A stronger element of the power structure is silencing another. It's simple as that. Look at the relentless pro-censorship brigading on most social media. Lots of money, power and influence is being applied here. If this was china or russia, we'd call it a soft "purge". They'd call it promoting "harmony" or "protecting the people". Not sure what we are going to call it.
Seems like whatever battle Trump and his faction was waging behind the scenes the last 4 years failed and he simply failed to win over enough power/influence to his side. We'll never know what really happened, we can just guess.
But feels like history is happening. I don't think any of us have lived to through anything like this. I know I certainly haven't.
A broad swathe of unrelated people systematically manipulated into feeling a certain way. This has been going on since Bush 2.0's 8 years of assault on the truth.
I genuinely can't tell which side you're taking about, one, or the other, or both. I feel like there are crazy people everywhere, ranging from the hyper woke to honest to god nazis. But one group decided to storm congress (which I still haven't wrapped my head around, I'm mentally living in the beforefor times) and by supporting the rule of law I must now be on the side that's not that, even if I have to share the bus with the nutters who believe in "censoring" and thought policing.
Protests inside the Capitol building are actually surprisingly frequent. But why did the events of January 6th result in Congress evacuating their chambers, and moved to defensible positions? Something was different this time?
The US Capitol Police handled the situation weirdly and it got out of hand. I'm not sure why they let protestors across barriers and declined assistance from neighboring agencies. Some people read a conspiracy into these events. I just know this wasn't even close to the first time people were upset at congress and demonstrated inside forbidden areas. Nor was it the first time large peaceful demonstrations were marred by a few acts of violence.
These people are upset because they perceive that different standards are being applied to the same actions because of the politics of the actors involved. I don't think this is going to go away as a result of us clutching our pearls at the horrific violation of our sacred legislative building.
I have read many an article with words like "hallowed halls" and "sacred ground". It's just a building, and with enough dollars it can be cleaned up and repaired. What I keep coming back to was the intent to overturn an election with force by disrupting a critical vote on the election that was in progress. That's not clutching at pearls, that's a threat to democracy and the rule of law.
It's neither brigading nor a broad new historical trend. A lot of people (myself included) simply see this as an emergency situation requiring extraordinary measures, and are okay with censorship of the Trump campaign even though we're anti-censorship in general. If it were Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, or even 2019 Donald Trump getting deplatformed like this, I'd be strongly opposed.
No you are not. Why lie? A free speech absolutist means that you believe any speech is acceptable. You comments clearly show you believe in limits to speech.
> but violent speech, "fighting words," insurrectionist speech, etc. are not protected under any free speech doctrine
"Insurrectionist speech". You just gave yourself away. It's not "free speech doctrine" that prevents it. It's a supreme court ruling. The US was mostly free speech absolutist until the courts ruled direct threats to be illegal.
In case you think america limited free speech before the 20th century...
Politicians could threaten each other and duel each other...
> I've argued in favor of free speech here on HN (and got the downvotes to prove it) more times than I can
As someone who has been downvoted defending free speech, I commiserate. But you don't strike me as a free speech guy. You have the strangest way of being "in favor of free speech".
> Free speech isn't some carte blanche that allows anyone to say anything at any time.
But you just claimed to be a free speech absolutist. That's exactly what a free speech absolutist believe. That you can say anything anytime.
> This has nothing to do with free speech, and Gab is an absolute cesspool of delusional QAnon conspiracies.
But you are a free speech absolutist. No?
Why do propagandists always do this? They pretend to be the other side and argue against the other side. It's like a meat eater pretending to be vegan and saying bad things about the vegan diet. And you have the gall to accuse gab of being disingenuous.
Just as logical point, you can't really be a de facto "absolutist," as any kind of reductio argument would obliterate your position. But I'd say I'm as absolutist as one can get.
You claimed to be an absolutist though. And yes, you can be a free speech absolutist. Take a class in philosophy and educate yourself.
There are plenty of free speech absolutists who believe any speech, including direct threats, should be protected speech. That you should have the right to threaten anyone and everyone. Of course, acting out and carrying out the threats is illegal.
For example, if you said "I am going to kill you", free speech absolutist believe that should be allowed. Now if you actually killed someone, then you should go to jail. Meaning there differentiate the words "I am going to kill you" with "murder". In other words, murder is illegal, but saying you will commit murder is not. There is some nuance to it, but there are free speech absolutists out there.
But you are not a free speech absolutist. You lied about it. You aren't even pro-free speech. You comments clearly show that you align with the pro-censorship crowd because you use their terms and their logic.
Like I said, you are a meat eater pretending to be a vegan talking shit about veganism. But why?
> As an EFF member I think they made the right call here.
They didn't. They chickened out. The ACLU was more vocal in its opposition to censorship. That should show how cowardly the EFF is being right now.
You falsely made it seem like EFF only deals with or is concerned with government "suppression". That isn't true. Most of EFF dealings is with corporate "suppression".
Under normal circumstances, EFF would have been far more vocal. But since they are extremely biased in this case, they chose to be anti-free speech.
"The EFF was active in the United States presidential election 2016 because of online phishing related to the controversy over fabrication of election results. J. Alex Halderman, a computer security professor at the University of Michigan, wrote an article that was published in Medium in 2016 stating he thought it was advisable to have a recount on some of the election results from states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania."
Don't you think EFF's belief in 2016 election fraud had anything to do with their lukewarm defense of Trump's free speech here?
They have a long history of questioning voting results, but only when republicans win...
"The EFF has long been an advocate of paper audit trails for voting machines and testified in support of them after the United States presidential election 2004."
I generally think EFF is a worthy enterprise, but it's obvious political bias is the reason for their pathetic "support" for free speech here.
The implication being that everything the EFF has done against corporate control of the internet is only good as long as their criticism doesn't extend to corporate censorship?
This "looking the other way if it's my guy" attitude towards violence as reached an unacceptable level. The Left and Right are both equally guilty in my view. You want to stop Systemic Racism, then end the fscking war on drugs. You want to stop White Supremacists, then perhaps we need to teach our children the simple universal spiritualist ideas such that people are to be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. People with money and power WANT Americans at each other's throats. It diverts the attention from how they have sold out our manufacturing base and jobs for short term profits.
> Taiwan has 20 million people. Mainland china has 1.4 billion people. I believe the "self-determination" part is already settled.
What does population have to do with self determination?
> Nope. Let them settle it. We shouldn't have been involved in the first place.
Except they were allied with the US and deals were drawn up that should be honored.
> Are you serious? One is the second largest economy in the world. The other is taiwan.
He said in a strategic industry, which semiconductors are.
If there is TSMC spam it's probably because this is a tech forum and they is a lot of movement in the field in the last year, mostly related to the failings of Intel and the rise of TSMC.
> Here's an observation: people who've survived longer than most are quick to smile. I like checking out stories about them, because I know I'll see an energizing photo of an upbeat person.
There is the other side.
"Russian Woman, Who Claims to Be World's Oldest at 129, Says She's Had One Happy Day in her Life"
Also, there was a documentary a while back on nursing homes. Pretty much all "people who've survived longer" were miserable. I remember an old woman who out-lived her husband, daughter, friends, etc. I still remember what she said: "Everynight I go to sleep hoping god would take me, but I always wake up." A modern day Sibyl of Cumae.
I don't think "quick to smile" has anything to do with longevity. Misers and misanthropes also can outlive many.
It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial knowledge is where wikipedia excels.
> I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.
In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc - which are ultimately all political.
> Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
Definitely. It has it's uses like everything. But it is extremely flawed.
Doesn't even have to be political. Moneyed interests and fanboys and cultists use Wikipedia for PR and similar all the time. See Falun Gong, for example.
There are also groups of Wikipedia "editors" who coordinate off-wiki to influence its workings. (Sock-puppeting and meat-puppeting)
Even if we disregarded all the malicious actors, harmful incompetence is rampant on Wikipedia.
And I was just talking about the English Wikipedia here, there are many "small" Wikipedias which are much much worse.
I haven't checked the page on Falun Gong for some time, but there was a concerted and largely successful effort to depict Falun Gong as in its own propaganda on many related Wikipedia pages. Some related info:
This is just an example of the issue of Wikipedia processes being too vulnerable to abuse, in contrast to the rose-tinted glasses view that most HN commenters view Wikipedia.
The obvious reason for this in this case is that people interested in contributing to articles about the Falun Gong are mostly already followers of Falun Gong. Stuff like this is all around Wikipedia. A related issue that I already indicated in another comment here is how most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off certain controversial or well guarded pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on Wikipedia.
One other reason for this is that discussion threads on Wikipedia can become incredibly large and involved very quickly. Typically a comment on Wikipedia will reference "diffs", which are changes elsewhere on Wikipedia (each with their own context and possibly requiring domain knowledge to understand them), or they can reference actual off-Wiki sources (e.g., a published book). Then someone else will respond to that comment with references to other stuff, and soon it is simply not manageable to keep track of everything. Everyone only has a fixed amount of free time and attention span, so very often things which shouldn't be taken at face value are taken at face value. On the other hand, meticulously checking something argued in bad faith expends time that could have been spent elsewhere. Walls of text and deep chains of references will scare a proportion of people outright before even engaging the discussion.
Another reason is that the assumption of good faith on part of the contributors is deeply embedded in Wikipedia. Not assuming good faith is actually forbidden on Wikipedia, and this is enforced. This might sound like a good idea (maybe it even is a good idea, it's hard to say), but in effect it just adds to the complicated minefield of vague rules breaking which can get one sanctioned on WP, but it isn't clear it actually does anything to improve the (low) standards of discourse on Wikipedia.
Apart from the rule that everybody has to assume good faith, the Wikipedia processes themselves are built on the assumption of good faith: the idea with Wikipedia is that everyone can talk out the differences in their opinions to establish "consensus",[N0] but malicious people can be severely disruptive in a discussion without doing anything that would cause them to be punished in any way on Wikipedia. E.g., someone makes a misleading comment (perhaps by taking things out of context, perhaps by exploiting some subtle semantics) and now people have to respond to them, which can take much more effort than it takes to make those comments. And there are accounts which do this all the time.
Another (smaller, perhaps) issue, which is actually fixable with better tech, is that although Wikipedia discussion threads usually logically have a tree structure, in actuality it's all unstructured Wiki-markup. This means that it's possible for the tree structure to become malformed, causing the discussions to become even less readable. Even if everything is structured correctly, it's often difficult to tell where does a comment end without reading it in its entirety, which is again caused by the lack of structure in the comments, every Talk page is just a single blob of Wiki-markup editable by any participant.
Thus, if you want to disrupt Wikipedia, the real way forward is not vandalism, it's arguing in bad faith with inpenetrable walls of text while being "civil". Bonus points for finding comrades to help you in a concerted effort.
Changing anything can be a tremendous effort on Wikipedia, but trying to change something while being opposed by an organized (off-wiki) and vigilant group, especially if they are malicious... I fear the whole project simply does/will not scale because of this. Organized groups will sadly keep their control of some topics/pages, and my fear is this situation will only get worse as Wikipedia's scope increases.
[N0] What consensus actually means on Wikipedia is another issue entirely, and it's often completely abitrary - whoever happens to "close" the Request for Comments (RfC - the process used for "determining consensus" on Wikipedia) can effectively create the "consensus" themselves.
It’s an encyclopedia. For facts, it can by definition only touch the surface. For subjective debates and subjects (like politics) it can by definition only give a high level overview of the different points of view.
Saying it’s “extremely flawed” is like saying Superman is weak because he’s vulnerable to Kryptonite.
You would be right, if Wikipedia would not cover the opinions/subjective topics as well. Nowadays it is often used as a column for some higher-up contributors/journalists.
It is still valuable for the scientific topics and I would not call that superficial at all, but you need to be very critical of anything that goes further than that. And actually even for the scientific topics you need to be aware if PR is involved with the article, because then you have to take anything with a grain of salt as well.
Censoring a president is far greater a threat to the republic than some silly protest. People like you exploiting a silly pathetic protest to justify censorship is the threat to the republic. I'd rather have the protests than censorship by tech companies.
It is not for a bunch of unelected tech elites to decide whether our elected leaders speak. That's not their job. Once we hand over that power to a bunch of tech elites, then we have the end of the republic.
Nobody voted for Amazon, Apple, Google to be our hall monitors.
If there is a "threat to the republic", then it's the job of the political leaders and law enforcement to deal with it. Not Tim Cook, not Zuckerburg and certainly not the idiots at CNN, foxnews or other media companies.
The collusion between tech and news industry is the greatest threat to the republic. Not some pathetic protest that amounted to nothing.
Have you ever bothered to ask who elected the tech industry to be our masters? Do you really want a bunch of unelected tech elite controlling our lives? Do you want these people to be lords over our elected leaders?
> And YT deletes content mentioning election fraud, and twitter permanent bans the president, all under the historically totalitarian guise of "safety"
Also, really puts a dent into the anti-free speech argument that "you can go to another platform" argument.
I do love watching all these "tech/social media is evil" crowd here suddenly praising tech/social media and wanting them to have even more control over our lives.
Social media is so evil that we need them to control our lives even more. Wonderful logic that.
That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.
I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives. I would like them to have less, which presumably happens either because (a) we stop using social media (at least in the current sense) and/or (b) more options for "social media" platforms emerge.
Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech. Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version? How about my comments on their articles?
> That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.
Actually I described you to the tee.
> I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives
So you are against censorship or for it?
> Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
Except that if tech companies collude together to prevent that. Fine, you say go make your own twitter. They do and then it gets banned from google play/apple store/etc. And down the line it goes. That's my point.
> I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech.
Who or what are you quoting? You just plucked a quote out of the ether. That's very dishonest and disingenuous. You almost write like a journalist.
> Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version?
Of course not. But then again, they are not a platform, they are publishers. But you already knew that.
I'm against censorship but don't consider what private corporations do with platforms that are not legally subject to public utility style regulation to be censorship.
If you can show collusion, please do. Meanwhile, WTF is with the "app store" concept in the first place? You're complaining that it isn't fair that Apple and Google can block apps from their platforms, even though that's what they've actually done since the arrival of smartphones? Free software advocates (look me up) have been warning about this since day one of the app store. There's nothing new here, other than the dispute of the day involves people's ability to type whatever they want in messages to some platform rather than some other feature that Apple/Google think doesn't fit with their intended platform ecosystems.
I wasn't quoting anyone. The double-quotes were an alternative to using hyphens to create a run-on phrase that attempted to describe how I see some people talking about these corporations.
If I understand your last line correctly, you believe there is some category called "platform" which needs to be treated differently. Are you calling for new laws to define what a platform is? If I create my own "dwitter", will your new laws allow me to have to any say over what people can post to it?
Youtube, Google, Apple, FB, Twitter, etc... I've said it before and I'll say it again, we need to look into collusion/cartel behavior of these tech companies. I'm sure I'll be downvoted like before by the suddenly "tech company" worshiping anti-free speech crowd here, but the coordinated nature of censorship really does need looking into.
They are just well known examples. Like stuff you learn in high school. So a lot of people have the same general knowledge. It doesn't seem like any sort of big conspiracy. In fact before reading the comments here both ideas came to mind immediately.
I have upvoted to counter a downvote. I think your opinion would not be downvoted as much if you simply stated your thought without labelling others.
Personally, I don't believe (though I have no evidence in this regard) there was any coordination here. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have been profiting from disinformation and hate speech for years, and Trump is neither the start nor the end of it. They should have banned him and others much earlier, but just didn't feel like the trouble of standing for basic ethics and human rights was worth that sweet stock. Now they can ban the man not only without hurting their bottom line, but also with a nice PR boost all along. And as soon as one makes the first step, the other tech-herd follows. No coordination, just VP herd mentality.
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).
Seems like whatever battle Trump and his faction was waging behind the scenes the last 4 years failed and he simply failed to win over enough power/influence to his side. We'll never know what really happened, we can just guess.
But feels like history is happening. I don't think any of us have lived to through anything like this. I know I certainly haven't.