I ask this of anyone who wants to argue that Twitter has an anti-conservative bias and believes the government should stop Twitter from moderating under that bias. Yes or no: Should GETTR receive that same treatment for carrying out politically biased moderation regardless of what political group GETTR targets with its moderation?
I suggest using a text expander like PhraseExpress so you can type a simple macro and have that whole bit copypasta’d into the comment box. That’s how I keep all my copypastas at the ready. Works well for being able to copypasta emojis, too. 😁
I believe that something ubiquitous can become a public utility.
It can, sure. But it being ubiquitous alone doesn’t make a service like Twitter qualify for being a public utility. Take Twitter away and there are still tons of places on the Internet to go for communicating with others. Take the Internet away and you can still communicate with others in meatspace through face-to-face interactions, phone calls, faxes, or whatever else you can think of—be it in private or in public.
Besides, if Twitter were to become a public utility, wouldn’t that mean the state would be seizing the means of social media production? Your communist leanings aren’t exactly helping your argument here, Koby.
If it's not your speech, then you're not being compelled.
Someone telling me to host someone else’s speech “or else” would be compelling me to host it by threatening to punish me for not hosting it. But you apparently seem fine with the idea of people being held at virtual (or real!) gunpoint while being made to host speech they wouldn’t normally host. (After all, you’ve never really answered that One Simple Question…)
if you rely on 47 U.S. Code § 230 c(1) then it is NOT your speech
Psst. Koby. I’mma let you in on a secret:
All interactive web services that accept third-party submissions rely on 47 U.S.C. § 230 to keep said services from being sued for moderating those submissions.
Oh, and here’s another secret:
230 doesn’t protect those services from legal liability for its first-party speech.
Oooh, and I nearly forgot the last one:
You’re so wrong about everything related to 230 that it would be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned depressing to see someone with as much sense as you have in other conversations get this shit so wrong for the sake of defending the forcing of speech upon platforms like Twitter, especially when you’re unable to defend the kind of speech that would be forced upon those platforms by conservatives, which isn’t necessarily “conservative speech” but has become so tangled up in conservative sociopolitical ideology that it may was well be “conservative speech” even if they (and you) never directly own it as such.
"capitalism is based on taking advantage of Others systems and flaws" What? No it isn't?
Capitalism, at its core, is about capitalists—that is, the people who own the monetary capital—exploiting the labor of the lesser classes in the pursuit of more wealth (i.e., capital). Jeff Bezos may not have been whipping his warehouse workers to make them work faster, but he sure as shit wasn’t making Amazon pay those workers even a fraction of what he makes in a year. If you’re not at the top of the ladder, you’re being exploited by someone higher up the ladder than you.
What makes capitalism more insidious these days is that we don’t temper it with a stronger social safety net and we don’t tax the fuck out of the wealthy. Wealth and poverty both compound—so we need a social safety net to keep poverty from killing the same people who carry out the actual work that keeps companies like Amazon in business.
No “pure” economic system can ever work because it will ultimately result in an untold number of deaths of the lower/working classes. Capitalism, socialism, bitcoinism, whatever—“pure” versions of them are bullshit. The ideal approach, from where I’m sitting, is capitalism tempered with facets of socialism: We create a broader social safety net paid for by taxing the everloving goddamned fuck out of the rich, but still allow the rich to obtain wealth through capitalist practices.
Being a billionaire is unethical and immoral. If they don’t want to get taxed all the way to hell, they should stop making/hoarding so much goddamn money and pay the working class more. (A minimum wage is meaningless without a maximum wage, after all.)
See, all the CRT thing comes down to is it intentionally try’s to focus on the remaining ‘now’ issues and the ‘then’ rather look at the great progress made, and the places for improvement.
Understanding how we made that progress is as important as making further progress. That means understanding how racist systems were dismantled in the past so we can dismantle racist systems in the present and have fewer such systems in the future. What good is worrying about the here and now if we can’t (or aren’t supposed to) understand how our past got us here?
It pushes one race above all others.
No, it really doesn’t. It looks at the historical impact of systems crafted by and upheld by the dominant societal group of American history—white people—that have given them and continue to give them privileges not enjoyed by other racial groups. (Again: In what year did Black people get full equal access to their civil rights, and how long was that after the founding of the country?) CRT is not about pushing any non-white racial group above all others (including white people), but about understanding how the dominant group has created systems that uphold racism—even when the people upholding those systems don’t intend to be (or are even actively anti-)racist. Read the fucking book.
[that shit-ass poem]
You’re actively shitting on people who want to have a chance at something other than soul-crushing labor for the wealthy every day. You’re actively shitting on people who want to be less poor.
Jesus, Lostcause, I knew you were something of a bootlicker for the rich, but you made a fucking three-course meal out of their boots with that poem. You’re seriously more concerned about helping the rich stay rich than about helping the poor stay alive.
The[y] went on strike and I went to work.
And you’re a fucking scab, to boot. From the bottom of my heart, Lodos: Fuck you. Never break a picket line.
The issue with redistribution is it doesn’t tackle the problem.
You don’t even know what the problem is because you’re more concerned about keeping rich people rich.
It targets management including people who have nothing to do with any exploitation if it exists.
Unless they’re management, someone is always being exploited by management. No exceptions. And targeting management is the right thing to do, since they’re the ones most likely to enrich themselves off the backs of the exploited. Tell me: How much money did Jeff Bezos make in his final year as Amazon CEO, how much money did the lowest-paid employee in his company make in that same timeframe, and how large is the difference between the two in terms of a percentage? Because I guarantee the lowest-paid employee did more work than Bezos did in that year—or at least more of the work that actually keeps the company in business.
It’s stable living in Bucket ND, Spring Hill MO, Falls MT, etc.
Do those cities have the same kinds of opportunities for high-paying jobs as the major metropolitan areas? Because “stable living” means nothing to people who are looking to make more than the money they need to pay for rent, utilities, and groceries every month. Not everyone is comfortable with living in “stable” poverty, Lodos.
I didn’t [c]ensor.
I didn’t say you did. I said you otherworded me. Allow me to break out another copypasta:
otherwording (or in-other-wordsing) — noun
Summarizing a point of argument in a way that distorts the point into saying something it does not and attributes the false interpretation to the person who raised the original point.
A blatant attempt to make winning an argument easier for someone who is out of their depth in said argument.
Example: You will often find the phrases “in other words” or “so you’re saying” at the beginning of an instance of otherwording.
See also: strawman; your comment
That’s generally my response to there being billionaires.
Because of course you see nothing wrong with letting people like Jeff Bezos get continually wealthy while his lowest-paid employees live in “stable” poverty after they do eight hours of the kind of body-destroying labor that Bezos has likely never done in his entire enchanted life. Of course you see nothing wrong with the rich exploiting the poor and the desperate, since you believe that’s the natural order of things and “punishing success” is tantamount to treason against the ruling class.
FYI: Kissing ruling class ass isn’t going to get you anywhere. They’ll just as soon kill you and not think twice about missing your lips on their shitholes if they think doing so will make them even more money. If you’re not exploiting people, chances are someone is exploiting you. Which side are you on: the greedy vulture class or the exploited worker class?
Allowing alternative speech is not tac[i]t approval of it.
It really is, though. If you allow speech like racial slurs on your service, regardless of whether you sandbox it, you are sending a tacit message of approval for that speech—that you are, in essence, okay with that speech being posted on your service.
Everyone has a right to speak. You’re under no obligation to let them say heinous shit on your service. If you’re honestly okay with someone using the N-word on your service—regardless of any possible sandboxing—you’re telling them that you’re okay with their bigotry. The only way to prevent their bigotry from infecting your service from the inside is to keep it from getting inside in the first place. You do that by banning the speech from the get-go (no sandboxing), deleting it when you’re aware of it being posted, and banning anyone who uses it.
Don’t think sandboxing will help keep that bigotry “in its place”, either. 4chan’s head honcho(s) thought /pol/ would work as a “containment” board. That idea didn’t work in any way that matters. It sure as shit wouldn’t work for you.
An enlightened individual seeks out every alternative view.
I don’t need to “seek out” the views of bigots, cranks, hateful assholes, and conservatives. (Whoops, tautology!)
That they are immediately going after the big fish [p]uts the tar[ge]ts on someone who can fight back and crush the law.
Victory is never guaranteed. Even the best efforts of “Big Tech” lobbyists can be for naught if lawmakers think going after “Big Tech” would help secure another term in office.
If we put the fight on the little sites they will shut down.
As you alluded to, “Big Tech” would be both the primary target and the entities best equipped to fight the laws. But asking what effect those laws would have on smaller sites/services isn’t “putting the fight” on those smaller entities—it’s putting the question of (for example) “what’s going to stop you from going after a fifty-person Mastodon instance” directly to the people writing the laws that would do exactly that, regardless of whether lawmakers intend for that to happen.
Lawmakers who can’t justify going after Twitter but leaving Mastodon instances alone for any reason other than the size of Twitter are full of shit. The only way to prove it is to raise the question. That you’re too much of a coward to do so means people with some actual testicular fortitude will have to do it.
And hey, look at that—didn’t I raise the question? 🤔
If a racist were to log onto your service and say “I hate n⸻rs”, you wouldn’t judge that “by first appearance”?
The whole point I keep making in re: association is that even if you sandbox the speech, you’re still saying “it’s okay to post that shit here, just do it where people can’t see”. You’re all but saying that people can be as bigoted as they want on your service, even if such behavior is only limited to that one slice of the service. You are willingly and knowingly associating with that content and giving it tacit approval to be posted.
And if you think that speech won’t eventually be associated with your service in some way, you’ve lost your mind.
The won’t justify anything any differently than now.
Any proposed law that tries to make Facebook or Twitter host speech will eventually be aimed at the smaller services. Making lawmakers justify such targeting now will help show how their targeting of the larger services is bullshit.
I believe the proper solution is to address the base problem. Not patch over the consequences.
The base problem, then, is how systems designed by and upheld by white Americans tend to benefit white Americans. That’s one of the key tenets of CRT, as the Root article mentioned: A system can be designed with a sense of “fairness”, but what’s “fair” is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder in American culture is often white people—openly racist or not.
IQ tests are another good example: They measure what the people who make them (typically people who grew up in the West) think constitutes "basic intelligence". They’re not objective because even the basic underpinnings of our understanding of the world aren't necessarily the same between cultures. While someone might not get a high IQ score, that doesn’t make them “stupid”—but get enough people to believe IQ scores are objective forms of measuring intelligence, and point out how underfunded/poor schools (especially when those are majority-Black schools) have kids with low IQ scores, and…well, you get the idea.
Racism isn’t always intentional and openly expressed. CRT is about pointing out how even the most well-meaning systems can still be infected with racism because of how the always-flawed perspective of the dominant society shapes those systems.
The problem in the education example is that it ignores the cause of the problem and looks for a scapegoat.
No, it doesn’t. It points out how the systems of redlining and school (under)funding, among others, play a role in how well students perform on the SATs. Then it points out how SAT scores can affect whether those students are accepted to a given college. Even if college admissions accounted for those issues, the historical impact of those racist systems can and will continue to generate consequences that will still be felt in the future. It’s not enough to look at SAT scores in a vacuum—we have to look at how various systems can, will, and already do affect SAT scores (among other things).
CRT isn’t about placing blame on one white person or even white people in general. Only asshole conservatives who’ve never even read about CRT outside of what other asshole conservatives write about CRT think that.
A white person in an urban environment is just as likely to succeed as fail as any other race.
And in a vacuum where race doesn’t matter, I’m sure that’s true. But historically, white people have had far more privileges in American society because they have always been the historically dominant racial group of the United States. (I mean, Black people didn’t even have equal access to their civil rights until nearly two centuries after the founding of a country whose declaration of independence said “all men are created equal” but whose Constitution also deemed Black people to be three-fifths of a person.) The whole point of CRT is to basically examine how those privileges came about and how they’re continually upheld.
Stealing from someone because you want what they have is unethical and immoral.
And what do you call it when a single person can make millions of dollars in a single day without doing nearly anything while hundreds of thousands of people barely make 60 dollars a day for doing backbreaking physical labor that often helps the millionaire become even richer? What do you call it when the poor and the middle class have their taxes raised while the rich have theirs lowered (and in some cases, actually pay nothing)? Because I call that exploitation. I call it socialism for the rich.
Boss made a dollar, I made a dime; that was a poem from a simpler time Now boss makes a thousand and gives us a cent while he's got employees who can’t make rent So when boss makes a million and workers make jack, then that’s when we riot and take our lives back
So
I don’t respond to otherwording.
Nice how everyone got a cheque, ram and voted for the party who paid them, with not a peep from the party till after the election that they were going to be paying taxes on the “stimulus” money.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the passage of the bills regarding the first two stimulus checks a bipartisan move, and wasn’t the president at the time of those bills being passed a Republican? Because I’m thinking that if you’re looking to blame the Dems alone, you’re rewriting history to make Republicans look even more callous than they were—which is a weird as hell thing to do, since you vote for Republicans.
Except that $2000 “stimulus” just pushed you over the bracket and you now owe $350 instead of getting $1200 back?
I don’t like it, either. But until you can change the rules, them’s the rules we play by.
I’d haul them off to the sand box and let them play with themselves.
Guess what? You’d still be hosting that speech. Sandboxing it off wouldn’t mean you got rid of it—or that you necessarily disapprove of it. It would only mean you don’t want it where it could be publicly associated with your platform. (And screenshots could still leak what’s behind the door, anyway.) The only way to fully disassociate yourself from that speech would be to delete it from your platform, lest people get the idea you think it’s okay for people to say the N-word on your service because you hide it behind the Internet equivalent of a paper door.
If it was just “offensive” —and that’s purely personal in the first place— … but they want anything they didn’t get and agree with gone.
They can want that all the live-long day. Doesn’t mean they’re going to get it—or that I approve of it. I don’t approve of people who think a flat tax doesn’t fuck over the poor, but that’s not reason enough to boot them from a service unless it’s a service I own and operate that has a rule against advocating for policies that would screw over/are screwing over the poor.
As far as I understand that’s a piece of software for creating your own platform. Not an actual platform.
That’s why I said “Mastodon instances”. Each instance is its own separate service, its own distinct platform. Rules change from one instance to the next; some alt-right shitpit instance might allow rank bigotry under the guise of Freeze Peach, while most other instances would ban such speech and refuse federation with instances that don’t.
My point is at the moment they are focused on platforms that can fight. Don’t direct them to ones that can’t.
And that’s my point: Make lawmakers explain and defend the policy that would target Twitter and exclude a Mastodon instance. If they can’t explain why one service should be targeted while another shouldn’t beyond “one of them is big”, their policy suggestion is bullshit. The law should generally treat all social media services the same: without favor, affection, malice, or ill-will. Any policy that would compel the biggest social media services to host speech but leave “the little guys” alone—especially “conservative-friendly” services—is bullshit and should be treated as such.
securing our borders, withdrawing our involvement in world affairs. Creating fair protective trade deals.
I didn’t ask you about those planks. I asked you about the planks that I mentioned.
Yes, a few are.
They’re also people in power, and they’re trying like hell to pass laws that attack trans people in particular. Trans people are queer people, too. Or are you a “drop the T” kind of person who would metaphorically run all over trans people if it meant you could secure civil rights for all other queer people?
Requiring ID and making sure the person voting is the person they claim to be.
The ID requirements being passed by GOP lawmakers are so strict and onerous that they’re often exclusionary of people of color. One such law—from my home state, in fact!—was found to be so discriminatory that an appeals court said the law’s new provisions “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision”.
And that doesn’t even get into voting restrictions laws that are targeting early voting (especially on Sundays, thanks to “souls to the polls” efforts in Black religious circles) and mail-in voting (which was not found to enable widescale voter fraud but did help increase voter turnout), not to mention the partisan gerrymandering still going on in GOP-controlled states.
So tell me again how Republicans are trying to make voting easier for everyone—including the people more likely to vote against Republicans. (An election isn’t fair unless every legal voter has the opportunity to vote, regardless of who they vote for.)
It’s not systematic. Some facets and pockets still exist.
Racism isn’t only “visible” racism—i.e., people yelling racial slurs, wearing Klan hoods, and doing other openly racist bullshit. Quoting at length from The Root:
[Critical Race Theory] begins with the acknowledgment that the American society’s foundational structure serves the needs of the dominant society. Because this structure benefits the members of the dominant society, they are resistant to eradicating or changing it, and this resistance makes this structural inequality ordinary.
Critical Race Theory also insists that a neutral, “color-blind” policy is not the way to eliminate America’s racial caste system. And, unlike many other social theories, CRT is an activist movement, which means it doesn’t just seek to understand racial hierarchies, it also seeks to eliminate them. …
Instead of the idiotic concept of colorblindness, CRT says that a comprehensive understanding of any aspect of American society requires an appreciation of the complex and intricate consequences of systemic inequality. And, according to CRT, this approach should inform policy decisions, legislation and every other element in society.
Take something as simple as college admission, for instance. People who “don’t see color” insist that we should only use neutral, merit-based metrics such as SAT scores and grades. However, Critical Race Theory acknowledges that SAT scores are influenced by socioeconomic status, access to resources and school quality. It suggests that colleges can’t accurately judge a student’s ability to succeed unless they consider the effects of the racial wealth gap, redlining, and race-based school inequality. Without this kind of holistic approach, admissions assessments will always favor white people.
CRT doesn’t just say this is racist, it explains why these kinds of race-neutral assessments are bad at assessing things. …
… According to Critical Race Theory, not only is racism an ordinary social construct that benefits white people, but it is so ordinary that white people can easily pretend it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, white people who refuse to acknowledge and dismantle this unremarkable, racist status quo are complicit in racism because, again, they are the beneficiaries of racism.
But, because white people believe racism means screaming the n-word or burning crosses on lawns, the idea that someone can be racist by doing absolutely nothing is very triggering. Let’s use our previous example of the college admissions system.
White people’s kids are more likely to get into college using a racist admissions system. But the system has been around so long that it has become ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that we actually think SAT scores mean shit. And white people uphold the racist college admissions system—not because they don’t want Black kids to go to college—because they don’t want to change admission policies that benefit white kids. …
… [I]f someone is complicit in upholding a racist policy—for whatever reason—then they are complicit in racism. And if an entire country’s resistance to change—for whatever reason —creates more racism, then “racist” is the only way to accurately describe that society.
In their relations with Negroes, white people discovered that they had rejected the very center of their own ethical professions. They could not face the triumph of their lesser instincts and simultaneously have peace within. And so, to gain it, they rationalized—insisting that the unfortunate Negro, being less than human, deserved and even enjoyed second class status.
They argued that his inferior social, economic and political position was good for him. He was incapable of advancing beyond a fixed position and would therefore be happier if encouraged not to attempt the impossible. He is subjugated by a superior people with an advanced way of life. The “master race” will be able to civilize him to a limited degree, if only he will be true to his inferior nature and stay in his place.
White men soon came to forget that the Southern social culture and all its institutions had been organized to perpetuate this rationalization. They observed a caste system and quickly were conditioned to believe that its social results, which they had created, actually reflected the Negro’s innate and true nature.
So maybe learn what the fuck CRT actually is before you go repeating whatever the fuck Tucker Carlson says CRT is. Hell, try reading the actual original book about CRT.
That’s a major concern.
I don’t see you saying shit about it, though—even though it’s a major part of the Republican/Religious Right alliance that has been a thing since the days of Nixon and the rise of the Southern Strategy. Read a book.
What it does is set in stone dates that will absolutely not be reachable, and will ultimately cause devastation country wide.
I’ve got news for you: Climate change is causing devastation country-wide right now. Hurricanes on the East Coast forming earlier and earlier each hurricane season, sea levels rising every year, and heatwaves so bad that they’re killing people and making forest fires worse in both number and impact—they’re all happening right now. Hell, Death Valley recorded a high temperature on Friday that was close to the world record for the hottest recorded temperature. You think the Green New Deal would destroy the United States? I’ve got news for you: So will climate change. Read a book.
Nothing I said relates to that.
You’re using the same “the Green New Deal is luxury gay space communism” bullshit arguments as the right-wingers who are going after what’s in the Green New Deal because it makes for a great boogeyman to stir up hatred and fear of change. Everything you say about the GND relates to that bullshit.
Everything changes. Would you rather that change be positive—i.e., give us a healthier overall environment—or would you rather that change be as devastating as unlivable climates around the world (and the growing issue of climate refugees) because we didn’t do shit about humanity’s effect on climate change out of laziness and fear?
What part of the multiple posts where I state I support, and support expanding, the social safety net do you not understand?
The part where you don’t support making the people who can most afford to pay into the public treasury pay more than they already do so they can benefit both themselves (they need public roads, cops, and firefighters, too!) and the general public.
You want to know how to fund social projects?
Tax the everloving fuck out of the rich. Being a billionaire is unethical and immoral.
Way to go on that plan, you just pushed millions over the minimum taxable point by calling it income.
Unless you want to completely eliminate taxes for everyone not making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and tax the rich on a progressively higher rate depending on how rich they are, that’s life. Shit sucks, doesn’t it. Read a motherfucking book.
Republicans don’t care about censorship in this fight.
No, they do—they just want the censorship to work in their favor by way of making “leftists” and other “enemies” of conservative ideology (e.g., queer people) so afraid to communicate on a broadly viewable platform—afraid of harassment and bullying and being treated like they’re not welcome—that those…shall we say, “undesirables” leave such platforms and never come back. Moderation would make sure such things can’t happen (to the best of a moderation team’s ability). Removing the ability to moderate by basically opening up moderation decisions to lawsuits would provide the result conservatives are looking for, though.
I am philosophically against the censorious methodology of deletionism
Yes, yes, you would willingly host bigoted speech of your own volition—we get it already.
we have dems fighting to tighten restriction and mandate actual censorship in law
Neither party looks good in this fight, but the Dems at least have the more morally righteous argument, in that they want more offensive speech moderated off platforms instead of less.
They’re currently targeting a few big companies with the ability to fight back. Let’s not point either group to more targets.
No, let’s do exactly that—and force our elected representatives to defend doing to those “targets” the same thing that would be done to “Big Tech”. If lawmakers want to go after Twitter, I want them to go after—and defend their going after—Mastodon instances for the exact same reasons. I want them to tell me why they want to make any interactive web service, regardless of size or owner or any other factor, host speech that service doesn’t want to/already doesn’t host.
And if they can’t defend going after Mastodon under the same reasoning they defend going after Twitter, I’d tell them to go after Twitter for something like antitrust issues instead of what speech Twitter does or doesn’t host.
Republican platforms are about securing our borders, withdrawing our involvement in world affairs. Creating fair protective trade deals.
They’re also about attacking queer people, dismantling voting rights, denying the existence of systemic racism to the point where they’re trying to ban practically anyone from teaching anything that might say “racism is still a thing”, and attempting to turn the country into a Christian theocracy with the worst excuse for a Christian ever installed as Dear Leader. What is it about that platform that you support? Because right now, that’s what Republicans in power are trying to do across the country. And if you think I’m exaggerating, go look up how Republicans are attacking trans people, passing voting restrictions bills, passing laws against critical race theory (a field of study they barely understand beyond the first two words of its name), and trying to somehow invalidate the results of the 2020 election so Donald Trump can return to power. That is the party you support, whether you like it or not.
not decimating the automotive, travel, and energy systems immediately, for a less than thought through green new deal
The Green New Deal wouldn’t destroy those industries overnight if it passed. That you think it would is proof you’re buying into the fearmongering of everyone even one step right of the center, including “moderate” Democrats.
The Democrat platform is
…ultimately meaningless because they’re never going to do half the shit they promise at a national level, or at least not right now. And even if they had the votes in the Senate to push through the Biden agenda, his agenda is not radical, socialist, or some form of luxury gay space communism. Hell, most of it is barely centrist. But since you’ve all but bought into the Trumpist lies about Democrats and “radical socialism” where anything centrist is “leftist” and anything even one step left of center is “an insult to capitalism that must be squashed in its infancy”, of course you believe the Biden agenda is ultra-super-mega-hyper leftist (Champion Edition & Knuckles [featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series]).
You’re not worried about the actual Biden agenda. You’re worried about a boogeyman version of it that doesn’t exist except in your head and the heads of other conservatives who’ve been told not to think critically but to believe conservative leaders, lawmakers, and pundits no matter what. Stop reading Murdoch’s rags and start reading actual books written by people who aren’t regular guests on Fox News or OAN.
And yet you’re all but rooting for them to win. Being on their side for even the smallest reason still means you’re on their side. I’m not a registered Democrat, but I know I’m still on the side of Democrats because I vote for and support Democrats. What the fuck is your excuse for your lack of self-awareness.
If Republicans win they stop the constant communist progressive push. If dems win the Republicans will challenge everything in court.
…you seem to care an awful lot about a party you claim doesn’t represent you winning so they can stop the other party and “communist progressive[s]” from doing…something.
a forum site is the same as a real-time message site like Twitter or a real-time microblog host like face book is the same as saying 16mm is the same as DVD. They both show audio and video right?
Insofar as both 16mm film and DVDs can both display audiovisual “data”? Yes, they are the same in terms of the most fundamental functionality. The same goes for forums, imageboards like 4chan, and social media services like Twitter: Their most fundamental functionality is to enable communication between multiple people.
On the post: House Republican's Entire 'Big Tech' Platform Is 'We Must Force Big Tech To Display Our Conspiracy Theories And Lies'
On the post: It Appears That Jason Miller's GETTR Is Speed Running The Content Moderation Learning Curve Faster Than Parler
I guess GETTR had to live and learn that fact first-hand.
On the post: It Appears That Jason Miller's GETTR Is Speed Running The Content Moderation Learning Curve Faster Than Parler
I have One Simple Question.
I ask this of anyone who wants to argue that Twitter has an anti-conservative bias and believes the government should stop Twitter from moderating under that bias. Yes or no: Should GETTR receive that same treatment for carrying out politically biased moderation regardless of what political group GETTR targets with its moderation?
On the post: House Republican's Entire 'Big Tech' Platform Is 'We Must Force Big Tech To Display Our Conspiracy Theories And Lies'
I suggest using a text expander like PhraseExpress so you can type a simple macro and have that whole bit copypasta’d into the comment box. That’s how I keep all my copypastas at the ready. Works well for being able to copypasta emojis, too. 😁
On the post: House Republican's Entire 'Big Tech' Platform Is 'We Must Force Big Tech To Display Our Conspiracy Theories And Lies'
It can, sure. But it being ubiquitous alone doesn’t make a service like Twitter qualify for being a public utility. Take Twitter away and there are still tons of places on the Internet to go for communicating with others. Take the Internet away and you can still communicate with others in meatspace through face-to-face interactions, phone calls, faxes, or whatever else you can think of—be it in private or in public.
Besides, if Twitter were to become a public utility, wouldn’t that mean the state would be seizing the means of social media production? Your communist leanings aren’t exactly helping your argument here, Koby.
Someone telling me to host someone else’s speech “or else” would be compelling me to host it by threatening to punish me for not hosting it. But you apparently seem fine with the idea of people being held at virtual (or real!) gunpoint while being made to host speech they wouldn’t normally host. (After all, you’ve never really answered that One Simple Question…)
Psst. Koby. I’mma let you in on a secret:
All interactive web services that accept third-party submissions rely on 47 U.S.C. § 230 to keep said services from being sued for moderating those submissions.
Oh, and here’s another secret:
230 doesn’t protect those services from legal liability for its first-party speech.
Oooh, and I nearly forgot the last one:
You’re so wrong about everything related to 230 that it would be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned depressing to see someone with as much sense as you have in other conversations get this shit so wrong for the sake of defending the forcing of speech upon platforms like Twitter, especially when you’re unable to defend the kind of speech that would be forced upon those platforms by conservatives, which isn’t necessarily “conservative speech” but has become so tangled up in conservative sociopolitical ideology that it may was well be “conservative speech” even if they (and you) never directly own it as such.
Get all that? Good. Now fuck off.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Capitalism, at its core, is about capitalists—that is, the people who own the monetary capital—exploiting the labor of the lesser classes in the pursuit of more wealth (i.e., capital). Jeff Bezos may not have been whipping his warehouse workers to make them work faster, but he sure as shit wasn’t making Amazon pay those workers even a fraction of what he makes in a year. If you’re not at the top of the ladder, you’re being exploited by someone higher up the ladder than you.
What makes capitalism more insidious these days is that we don’t temper it with a stronger social safety net and we don’t tax the fuck out of the wealthy. Wealth and poverty both compound—so we need a social safety net to keep poverty from killing the same people who carry out the actual work that keeps companies like Amazon in business.
No “pure” economic system can ever work because it will ultimately result in an untold number of deaths of the lower/working classes. Capitalism, socialism, bitcoinism, whatever—“pure” versions of them are bullshit. The ideal approach, from where I’m sitting, is capitalism tempered with facets of socialism: We create a broader social safety net paid for by taxing the everloving goddamned fuck out of the rich, but still allow the rich to obtain wealth through capitalist practices.
Being a billionaire is unethical and immoral. If they don’t want to get taxed all the way to hell, they should stop making/hoarding so much goddamn money and pay the working class more. (A minimum wage is meaningless without a maximum wage, after all.)
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Understanding how we made that progress is as important as making further progress. That means understanding how racist systems were dismantled in the past so we can dismantle racist systems in the present and have fewer such systems in the future. What good is worrying about the here and now if we can’t (or aren’t supposed to) understand how our past got us here?
No, it really doesn’t. It looks at the historical impact of systems crafted by and upheld by the dominant societal group of American history—white people—that have given them and continue to give them privileges not enjoyed by other racial groups. (Again: In what year did Black people get full equal access to their civil rights, and how long was that after the founding of the country?) CRT is not about pushing any non-white racial group above all others (including white people), but about understanding how the dominant group has created systems that uphold racism—even when the people upholding those systems don’t intend to be (or are even actively anti-)racist. Read the fucking book.
You’re actively shitting on people who want to have a chance at something other than soul-crushing labor for the wealthy every day. You’re actively shitting on people who want to be less poor.
Jesus, Lostcause, I knew you were something of a bootlicker for the rich, but you made a fucking three-course meal out of their boots with that poem. You’re seriously more concerned about helping the rich stay rich than about helping the poor stay alive.
And you’re a fucking scab, to boot. From the bottom of my heart, Lodos: Fuck you. Never break a picket line.
You don’t even know what the problem is because you’re more concerned about keeping rich people rich.
Unless they’re management, someone is always being exploited by management. No exceptions. And targeting management is the right thing to do, since they’re the ones most likely to enrich themselves off the backs of the exploited. Tell me: How much money did Jeff Bezos make in his final year as Amazon CEO, how much money did the lowest-paid employee in his company make in that same timeframe, and how large is the difference between the two in terms of a percentage? Because I guarantee the lowest-paid employee did more work than Bezos did in that year—or at least more of the work that actually keeps the company in business.
Do those cities have the same kinds of opportunities for high-paying jobs as the major metropolitan areas? Because “stable living” means nothing to people who are looking to make more than the money they need to pay for rent, utilities, and groceries every month. Not everyone is comfortable with living in “stable” poverty, Lodos.
I didn’t say you did. I said you otherworded me. Allow me to break out another copypasta:
otherwording (or in-other-wordsing) — noun
Summarizing a point of argument in a way that distorts the point into saying something it does not and attributes the false interpretation to the person who raised the original point.
Example: You will often find the phrases “in other words” or “so you’re saying” at the beginning of an instance of otherwording.
See also: strawman; your comment
Because of course you see nothing wrong with letting people like Jeff Bezos get continually wealthy while his lowest-paid employees live in “stable” poverty after they do eight hours of the kind of body-destroying labor that Bezos has likely never done in his entire enchanted life. Of course you see nothing wrong with the rich exploiting the poor and the desperate, since you believe that’s the natural order of things and “punishing success” is tantamount to treason against the ruling class.
FYI: Kissing ruling class ass isn’t going to get you anywhere. They’ll just as soon kill you and not think twice about missing your lips on their shitholes if they think doing so will make them even more money. If you’re not exploiting people, chances are someone is exploiting you. Which side are you on: the greedy vulture class or the exploited worker class?
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
It really is, though. If you allow speech like racial slurs on your service, regardless of whether you sandbox it, you are sending a tacit message of approval for that speech—that you are, in essence, okay with that speech being posted on your service.
Everyone has a right to speak. You’re under no obligation to let them say heinous shit on your service. If you’re honestly okay with someone using the N-word on your service—regardless of any possible sandboxing—you’re telling them that you’re okay with their bigotry. The only way to prevent their bigotry from infecting your service from the inside is to keep it from getting inside in the first place. You do that by banning the speech from the get-go (no sandboxing), deleting it when you’re aware of it being posted, and banning anyone who uses it.
Don’t think sandboxing will help keep that bigotry “in its place”, either. 4chan’s head honcho(s) thought /pol/ would work as a “containment” board. That idea didn’t work in any way that matters. It sure as shit wouldn’t work for you.
I don’t need to “seek out” the views of bigots, cranks, hateful assholes, and conservatives. (Whoops, tautology!)
Victory is never guaranteed. Even the best efforts of “Big Tech” lobbyists can be for naught if lawmakers think going after “Big Tech” would help secure another term in office.
As you alluded to, “Big Tech” would be both the primary target and the entities best equipped to fight the laws. But asking what effect those laws would have on smaller sites/services isn’t “putting the fight” on those smaller entities—it’s putting the question of (for example) “what’s going to stop you from going after a fifty-person Mastodon instance” directly to the people writing the laws that would do exactly that, regardless of whether lawmakers intend for that to happen.
Lawmakers who can’t justify going after Twitter but leaving Mastodon instances alone for any reason other than the size of Twitter are full of shit. The only way to prove it is to raise the question. That you’re too much of a coward to do so means people with some actual testicular fortitude will have to do it.
And hey, look at that—didn’t I raise the question? 🤔
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
If a racist were to log onto your service and say “I hate n⸻rs”, you wouldn’t judge that “by first appearance”?
The whole point I keep making in re: association is that even if you sandbox the speech, you’re still saying “it’s okay to post that shit here, just do it where people can’t see”. You’re all but saying that people can be as bigoted as they want on your service, even if such behavior is only limited to that one slice of the service. You are willingly and knowingly associating with that content and giving it tacit approval to be posted.
And if you think that speech won’t eventually be associated with your service in some way, you’ve lost your mind.
Any proposed law that tries to make Facebook or Twitter host speech will eventually be aimed at the smaller services. Making lawmakers justify such targeting now will help show how their targeting of the larger services is bullshit.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
The base problem, then, is how systems designed by and upheld by white Americans tend to benefit white Americans. That’s one of the key tenets of CRT, as the Root article mentioned: A system can be designed with a sense of “fairness”, but what’s “fair” is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder in American culture is often white people—openly racist or not.
IQ tests are another good example: They measure what the people who make them (typically people who grew up in the West) think constitutes "basic intelligence". They’re not objective because even the basic underpinnings of our understanding of the world aren't necessarily the same between cultures. While someone might not get a high IQ score, that doesn’t make them “stupid”—but get enough people to believe IQ scores are objective forms of measuring intelligence, and point out how underfunded/poor schools (especially when those are majority-Black schools) have kids with low IQ scores, and…well, you get the idea.
Racism isn’t always intentional and openly expressed. CRT is about pointing out how even the most well-meaning systems can still be infected with racism because of how the always-flawed perspective of the dominant society shapes those systems.
No, it doesn’t. It points out how the systems of redlining and school (under)funding, among others, play a role in how well students perform on the SATs. Then it points out how SAT scores can affect whether those students are accepted to a given college. Even if college admissions accounted for those issues, the historical impact of those racist systems can and will continue to generate consequences that will still be felt in the future. It’s not enough to look at SAT scores in a vacuum—we have to look at how various systems can, will, and already do affect SAT scores (among other things).
CRT isn’t about placing blame on one white person or even white people in general. Only asshole conservatives who’ve never even read about CRT outside of what other asshole conservatives write about CRT think that.
And in a vacuum where race doesn’t matter, I’m sure that’s true. But historically, white people have had far more privileges in American society because they have always been the historically dominant racial group of the United States. (I mean, Black people didn’t even have equal access to their civil rights until nearly two centuries after the founding of a country whose declaration of independence said “all men are created equal” but whose Constitution also deemed Black people to be three-fifths of a person.) The whole point of CRT is to basically examine how those privileges came about and how they’re continually upheld.
And what do you call it when a single person can make millions of dollars in a single day without doing nearly anything while hundreds of thousands of people barely make 60 dollars a day for doing backbreaking physical labor that often helps the millionaire become even richer? What do you call it when the poor and the middle class have their taxes raised while the rich have theirs lowered (and in some cases, actually pay nothing)? Because I call that exploitation. I call it socialism for the rich.
Boss made a dollar, I made a dime; that was a poem from a simpler time
Now boss makes a thousand and gives us a cent while he's got employees who can’t make rent
So when boss makes a million and workers make jack, then that’s when we riot and take our lives back
I don’t respond to otherwording.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the passage of the bills regarding the first two stimulus checks a bipartisan move, and wasn’t the president at the time of those bills being passed a Republican? Because I’m thinking that if you’re looking to blame the Dems alone, you’re rewriting history to make Republicans look even more callous than they were—which is a weird as hell thing to do, since you vote for Republicans.
I don’t like it, either. But until you can change the rules, them’s the rules we play by.
Life sucks. Get used to it.
On the post: This Week In Techdirt History: July 4th - 10th
Clicked and copy-pasted the link in separate tabs; got the same result in each one: “Sorry, that something isn’t here.”
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Guess what? You’d still be hosting that speech. Sandboxing it off wouldn’t mean you got rid of it—or that you necessarily disapprove of it. It would only mean you don’t want it where it could be publicly associated with your platform. (And screenshots could still leak what’s behind the door, anyway.) The only way to fully disassociate yourself from that speech would be to delete it from your platform, lest people get the idea you think it’s okay for people to say the N-word on your service because you hide it behind the Internet equivalent of a paper door.
They can want that all the live-long day. Doesn’t mean they’re going to get it—or that I approve of it. I don’t approve of people who think a flat tax doesn’t fuck over the poor, but that’s not reason enough to boot them from a service unless it’s a service I own and operate that has a rule against advocating for policies that would screw over/are screwing over the poor.
That’s why I said “Mastodon instances”. Each instance is its own separate service, its own distinct platform. Rules change from one instance to the next; some alt-right shitpit instance might allow rank bigotry under the guise of Freeze Peach, while most other instances would ban such speech and refuse federation with instances that don’t.
And that’s my point: Make lawmakers explain and defend the policy that would target Twitter and exclude a Mastodon instance. If they can’t explain why one service should be targeted while another shouldn’t beyond “one of them is big”, their policy suggestion is bullshit. The law should generally treat all social media services the same: without favor, affection, malice, or ill-will. Any policy that would compel the biggest social media services to host speech but leave “the little guys” alone—especially “conservative-friendly” services—is bullshit and should be treated as such.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
I didn’t ask you about those planks. I asked you about the planks that I mentioned.
They’re also people in power, and they’re trying like hell to pass laws that attack trans people in particular. Trans people are queer people, too. Or are you a “drop the T” kind of person who would metaphorically run all over trans people if it meant you could secure civil rights for all other queer people?
The ID requirements being passed by GOP lawmakers are so strict and onerous that they’re often exclusionary of people of color. One such law—from my home state, in fact!—was found to be so discriminatory that an appeals court said the law’s new provisions “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision”.
And that doesn’t even get into voting restrictions laws that are targeting early voting (especially on Sundays, thanks to “souls to the polls” efforts in Black religious circles) and mail-in voting (which was not found to enable widescale voter fraud but did help increase voter turnout), not to mention the partisan gerrymandering still going on in GOP-controlled states.
So tell me again how Republicans are trying to make voting easier for everyone—including the people more likely to vote against Republicans. (An election isn’t fair unless every legal voter has the opportunity to vote, regardless of who they vote for.)
Racism isn’t only “visible” racism—i.e., people yelling racial slurs, wearing Klan hoods, and doing other openly racist bullshit. Quoting at length from The Root:
Hell, even MLK—whose work partially inspired CRT—was able to encapsulate the same ideas:
So maybe learn what the fuck CRT actually is before you go repeating whatever the fuck Tucker Carlson says CRT is. Hell, try reading the actual original book about CRT.
I don’t see you saying shit about it, though—even though it’s a major part of the Republican/Religious Right alliance that has been a thing since the days of Nixon and the rise of the Southern Strategy. Read a book.
I’ve got news for you: Climate change is causing devastation country-wide right now. Hurricanes on the East Coast forming earlier and earlier each hurricane season, sea levels rising every year, and heatwaves so bad that they’re killing people and making forest fires worse in both number and impact—they’re all happening right now. Hell, Death Valley recorded a high temperature on Friday that was close to the world record for the hottest recorded temperature. You think the Green New Deal would destroy the United States? I’ve got news for you: So will climate change. Read a book.
You’re using the same “the Green New Deal is luxury gay space communism” bullshit arguments as the right-wingers who are going after what’s in the Green New Deal because it makes for a great boogeyman to stir up hatred and fear of change. Everything you say about the GND relates to that bullshit.
Everything changes. Would you rather that change be positive—i.e., give us a healthier overall environment—or would you rather that change be as devastating as unlivable climates around the world (and the growing issue of climate refugees) because we didn’t do shit about humanity’s effect on climate change out of laziness and fear?
The part where you don’t support making the people who can most afford to pay into the public treasury pay more than they already do so they can benefit both themselves (they need public roads, cops, and firefighters, too!) and the general public.
Tax the everloving fuck out of the rich. Being a billionaire is unethical and immoral.
Unless you want to completely eliminate taxes for everyone not making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and tax the rich on a progressively higher rate depending on how rich they are, that’s life. Shit sucks, doesn’t it. Read a motherfucking book.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
No, they do—they just want the censorship to work in their favor by way of making “leftists” and other “enemies” of conservative ideology (e.g., queer people) so afraid to communicate on a broadly viewable platform—afraid of harassment and bullying and being treated like they’re not welcome—that those…shall we say, “undesirables” leave such platforms and never come back. Moderation would make sure such things can’t happen (to the best of a moderation team’s ability). Removing the ability to moderate by basically opening up moderation decisions to lawsuits would provide the result conservatives are looking for, though.
Yes, yes, you would willingly host bigoted speech of your own volition—we get it already.
Neither party looks good in this fight, but the Dems at least have the more morally righteous argument, in that they want more offensive speech moderated off platforms instead of less.
No, let’s do exactly that—and force our elected representatives to defend doing to those “targets” the same thing that would be done to “Big Tech”. If lawmakers want to go after Twitter, I want them to go after—and defend their going after—Mastodon instances for the exact same reasons. I want them to tell me why they want to make any interactive web service, regardless of size or owner or any other factor, host speech that service doesn’t want to/already doesn’t host.
And if they can’t defend going after Mastodon under the same reasoning they defend going after Twitter, I’d tell them to go after Twitter for something like antitrust issues instead of what speech Twitter does or doesn’t host.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
They’re also about attacking queer people, dismantling voting rights, denying the existence of systemic racism to the point where they’re trying to ban practically anyone from teaching anything that might say “racism is still a thing”, and attempting to turn the country into a Christian theocracy with the worst excuse for a Christian ever installed as Dear Leader. What is it about that platform that you support? Because right now, that’s what Republicans in power are trying to do across the country. And if you think I’m exaggerating, go look up how Republicans are attacking trans people, passing voting restrictions bills, passing laws against critical race theory (a field of study they barely understand beyond the first two words of its name), and trying to somehow invalidate the results of the 2020 election so Donald Trump can return to power. That is the party you support, whether you like it or not.
The Green New Deal wouldn’t destroy those industries overnight if it passed. That you think it would is proof you’re buying into the fearmongering of everyone even one step right of the center, including “moderate” Democrats.
…ultimately meaningless because they’re never going to do half the shit they promise at a national level, or at least not right now. And even if they had the votes in the Senate to push through the Biden agenda, his agenda is not radical, socialist, or some form of luxury gay space communism. Hell, most of it is barely centrist. But since you’ve all but bought into the Trumpist lies about Democrats and “radical socialism” where anything centrist is “leftist” and anything even one step left of center is “an insult to capitalism that must be squashed in its infancy”, of course you believe the Biden agenda is ultra-super-mega-hyper leftist (Champion Edition & Knuckles [featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series]).
You’re not worried about the actual Biden agenda. You’re worried about a boogeyman version of it that doesn’t exist except in your head and the heads of other conservatives who’ve been told not to think critically but to believe conservative leaders, lawmakers, and pundits no matter what. Stop reading Murdoch’s rags and start reading actual books written by people who aren’t regular guests on Fox News or OAN.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
And yet you’re all but rooting for them to win. Being on their side for even the smallest reason still means you’re on their side. I’m not a registered Democrat, but I know I’m still on the side of Democrats because I vote for and support Democrats. What the fuck is your excuse for your lack of self-awareness.
On the post: Elon Musk's Pointless, Subsidized Tunnels Head To Flood-Prone Florida
What the fuck are you talking about.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
And yet…
…you seem to care an awful lot about a party you claim doesn’t represent you winning so they can stop the other party and “communist progressive[s]” from doing…something.
Are you sure you’re not a Republican?
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
…fucking what
No, seriously, I didn’t understand a single fucking thing in that post.
On the post: As Expected: Judge Grants Injunction Blocking Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Law
Two things.
That “right?” rhetorical gimmick is bullshit. That said…
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