Apple Removes Infowars from Podcast Directory

His initial post:

"I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship via the government's monopoly on physical force.

That said....."

And then your reply, where having literally just finished reading a substantial block of text (the above is just one excerpt), you act as if he was specifically discussing the first amendment, and only the first amendment:

> It's not broader or more nuanced though, the first amendment is very clear.

He is not talking only about technicalities of the first amendment, yet you continue to reply as if he is.

My questions to you:

Are you aware that you are doing this? Is this behavior accidental, or is it intentional?

One idea xoa discusses is the notion of "human resource attacks": "I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same scaling and automation threats. In fact, perhaps even more pernicious is when it's not bad faith but someone who has been fed a bunch of stuff they are arguing in all earnestness, yet there simply isn't time to address them individually. They must be directed to authorities and be expected to educate themselves on it."

I would assert that what's happening here is a specialized variant of a more general "human resource attacks", specifically patience, and it is something one will see repeatedly in forums, particularly on topics that fall under the the social sciences. In this case, xoa is trying to have a genuine conversation in good faith about an important topic, and you are exhibiting a behavior where you repeatedly behave as if you misunderstand the specific point he is trying to make, even when it is explicitly pointed out to you that in your responses you are changing the subject from what he is actually talking about to a related topic of your choosing, and then using that to dismiss his points.

I wonder if anyone has catalogued all of these behaviors/techniques. I recall encountering mention of some sort of a handbook on disrupting online forums or communities, I wonder if this might be something it covered, because these techniques (techniques if conscious and deliberate, behaviors if an observation of subconscious human behavior) are very effective, and in my experience (from looking for these types of behaviors while reading forums for quite some time), very common.

Wikileaks isn't about shedding light on corruption, as clearly indicated by Assange's activity during and after the 2016 campaign. His purpose and intent is to weaken the US and its ability to act as a united people for their own benefit. He's a happy Russian co-opt, a racist, a misogynist, and wants nothing more than to bring the US down for his own benefit.

Likewise all the other campaigns. It is a freshman error to believe the maskirovka, which is a plausible and agreeable statement of purpose or condition, and not see the underlying intent which is to do everything, anything, which reduces the ability of the people to unify and act in unity. Thus the funding and provocation of extremists on both left and right, ideology is irrelevant as long as division can be created and sown.

There is an enormous difference between the activities we are seeing, from Wikileaks, to Antifa, to the NRA, to Infowars,to Q, which are intended not to improve the US, but to destroy it, and some campaign which may be harmful to some in power but ultimately working within the social compact, for the benefit of others, and ultimately strengthening and unifying the people as a whole.

None of the above-named parties have the best interests of the US at heart. None of them. They are at war with the US, they are simply too weak to do so using overt violence. If they are a bit more successful we will see a shift in tactics, though, as we did in the 1970's, adding violence to the mix.

We should not be fools enough to let that happen.

We know who gets to decide - the owners of the communications platform and those who influence them, under current democratic legislation, which is completely subject to change according to the will of the citizens of a democratic country.

It's interesting how easy it is to observe stereotypical right-wing pedantically technical justification behaviors be adopted by the left (feel free to correct me if my assumption is wrong) as the topic of specific discussion moves around various dimensions of reality.

- Ignoring your unfair ad hominem aimed at Assange, you are making the broader point that many orgs can be "weaponized" in a way that creates division and tension. This is true.

- Is it your contention that the "activities we are seeing" are somehow part of a coordinated campaign? (antifa, NRA, Wikileaks, Infowars, Q).

- Or do you believe that each of these groups is independently seeking to harm the US by creating division?

- What would it mean to have the best interests of the US at heart? Over what time horizon is this defined? Which group of beneficiaries of such actions would be most aware of the benefits, which group least aware?

My view is that in a pluralistic society there are always countervailing interests. If I am selling a laptop I want to get a high price for it, the buyer wants to get a low price. We are strenuously opposed, yet if we transact we have reached an agreement.

In trade relationships, consensus takes place when a price is agreed on by two parties, but in governance, consensus is not so simple.

What does it mean to have consensus? The expression "the tyranny of the majority" illustrates the way in which the 51% may rule viciously over the 49%. Different political systems establish different consensus rules upon participants. Some democracies might require 100% consent by all citizens for anything to become law, others might require even less (such as plurality voting).

The NRA exists because the issue of gun ownership/rights lies close to the consensus margin... so do pro-life organizations. At least, pro-life organizations believe that the margin is close (I personally think that 80% or more oppose restricting reproductive freedom).

What happens when political action organizations wage campaigns that result in policy changes? By your definition I think you would say that something important is being destroyed. In the issue of reproductive freedom, depending on what side of the issue one is on, a change in laws would either be viewed as a great humanitarian tragedy or as a great humanitarian advancement... Or put another way, one side would view it as a great strengthening/improvement to the country, the other would view it as the destruction of something important.

So I'm trying to determine whether your view about those organizations trying to harm the US is based on the particulars of their views or of the tactics that they utilize to try to make political change.

I really do not understand how you could believe that in a democracy where people are free to vote for whichever candidate they prefer, how wikileaks revealing raw data from one of the candidates that would help voters come to understand the positions and opinions of the candidate better could possibly be viewed as anything other than a tremendous benefit to the democratic process.

In an election, one candidate has to win and another has to lose, and if voters are not supposed to use actual factual information to make the decision, what should they believe? Should they believe the TV commercials sponsored by the candidate? The lies told in speeches by the candidate?

To refer specifically to the Wikileaks emails from Clinton, I would strongly have preferred that someone also leak a bunch of Trump's emails, but I was personally very happy to see more details about what the candidate HRC actually believed in. It turned out she was both much more neoconservative than she had claimed, but also a bit more of a free-trade-idealizing libertarian. For me, this didn't really alter my view of her, some of the items were good news and others were bad news, and it all came out pretty much even.

So suppose that instead of Wikileaks the emails had been leaked to a major newspaper that did not publish all of them the way Wikileaks did but instead wrote individual stories highlighting the most newsworthy of the emails. Would this too have been an attack on the US? Why or why not?

In my view, we should all seek to be brothers in truth and the people should unite in solidarity against the elites who lie to us about wars and expect us to vote for them. Why do we accept their authority so readily? Why do people read newspapers of their chosen partisan slant and simply believe everything wholesale while disbelieving everything written in the opposing partisan newspaper?

In my view, it is the herd mentality and the high degree of loyalty that is the biggest threat to our freedom and our nation as a whole.