I know we're already talking about lawyers that seem fairly incompetent, but that makes no sense. Why intentionally include claims that are useless in a legal sense, just to rile up users that seem intent on sticking around anyway?
Once again I plug All the President's Lawyers, a podcast from KCRW featuring Ken "Popehat" White.
Not all lawsuits are about winning. Some are about the performative messaging. Like the impeachment against joe biden - the claims have been adjudicated by the house, the senete, and the OLC and there is nothing there. But filing these articles signals to her base, makes her look to them like shes fighting, and that gives her political capital from doing nothing. Same with parler.
Mike was not responding to google's political ad ban in the comment you replied to. He was responding to the question "How about no political ads at all", and noted, as he did in the article and in multiple articles in the past, that defining political advertising is hard, because content is advertising. A core tenant of the Techdirt philosophy. In politics what you say can have deeper hidden messages advertising your support and intentions to various groups that back you holding office, as Techdirt saw in its Electioneering simulations. Going back to the clear example, everything Trump did was about advertising the Trump brand, making the Trump brand look good. A lot of fucking political advertising is run through official statements, press releases, speeches in congress, and common people discussing the issue with their friends. Think about the crazyness of determining what is a donation in kind to a campaign, and then start considering what people might consider Advertising-in-kind.
Is it political advertising to advertise a documentary that touches on the shady past of a politician? Because that is literally why we have citizen's united. A law barring third party political advertising (electioneering communications, specifically) close to an election hit ads for a documentary critical of Hilary Clinton during the 2008 election. Your plan is even more broad, and would likely have barred the documentary from ever being advertised.
Exposure is advertising. Can a politician not appear on TV? You say they can, but speeches are not just messaging. Trump used anti-caravan messaging to drum up support for republican candidates in the 2018 election. That is, he used his platform to to tell voters to vote for "strong border" candidates. He got his political ads free because the press would swarm to write it down if he farted, but all the hyperventilating was advertising and absolutely political in nature. If no candidate turned a series of his sound bytes on the caravan into a political ad, positive or negative, for one of those candidates I'd be shocked.
A 10 YEAR Ban on advertising would rip apart the ability of people to state their preference for a candidate, as such endorsements even informal are advertising under the current legal understanding of the term. Arguing for a 10 year ban on political advertising when you can't pin down a definition of such is outrageous.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More moderate than I was expecting.
No one is likely to read this, but I need this to exist.
A company dictating what's allowed online is going to do so in regards to it's profits. I.e. What's allowed is what is profitable. A government does so based on it's political agenda. I.e. What's allowed is what is Politically Correct. Neither are acceptable from a democracy standpoint. As what is profitable or Politically Correct need not be truthful nor supportive of political debate and consensus.
You have hit a core issue on its head. Capitalim talks like it is democratic, with the marketplace being described as a democratic forum, where the best products rise and the worst fail by voting with your wallet. And if you subscribe to that view, twitter booting voices off because of a profit motive is the market at work. Democracy (the will of the userbase reflected in what ideas are profitable) has decided that certain ideas are disfavored.
Your complaint, and the complaint of every "Twitter/Facebook/et al cant boot me off because they are too big" user is at its core a complaint about the ways capitalism can subvert the democratic process. It is very true that it can. But your assessment stops at stating that the process can be subverted, but then proceeds to assume that it has been subverted. You keep flailing towards profit being the motive, but refuse to question if profits come not because a minority is subverting the market, but because the market is responding to the will of the majority.
You have to do more than prove the possibility of market subversion for the argument to be taken seriously. You need to actually establish the market is being subverted. Part of a democratic process is establishing the Overton Window, the scope of ideas that are on the table for discussion. Race science isn't on the table, not because we 'can't talk about it', but because race scientists are making the same arguments, with the same data, they were making 50 years ago and we've already had that debate. The marketplace can decide that a product is too toxic to carry. IF a survival knife became known to fall apart in shipping, consumers will stop buying it. Retailers stop stocking it because they can't sell a faulty product. Eventually its not in the marketplace at all. Then it can't be bought, even if what you want is indeed a knife that falls apart under any strain.
Same goes for speech. If you want to think of speech as a product in a marketplace, you have to accept that the marketplace might remove some speech because the market refuses to carry it.
and it's a better alternative
According to who? "Better" is a term relative to the one using it.
Better for anyone who believes in speech free from government abuse. If you quote the rest of the sentance:
...it's a better alternative than the government stepping in and dictating that sort of stuff for various reasons like constitutionality to precedent that might be applied elsewhere.
That One Guy explained why he thought it was a better alternative. You didn't engage on the actual argument he made, just quoted an out of context bite and argued THAT. Its a strawman.
individuals aren't the Party. The American Democrat Party platform is not marxist or socialist. That Bernie is considered a fringe platform within the party loyalists is evidence to this. However to address your question on its own terms: I don't know of any nationally elected official describing themselves as marxist. Bernie uses the term democratic socialist, something his history backs up as his personal beliefs, but the policies he proposes are more in line with the social democrat philosophy as seen in the similarly named parties of Europe. You might wonder the difference.
Democratic socialists want economic change that democratizes ownership of business and profits (eliminating the capitalist class) without the nationalizing of industry, in contrast to many interpretations of early marxist thought such as in the USSR.
Social democrats advocate for the retention of capitalist owned industry but use the power of the the state and the democratic process to curb excesses of Capitalism through strong social programs, ala the Nordic model.
Can you cite a marxist american politician? I admit I can't keep track of every state and local level official. Id love to learn about some of them.
It was blatantly clear if you read his commentary rather than get triggered when he described the content of the video as conspiracy riddled nonsense. Everyone criticizing you understood the context of TFG's commentary.
Haven't read much. Fascism relates to the government - how the power of government is established and derived. Socialism relates to economics - how ownership of income generating property is established and who owns the profits.
Nazis for instance, took over Jewish owned busineses. But the government didn't own/run them generally. Nazis were big on privitization, a hallmark of capitalist economic thought.
Fascism, academically, is considered the reaction of the "political right" to leftist calls to extend the ideals of democracy into economics. It doesn't require any socialism to operate, and while they tend to talk socialism, those that implement 'socialism' use state ownership as a substitute for public ownership, which is highly disfavored in modern socialist thought. But as seen in the Nazi example, many also just say "socialism" when actually engaging in capitalist economic policy.
THat is why, as the video suggests, the understanding of what maxist theory is, and what mordern socialist theory is, compared to the propeganda you hear, is highly important.
That is context it would have been helpful to have when you shared the video. As PaulT noted, you should provide context as to the importance of a link, such as "don't concern yourself with the specific framing, I am only sharing this for its description of the use of propeganda to subvert ideals" It also was the very context with which TFG approached the video - that the descriptions of the subversion of the conciousnes are very important but that the framing was not accurate. Your criticism of TFG's commentary ignored his very commentary that the underlying warnings were valuable. Which is why I among others assumed you were endorsing the democrats are marxists message, because what you criticized is a refutation of the democrats are marxists framing.
The video you linked frames the democrats as Marxists. You reacted to a criticism of that framing as conspiratorial by saying that such a criticism was designed to shut down critical thinking. This suggests you disagree with the assertion that the democrats are not marxist.
You therefore support the assertion that democrats are marxists. If you don't support that claim, a more nuanced criticism of TFG's response would be in order.
If you fail to be specific in your criticism, it is your fault when we attempt to use context to fill in the blanks.
I can guarentee you don't know what marxism is or what socialism is, because anyone claiming the modern democratic party of supporting either is ignorant of the meanings of those terms.
putting 200-300% tariffs on everything made in China
Which would do what exactly? Tariffs on those goods don't hurt china, and the legal benefits are significant enough that there is a lot of tolerance for tarrifs that can be passed on to consumers with a shrug.
barring all CCP members from the country (except ambassador, UN ambassador, and minimal staff) and making moves to eject them.
How are you making that determination?
moving towards nationalizing and selling off all Chinese-business-owned property in the country.
So ending the mutual economic ties between America and China which are the core of our best defense against war since you already dumped diplomatic ties?
You see, 7-10 years ago mike was so concerned he was being exposed by OOTB and created a bunch of sockpuppet accounts to astroturf support for Techdirt's positions. Then he did nothing with them for years so they would seem like long time supporters until the exposure got to be too much and he finally started making a tepid post or two.
Re: Re: Won't somebody PLEASE think of the software "patents"
Software is not math.
Software is precisely math. All a computer can do is math. All it can do is take inputs, process those inputs through a set formula, and produce an output. if you have all the same inputs you will always get the same result(s).
I don't think anything discussed here has 230 implications. We aren't talking content issues here. We are discussing Google's actions outside of content moderation. 230 doesn't apply.
Could you explain what liability should instead be asserted at users rather than at google?
As far as Google paying Apple, the logic comes out of a specific category of anti-trust. A company who uses the money they earn to lock out competitors and secure more of the market can be seen as manipulating the market.
Apple and Google compete in mobile OS and the browser space, true. But they don't compete in search. Apple would have a natural incentive to use a competing search engine as the default in iOS to avoid bolstering their mobile OS/browser competitor.
Google however subverts this natural incentive by spending the money smaller competitors don't have. That they had to pay Apple is evidence that Apple would not have made organically made this choice. This then serves to roadblock smaller search engines by dint of google's money influencing the market. So far so good.
Where I agree with you is I have yet to see that the lawsuit then alleges that this move harmed consumers. It did not prevent consumers from making a choice. A customer that does not want to use google can use google to figure out how not to use google by default, like how I have to use edge to download Vivaldi or Chrome.
The issue is that consumers don't care enough. And legislators seem to think that by forcing them to make a choice during ever-longer setup screens and less space available on the phone as a result of a series of pre-installed options will somehow fix this apathy.
Your logical fallacy comes in the assumption that section 230 reform will make big platforms small.
Section 230 reform would serve to further consolidate "Hosts". Reform would only serve to move general content moderation the direction of copyright-related moderation as safe harbor stop being automatic. To avoid Vemio-like deaths where the company wins in court but goes bankrupt doing so, hosts will consolidate to create big enough war chests to survive as YouTube did.
If you want anti-trust, with the goal of making tech companies smaller, requiring them to be big to continue to operate is contradictory.
On the post: Judge Easily Rejects Parler's Demands To Have Amazon Reinstate Parler
Re: Re: Re: Re: Par-lie
Once again I plug All the President's Lawyers, a podcast from KCRW featuring Ken "Popehat" White.
Not all lawsuits are about winning. Some are about the performative messaging. Like the impeachment against joe biden - the claims have been adjudicated by the house, the senete, and the OLC and there is nothing there. But filing these articles signals to her base, makes her look to them like shes fighting, and that gives her political capital from doing nothing. Same with parler.
On the post: Inauguration Has Happened, Google And Facebook Should End The Ban On Political Advertisements
Re: Re: Re: Re: How about no?
Mike was not responding to google's political ad ban in the comment you replied to. He was responding to the question "How about no political ads at all", and noted, as he did in the article and in multiple articles in the past, that defining political advertising is hard, because content is advertising. A core tenant of the Techdirt philosophy. In politics what you say can have deeper hidden messages advertising your support and intentions to various groups that back you holding office, as Techdirt saw in its Electioneering simulations. Going back to the clear example, everything Trump did was about advertising the Trump brand, making the Trump brand look good. A lot of fucking political advertising is run through official statements, press releases, speeches in congress, and common people discussing the issue with their friends. Think about the crazyness of determining what is a donation in kind to a campaign, and then start considering what people might consider Advertising-in-kind.
On the post: Inauguration Has Happened, Google And Facebook Should End The Ban On Political Advertisements
Re: Re: Re: How about no?
Di you read the article and the sources?
Is it political advertising to advertise a documentary that touches on the shady past of a politician? Because that is literally why we have citizen's united. A law barring third party political advertising (electioneering communications, specifically) close to an election hit ads for a documentary critical of Hilary Clinton during the 2008 election. Your plan is even more broad, and would likely have barred the documentary from ever being advertised.
Exposure is advertising. Can a politician not appear on TV? You say they can, but speeches are not just messaging. Trump used anti-caravan messaging to drum up support for republican candidates in the 2018 election. That is, he used his platform to to tell voters to vote for "strong border" candidates. He got his political ads free because the press would swarm to write it down if he farted, but all the hyperventilating was advertising and absolutely political in nature. If no candidate turned a series of his sound bytes on the caravan into a political ad, positive or negative, for one of those candidates I'd be shocked.
A 10 YEAR Ban on advertising would rip apart the ability of people to state their preference for a candidate, as such endorsements even informal are advertising under the current legal understanding of the term. Arguing for a 10 year ban on political advertising when you can't pin down a definition of such is outrageous.
On the post: Parler Attempting to Come Back Online, Still Insisting The Site's Motivation Is 'Privacy' Despite Leaking Details On All Its Users
Re: Dangerous to monitor
How so? does Epik have a sweet ass captcha that determines if you are a journalist?
On the post: A Few More Thoughts On The Total Deplatforming Of Parler & Infrastructure Content Moderation
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More moderate than I was expecting.
No one is likely to read this, but I need this to exist.
You have hit a core issue on its head. Capitalim talks like it is democratic, with the marketplace being described as a democratic forum, where the best products rise and the worst fail by voting with your wallet. And if you subscribe to that view, twitter booting voices off because of a profit motive is the market at work. Democracy (the will of the userbase reflected in what ideas are profitable) has decided that certain ideas are disfavored.
Your complaint, and the complaint of every "Twitter/Facebook/et al cant boot me off because they are too big" user is at its core a complaint about the ways capitalism can subvert the democratic process. It is very true that it can. But your assessment stops at stating that the process can be subverted, but then proceeds to assume that it has been subverted. You keep flailing towards profit being the motive, but refuse to question if profits come not because a minority is subverting the market, but because the market is responding to the will of the majority.
You have to do more than prove the possibility of market subversion for the argument to be taken seriously. You need to actually establish the market is being subverted. Part of a democratic process is establishing the Overton Window, the scope of ideas that are on the table for discussion. Race science isn't on the table, not because we 'can't talk about it', but because race scientists are making the same arguments, with the same data, they were making 50 years ago and we've already had that debate. The marketplace can decide that a product is too toxic to carry. IF a survival knife became known to fall apart in shipping, consumers will stop buying it. Retailers stop stocking it because they can't sell a faulty product. Eventually its not in the marketplace at all. Then it can't be bought, even if what you want is indeed a knife that falls apart under any strain.
Same goes for speech. If you want to think of speech as a product in a marketplace, you have to accept that the marketplace might remove some speech because the market refuses to carry it.
Better for anyone who believes in speech free from government abuse. If you quote the rest of the sentance:
That One Guy explained why he thought it was a better alternative. You didn't engage on the actual argument he made, just quoted an out of context bite and argued THAT. Its a strawman.
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
individuals aren't the Party. The American Democrat Party platform is not marxist or socialist. That Bernie is considered a fringe platform within the party loyalists is evidence to this. However to address your question on its own terms: I don't know of any nationally elected official describing themselves as marxist. Bernie uses the term democratic socialist, something his history backs up as his personal beliefs, but the policies he proposes are more in line with the social democrat philosophy as seen in the similarly named parties of Europe. You might wonder the difference.
Democratic socialists want economic change that democratizes ownership of business and profits (eliminating the capitalist class) without the nationalizing of industry, in contrast to many interpretations of early marxist thought such as in the USSR.
Social democrats advocate for the retention of capitalist owned industry but use the power of the the state and the democratic process to curb excesses of Capitalism through strong social programs, ala the Nordic model.
Can you cite a marxist american politician? I admit I can't keep track of every state and local level official. Id love to learn about some of them.
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re: Re:
It was blatantly clear if you read his commentary rather than get triggered when he described the content of the video as conspiracy riddled nonsense. Everyone criticizing you understood the context of TFG's commentary.
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Haven't read much. Fascism relates to the government - how the power of government is established and derived. Socialism relates to economics - how ownership of income generating property is established and who owns the profits.
Nazis for instance, took over Jewish owned busineses. But the government didn't own/run them generally. Nazis were big on privitization, a hallmark of capitalist economic thought.
Fascism, academically, is considered the reaction of the "political right" to leftist calls to extend the ideals of democracy into economics. It doesn't require any socialism to operate, and while they tend to talk socialism, those that implement 'socialism' use state ownership as a substitute for public ownership, which is highly disfavored in modern socialist thought. But as seen in the Nazi example, many also just say "socialism" when actually engaging in capitalist economic policy.
THat is why, as the video suggests, the understanding of what maxist theory is, and what mordern socialist theory is, compared to the propeganda you hear, is highly important.
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
That is context it would have been helpful to have when you shared the video. As PaulT noted, you should provide context as to the importance of a link, such as "don't concern yourself with the specific framing, I am only sharing this for its description of the use of propeganda to subvert ideals" It also was the very context with which TFG approached the video - that the descriptions of the subversion of the conciousnes are very important but that the framing was not accurate. Your criticism of TFG's commentary ignored his very commentary that the underlying warnings were valuable. Which is why I among others assumed you were endorsing the democrats are marxists message, because what you criticized is a refutation of the democrats are marxists framing.
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
How do any of thiese things relate to the question of if democrats are marxists looking to destroy democracy and the United States?
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The video you linked frames the democrats as Marxists. You reacted to a criticism of that framing as conspiratorial by saying that such a criticism was designed to shut down critical thinking. This suggests you disagree with the assertion that the democrats are not marxist.
You therefore support the assertion that democrats are marxists. If you don't support that claim, a more nuanced criticism of TFG's response would be in order.
If you fail to be specific in your criticism, it is your fault when we attempt to use context to fill in the blanks.
On the post: Bad Idea: President-Elect Biden Wants To Turn 1/6 Into The New 9/11
Re: Re: Re:
I can guarentee you don't know what marxism is or what socialism is, because anyone claiming the modern democratic party of supporting either is ignorant of the meanings of those terms.
On the post: The Beijing Arrests In Hong Kong Expand As America Loses Its Ability To Credibly Respond
Re:
Which would do what exactly? Tariffs on those goods don't hurt china, and the legal benefits are significant enough that there is a lot of tolerance for tarrifs that can be passed on to consumers with a shrug.
How are you making that determination?
So ending the mutual economic ties between America and China which are the core of our best defense against war since you already dumped diplomatic ties?
Definitely a good thing.
On the post: Eighth Circuit Strips Qualified Immunity From Cop Who Pulled Over A Driver For Flipping Her Off
Re: Re:
No one said nope
Your pants are on fire
Have a flag you shitposting liar.
On the post: 'Going Dark' Is Bullshit, Says Yet Another Report Detailing All The Ways Law Enforcement Can Obtain Evidence
Re: Re: FIRST ZOMBIE OF THE YEAR!
You see, 7-10 years ago mike was so concerned he was being exposed by OOTB and created a bunch of sockpuppet accounts to astroturf support for Techdirt's positions. Then he did nothing with them for years so they would seem like long time supporters until the exposure got to be too much and he finally started making a tepid post or two.
Astroturfing!
/Sarcasm
On the post: 60 Minutes Episode Is Pure Misleading Moral Panic About Section 230; Blames Unrelated Issues On It
Re:
Wyden has done multiple interviews for news orgs, including at least one cable news interview, over the past year.
It has had no effect.
On the post: Senators Tell The USPTO To Remove The Arbitrary Obstacles Preventing Inventors (Especially Women Inventors) From Getting Patents
Re: Re: Won't somebody PLEASE think of the software "patents"
Software is precisely math. All a computer can do is math. All it can do is take inputs, process those inputs through a set formula, and produce an output. if you have all the same inputs you will always get the same result(s).
On the post: Another Day, Another Antitrust Lawsuit For Google:
Re:
I don't think anything discussed here has 230 implications. We aren't talking content issues here. We are discussing Google's actions outside of content moderation. 230 doesn't apply.
Could you explain what liability should instead be asserted at users rather than at google?
On the post: Another Day, Another Antitrust Lawsuit For Google:
As far as Google paying Apple, the logic comes out of a specific category of anti-trust. A company who uses the money they earn to lock out competitors and secure more of the market can be seen as manipulating the market.
Apple and Google compete in mobile OS and the browser space, true. But they don't compete in search. Apple would have a natural incentive to use a competing search engine as the default in iOS to avoid bolstering their mobile OS/browser competitor.
Google however subverts this natural incentive by spending the money smaller competitors don't have. That they had to pay Apple is evidence that Apple would not have made organically made this choice. This then serves to roadblock smaller search engines by dint of google's money influencing the market. So far so good.
Where I agree with you is I have yet to see that the lawsuit then alleges that this move harmed consumers. It did not prevent consumers from making a choice. A customer that does not want to use google can use google to figure out how not to use google by default, like how I have to use edge to download Vivaldi or Chrome.
The issue is that consumers don't care enough. And legislators seem to think that by forcing them to make a choice during ever-longer setup screens and less space available on the phone as a result of a series of pre-installed options will somehow fix this apathy.
On the post: Smaller Internet Companies Say They're Open To 230 Reform... To Keep Facebook From Being The Only Voice In The Room
Re: There is NO contradiction!
Your logical fallacy comes in the assumption that section 230 reform will make big platforms small.
Section 230 reform would serve to further consolidate "Hosts". Reform would only serve to move general content moderation the direction of copyright-related moderation as safe harbor stop being automatic. To avoid Vemio-like deaths where the company wins in court but goes bankrupt doing so, hosts will consolidate to create big enough war chests to survive as YouTube did.
If you want anti-trust, with the goal of making tech companies smaller, requiring them to be big to continue to operate is contradictory.
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