President Joe Biden

Says one of the lefty trolls :D

Defending the Impeached Peach of Shit from an assertion that he lacks human qualities says a lot Grace Karen. It looks like you’re really getting to her @Hüsker Dü.

Brace yourselves everybody, ‘cuz Grace Karen the Apologist is about to go through the roof today over impeachment. I don’t know someone rationalizes being wrong with such frequency. Wanna give us some insight @crush?
 
Private companies restricting content is not a 1st amendment issue. You or I don't have the right to post whatever we want here, for example. We have the right to post whatever Dominic is prepared to tolerate. If he decides to ban either of us, he's not restricting our 1st amendment rights. Twitter, Facebook etc. are just mega scales larger.
That is the problem. Twitter and Facebook are in fact the public square now. They have more power to regulate speech in a sense right now vs what the gov does.

If Dom bans me or you, then our access to chatting with 20 regulars and maybe 200 people who drop is stopped.

When Twitter bans someone or some group, their access to billions is gone. And the billions access to their ideas are gone.

That is the big difference.

"What, then, should be done? First, the Parler purge should be investigated as an antitrust violation. The Sherman Antitrust Act makes conspiracies in restraint of trade unlawful; Parler has a colorable claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon acted in concert to crush their company.

Antitrust is just the beginning. Conservatives are facing a collective, inescapable, yet private regime of discrimination and censorship. The only institution powerful enough to defeat this cartel is the federal government. If and when Republicans retake power in 2024, the first item on the agenda should be new laws that protect every American’s civil right to speak freely on social media.

And yes, the right of all Americans to speak on social media should be seen as a civil right.

The Fourteenth Amendment made governmental racial discrimination unlawful; that, though, was not enough to make our country’s underlying commitment to racial equality meaningful, so the federal government passed laws prohibiting racial discrimination by private companies.

Similarly, the First Amendment protects against government censorship. But in 2020, most political debate happens on large social-media platforms. Facebook and Twitter are the modern public square. Thus, if our society’s commitment to free speech is to have any meaning, our government must constrain large social-media companies from censoring Americans’ lawful speech.

Poland, appropriately enough, is leading the way. Their Justice Minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, announced last month that the Polish government would enact a law constraining Big Tech from censoring their citizens. Polish users who are victims of censorship can go to a new Polish court, get an injunction forcing the company to restore their account and their content, on penalty of a fine of as much as 1.8 million euros.

We should do the same."
 
I wonder how Grace Karen feels about American hero @donk_enby exposing all the domestic terrorists’ identities? She’s been such a huge defender of “self help” insurrection, surely she is a fan of self help hacking to Parler to discovery these seditionists’ identities. Or maybe she’s only a supporter of the rights of social media when it involves facilitating insurrection like Parler, but not preventing it like Twitter.

My best guess is that she supports breaking into the Capitol in support of a coup, but does not support breaking into the servers of a private entity that facilitates the attempted overthrow of the u.S. government.
 
That is the problem. Twitter and Facebook are in fact the public square now. They have more power to regulate speech in a sense right now vs what the gov does.

If Dom bans me or you, then our access to chatting with 20 regulars and maybe 200 people who drop is stopped.

When Twitter bans someone or some group, their access to billions is gone. And the billions access to their ideas are gone.

That is the big difference.

"What, then, should be done? First, the Parler purge should be investigated as an antitrust violation. The Sherman Antitrust Act makes conspiracies in restraint of trade unlawful; Parler has a colorable claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon acted in concert to crush their company.

Antitrust is just the beginning. Conservatives are facing a collective, inescapable, yet private regime of discrimination and censorship. The only institution powerful enough to defeat this cartel is the federal government. If and when Republicans retake power in 2024, the first item on the agenda should be new laws that protect every American’s civil right to speak freely on social media.

And yes, the right of all Americans to speak on social media should be seen as a civil right.

The Fourteenth Amendment made governmental racial discrimination unlawful; that, though, was not enough to make our country’s underlying commitment to racial equality meaningful, so the federal government passed laws prohibiting racial discrimination by private companies.

Similarly, the First Amendment protects against government censorship. But in 2020, most political debate happens on large social-media platforms. Facebook and Twitter are the modern public square. Thus, if our society’s commitment to free speech is to have any meaning, our government must constrain large social-media companies from censoring Americans’ lawful speech.

Poland, appropriately enough, is leading the way. Their Justice Minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, announced last month that the Polish government would enact a law constraining Big Tech from censoring their citizens. Polish users who are victims of censorship can go to a new Polish court, get an injunction forcing the company to restore their account and their content, on penalty of a fine of as much as 1.8 million euros.

We should do the same."
So you want the US to be the same as China and dictating what can (and by extension cannot) be said on social media.

Just because someone someone says "Facebook and Twitter are the modern public square" doesn't make it true. The First Amendment doesn't allow any speech, there are limits, such as incitement to riot, incitement to commit murder, incitement to commit criminal acts, collusion to commit criminal acts etc. I agree that that rules should be consistent for everyone.

The Polish regime as a leader in anything democratic is hilarious. The same regime that decided to lower the retirement age of the judiciary so that it could purge its ranks. The regime that brought in a law that would allow them to discipline the judiciary for their rulings (if they disagree with the govt. basically), essentially eliminating judicial independence. They are surely the gold standard for something, but free speech certainly isn't it, neither is democracy but there you go.
 
That is the problem. Twitter and Facebook are in fact the public square now. They have more power to regulate speech in a sense right now vs what the gov does.

If Dom bans me or you, then our access to chatting with 20 regulars and maybe 200 people who drop is stopped.

When Twitter bans someone or some group, their access to billions is gone. And the billions access to their ideas are gone.

That is the big difference.

"What, then, should be done? First, the Parler purge should be investigated as an antitrust violation. The Sherman Antitrust Act makes conspiracies in restraint of trade unlawful; Parler has a colorable claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon acted in concert to crush their company.

Antitrust is just the beginning. Conservatives are facing a collective, inescapable, yet private regime of discrimination and censorship. The only institution powerful enough to defeat this cartel is the federal government. If and when Republicans retake power in 2024, the first item on the agenda should be new laws that protect every American’s civil right to speak freely on social media.

And yes, the right of all Americans to speak on social media should be seen as a civil right.

The Fourteenth Amendment made governmental racial discrimination unlawful; that, though, was not enough to make our country’s underlying commitment to racial equality meaningful, so the federal government passed laws prohibiting racial discrimination by private companies.

Similarly, the First Amendment protects against government censorship. But in 2020, most political debate happens on large social-media platforms. Facebook and Twitter are the modern public square. Thus, if our society’s commitment to free speech is to have any meaning, our government must constrain large social-media companies from censoring Americans’ lawful speech.

Poland, appropriately enough, is leading the way. Their Justice Minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, announced last month that the Polish government would enact a law constraining Big Tech from censoring their citizens. Polish users who are victims of censorship can go to a new Polish court, get an injunction forcing the company to restore their account and their content, on penalty of a fine of as much as 1.8 million euros.

We should do the same."

Ha ha. You’ve clearly been talking to legal beagle Grace Karen. The argument that private companies Facebook and Twitter are actually public companies because they did something you don’t like - exercising their first amendment and free market right to tell the Impeached Peach of Shit to f**k off - is about as stupid as it gets. Seriously, this argument is delusional. So whiny. And where were you when Trumplestiltskin was using it to his advantage anyway?

As for Amazon, Parler can use any of a number of vendors to host its servers. No antitrust. As for Apple and Google, there are any number of ways Parler can be still be accessed, even on phones that use Apple and Google operating systems. Just log into their site using the Internet. Apple and Google didn’t shut off their servers. That is another problem by another company in another business.

You are seriously saying that the U.S. should do what Poland is doing? This is what the magat ‘publicans have come to. They are grasping at straws and desperate for anything that would impair the 1st Amendment and free market for no reason other than they don’t like democracy. They’re so desperate that they’re claiming we should take our lead from what is essentially a third world country with an autocratic government and no 1st Amendment.

Whiny losers. Seditionists. Collaborators. Appeasers. Just admit that you think we should skip the Marmalade Middle Man and just let Putin tell us what to do directly.
 
So you want the US to be the same as China and dictating what can (and by extension cannot) be said on social media.
Actually you have it backwards.

In China the government has biz limit speech. They tell the companies not to allow certain ideas.

That is very different from what we have today where biz in the US is actively taking sides, and limiting speech.

There are no other avenues for the dissemination of speech that has the reach of FB, Twitter, Instagram.

So the idea is not to tell these companies to kill of speech as is happening in China. The idea is that since these companies effectively control what is being disseminated, to tell them they CANNOT silence voices.

Big difference.
 
Actually you have it backwards.

In China the government has biz limit speech. They tell the companies not to allow certain ideas.

That is very different from what we have today where biz in the US is actively taking sides, and limiting speech.

There are no other avenues for the dissemination of speech that has the reach of FB, Twitter, Instagram.

So the idea is not to tell these companies to kill of speech as is happening in China. The idea is that since these companies effectively control what is being disseminated, to tell them they CANNOT silence voices.

Big difference.

Your brain is scrambled. Every autocratic government tells you it will control and regulate speech fairly once it gets to make the decisions. Then, in the name “fairness”, it does exactly what you want, which is force everyone to hear more of what they want you to hear. You want to force everyone to hear more conspiracy theories, more lies about how the election was stolen, more of everything you want because it turns out that the information that you want to get publicized does not have real value in the free market. The only way to force people to hear more lies more frequently is to have control over the means. You want to allow the government to force private companies to allow people to “flood the space” with information that lacks value and cannot stand on its own without being propped up by the government.

The U.S. government cannot force newspapers to publish articles written by “journalists” it likes, by the Marmalade Moron, or by the Q whackadoos. It cannot force billboard operators to post Devin Nunes conspiracy theories on the highway. It can’t force a book publishing company to publish a book it doesn’t want to. It cannot tell any private entity what they must publish. That is as clear a violation of the 1st Amendment as there is. You just hate the 1st Amendment because you’re hearing too much of the truth and you don’t like it.

You also want government to control private business. A company (Parler) breached the terms of its contract with Amazon, so you want the government to be able to override it because they don’t like what is happening in private business. And not because Amazon is even remotely the only place that can provide server hosting, but because you don’t want contracts to apply when they don’t benefit you.

What you are saying is insane. It is nothing more than that you don’t like democracy so let’s get the f**k rid of it in the hope that autocracy will work out better for you. God you magats are brain dead.
 
Actually you have it backwards.

In China the government has biz limit speech. They tell the companies not to allow certain ideas.

That is very different from what we have today where biz in the US is actively taking sides, and limiting speech.

There are no other avenues for the dissemination of speech that has the reach of FB, Twitter, Instagram.

So the idea is not to tell these companies to kill of speech as is happening in China. The idea is that since these companies effectively control what is being disseminated, to tell them they CANNOT silence voices.

Big difference.
No, that's what you'd like to think, but essentially you are saying that government decides what speech can be allowed. In your ideal, that's any - but you are not the govt. If the govt. can decide any, then they can also decide "anything but", just as China does.
 
No, that's what you'd like to think, but essentially you are saying that government decides what speech can be allowed. In your ideal, that's any - but you are not the govt. If the govt. can decide any, then they can also decide "anything but", just as China does.

There's a very simple fix to this (well, at least simple at first glance and I'll get into why it's not really simple at all). What the government can do is basically tell the ISP, o.k. if you want immunity, you can moderate but it can only be moderation in line with the established first amendment case law and it must be administered politically neutrally. If you don't want immunity, that's fine you can do whatever you want but then you are responsible for the content of your users (including CR, defamation, incitement). For the larger ones, there has to be an appeals process to maintain that immunity, with an ultimate resort to the courts with attorneys fees awarded for frivolous actions. It's also probably a good idea, given what happened to Parler, to break up some of the tech industry on antitrust grounds. You are either a newspaper that gets to make content decisions, or you're a bulleting board...pick one.

Here's why the left will object and why it's not so simple....there's no hate speech exception in the US Constitution. So you couldn't ban nasty racist speech under that formulation unless it's an actual call to violence or something defamatory.
 
The Republican establishment is badly misreading the mood of the Republican electorate. I'm becoming increasingly convinced the Republican Party won't survive this.....


What's incredibly sad to me with all of this, is at the core, all Americans want the same things. The media and politicians are just in the way of making it happen. Even on here we continually talk about the "lefties" this, the "righties" that. It's these ridiculous boundaries we've created that literally make no sense. I know I'm throwing out a lot of idealism here, but at the end of the day everyone wants (in no particular order):

- Equality
- Food and Shelter
- A living wage
- Opportunity
- Religious Freedom
- Reasonable Healthcare
- Reasonable Immigration
- Reasonable Education
- Protection from Foreign Countries/Entities
- Safety at large gatherings (concerts, schools, etc)
- Safety from natural disasters (fires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, etc)

There are some hot button issues, such as abortion, but I argue if we could focus on the above, we'd bring a lot of this country together.
 
There's a very simple fix to this (well, at least simple at first glance and I'll get into why it's not really simple at all). What the government can do is basically tell the ISP, o.k. if you want immunity, you can moderate but it can only be moderation in line with the established first amendment case law and it must be administered politically neutrally. If you don't want immunity, that's fine you can do whatever you want but then you are responsible for the content of your users (including CR, defamation, incitement). For the larger ones, there has to be an appeals process to maintain that immunity, with an ultimate resort to the courts with attorneys fees awarded for frivolous actions. It's also probably a good idea, given what happened to Parler, to break up some of the tech industry on antitrust grounds. You are either a newspaper that gets to make content decisions, or you're a bulleting board...pick one.

Here's why the left will object and why it's not so simple....there's no hate speech exception in the US Constitution. So you couldn't ban nasty racist speech under that formulation unless it's an actual call to violence or something defamatory.

The crazy lengths to which crazy people will present crazy ideas to rationalize authoritarian government is mind boggling.

Grace Karen proposes that the government tell private companies that if you don’t publish the speech to our satisfaction, we are going to punish you for it. If you are going to decide what speech you want to publish, we will punish you.

This is as clear a First Amendment violation as you could possibly have, whether it’s a newspaper, a book publishing company, a billboard company, or a social media company. The government does not get to decide what a private company decides to publish. Period. If it tried to do what the legal beagle says, it would last two seconds in court.

At least she recognizes that it’s the right that is almost exclusively responsible for hate speech. Suck on that ‘publicans.
 
"On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.

With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.

Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”

----

"As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.

It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country."

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor."

 

Yeah, between the Jordan Peterson book, the Ngo book, and the Hawley book, and the pressure now coming to remove Art of the Deal from Amazon and other book sellers, we are now in the lets ban books phase of all this.
 
Yeah, between the Jordan Peterson book, the Ngo book, and the Hawley book, and the pressure now coming to remove Art of the Deal from Amazon and other book sellers, we are now in the lets ban books phase of all this.
This is the trend.

Remember when a Rep Senator said over the summer, that the National Guard should be called in to stop the riots? How did the staff of the NY Times react?

This attitude of shutting down views one disagrees with is becoming increasingly common on the left.

 
What's incredibly sad to me with all of this, is at the core, all Americans want the same things. The media and politicians are just in the way of making it happen. Even on here we continually talk about the "lefties" this, the "righties" that. It's these ridiculous boundaries we've created that literally make no sense. I know I'm throwing out a lot of idealism here, but at the end of the day everyone wants (in no particular order):

- Equality
- Food and Shelter
- A living wage
- Opportunity
- Religious Freedom
- Reasonable Healthcare
- Reasonable Immigration
- Reasonable Education
- Protection from Foreign Countries/Entities
- Safety at large gatherings (concerts, schools, etc)
- Safety from natural disasters (fires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, etc)

There are some hot button issues, such as abortion, but I argue if we could focus on the above, we'd bring a lot of this country together.

This is not true at all. I would say that everyone wants those things for themselves, but where things go wrong is that (mostly ‘publicans) don’t give a shit whether anyone else has any of them. It is the American Way.

Equality for example - “I want to be treated with dignity and respect, but I don’t want you to be able to get married like I can because you’re gay. I don’t want you to get the tax benefits I get, because you’re gay. I also want to be able to kick you out of my business because you are gay, but I don’t want anyone to be able to do that to me because of the excuse I use to kick you out of mine, namely my religion. And don’t get me started on how you black people have had enough time to get over centuries of oppression, mistreatment and discrimination. If you don’t want cops to shoot you, you shouldn’t storm the Capitol, I mean hold a bag of chips or especially maybe steal a pack of smokes.”

The starting point to fixing a problem is recognizing it exists.
 
This must be more of the #UNITY I have been hearing about.

"President-elect Joseph R. Biden on Monday said he is looking for ways that the Senate could hold an impeachment trial for President Trump while working on the new administration’s agenda."

 
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