Political So now what

[Cody]

They are only pro minority if that minority votes for them. Otherwise they bash and throw them under the bus. Been watching it all year long.

Yes, and only pro "stop the count" when they are ahead....and pro "count them all" when behind, and would have been pro-mail in votes if the thought was that those would have been primarily Republican. I think that most of what is said badly about one side, can just as easily be said about the other side. They are both firmly in the business of seeing the other side fail even if it means the US goes down with them.

Freedom of speech only goes so far. Since 1969 it has specifically not included speech "that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action". That creates what will surely amount to a totally subjective interpretation of the act, but nonetheless, that is the legal standing that the have. I try to stay unbiased, but Trump's words last week were not selected to stop or deescalate the situation. He was fanning the flames.

Thinking out loud, we have freedom of speech, but does the government have the authority to dictate to a private company what their terms of service are? Shouldn't the private company be allowed to determine what they can "publish". I mean, they can't force The Deseret News to cover the Pride Festival, why should they be able to force Twitter to allow someone who's message that company deems harmful on their platform? Besides, I thought the idea was for less government oversight (which I side with).

It may be time to more specifically define the roll of social media companies as members of the press. These are crazy times...I remember thinking the most notable thing about the first Obama election is it marked the first time the media selected the President. I wouldn't have ever believed how much more of a problem that would become over the next decade.

 

[Spork]

Since you brought up the private companies can determine who/what they allow, I believe it's important to be upfront about it. I would hate to plan a wedding and find out the day of the wedding the guy didn't like me and refused to bake a cake. I would hate to create a social media company and run it for 2 years and then get shut down because the cloud provider didn't like me. If I'm selling something my objective should be to sell it, in the case of AWS I think they should have said we're screwing Parler out of millions a year for hosting fees, not they might be saying something legal over there I don't like and I'm shutting them down. I think from the IT side it's a wake up call to those companies heavily invested in cloud services. I've talked to lots of people that are 100% cloud, after the AWS news I would make sure I had a plan no matter what my business was to move/host/exist in more than one place just in case.

 

[Hickey]

I'm not one to push for government restrictions on private companies. I'm not asking for that. I'm just voicing my opinion that their decisions are ****ed up.

 

[Spork]

Something is happening with dns/cloud flare/godaddy looks like they are killing sites someone finds objectionable...
Examples

ar15.com - Your Firearm Resource. (AR-15, AR-10, M4, M16, AK-47, and More!)

Firearm Discussion and Resources from AR-15, AK-47, Handguns and more! Buy, Sell, and Trade your Firearms and Gear.

ar-15.com

Gab.com

The Home of Free Speech and the Parallel Economy. Join our community where people who support family, faith and free speech can speak freely and shop at businesses who share their values.

gab.com

Probably more, just running out of sites I can think they would target.

 

[Kevin B.]

I'm 100% in favor of private companies getting to ban/delete/censor whatever in hell they want, just as soon as we give our antitrust legislation some teeth so that the market isn't dominated by two or three Big Tech media companies.

 

[Cody]

Since you brought up the private companies can determine who/what they allow, I believe it's important to be upfront about it. I would hate to plan a wedding and find out the day of the wedding the guy didn't like me and refused to bake a cake. I would hate to create a social media company and run it for 2 years and then get shut down because the cloud provider didn't like me. If I'm selling something my objective should be to sell it, in the case of AWS I think they should have said we're screwing Parler out of millions a year for hosting fees, not they might be saying something legal over there I don't like and I'm shutting them down. I think from the IT side it's a wake up call to those companies heavily invested in cloud services. I've talked to lots of people that are 100% cloud, after the AWS news I would make sure I had a plan no matter what my business was to move/host/exist in more than one place just in case.

I'm inclined to agree with you. In the cake situation, I don't remember the details perfectly, but the baker should have been upfront about it ,and the gay couple should have just walked away and opted not to make a media frenzy out of it.

Did Parler have their hosting pulled? I know the big two phone platforms took the application off, but I honestly haven't looked at it. I'm assuming that somewhere in the hosting contracts there is a clause about illegal activities are something, which is probably pretty arbitrary in favor of the hosting company. I bet a lot of contracts are being looked at REALLY carefully right now.

@Herzog please don't pull our plug!

I don't know much about the hosting world..literally nothing. But in my world we had a group decked out in what would have been WuTang colors most of my life. I guess "Proud Boys' is their group? I had to read up a little about them because I actually thought that term was a social media joke, but I guess they are a real group that takes a pretty hard line stance on some current issues. We had a group of them in the brewery end of last week in their gear. One of my bartenders felt "uncomfortable" with them there, and they said a couple customers asked them what the deal was with them. My bartender thought we should ask them to leave because they were making other customers uncomfortable. I said tough shit. They weren't causing any issues, wore their masks where they needed to, and I wasn't going to kick anyone out just because the idea of them made someone else uncomfortable. If someone had come to them and said the big gay black Russian dude at the end of the bar minding his own business was making someone uncomfortable, then tough shit too. Everyone has a right to peacefully be here, but if any group started causing problems, regardless of who they are, we have a policy for that. But looking like someone you don't agree with is no reason to give someone the boot. All forms of assholes are welcome, as long as you aren't acting like an asshole

I guess what I'm saying is, I'd sell Trump a beer. But if he started drumming up trouble, I'd give his ass the boot too. But no sooner

 

[Spork]

Yes parler got their hosting on AWS pulled and are currently down. They are currently suing AWS. I think part of the issue is AWS basically gave them 24hours to move. I was involved in a project pulling hosting back from Azure cloud back to physical servers in a datacenter a while back, management decided that the $1k a day hosting charge could easily buy a dozen servers instead of continuing. Part of the issue is they wanted a smooth transition back so it wasn't just pull 40TB back on prem and ditch the cloud. I believe it was almost 3 months before they were complete.

Parler social network sues Amazon for pulling support

The social network has hit back asking a federal judge to order it to be reinstated.

www.bbc.com

 

[Cody]

That could be a dynamite court case. Imagine the shit that could be presented in court as evidence

 

[glockman]

The feds should not force Twitter and FB to allow Trump. That is anti American in my book. They should however repeal section 230 or at least modify it. My understanding is, that legislation was put in place to protect a platform, say a website that allowed comments. If the website curated the comments, they got an exemption from being held liable for the commentors actions. FB and Twitter got the exemption because they claimed they could not control the participants on their platforms. That has been proven to be false. They should face the same scrutiny as the NY times. If someone from the NYT makes a false claim that damages a business or person, they can be sued and held liable. Social media controls the content on their platform and restricts who can provide that content, exactly like a newspaper, but on a larger scale.

As for limits on free speech, Bernie ranted about republican senator's killing old people by not paying then more through social security. Some idiot shot several senators at a ball park due to that belief, fed to him by Bernie. Bernie is not responsible for that loons actions unless he said, go shoot republicans.
Obama ranted about racist police and the systemic rasicm in law enforcement. A loon ambushed 6 Dallas officers, because of that belief. Obama is not responsible for that loonatic. Trump said many things but never said storm the capital. He in fact said we are all going to march down there and peaceful protest.
The limit for free speech is directly telling someone to commit violence, not suggesting people are bad actors.

 

[Herzog]

@Herzog please don't pull our plug!

Why would I ever do that!?

I'm pretty nervous about the AWS stuff and if they are in the business of censoring I do not want to give them money. I leverage some of their services.... might have to switch to digitalocean or somewhere else soon.

 

[Noahfecks]

FB and Twitter ceased to be private companies when they got into bed with the .gov to protect themselves from liability. They agreed to be the public square and allow all voices the same access, clearly that is not the case. To suggest that the banning of DJT is anything other than partisan censorship is an outright lie.

 

[Herzog]

There's pretty good evidence out there that facebook was actually the child of a DARPA project called lifelog. In fact, the day lifelog went 'offline' was the day facebook went 'online'. Pretty interesting stuff... I never believed the startup story about facebook anyways.

 

[Herzog]

Good read. I never joined Parler because of who owns it (Mercers, felt like a honey pot) but it's still an important event. It's happened to several sites over the years but parler just happened to be big enough at the time of deplatforming to cause big enough of a stir.

How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler

In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.

greenwald.substack.com

I'm particularly fond of this comment below the article as well:

The deplatforming of Parler, mass calls to excommunicate those who basically supported a political opponent while being cheered by neoliberal zealots backed by an opportunistic corrupt class is the latest manifestation of the establishment authoritarians intent on burning dissent at the stake in the guise of protecting “Democracy. It’s the kind of thing that happened during the Spanish Inquisition where a corrupt Catholic Church backed by moneyed classes defined what were allowable views or not with dire penalties for those who blasphemed. (Today that could mean not just being robbed of the ability to speak freely on social media, but loss of livelihood, ability to shop, bank, travel...and even subject to violence.)

What the US Empire in the throes of its latest orgy of hysteria against its never ending enemies - now fully turned inwards, in a blowback of historic proportions - may be missing is the reaction this is having in the rest of the World where US Big Tech is already viewed with deep suspicion due to their monopoly on data and information. What is especially disquieting is the knowledge that the CIA/NSA have their hooks in these companies which operate under US laws and jurisdictions and increasingly not even that. Amazon brazenly broke its contract with Parler without even a chance of a stay order. Lawyers even quit representing Parler with erstwhile civil libertarians like ACLU - which had once defended the rights of actual Nazis to march as part of their First Amendment Rights - joining in on the feeding frenzy. Even a serial killer has right of representation but ironically a serial killer will have a better chance of justice in the US than having a view that the 2020 election was unfair (which incidentally was the exact same thing Dems yammered on to cheers for 4 years with Clinton repeatedly calling Trump “illegitimate” and the 2016 election “stolen”.

If a sitting POTUS and tens of millions of his followers could be hounded in the US by tech monopolies and corporations clearly allied with a party that has gained power, ignoring US laws and precedent, what protection is there for other countries where US laws don’t even nominally apply?

Countries such as China and Russia have actively started building out their own verticals - hardware, networks, domain nodes, data centers, operating systems, social media applications - that don’t rely on the latest whims and politics of an Empire in the midst of a civil war between Establishment and anti-Establishment ideologies. Turkey is already accelerating its move away from WhatsApp into a home grown app. There are active calls in India - with its giant population and ubiquitous use of digital services even among the poor - which is almost entirely reliant on US technology, that these latest shenanigans in the US - against around half its *own* people - are the wake up call for digital independence. (This is akin to the increasing call for independence from the dollar by various countries - including China, Russia, India which are parts of RIC, SCO, BRICS organizations - since basically the dollar under the Obama and accelerated during the Trump admin has become a tool of raw US power to dictate who sovereign nations may trade with and who not.)

 

[Jesser04]

I was on the fence about antifa being involved at the capital until I read this. I now have not doubt they were involved.

 

[Houndoc]

I'd say the right wing of American politics for at least the last 30 years is very much anti socialism and anti fascism. If that is the case, the term right wing may be used for both but they are not the same. Kind of like the Democratic party's flip from being pro segregation to being pro minority.

Hate to say it, but there are many aspects of the Republican party the last 4 years or so that share traits with fascism, although not to a degree that I would by any means suggest the current GOP is truly 'fascist.'

The right has certainly become very nationalistic, is anti-immigrant (I know many will say not anti-immigrant just anti-illegal, but facts under the Trump administration prove that wrong), favors state goals over free trade (look at the 'trade wars', tariffs and attempts to ban foreign companies such as Tik Tok), utilizes attacks on the press ('enemy of the people', anything negative 'fake news'), has clear traits of tolitarianism (the widely held idea that if someone did not support the president 100% they are a "rino" and that the role of elected members of Congress was to support the president ) and the argument certainly can be made that Trump and some Republicans opposed truly free elections (either making voting more difficult by opposing vote-by-mail, limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county in Texas and refusing to accept the results, when they lost.)

My point here again is simply to recognize that we need to remain vigilant to the dangers the extreme on both the left and the right pose to freedom.

 

[Kevin B.]

Hate to say it, but there are many aspects of the Republican party the last 4 years or so that share traits with fascism, although not to a degree that I would by any means suggest the current GOP is truly 'fascist.'

The right has certainly become very nationalistic, is anti-immigrant (I know many will say not anti-immigrant just anti-illegal, but facts under the Trump administration prove that wrong), favors state goals over free trade (look at the 'trade wars', tariffs and attempts to ban foreign companies such as Tik Tok), utilizes attacks on the press ('enemy of the people', anything negative 'fake news'), has clear traits of tolitarianism (the widely held idea that if someone did not support the president 100% they are a "rino" and that the role of elected members of Congress was to support the president ) and the argument certainly can be made that Trump and some Republicans opposed truly free elections (either making voting more difficult by opposing vote-by-mail, limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county in Texas and refusing to accept the results, when they lost.)

My point here again is simply to recognize that we need to remain vigilant to the dangers the extreme on both the left and the right pose to freedom.

You're not wrong, but I think you're missing the big picture to pin this entirely on the current Republican party. In as much as the rest of the Republicans and the Democrats as a whole are complicit in the perpetuation of the two party system, they are complicit in everything that happens as a result. Trumpism is absolutely the Dems fault as much as the Pubs. And the Bidenism we're about to see is the Pubs fault as much as the Dems.

We all need to stop voting for the "lesser of two evils" and start demanding choice, or this gets much worse.

 

[anderson750]

Hate to say it, but there are many aspects of the Republican party the last 4 years or so that share traits with fascism, although not to a degree that I would by any means suggest the current GOP is truly 'fascist.'

The right has certainly become very nationalistic, is anti-immigrant (I know many will say not anti-immigrant just anti-illegal, but facts under the Trump administration prove that wrong), favors state goals over free trade (look at the 'trade wars', tariffs and attempts to ban foreign companies such as Tik Tok), utilizes attacks on the press ('enemy of the people', anything negative 'fake news'), has clear traits of tolitarianism (the widely held idea that if someone did not support the president 100% they are a "rino" and that the role of elected members of Congress was to support the president ) and the argument certainly can be made that Trump and some Republicans opposed truly free elections (either making voting more difficult by opposing vote-by-mail, limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county in Texas and refusing to accept the results, when they lost.)

My point here again is simply to recognize that we need to remain vigilant to the dangers the extreme on both the left and the right pose to freedom.

The trend of socialism is one that the left can certainly own. On the topic of facism, I think you could say that one extreme has been countered by another extreme. As many arguments you could make on the right showing traits a facism, I could probably make as many in regards to the left. There is no middle ground anymore. DJT got elected because his message of politicians, both R & D have sold out American interests for far to long and it resonated with a lot of people. I think it is safe to say that he had almost as many Republicans working against behind the scenes him as he did Democrats in the open. He was elected to upset the apple cart......and he did a pretty good job doing it.

Attacks on the press....spare me the BS. You cannot honestly tell me that the mainstream press even gave him anything close to fair coverage. DJT is a fighter...and you cannot honestly tell me that if you spent that amount of time being spun by the press that you would not fight back. There is very little news.......just opinion and spin dressed up as news. He is not a typical DC Republican that tucks his tail between his legs. Have you listened to the full CNN morning meeting tapes? There was coordinated effort to give negative coverage to Trump and cover to Biden and his families financial ties to China, Ukraine, Russia, etc

I look at our country much as I do my family. You act as if being nationalistic is a bad thing. Shouldn't we be putting the interests of our country above the interests of other countries. I put the well being of my family above anything else. If we are not in good order, then we can't help others.

How can I give $100 to somebody who needs it if I don't have it.

Would I open my house up to any stranger? No, I would not, but if I knew the person I would. Why should we have an open border like many Democrats want.

All this aside, I really do not have as big of a concern with the elected officials as I do with what is going on in our courts. The judicial side has become very political. Why is it openly accepted that cases are judge shopped? Think of all the SUWA cases that have cost us thousands of miles of roads, trails and access. We have an easier path to change the people in DC than we do the courts.

 

[glockman]

Hate to say it, but there are many aspects of the Republican party the last 4 years or so that share traits with fascism, although not to a degree that I would by any means suggest the current GOP is truly 'fascist.'

The right has certainly become very nationalistic, is anti-immigrant (I know many will say not anti-immigrant just anti-illegal, but facts under the Trump administration prove that wrong), favors state goals over free trade (look at the 'trade wars', tariffs and attempts to ban foreign companies such as Tik Tok), utilizes attacks on the press ('enemy of the people', anything negative 'fake news'), has clear traits of tolitarianism (the widely held idea that if someone did not support the president 100% they are a "rino" and that the role of elected members of Congress was to support the president ) and the argument certainly can be made that Trump and some Republicans opposed truly free elections (either making voting more difficult by opposing vote-by-mail, limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county in Texas and refusing to accept the results, when they lost.)

My point here again is simply to recognize that we need to remain vigilant to the dangers the extreme on both the left and the right pose to freedom.

China is robbing us blind. They have committed multiple attacks on my company and stolen intellectual property from us and countless other us companies. Do you think that is OK? If not, what should the response be?
You're opinion on immigration is not rational or tied to facts. You are emotionally involved and I understand that but though all the rme threads I've never seen you post and evidence of a policy or order Trump enacted that was anti immigrant. The definition of fascism, "forcible suppression of opposition" Trump certainly said the media was the enemy of the republic. He never tried to shut them down, deplatform then or silence them. Calling a spade a spade is not fascist.

 

[Stephen]

I'm going to be pretty interested to see the revenue drops for media companies. Without Trump to rage about 24/7/365; what do to the majority of the cable news stations have to talk about? I suspect that there will be a substantial drop in viewership and thus a drop in ad revenue. Wouldn't be surprised if some of the online outlets fold even.

 

[TRD270]

I'm going to be pretty interested to see the revenue drops for media companies. Without Trump to rage about 24/7/365; what do to the majority of the cable news stations have to talk about? I suspect that there will be a substantial drop in viewership and thus a drop in ad revenue. Wouldn't be surprised if some of the online outlets fold even.

I'm sure they will find some new target and BS to generate more click bait I mean news