Anyone who writes on RFK, Jr. and says he is anti-vax is obviously stupid.
He constantly goes on about the dangers of vaccines without reliable evidence to support his claims. Most would characterize that as anti-vax.
Bobby has said every day in every way he is not against vaccines…
That he denies the label doesn’t prove that the label doesn’t fit.
…and has had his kids vaccinated.
So he’s a hypocrite, too.
This is just more of this "1st Amendment is only applies to government" nonsense coming from certain writers at Tech Dirt
It’s not nonsense. That’s literally what it says.
Ok, I'll grant you: the Founders were wrong. They should have added "and all tech monopolies" to the 1st Amendment. That's obviously what needs to happen.
First, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant only to set up the government and proscribe what it can and cannot do. It was never intended to restrict private citizens or corporations at all. That’s what laws are for.
Second, while that’s an interesting idea, the fact remains that they didn’t and that hasn’t happened yet, so right now, the FA just applies to the government and not to private citizens or organizations.
Otherwise, what's next? The phone company won't allow you a phone line if they don't like your conversations?
We have laws regulating public utilities like phone companies to keep that from happening. There is no such law regulating social media companies in a similar manner. Besides, that has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Also, even if it leads to undesirable results, that doesn’t change what the law is.
In the meantime, Bobby is on to something with these actions. And it's real stupid to call him and his actions stupid.
Under the current laws in the US and California, no he is not. This lawsuit is doomed to fail, and it will likely mean that the ones filing the lawsuit will be on the hook for Facebook et al’s legal costs. This isn’t even a close call. As such, filing such a lawsuit against a large, California-based company in a California court could be reasonably considered a stupid action. It is therefore reasonable to call the ones filing the lawsuit stupid themselves.
I and others have pointed out other motivations for Trump to ban TikTok, including the fact that he was embarrassed at a rally due to TikTok users. I also noted that there’s nothing that proves and no reason to believe that Facebook singled out TikTok by name or anything; I actually used this to show that Facebook’s spokesman was missing the point in his denial.
More importantly, how is any of that inconsistent with what was written?
"Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said in statement Sunday that "Mark has never advocated for a ban on TikTok." He also said it was wrong to conclude that policy decisions were driven by Zuckerberg.
"He has repeatedly said publicly that the biggest competitors to US tech companies are Chinese companies, with values that don't align with democratic ideals like free speech," he said. "It's ludicrous to suggest that long-standing national security concerns — raised by policymakers on both sides of the aisle — have been shaped by Mark's statements alone."
Believe it or not, I actually believe the spokesman is being completely truthful here. No one said that Zuckerberg was advocating for a TikTok ban specifically, Zuckerberg has made similar statements publicly, and I don’t believe anyone is saying that it was only Mark’s statements that were responsible for this decision, let alone the aforementioned “longstanding security concerns”.
However, the spokesman is rather missing the point. Combine the broad statements likely made by Mark to Trump with Trump’s xenophobia—particularly against China when it comes to economics—and the humiliation he got from TikTok recently, and it seems clear why these actions by Trump were directed at TikTok specifically and why now. Mark never needed to mention TikTok specifically.
It’s also the case that Facebook is at least a bit of a hypocrite in the consumer-security-and-privacy area even with regards to those broader statements, which the spokesman’s statement in no way addresses at all. That’s perhaps the main issue here.
Ummm, I never claimed to be atheist. I support their rights to not believe and as decent human beings, but I’ve always been an agnostic Christian and never claimed otherwise.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: bhull Aspergers, and the negative effects of
Odd that it took so long to get a reply, but whatever.
Yes, we agree on all of those points.
Good. Glad we have some common ground.
have you been following the case if Ahmaud Arbery
I have not. I’ll look it up later and see what I think of it.
All of that is good enough evidence, and empirical “proof ” for me that gang stalking is what Is say it is.
Having gone through the list, I’d like to point out that, by your own admission, at least one of those people gang-stalking someone is being investigated, which tends to undermine the idea that this was a widespread conspiracy.
More importantly, though, 1) I already said that at least some instances of organized gang stalking do exist; 2) none of that is empirical evidence, just a single anecdote; and 3) even if true, none of it really tends to favor your interpretation over mine of gang stalking as a whole. I’m not saying it’s bad evidence per se, but it’s not really definitive evidence of a trend or large-scale conspiracy.
Again, though, I’ll have to look it up to say anything more about that.
And, then, theres the case of George Floyd, who you might have heard about too.
Similar facts exist in that case too.
Really? I mean, I’ve heard about the case, sure, but from what I can tell, while not entirely an isolated incident, it sure does seem pretty different from gang stalking, organized or otherwise. Here’s what I’m aware of:
George Floyd, like many Blacks, has a history of being harassed by police over minor violations. I’m not aware of any stalking or secret surveillance, of Floyd, though, nor am I aware of any ongoing investigation(s) of Floyd at the time of the incident that predated the day in question.
On the day of the incident, a store clerk called police because he suspected—though he had no evidence—that Floyd had passed a counterfeit bill.
After police stopped Floyd for questioning, for no clear reason, one of the officers violently restrained Floyd and sat on top of him for quite some time, restricting his breathing. As I recall, this method of restraint actually goes against police regulations.
After some time passed with Floyd not moving or making any noise, an officer tried to find a pulse and couldn’t find one. Despite this, quite some time passed before the officer on top of Floyd finally got off of him.
None of the other officers on the scene did anything to stop, help, discourage, or encourage what that officer was doing to Floyd.
Essentially, this officer killed Floyd over a suspected counterfeit bill despite the fact that Floyd posed no real threat to the officers.
That officer has been (or soon will be) charged with homicide or manslaughter over this incident. I don’t recall whether or not he has had any other consequences (like being suspended or fired from his job).
Really, while there is a lot of terrible parts of this (each of the bullet points except the last one were each individually reprehensible at best), it’s a) quite different from what you said about the Ahmed Arbery Case and b) doesn’t appear to be gang stalking at all. There’s no stalking, no involvement of the prosecutor(s) or higher-ups, no one involved besides on-duty police officers and the victim, no long-term plans (in fact, it appears that there was no plan to kill him prior to the phone call to police by the store clerk), nothing about online stuff, and no allegations or charges of child abuse or child porn.
It may be (and likely is) indicative of some serious issues with how many police treat suspects, but it’s not really indicative of any sort of conspiracy or gang stalking (organized or otherwise).
Even if it was evidence of organized gang stalking, once again, it would be purely anecdotal evidence, not empirical.
Quick history lesson: for the German variety, the very name stood for Nationalist SOCIALIST. In their 25 point plan, they included land expropriation, nationalization of certain industries, and expanded welfare.
The National Socialist Party changed drastically once Hitler took over. It’s also worth noting that America nationalizes certain industries, too, that having some welfare is true of many European parties on both sides of the aisle, and that land expropriation is not socialism.
Fascism is a mindset that can be completely devoid of government, and does not depend on totalinarianism.
Fascism is about government. It is not separate from that; that’s what makes it political. The whole idea involves having a totalitarian government that explicitly excludes certain “others” and suppressing dissent and favors national pride over all else.
The European fascists of the 1930s were left wing socialists.
No, no they were not. When people think of European fascists, they think of Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom were very hard right politically. They were not socialists either because they didn’t own the means of production or most businesses. Same goes for the fascist dictator of Spain (whose name escapes me at the moment).
I’m beginning to think you don’t actually know what “fascism”, “left[-]wing”, or “socialist[]” actually mean. Fascism is explicitly a far right ideology, not left-wing, and socialism specifically refers to the economic system where the means of production (e.g. ownership of businesses and employment for said businesses) are owned by the government/head(s) of state rather than private individuals/organizations. Fascism is essentially a subset of totalitarianism, totalitarian governments may or may not be socialist, and socialist countries may or may not be run by a totalitarian government. I think you’re confusing “fascism” with “totalitarianism” and “socialism” with either “left-wing totalitarianism”, “not 100% capitalist”, or “leftist”.
If the disagreer is an ordinary adult, then the facist wants that person fired from their job, and banned from social media. If the disagreer cannot be fired, perhaps because they own a business, then the facist wants a boycott to ruin the person financially, and then thrown in jail.
That’s not exclusive to fascists, you know? And outside of the “thrown in jail”, those aren’t even necessarily indicative of fascism or vice versa. Seriously, you don’t seem to understand what the words you keep using actually mean.
It is special treatment when literally everyone else gets persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. That’s literally what “special treatment” means!
Also, how is getting ads and such limited on Facebook for spreading misinformation in any way equivalent to being persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition?
That they don’t specifically allow users to easily change the OS isn’t a lock. That the PS3 allowed it was highly unusual and required specific software to do.
As I recall, the PS3 was notoriously difficult to code for for several reasons, namely that its hardware was substantially different from PCs or XBox 360s or the Wii. It also had one important hardware difference from PCs in that it used Blu-Ray instead of DVDs for physical media, which can store more data.
There are also some substantial differences between the Wii U and either the XBox One or the PS4.
See, the thing is that when there’s only like three consoles per generation, and only a few of the ones from the past two generations were using more standardized chipsets, saying that most consoles aren’t “genuinely specialized” (ignoring the fact that the OS, ports, chips outside the CPU and GPU, and specialized controllers are all also part of what makes consoles specialized) isn’t all that accurate. Some were, some weren’t.
I agree with most of what you said (though I believe modding for some titles like Skyrim is allowed on XBox One), but I do believe there should be some clarification here. On PC, there is usually the option for higher resolution. Different PCs perform differently, so there’s generally more customizability for PC games.
Basically, a lot of the differences between PC and consoles come down to the fact that consoles generally only have one or two builds with different RAM, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. that affect performance and what the platform is capable of and only accept one or two (maybe three if there’s backwards compatibility) different media for storing games, while PCs have a lot of options for different performances and specs. The PCs themselves are more varied and customizable, so so are the games’ options on PC.
What consoles offer is simplicity in getting the games, starting the games, and knowing whether your machine supports a given (version of a given) game. You generally don’t have to worry about hardware requirements with consoles like you do with PCs. That customizability and openness of PCs is a double-edged sword, after all. Sure, PC games may have higher max graphics and performance than console games, but console games are generally more guaranteed to work on your machine and simpler to set-up and research.
I agree with most of what you said (though I believe modding for some titles like Skyrim is allowed on XBox One), but I do believe there should be some clarification here. On PC, there is usually the option for higher resolution. Different PCs perform differently, so there’s generally more customizability for PC games.
Basically, a lot of the differences between PC and consoles come down to the fact that consoles generally only have one or two builds with different RAM, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. that affect performance and what the platform is capable of and only accept one or two (maybe three if there’s backwards compatibility) different media for storing games, while PCs have a lot of options for different performances and specs. The PCs themselves are more varied and customizable, so so are the games’ options on PC.
What consoles offer is simplicity in getting the games, starting the games, and knowing whether your machine supports a given (version of a given) game. You generally don’t have to worry about hardware requirements with consoles like you do with PCs. That customizability and openness of PCs is a double-edged sword, after all. Sure, PC games may have higher max graphics and performance than console games, but console games are generally more guaranteed to work on your machine and simpler to set-up and research.
Plus, Sony really dragged their feet on cross-platform support.
That said, while I’m not surprised at Sony making consumer-hostile decisions aimed at exclusivity and closed content, nor am I going to waste my time complaining about titles being made platform-exclusive purely because of deals made with platform holders, making a third-party character (one who isn’t even originally from a video game) platform exclusive is a new low.
On the post: GOP Senators Release Latest Truly Stupid Section 230 Reform Bill; Would Remove 'Otherwise Objectionable'; Enable Spamming
Re: The 'Stop Moderating Assholes' bill, take 8
I like the nickname, but do you mean “stop assholes who moderate” or “stop people from moderating those who are assholes”?
On the post: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Insanely Stupid Lawsuit Against Facebook
Re: Stupid
He constantly goes on about the dangers of vaccines without reliable evidence to support his claims. Most would characterize that as anti-vax.
That he denies the label doesn’t prove that the label doesn’t fit.
So he’s a hypocrite, too.
It’s not nonsense. That’s literally what it says.
First, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant only to set up the government and proscribe what it can and cannot do. It was never intended to restrict private citizens or corporations at all. That’s what laws are for.
Second, while that’s an interesting idea, the fact remains that they didn’t and that hasn’t happened yet, so right now, the FA just applies to the government and not to private citizens or organizations.
We have laws regulating public utilities like phone companies to keep that from happening. There is no such law regulating social media companies in a similar manner. Besides, that has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Also, even if it leads to undesirable results, that doesn’t change what the law is.
Under the current laws in the US and California, no he is not. This lawsuit is doomed to fail, and it will likely mean that the ones filing the lawsuit will be on the hook for Facebook et al’s legal costs. This isn’t even a close call. As such, filing such a lawsuit against a large, California-based company in a California court could be reasonably considered a stupid action. It is therefore reasonable to call the ones filing the lawsuit stupid themselves.
On the post: Surprise: Report Claims Facebook Has Been Driving White House TikTok Animosity
Re: Re: Re: Hitchen's Razor
I and others have pointed out other motivations for Trump to ban TikTok, including the fact that he was embarrassed at a rally due to TikTok users. I also noted that there’s nothing that proves and no reason to believe that Facebook singled out TikTok by name or anything; I actually used this to show that Facebook’s spokesman was missing the point in his denial.
More importantly, how is any of that inconsistent with what was written?
On the post: Surprise: Report Claims Facebook Has Been Driving White House TikTok Animosity
Re: The trade war isn't working?
No one wins a trade war.
On the post: Surprise: Report Claims Facebook Has Been Driving White House TikTok Animosity
I’m constantly amazed that Trump can be so highly critical of someone one second then actually take their advice seriously the next.
On the post: Surprise: Report Claims Facebook Has Been Driving White House TikTok Animosity
Believe it or not, I actually believe the spokesman is being completely truthful here. No one said that Zuckerberg was advocating for a TikTok ban specifically, Zuckerberg has made similar statements publicly, and I don’t believe anyone is saying that it was only Mark’s statements that were responsible for this decision, let alone the aforementioned “longstanding security concerns”.
However, the spokesman is rather missing the point. Combine the broad statements likely made by Mark to Trump with Trump’s xenophobia—particularly against China when it comes to economics—and the humiliation he got from TikTok recently, and it seems clear why these actions by Trump were directed at TikTok specifically and why now. Mark never needed to mention TikTok specifically.
It’s also the case that Facebook is at least a bit of a hypocrite in the consumer-security-and-privacy area even with regards to those broader statements, which the spokesman’s statement in no way addresses at all. That’s perhaps the main issue here.
On the post: Surprise: Report Claims Facebook Has Been Driving White House TikTok Animosity
Re:
I’m sorry, but are you saying that Mark Zuckerberg is not an American citizen?
On the post: SLAPP Suits And The Enemies Of Writing And Ideas
Re: words do have meaning
Ummm, I never claimed to be atheist. I support their rights to not believe and as decent human beings, but I’ve always been an agnostic Christian and never claimed otherwise.
On the post: SLAPP Suits And The Enemies Of Writing And Ideas
Re: Re:
I wouldn’t blame atheism for him.
On the post: Dear Reuters: This Is NOT How You Report On Dishonest, Disingenuous Talking Points From US Officials Regarding Encryption
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: bhull Aspergers, and the negative effects of
Odd that it took so long to get a reply, but whatever.
Good. Glad we have some common ground.
I have not. I’ll look it up later and see what I think of it.
Having gone through the list, I’d like to point out that, by your own admission, at least one of those people gang-stalking someone is being investigated, which tends to undermine the idea that this was a widespread conspiracy.
More importantly, though, 1) I already said that at least some instances of organized gang stalking do exist; 2) none of that is empirical evidence, just a single anecdote; and 3) even if true, none of it really tends to favor your interpretation over mine of gang stalking as a whole. I’m not saying it’s bad evidence per se, but it’s not really definitive evidence of a trend or large-scale conspiracy.
Again, though, I’ll have to look it up to say anything more about that.
Really? I mean, I’ve heard about the case, sure, but from what I can tell, while not entirely an isolated incident, it sure does seem pretty different from gang stalking, organized or otherwise. Here’s what I’m aware of:
George Floyd, like many Blacks, has a history of being harassed by police over minor violations. I’m not aware of any stalking or secret surveillance, of Floyd, though, nor am I aware of any ongoing investigation(s) of Floyd at the time of the incident that predated the day in question.
On the day of the incident, a store clerk called police because he suspected—though he had no evidence—that Floyd had passed a counterfeit bill.
After police stopped Floyd for questioning, for no clear reason, one of the officers violently restrained Floyd and sat on top of him for quite some time, restricting his breathing. As I recall, this method of restraint actually goes against police regulations.
After some time passed with Floyd not moving or making any noise, an officer tried to find a pulse and couldn’t find one. Despite this, quite some time passed before the officer on top of Floyd finally got off of him.
None of the other officers on the scene did anything to stop, help, discourage, or encourage what that officer was doing to Floyd.
Essentially, this officer killed Floyd over a suspected counterfeit bill despite the fact that Floyd posed no real threat to the officers.
Really, while there is a lot of terrible parts of this (each of the bullet points except the last one were each individually reprehensible at best), it’s a) quite different from what you said about the Ahmed Arbery Case and b) doesn’t appear to be gang stalking at all. There’s no stalking, no involvement of the prosecutor(s) or higher-ups, no one involved besides on-duty police officers and the victim, no long-term plans (in fact, it appears that there was no plan to kill him prior to the phone call to police by the store clerk), nothing about online stuff, and no allegations or charges of child abuse or child porn.
It may be (and likely is) indicative of some serious issues with how many police treat suspects, but it’s not really indicative of any sort of conspiracy or gang stalking (organized or otherwise).
Even if it was evidence of organized gang stalking, once again, it would be purely anecdotal evidence, not empirical.
On the post: Yes, Facebook Treats Trump Fans Differently: It Has Relaxed The Rules To Give Them More Leeway
Re: Re: Re: Re:
That doesn’t make it socialism.
On the post: Yes, Facebook Treats Trump Fans Differently: It Has Relaxed The Rules To Give Them More Leeway
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The National Socialist Party changed drastically once Hitler took over. It’s also worth noting that America nationalizes certain industries, too, that having some welfare is true of many European parties on both sides of the aisle, and that land expropriation is not socialism.
Fascism is about government. It is not separate from that; that’s what makes it political. The whole idea involves having a totalitarian government that explicitly excludes certain “others” and suppressing dissent and favors national pride over all else.
On the post: Yes, Facebook Treats Trump Fans Differently: It Has Relaxed The Rules To Give Them More Leeway
Re: Re:
No, no they were not. When people think of European fascists, they think of Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom were very hard right politically. They were not socialists either because they didn’t own the means of production or most businesses. Same goes for the fascist dictator of Spain (whose name escapes me at the moment).
I’m beginning to think you don’t actually know what “fascism”, “left[-]wing”, or “socialist[]” actually mean. Fascism is explicitly a far right ideology, not left-wing, and socialism specifically refers to the economic system where the means of production (e.g. ownership of businesses and employment for said businesses) are owned by the government/head(s) of state rather than private individuals/organizations. Fascism is essentially a subset of totalitarianism, totalitarian governments may or may not be socialist, and socialist countries may or may not be run by a totalitarian government. I think you’re confusing “fascism” with “totalitarianism” and “socialism” with either “left-wing totalitarianism”, “not 100% capitalist”, or “leftist”.
That’s not exclusive to fascists, you know? And outside of the “thrown in jail”, those aren’t even necessarily indicative of fascism or vice versa. Seriously, you don’t seem to understand what the words you keep using actually mean.
On the post: Yes, Facebook Treats Trump Fans Differently: It Has Relaxed The Rules To Give Them More Leeway
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Again, you’re defining “left wing” as someone who doesn’t agree with you.
On the post: Yes, Facebook Treats Trump Fans Differently: It Has Relaxed The Rules To Give Them More Leeway
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It is special treatment when literally everyone else gets persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. That’s literally what “special treatment” means!
Also, how is getting ads and such limited on Facebook for spreading misinformation in any way equivalent to being persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition?
On the post: Crystal Dynamics Explains Spider-Man PS4 Exclusivity By Saying A Bunch Of... Words, I Guess?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
That they don’t specifically allow users to easily change the OS isn’t a lock. That the PS3 allowed it was highly unusual and required specific software to do.
On the post: Crystal Dynamics Explains Spider-Man PS4 Exclusivity By Saying A Bunch Of... Words, I Guess?
Re: Re: Re:
As I recall, the PS3 was notoriously difficult to code for for several reasons, namely that its hardware was substantially different from PCs or XBox 360s or the Wii. It also had one important hardware difference from PCs in that it used Blu-Ray instead of DVDs for physical media, which can store more data.
There are also some substantial differences between the Wii U and either the XBox One or the PS4.
See, the thing is that when there’s only like three consoles per generation, and only a few of the ones from the past two generations were using more standardized chipsets, saying that most consoles aren’t “genuinely specialized” (ignoring the fact that the OS, ports, chips outside the CPU and GPU, and specialized controllers are all also part of what makes consoles specialized) isn’t all that accurate. Some were, some weren’t.
On the post: Crystal Dynamics Explains Spider-Man PS4 Exclusivity By Saying A Bunch Of... Words, I Guess?
Re: Re:
I agree with most of what you said (though I believe modding for some titles like Skyrim is allowed on XBox One), but I do believe there should be some clarification here. On PC, there is usually the option for higher resolution. Different PCs perform differently, so there’s generally more customizability for PC games.
Basically, a lot of the differences between PC and consoles come down to the fact that consoles generally only have one or two builds with different RAM, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. that affect performance and what the platform is capable of and only accept one or two (maybe three if there’s backwards compatibility) different media for storing games, while PCs have a lot of options for different performances and specs. The PCs themselves are more varied and customizable, so so are the games’ options on PC.
What consoles offer is simplicity in getting the games, starting the games, and knowing whether your machine supports a given (version of a given) game. You generally don’t have to worry about hardware requirements with consoles like you do with PCs. That customizability and openness of PCs is a double-edged sword, after all. Sure, PC games may have higher max graphics and performance than console games, but console games are generally more guaranteed to work on your machine and simpler to set-up and research.
On the post: Crystal Dynamics Explains Spider-Man PS4 Exclusivity By Saying A Bunch Of... Words, I Guess?
Re: Re:
I agree with most of what you said (though I believe modding for some titles like Skyrim is allowed on XBox One), but I do believe there should be some clarification here. On PC, there is usually the option for higher resolution. Different PCs perform differently, so there’s generally more customizability for PC games.
Basically, a lot of the differences between PC and consoles come down to the fact that consoles generally only have one or two builds with different RAM, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. that affect performance and what the platform is capable of and only accept one or two (maybe three if there’s backwards compatibility) different media for storing games, while PCs have a lot of options for different performances and specs. The PCs themselves are more varied and customizable, so so are the games’ options on PC.
What consoles offer is simplicity in getting the games, starting the games, and knowing whether your machine supports a given (version of a given) game. You generally don’t have to worry about hardware requirements with consoles like you do with PCs. That customizability and openness of PCs is a double-edged sword, after all. Sure, PC games may have higher max graphics and performance than console games, but console games are generally more guaranteed to work on your machine and simpler to set-up and research.
On the post: Crystal Dynamics Explains Spider-Man PS4 Exclusivity By Saying A Bunch Of... Words, I Guess?
Re: Re: Re: Maybe nex time try silence
Plus, Sony really dragged their feet on cross-platform support.
That said, while I’m not surprised at Sony making consumer-hostile decisions aimed at exclusivity and closed content, nor am I going to waste my time complaining about titles being made platform-exclusive purely because of deals made with platform holders, making a third-party character (one who isn’t even originally from a video game) platform exclusive is a new low.
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