There were no deaths directly caused by the protestors. Sicknick died from a blood clot.
So when you say that the protestors caused a truly harmful action to take place, what exactly are you referring to?
Of course, if you’re fair and reasonable in your judgments you’d see that both were legitimate protests, and the only innocent victims of violence in the maga protest were the unarmed protestors themselves.
It's MAGA world, they are closing ranks around "violence is ok look what you made us do".
It's the natural last step in any fascist movement. The question remains, how many Americans remain this radicalized. If the number is low enough , the country survives.
I never compared jumping off cliffs and breaking into Congress. The point is that your argument that we ought to condemn the actions of the trump supporters because the rest of society has done so is not a rational argument.
I don’t think breaking into Congress is always bad. I support people’s right to peaceful protest. The Trump supporters by and large did not initiate violence, the violence was initiated on them by the police. If there was evidence that the trump supporters actually were initiating mass violence against people in the capitol that would be a different story, but with 4 unarmed protestors dead, they were the only ones who suffered casualties. That’s simply a fact.
You’re drawing a line that any protest which occupies the capitol is immoral. I disagree with that but if you really believe that, was it immoral when the women’s March protesters took the capitol? https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20
> your argument that we ought to condemn the actions of the trump supporters because the rest of society has done so is not a rational argument.
I’m not arguing that at all, I’m just telling you what the rest of the society is doing; that pressure you feel to change your opinion is coming entirely from within yourself.
> was it immoral when the women’s March protesters took the capitol?
I’m not sure, let me check: did they break windows and doors to gain entry into the capitol building? Did they break into representatives’ offices? Were there weapons and detaining tools found on their persons?
> I’m not sure, let me check: did they break windows and doors to gain entry into the capitol building? Did they break into representatives’ offices? Were there weapons and detaining tools found on their persons?
So now your position is that it’s okay to occupy a capitol building as long as you don’t break windows, break into representatives offices, and/or some small percentage of them have weapons on them? Even if they directly cause no one harm. Okay. Was it immoral when BLM occupied and damaged the Ohio capitol? https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/05/state-officials-asses...
> Damage included 28 broken windows along the west and south sides of the building, as well as damage to the wooden window frames, five pole lamps and two doors, including the West Rotunda entrance, according to the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, the agency responsible for keeping the Statehouse grounds. Flags planted in flower beds were burned.
> I never compared jumping off cliffs and breaking into Congress.
You’re not a child, I think, so I can’t scare you with made up stories about what happens when you lie. But seriously, it’s not good for you, or those around you.
But this is the point I tried to make at the top of this thread.
These people are playing a game. They aren't interested in talking about this honestly.
Seriously, where is the legitimate debate about the events of this week?
Is anyone compelled by the idea that this seditious event was comparable to the women's march?
I don't know what tools we have to bring these people back. I wish I could point to something and say "here", this is how we can find common ground. But they are proving every day that they are more interested in this dishonest babble than engaging in serious discussion.
Again, for anyone whose made it this far. The fact that they are pretending that there is no difference between the women's march and the events this week are all you need to see to dismiss the rest of the justifications they put forth.
Don't fall for the trap. They wont argue "the point". They will deflect, lie and twist every issue to fit their narrative.
"The circumstances surrounding Mr. Sicknick's death were not immediately clear, and the Capitol Police said only that he had “passed away due to injuries sustained while on duty.” At some point in the chaos "
Capitol Police said this...
Or are we only allowed to provide partial facts?
Maybe all of those gun shot victims I keep reading about are simply dying from loss of blood? My mistake...
"While authorities haven’t provided details on the medical emergencies, Greeson’s son said his father died from a heart attack mid-protest. Boyland died after being crushed by the crowd, according to one report, while Philips had a stroke, fellow protesters said."
If they do respond, it will be with "Yeah but what about..." without missing a beat. No reflection, no introspection, just furthering the infinite game.
This is why I don't talk politics, ever. You simply cannot attack a person's idea in politics, because their ideas are their identity. They will respond with the ferocity in which they would if someone were to physically attack them. While noble of you to try, it will fail. Every time.
I think part of the problem is that on many issues elections are already irrelevant. If I'm an American and I want the US to withdraw from Afghanistan, who do I vote for?
The relevancy of elections comes not just from how they affect things in the present moment and the choices they bring, but in the ability to assume there is always an open path towards progress for issues you care about, no matter now narrow.
This is the paradox of tolerance. We can tolerate having a free internet but if it leads to the intolerant taking over and making everything worse, we need to be intolerant of them now, not later.
Please, can we put this canard to rest? It is an extremely simplistic take that is bordering on cliche at this point. It adds nothing, it illuminates nothing, and it fails to address any of the very real and complex issues by turning everything into a binary of tolerant/intolerant.
Is the irony that this cuts both ways not obvious? Seems very clear; the left thinks the right is intolerant and must be silenced, the right thinks the left is intolerant and must be hobbled. The twist is that both sides are absolutely correct: the other side is intolerant.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a great game theory exercise, just like Mutually Assured Destruction, but I'd prefer to live in a society where we don't lean into these strategies with our foot on the gas.
A witty saying proves nothing, and in this case it particularly doesn't since you seem you do not know what else was being said when it was written by its author.
It’s like the libertarian view that everything will work without regulation, it just requires everyone to abide by some unrealistic “do no harm principle” that obviously can’t work.
Trump (and his supporters) has been in possession of the entire federal apparatus, from CIA/NSA to the military, and yet he's been a pretty ineffective in overthrowing anything. It's your fantasies that need to be overthrown.
Have you ever spent time on the leftist "tankie" / "Chapo trap house" kind of subreddits? Or the Gen Zedong groups that glorify the purge of landlords during the communist revolution in China? If we are really going to go after such people wanting to violently overthrow the government we can't be ignoring the left when they do it.
Given the seditious aspect to it off directly attacking a body of government. It seems different under US law compared with arson/vandalism that has most characterised the protests around US cities.
I think it would be condemned equally no matter who tried it. It’s the beginning of an end game scenario of democracy... so it makes sense it is viewed so harshly
It is wrong to say that there was "burning" for "several months", unless you're referring to the forest fires. A few buildings were burned down in isolated incidents during several months of protests across multiple cities. Looting is not well-documented but my friends in Portland didn't seem very concerned.
The vast majority of participants in the protests following the Floyd murder did not take part in any violence. It is all but certain that the fraction who did is much smaller than the fraction of 1/6/21 protestors who illegally entered the Capitol.
>It is wrong to say that there was "burning" for "several months", unless you're referring to the forest fires. A few buildings were burned down in isolated incidents during several months of protests across multiple cities.
That's neither here nor there. I didn't say "burning for months" (e.g. the same fires keep burning for months), I said "burning and looting for months", that is incidents of burnings and lootings occuring for months. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, and have lasted (not each individual, the case of them popping has lasted) for months...
>The vast majority of participants in the protests following the Floyd murder did not take part in any violence. It is all but certain that the fraction who did is much smaller than the fraction of 1/6/21 protestors who illegally entered the Capitol.
That's not certain at all. The videos show a totally different story.
>Looting is not well-documented but my friends in Portland didn't seem very concerned.
Many of those in favor aren't, especially if they live outside of the affected radius.
There have been five hundred separate BLM/Antifa-related riots, and the most recent one was the night before the Capitol protest. They have, in fact, lasted several months.
All of these efforts are happening to prevent Trump supporters from speaking. I'm certain you would not apply the same judgement to Trump supporters who are just speaking about violence, would you?
But note that as far as the US is concerned, in the past couple of decades, right wing extremists have killed a significantly greater number of people than left-wing extremists (eg. the CSIS credits them with 90% of all extremist killings in the timeframe 2018/19). They also lead by number of plots - though by body count, Islamist terror still takes the lead for the obvious reasons.
"I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years" said (now-former) acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf in DHS's most recent domestic threat assessment.
How many people are in positions of power that represent these leftist groups? I don't think it's in any way comparable to the fact that the far right literally have the US president on their side along with a sizable portion of the GOP.
Tankie leftists that support violence have the political weight as furry enthusiasts afaik.
It unequivocally is in no way relevant. Sure, if these people you mention had invaded the white house with weapons and make-shift bombs then it would be a fair comparison. However that didn't happen, it is a completely false equivalence.
I simply don’t know what to say to you except to please re-examine your humanity as well as your critical thinking skills.
Not by the sitting President, but by every single mainstream media organization and a pretty solid fraction of sitting Democrat Congresspeople and Senators, who spent months excusing and denying violent riots as they raged for months.
Trump’s nature further polarized both sides. He’s a binary-minded individual, either for / against. Dangerous quality for a leader, pushes both sides toward the extremes.
Can you please provide evidence for the President inciting violence?
I would also say that there are leftist politicians who are encouraging and inciting criminal acts. See this recent tweet from AOC (https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1334184644707758080), where she excuses activists acting illegally because the "polite language policy game" (her words) didn't work for them. This is no less an act of incitement than Trump, since Trump never called for violence or encouraged acts of violence.
I also think there is a great deal of hypocrisy from the left on this point given the events of this last year. There have been numerous riots, arrests, deaths, and illegal occupation of public places recorded. All the politicians, activists, organizations involved in those criminal acts have been given a pass and have faced very little accountability and virtually no censorship from big tech.
Even before George Floyd, we have incidents from left-leaning activists where they literally invade federal buildings. Here's an example documented by the Associated Press (https://youtu.be/B_kxyacaAF4). What was the response from the far left elements? Rashida Tlaib and AOC actually joined some of their events and encouraged them (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...). And yet, these two continue to be allowed their platforms.
Let's be honest, the tech platforms are using this ridiculously inept protest at the Capitol as an enabling excuse to further censorship and erode free speech, aligning with the interests of their left-biased employee bases. The precedent it sets is dark, as it will be employed to discriminate against viewpoints that disagree with the progressive agenda.
They certainty broke into the offices in some of these incidents, like the one involving AOC, where they broke into Pelosi’s office. There was also an incident where they broke into McConnell’s office. I don’t know if they stole things or not but it’s somewhat irrelevant. They costed time and resources which is still theft.
That's because they're laughably ineffective and tend to shit their own kitchens. It's also last year's news, a whataboutism to deflect from the actual insurrection that occurred this week.
"Shitting in their own kitchen" got many/most major cities to examine how they allocate police and social service resources just like the protesters wanted.
Exactly. There are dangerous extremists on both ends of the spectrum, but God forbid you want to assess the entire landscape in some forums. You're just mocked for being some kind of centrist, as if not being a slobbering partisan is a character flaw.
if a centrist in the UK would be halfway between current Labour and Conservative policies, that would probably make you close to a mainstream Democrat. Labour is left of the Democrats and the Conservatives are right of them (primarily economically), but neither by a huge margin.
I agree with you. I would go so far as to say that the Conservatives are to the left of the Democrats, even economically. Look at the extent of public borrowing funding all the furlough schemes etc. Not to mention both Labour and Tories are fully behind free public healthcare, which Democrats are having to be dragged kicking and screaming towards. Although that is rather a special case.
Come to think of it I can't think of any policies on which the (mainstream) Democrats are to the left of the Conservatives, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.
That's a good point, especially since Thatcher the conservatives haven't even been all that economically right wing. They do have a tendency to cut public sector spending, with austerity and such policies, but the UK starting point for the welfare state is much more than the US.
I don't read or follow thedonald.win, but I share your general feelings of apprehension for the well being of anyone who consumes CNN, MSNBC or NYT hoping to be accurately informed.
One indisputable lesson of these last few years (which was probably always true, and known by some) is that people largely seem to be able to recognize propaganda from people they disagree with but by and large are very poor at using that to better see the propaganda they are accepting for themselves.
I won't dispute that. Imagine if there was some AI that could discern "truth" in an unbiased way, I bet it would have many interesting (and enraging) things to say.
Iraq WMDs, Russiagate, just to name a couple big ones. MSM is complete and utter trash, any one pretending they're actually informative where it matters has already been deceived. I really don't know where to get good news, the best I've found so far are random Youtube channels who parse all the news and try to cut through the constant flood of BS.
It's clear that liberals(and never-trump conservatives) don't know how to effectively deal with Trump supporters.
Censoring(or moderating if that's what you're going to argue it's called) will only make things worse, it will polarize things even further.
The way to address Trump supporters is to listen to them.
Suppress whatever biased lower-level consciousness that's going to hijack your thought process and demonize them.
Observe what is driving their anger and actually help them.
You cannot stomp out this many people who have very real concerns that need to be addressed. And the effective solution will not be the thing that confirms all your priors.
There's no point in American history where a mainstream pub or club or meeting hall would willingly host a conspiracy to overturn the results of a democratic election.
This is fully in keeping with the Founders' vision for our country.
Unfortunately, it seems we've literally run out of options at this point. Social media companies can either act to silence violent insurrectionists (and hopefully prevent them from organizing) or they can turn the other cheek and risk allowing them to overthrow our government. And do we really believe that a Trump-led dictatorship would be more friendly towards dissenting views or permissive of media platforms that broadcast them?
> And do we really believe that a Trump-led dictatorship would be more friendly towards dissenting views or permissive of media platforms that broadcast them?
How is this relevant? We don't have a Trump-led dictatorship in the US. And since when is "Well it's not as bad as a <insert really bad scenario>" a well thought out argument?
> How is this relevant? We don't have a Trump-led dictatorship in the US.
Precisely what would we have gotten if those insurrectionists had succeeded in neutralizing the legislative branch?
> And since when is "Well it's not as bad as a <insert really bad scenario>" a well thought out argument?
It's an argument that is sufficiently well thought out when we are literally faced with a choice between A and B. We can do whatever we can now to prevent this movement from continuing to gain momentum or we can allow ourselves to be overrun by the movement.
> Precisely what would we have gotten if those insurrectionists had succeeded in neutralizing the legislative branch?
Oh please. This is pure delusion. There was 0 path for a group of a few hundred to “neutralizing the legislative branch”. What happened at the capitol was bad, but pretending there was any chance in it ending in a Trump dictatorship is simply hyperbole.
So, what's the goal? Force Trump supporters to build their own social media?! When I see the growth of Parler, how is this helping the already struggling Twitter, Reddit, etc. I don't really get why technology companies want to get involved in the policing business - how is this helping their bottom line? Are they business or activists pretending to be businesses?
The end goal is cessation of real and specific incitements to violence against people and property, and planning thereof.
Much as you like to spin it, if there weren't notable, repeated documented cases of idiots on Parler coordinating protests and outright violence, then no-one would really give a shit.
Making this out to be "the left wants to remove our ability to speak whatsoever" is not a "narrative shift", it's your conjecture.
It's not conjecture (it's abductive reasoning) and it's not about left vs right. It's about the precedent being set.
Once that precedent is set, people who once felt they were "on the right side of history" will equally be silenced for whatever reason the mob wants and then wonder "what happened?" This has played out before in history. The only difference is now we have smartphones.
A quote I just saw that encapsulates this well:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” - C.S. Lewis
> The end goal is cessation of real and specific incitements to violence against people and property
You:
> So are we just pretending that March-September 2020 didn't happen in dozens of major cities across the US.
Apparently you are confused between "empathy" and "incitement".
That "supercut" didn't have anyone inciting violent behavior. No-one saying "Go out, damage and destroy property. Hurt people". It didn't have anyone saying "this is a good thing".
You have people saying "I can understand why this is happening", "I get why people are driven to it".
I'm not confused at all. I'm a very empathetic person and care a lot about people, it's one of the many reasons I speak up when I see things like this happening.
I was also raised by a convert narcissist and have experienced (and fortunately, overcome) the exact behavior being used to manipulate the population. It was used to manipulate me in the exact same way.
Deny reality all you want but none of what's happening right now is good.
As someone who voted for Joe Biden, I'm not surprised at all by the current response from the right, even those who aren't hell bent on supporting Trump. Silencing people doesn't make them go away or give up,it makes them double down on their beliefs (whether based on conspiracy theories or not) and continue to escalate. Good faith arguments and honest media are how we solve this problem, not by banning people we disagree with just to feel good on the inside.
Of course you're not obligated. But it's in all of our best interest to talk with them rather than suppress their voices (however crazy). Many metrics relating to quality of life for many Americans are trending in the wrong direction. We cannot afford to further decouple people from society. This isn't just for the rural working classes but also the inner city poor. People need to feel worth and have a life of meaning otherwise they can become dangerous liabilities.
They are decoupled from society because they see a dimming of the white hegemony that has lit their world for centuries. No amount of listening to their Jim Crow rhetoric will ever change that.
Then to you, they are too far gone and are already enemies. I only see conflict arising through that perspective.
I have too much to lose for that to happen. I hope you realize the implications of your line of thought, not to just yourself, but to society around you.
I'm African-American, US History is dripping with blood from the countless times whit supremacy has reasserted itself over and over again. This isn't anything new or special.
I don't really see how implicating "all white people" as complicit in modern day whit supremacy isn't basically the definition of a claim in bad faith? This kind of cryptic pseudo argument is what makes these people even more incensed.
Applying your logic to your own politics would lead me to believe that "all left leaning americans" are communists who want to take my property by force, just because I saw one hammer and sickle on a flag.
Can you point to where I said "all white people"? Seems like my explicit mention of race has brought up feelings of anxiety in you and you threw out a strawman to compensate.
It's irrelevant, but it's quite apparent that the establishment is using what's relatively a minor event* to put into motion the crack downs they've wanted to do for years.
Seeing the Twitter mob, composed not only of the usual subjects, but also major media members, celebrities, and politicians outright push for restrictions and "punishments" for anyone who has ever shown support for Trump is terrifying. The left has become the true fascists they've always pretended they were fighting. It's a small step from here to the Bolshevik purges and Chinese Cultural Revolution. Exact same playbook being enacted.
* Congress has been "stormed" many times in US history, as recent as Kavanaugh hearings.
After a cursory check of the "frontpage" there... yeah, it doesn't seem very balanced. More like "r/The_Donald"-lite, with even some anti-vaxx stuff thrown in.
No moderation means it will be overrun with trolls and spammers. This is true of any discussion system. Once you grow beyond a certain point, typically a few dozen users or so moderation is necessary to avoid having the signal to noise ratio drop so low that all of the quality people leave.
This comment is to establish my gratitude to major service providers for removing hateful content and reestablishing trust with the people of the United States and the world who depend on their honesty and public service. Zuck, Jack and whoever is CEO this week at Reddit should be first in line for the Nobel Peace Prize after the General Atomics CEO.
> In general, sedition is defined as trying to overthrow the government with intent and means to bring it about; the Supreme Court, however, has been divided over what constitutes intent and means.
> These acts made it a federal crime to speak, write, or print criticisms of the government that were false, scandalous, or malicious.
It is frightening to me that so many U.S. citizens get their perception of reality through social media channels; that is to say they get messages that are amplified by algorithm with insufficient regard to refutability (and a requirement of evidence to refute or confirm.)
As someone who cannot visit every single polling place in the country (I visited zero and voted by mail) I cannot with absolute certainty proclaim that there there was no widespread, coordinated and shockingly well-concealed election fraud. As a person of logic and reason and based on multiple sources of information that I consider reputable, I strongly believe this did not take place, and I would need multiple, reputable sources of information and likely trusted peer acceptance before I would change my mind to believe it did.
My way of trying to only accept what I believe to be accurate information will always be imperfect, and, at times, fail me. But I believe it is only shades different from what someone who believes in election fraud does. Their sources include the content of speeches made by the President of the United States, news anchors and journalists of conversatively-biased news, and perhaps most importantly, peers they trust liking and sharing those same speeches and articles with them as a stamp of acceptance.
That's a complex and very human problem that is not readily solved with gut reactions, broad strokes and absolutes.