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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

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Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#451

Post by Kephael »

shlant wrote: post #448
Kephael wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is "democracy" I don't see a point to it. I haven't been able to vote on any civilizational matters under "democracy" anyways. This is like the CCP but instead of CCP restrictions it is DNC restrictions.

I suggest you refrain from making such hyperbolized false equivalencies if you want people to seriously consider your perspective. People can empathize with your frustrations around the seeming lack of agency available to individuals in some democratic countries (in the US especially) without you comparing it to some authoritarian country.

It's not hyperbole, and we do live in authoritarian countries across most of the "Western" world. If you question the Leftist narrative in a public manner you will lose your professional job. If you tweet facts that the Left does not like, it will be deleted (and possibly result in the aforementioned termination of your employment). We don't presently have camps, but we absolutely have an undocumented social credit system.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#452

Post by Clubber »

zimpenfish wrote: post #442
skinkestek wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with the first part. I think you are right but don't talk more about it: it brings up the ugliest discussions at this place. For the second part they seem to be lucky to get a good judge now that will not let her own ideas interfere much with her job and instead interpret the constitution as it was written.

> interpret the constitution as it was written Does this mean she'll be ruling that owning people is ok, removing the vote from women, and striking down the 2nd Amendment?

The 13th, 19th and 2nd amendments exist in the constitution, as written:

13th: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

19th: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

2nd: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Any political and / or legal discussion should start with at least a vague understanding of that document. All our laws and institutions are founded with it.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#453

Post by thu2111 »

dlp211 wrote: post #279
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about political opinions, I'm talking about highly connected political operatives in positions of power within these companies. Liz Bourgeois would be an example of such a person. She was Assistant Press Secretary at the DNC and prior to that was a Legislative Correspondant for Nancy Pelosi and Debbi Wasserman Shultz. Now she works as "Director, Strategic Response Communications" at Facebook.

This would be a valid criticism if these companies didn't hire top tier operatives from both parties and donate substantial amounts via their PACs to both.

Do they? As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley is Joel Kaplan, and we know from leaks that Zuckerberg spends a significant amount of his time trying to stop his workforce from lynching the guy.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#454

Post by creato »

crocodiletears wrote: post #240
hackyhacky wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think that it's out of "political expedience" that sites are blocking links to probable foreign disinformation? Or is it out of a moral interest in not being pawns of the bad actors who stand behind it? This kind of disinformation is dangerous, and we are vulnerable to it precisely because we value freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that we're morally obligated to value all speech equally. Obviously f…

Journalists and commentators are the ones acting out of political expediency. The platforms themselves are a mixed bag, occasionaly banning content that represents legitimate disinformation, but often suppressing information that's contextually true, or conflicts with an existing broader social narrative which the moderator required to inspect the content has bought into. The human moderators are often inconsistent.…

> If this is disinformation, the FBI, which has ostensibly been in possession of the documents for several months, has every incentive to comment on it, as does the CIA.

This is ridiculously wrong. The FBI and CIA and every other government agency absolutely do not want to comment on something like this, because it just pulls them into this political bullshit. This is exactly the "official" reason James Comey was fired, for an almost identical issue, almost exactly 4 years ago. It is a near 100% certainty that any FBI or CIA official commenting on this issue now will be fired a few months from now.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#455

Post by SquareWheel »

chroem- wrote: post #209
mrfusion wrote: post #191

> Both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier. They have no constitution to answer to. They’re not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny. - Aaron Swartz

It gets better (worse?) though: reddit has removed any references to Aaron Swartz from its list of founders. https://www.redditinc.com/ > Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends. > Steve Huffman, Co-Founder/CEO > Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder

The quoted section is accurate. Swartz received the title of co-founder as part of a merger, but he never actually co-founded reddit.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#456

Post by Klonoar »

chrisco255 wrote: post #440
barumi wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's Hunters laptop. Hunter is a crack head (...) Ok you already made it quite clear that you don't care about the issue being discussed, and your focus is only on smearing by proxy an election candidate that you feel strongly against. I have no dog in the race, as I am not an US citizen nor do I live in the US. However, it's very disheartening to see a country, which a couple of decades ago was seen as the shining…

Here's Politico's Quint Forgey quoting the Director of National Intelligence that the laptop (source of the emails) is in the FBI's possession and that it is authentically Hunter's: https://twitter.com/QuintForgey/status/1318166732419235841 Here's Fox saying the same thing, quoting a Federal Law Enforcement Official: https://twitter.com/SeanLangille?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcam ... Here's a signed MacBook Repair quote…

Seek help.

Edit: actually, screw it, I'm also going to point out that there are way too many people showing up in this thread with useless number strings in their handles and completely blank profiles, trying to argue a conspiracy theory.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#457

Post by thu2111 »

vkou wrote: post #412
RhysU wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor. Those private entities can censor in excess of the government. They are scarier.

All that a private entity can do is toss you off their platform. If every single private website threw you, and your views off the internet tomorrow, you'd return to the age of tyranny and darkness... That ~every human being on earth lived in prior to ~1995. The horror! In contrast, your government can kill or imprison you, if you say something it doesn't like - but for some strange reason, nerd culture spills gallon…

Sure, so Chrome and Safari blacklist your websites. You're only back to 1995, the horror.

Then Amazon refuses to sell your books. And VISA refuses to let people buy them, if they find them in an alternative outlet. What's the big deal, you're only rolled back to the 1980s. And then they go a step further and say, if you're assisting in the distribution of these books, we'll cut off your AWS and payment processing services as well. Hey, you're only rolled back to the 1940s. People can still photocopy the sheets they got from a friend manually as long as the companies they rely on don't find out, right?

The problem here is that a small number of large companies are being captured by extreme left-wing political activists who don't recognise disagreement as being legitimate. Trying to figure out how much private sector censorship is OK is a distraction. The problem here is the ever increasing power of Marxists inside large powerful institutions, often smuggling their ideologies in under the guise of 'diversity' or 'inclusion' programs (which are inevitably about conformity and exclusion).

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#458

Post by mytherin »

ben509 wrote: post #333
ketamine__ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NY Post doesn't own the copyright to the photos it is publishing. Imagine if someone stole your laptop and published all your photos. I hope someone can step in and do to the Post what Peter Thiel did to Gawker.

Hunter Biden left his laptop at the repair shop and never paid for the repairs. After waiting the legally required 90 days, the repair shop became the rightful owner of the laptop and its contents. Once they owned those photos, they had every right to publish them or do whatever they wanted. The least the press could ask VP Biden would be, "will you pledge that your son will not be involved in any sensitive discussio…

So if I sell my laptop that still has some photos on it, the buyer would own the copyright over those photos because they own the laptop?

If I deleted the photos from the laptop, but they used a recovery tool to restore them from the disk, would they still own the copyright then?

What if I have the same photo on two different USB drives, and I sell those to two different people, who owns the copyright then?

That doesn’t seem right. Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium. You don’t lose copyright by losing ownership of the physical medium that holds a copy of the photos/source code/etc.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#459

Post by Clubber »

tt433 wrote: post #385
pseudo0 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the FBI[0] and the DNI[1], there is no evidence indicating that Hunter Biden's laptop is misinformation. Given that some of the emails have been independently verified by their recipients who have made statements on the record[2], and Joe Biden's campaign still has not disputed the emails' authenticity, the vast majority of the evidence points towards this material being authentic. The media and big tech…

I mean it's a false equivalency in the first place to put Hunter in some special bad place while the First Children reap the rewards of nepotism themselves. Misinformation doesn't need to be foreign, just good enough swill to distract some people from the important abuses of power.

It's entirely possible that both parties you mention could be corrupt. The concern of the article is that a large chuck of the entire news industry is trying to bury the story because they want to the election to go a certain way, which makes them just as despicable as the remaining chunk of the news industry. Remember how Tara Reade was handled? Me too.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#460

Post by cryptica »

The way Facebook and Twitter censored the Biden story was a bit too obvious. Makes me think that they probably want Trump to be re-elected. They're just riding on the rhetoric of the last election; people will vote for the candidate which Big Tech doesn't want to win. So if it looks like Big Tech hates Trump (I.e. helping Biden), then people will vote for Trump.

Or maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence of people who work for Facebook and Twitter?

Maybe they're not very smart and they think that censoring the Biden story will help Biden.

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