USA Politics Thread |OT| Son of a bitch!

[zomgee]

Rudy should announce he's going to sue Twitter. I want to see that.

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1347922394497884167


 

[Potato]

https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1347922394497884167


 

Lol I don't think I've ever read anything on Forbes.com that came across as truthful.

[Great Rumbler]

The president has all the methods in the world to communicate with people but he's ban evading and desperate for jack dorsey to take pity on him 

No, see, Twitter is the only platform for presenting speech. If they ban you, that's basically making it so no one will ever see or hear you ever again. Not unlike Communist Russia.

[zomgee]

Can't make a fortnite announcement if you can't download fortnite.

thinking.jyff

[Boredfrom]

The president has all the methods in the world to communicate with people but he's ban evading and desperate for jack dorsey to take pity on him 

No, see, Twitter is the only platform for presenting speech. If they ban you, that's basically making it so no one will ever see or hear you ever again. Not unlike Communist Russia.

Being fair, many of the bigger social platforms are actually colluding to actually ban him from their services (thought they are not exactly in the wrong to do it) so is not like has better options at social media beyond Parler.

Of course, being ultra fair, he has that megaphone called FoxNews still ready to go for the most part, so. 

[Svejk]

Supposedly there were special forces secretly mixed in with the riot goons (as to why they were "let in"), and have confiscated Nancy Pelosi's laptop.  She's freaking out and pushing the impeachment HARD.

[EchoRin]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

personally I think they should have given him the boot long before now, but sure I can understand this argument too. I felt just the same as this video as recently as 2014 or so.

[close]

[Potato]

Twitter banning Trump is no different to any other news channel deciding they won't carry any words/audio/video of him. It's not censorship, it's editorial independence.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

However, if Twitter can decide to take editorial action to censor people, then aren't they essentially a news service or publisher and shouldn't they be subject to the same editorial standards?
 

[close]

[Madrun Badrun]

Counterpoint - a lot of social progress has been made because of social media since it gives a voice to minorities.  It just happens that 1) bigots are also a minority that found a voice and 2) fast changes in social progress fueled a counter-reaction.  Twitter wasn't a mistake, it was treating bigoted speech, and opinions as fact as equally valid that was the mistake.  Also, I really hate how everyone has it out for social media but acts like Fox News is just something we have to live with. 

[HaughtyFrank]

Jack should just admit twitter was a mistake and shut down the whole platform and go live in a hut in the Amazon or whatever weird things he does

People would instantly create twitter 2.0 so they can tell everyone about how happy they are that twitter is dead

[Joe Molotov]

Supposedly there were special forces secretly mixed in with the riot goons (as to why they were "let in"), and have confiscated Nancy Pelosi's laptop.  She's freaking out and pushing the impeachment HARD.

Doesn’t seem plausible, this didn’t even happen as part of a shootout with the CIA in some European capital, and I don’t see a single mention of Hugo Chavez or spy satellites.

[Transhuman]

So I guess for you guys the point at which free speech ends is when a politician mobilizes their fanatical worshipers in an attempt to mount a political coup to stay in power. And you dare call yourselves progressives.

[Cauliflower Of Love]

what a cunt

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1347928868859097088

[Madrun Badrun]

Isn't it necessary that Sanders stays in his current position? 

[Cauliflower Of Love]

maybe

[Joe Molotov]

I see EGS hasn't banned him tho

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1347585193536872448

[Boredfrom]

maybe

You know your senate majority is tight as hell, right?

[Great Rumbler]

So I guess for you guys the point at which free speech ends is when a politician mobilizes their fanatical worshipers in an attempt to mount a political coup to stay in power. And you dare call yourselves progressives.

So much for the tolerant Left!

[Great Rumbler]

what a cunt

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1347928868859097088

Bernie would get replaced in the Senate by Phil Scott, the Republican governor of Vermont. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't pick a replacement who'd caucus with the Democrats.

[Boredfrom]

So I guess for you guys the point at which free speech ends is when a politician mobilizes their fanatical worshipers in an attempt to mount a political coup to stay in power. And you dare call yourselves progressives.

Is more worrying how many people forget this, including the people celebrating Trump ban.

[Madrun Badrun]

Canada has hate speech laws and conservatives howl all the time about how it's a slippery slope and how they will be misused.  I can think of one time in my life where it might be questionable.  making Nazis shut up is a pretty effective anti-nazi method.  The fact the left traditionally needed to fight for free speech really only goes to the fact that limited speech was weaponized against the left and it had to be overcome, not that free speech is inherently a good thing in all situations. 

[Madrun Badrun]

Also when the AIs take over, only I will be able to make twitter posts.  Forwarning you guys now. 

[Boredfrom]

Canada has hate speech laws and conservatives howl all the time about how it's a slippery slope and how they will be misused.  I can think of one time in my life where it might be questionable.  making Nazis shut up is a pretty effective anti-nazi method.  The fact the left traditionally needed to fight for free speech really only goes to the fact that limited speech was weaponized against the left and it had to be overcome, not that free speech is inherently a good thing in all situations.

Lol

What makes you think your political side will keep the monopoly of how to weaponize speech?

Shitty half assed posturing to take.

[Cauliflower Of Love]

maybe

You know your senate majority is tight as hell, right?

I don't have a senate.

[Madrun Badrun]

Same reason I think that banning guns won't lead to the US becoming a dictatorship.  It's not the guns or the speech laws that matter, if it's going to happen, the political landscape has changed drastically to the point that concern about the laws is pointless.  Now I was talking about it in terms of twitter in my head which got muddied when I brought in the Canadain laws, which was a mistake, but even if the US passed hate speech laws, it's not in the political landscape right now to call BLM or environmentalism hate speech or whatever the fear may be, and if it were possible we'd be in bigger trouble than them calling BLM hate speech.  Like if it ever got to that point, they could just as easy call them a terrorist group with existing laws. 

[Boredfrom]

Why the fuck are you comparing guns with free speech?

It's not the guns or the speech laws that matter, if it's going to happen, the political landscape has changed drastically to the point that concern about the laws is pointless.   

You know that is not a good thing to begin with, right?

I can say that, I from a country where respecting laws are not high concern for the elite class unless is convenient against political rivals.

  Like if it ever got to that point, they could just as easy call them a terrorist group with existing laws.

USA current anti terror laws are criticized precisely because they could make the government easy to exploit them and curb free expression. Why did you think Trump was eager to call the National Guard with the BLM protests?

[Madrun Badrun]

.

[HaughtyFrank]

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

making Nazis shut up is a pretty effective anti-nazi method.

think of any idea, no matter how taboo, and no matter how censored and oppressed it has been across history, and you'll find believers and practitioners of that idea persist today.

You can't kill ideas by stifling them or pretending they don't exist.
You kill them by dismantling them and deconstructing them, and you make them openly available and ostensibly ridiculous so theres no illicit thrill of transgression by people talking about them, and they can't have that seduction of rebellion or forbidden knowledge.

[Madrun Badrun]

I agree.  The method by itself obviously doesn't get rid of all nazis, but it does contain it to the point where you can try to dismantle them and deconstruct them (and even then you will never get rid of fascism, you can just perpetually contain it).  But you can not do this when they can just look at their thousands of online nazi friends and think 'Nope, we are actually the right ones'.  It's not pretending it's not an issue and not a cure-all.

[Tasty]

Fucking scary.

[Madrun Badrun]

Yes, that is my point.  Under Obama, they were silenced and in hiding, you need to at least get back to that before you can actually get the problem under control.  Not allowing for their ideology to spread is necessary for that.  Now what you are saying is well they were always there and all it took was from them to be unsilenced for this to happen and my point is ya let's try harder to keep them silenced in the first place because once it's out there, it is a lot harder to put the lid back on.  I acknowledge that this does not address any of the reasons why nazis are nazis other than being exposed to the ideology - but that was never my point.  They fester far worse when they spread their hate than when they can not.  They are going to believe nonsense regardless so limiting the amount of nonsense they see does help.  In terms of the US, I really don't see it getting better, as I have posted multiple times over the last few years, I do not see a way for undoing the damage that has been done without violence. 

[Cauliflower Of Love]

Toomey on Sunday joined his Senate colleague Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in calling for Trump to resign.

"I think at this point with just a few days left [in Trump's term], it's the best path forward, the best way to get this person in the rearview mirror for us," Toomey told CNN's State of the Union. "That could happen immediately. I'm not optimistic it will, but I do think that would be the best way forward."

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/10/955410729/gop-sen-toomey-joins-call-for-trump-to-resign-as-house-impeachment-plans-move-ah

[Cauliflower Of Love]

It's not a cycle.

Fuck these people.

[BIONIC]

It's not a cycle.

Fuck these people.

Tio Bernie would’ve fixed everything 

[Uncle]

I don't know that trying to get people out of their echo chambers is a viable option anymore. These people just found out their world view for the past few years has been nothing but lies and bullshit and their reaction is to double down on it all and call for more violence.

so what's your reaction to them?

to call for violence? if getting people out of their echo chambers isn't viable then I guess you have to silence them another way?

[Cauliflower Of Love]

It's not a cycle.

Fuck these people.

Tio Bernie would’ve fixed everything 

The revolution brought on would have.

[james]

I don't know that trying to get people out of their echo chambers is a viable option anymore. These people just found out their world view for the past few years has been nothing but lies and bullshit and their reaction is to double down on it all and call for more violence.

so what's your reaction to them?

to call for violence? if getting people out of their echo chambers isn't viable then I guess you have to silence them another way?

Organize a convention /rally

Have tens of thousands of them in one place

Accidentally drop a nuke

Problem solved.

Its the humane solution

[EchoRin]

Certified by Occam

[Cryo]

So its either a constant that Americans just have to accept as part of their country (valid, the country was founded on racial genocide). Or, its something that can be cured or at least addressed. Many people who work with getting people out of the KKK and have been doing so successfully, claim dialogue is the way forward. Getting people out of their echo chambers.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

Its a really effective way of doing it.

But, it'll never happen because its a country that runs on making the rich richer and the poor poorer. And the theatre of politics is a really good diversion.

Anyways, I have like maybe another good 20 years left of my life, so the fight just seems fruitless. But here's a really good reddit post I read some time back and bookmarked.

I think there's a misconception when a lot of people ask this question. There's no shadowy cabal manipulating the entire world for their collective benefit.

There are a lot of individual people who happen to benefit from largescale changes in public opinion, and some of those individuals are deliberately misleading people to that end, but they're rarely doing it in any sort of concerted effort with anyone else.

The exceptions are largely think-tank PACs that are designed to do it and advertising companies, which are also designed to do it. News media tends to do it, but with little cooperation with anyone else.

And at the end of the day, all of the people doing this deliberately have one thing in common: they're rich. It's not necessarily done as a distraction though; it's more often done just because there's a product to be sold and money to be made. There are very few "evil geniuses" out there who are trying to destroy the world and keep people unaware the whole time. This is partially because anyone with a real amount of power, influence, and intelligence will tell you that the public's attention span is low enough that there's no need to distract them. They'll do it themselves.

The way you stop them is to engage in local and national politics, keep a level head, use primary citation sources, and demand changes that prevent or discourage the above behavior. Namely:

Get money out of politics. Elections should be publicly-funded with VERY strict laws surrounding the kinds of advertisements you can do and the sources of those advertisements;

Change the voting system from First Past the Post to Ranked Choice/Instant Runoff, or other voting options that allow for multiple viable parties to exist;

Strict ethics/accountability watchdogs with the power to actually punish public figures that abuse their power; and

Strict regulations surrounding news media and media that purports to be news such that their material must be very distinctly divided between news and entertainment, and that the news must be entirely fact-based or evidence-based using non-partisan fact checkers as watchdogs with (again) strict punishments for deviations.

Basically, we need to empower independent groups to police and punish people for lying and abusing authority. And those punishments have to have real teeth.

I don’t see why any of these goals, which many recognize as important, require a source of hyperspeed conspiracy dialogue running concurrently, unless you’re saying we’re focusing too much on stifling said source rather than focusing on the process of removing money from politics.

[Coffee Dog]

Just marginalize their viewpoints and their ability to impact politics by tarring anyone who supports them as enablers.   

You dont have to jail people en masse to eradicate a way of thinking. People that were against, say, interracial marriage, were not jailed, but their opinions became untenable enough that it stopped being something they can change through policy. Marginalization works. It works against groups that don't deserve, and those that do.

[james]

KILL THEM ALL




IN MINECRAFT

[Uncle]

I don't know that trying to get people out of their echo chambers is a viable option anymore. These people just found out their world view for the past few years has been nothing but lies and bullshit and their reaction is to double down on it all and call for more violence.

so what's your reaction to them?

to call for violence? if getting people out of their echo chambers isn't viable then I guess you have to silence them another way?

I've seen it in real life with my own family members. Any push back on their worldview, any proof given to them that something they're saying or believe is false, they just double down and use that as proof of the conspiracy and YOU'RE  the one being lied to and you just don't see it, you lib. You will not and can not convince people whose identity and world view is primarily based around white grievance to get out of that train of thought. The percentage of people you're going to get out of this sphere of influence might as well be 0. They legit live in different realities.

right, you already said this

so what's your action plan since they cannot be convinced

[james]

God damnit.

The right wing nut jobs have appropriated a minecraft

https://twitter.com/LiteraryMouse/status/1347903805338382341

Click the image. Second tweet, bottom right pic

Fuck. I renounce my pervious minecraft posts

[BIONIC]

James was a right-wing insurrectionist this whole time? 

[zomgee]

Cancel religious exemption. For everything. Tax, schooling, medical exemptions. Cancel it.

[BIONIC]

Cancel religion 

[james]

James was a right-wing insurrectionist this whole time? 

I just like building games

[Potato]

The real problem in US politics is not that a fringe group of lunatics stormed the Capitol and tried to lynch the government. It's that 75 million Americans saw all this happening over the last four years and still voted for Trump.

[Madrun Badrun]

The main problem in American politics is Americans.

[james]

White people

[Boredfrom]

Just marginalize their viewpoints and their ability to impact politics by tarring anyone who supports them as enablers.   

You dont have to jail people en masse to eradicate a way of thinking. People that were against, say, interracial marriage, were not jailed, but their opinions became untenable enough that it stopped being something they can change through policy. Marginalization works. It works against groups that don't deserve, and those that do.

That’s why people are not exactly thrilled to weaponize it. Trumptards deserve to be marginalized, don’t get me wrong, but pretending is clear cut or that governments or companies don’t take advantage of it is, well...

Not everyone is as obviously vile like Trumptards or Nazis.

[EchoRin]

Punisher Writer Garth Ennis Calls Rioters Wearing Skull Logos "Halfwits"

https://comicbook.com/marvel/news/punisher-skull-logo-garth-ennis-capitol-rioters/

He continued, "The people wearing the logo in this context are kidding themselves, just like the police officers who wore it over the summer. What they actually want is to wear an apparently scary symbol on a T-shirt, throw their weight around a bit, then go home to the wife and kids and resume their everyday life. They've thought no harder about the Punisher symbol than the halfwits I saw [on Wednesday], the ones waving the Stars & Stripes while invading the Capitol building."

People with the Punisher bumper stickers . One those "that type of guy" moments

[Pissy F Benny]

Yeah I’m not sure what you can really say to a group of people who’ve deluded themselves that Donald trump, someone who has never stepped foot in a church by choice in his life, aside from weddings or funerals, is a true man of god

[Boredfrom]

Yeah I’m not sure what you can really say to a group of people who’ve deluded themselves that Donald trump, someone who has never stepped foot in a church by choice in his life, aside from weddings or funerals, is a true man of god

That always cracks me out.

[zomgee]

"... it's *a* bible."

[HaughtyFrank]

"Old testament or new testament guy?"

"Probably.... equal"

It reminds me so much of a kid in class being asked about a book he clearly didn't read

[Dickie Dee]

https://twitter.com/RayRedacted/status/1348388601118273537

 

[headwalk]

always thought this bit from barry-o summed up the bizarre dissonance between what trump's supporters wanted him to be and what he actually was:

I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life,” he said. “He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”

Trump, Obama noted, is not exactly an exemplar of traditional American manhood. “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ’30s and ’40s and before that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”