YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel

I can explain that one. Stick with me on this dear HN reader, as your gut reaction may be to trigger downvote, but I'm going to actually explain it for real, I'm going to tell you exactly why (I'm not going to filter it for everyone so it feels better or sounds better).

Jobs. Opioid deaths. Suicides. Life expectancy. Standards of living. Manufacturing erosion. Lack of a future. Lack of wealth creation. Rural and middle class erosion. Education costs. Healthcare costs. Endless war. Shitty rotting infrastructure. Mismanagement of the US fiscal house by worthless political elites obsessed with their own petty bubbles in DC. A mediocre social safety net despite enormous government spending. Corporate-government-lobby coordination to endlessly pillage the people (eg per capita healthcare costs in the US being 2x what they should be). Being lied to for generations by the elite political class while things haven't gotten better for half the country for 50 years.

Everyone is starting to look around and ask good questions. Like, why do US taxpayers & citizens fork over $8.2 trillion (directly or through debt/inflation) every year, equal to ~40% of the economy, and have so little to show for it? Why is there no money in Social Security? What did they do with what should be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund? Why does nobody call them out on the lie that is the non-existent Social Security lockbox? Why do we keep burning trillions of dollars in the Middle East? Insert 487 other lies from the political class.

Trump got their attention because he brought up some of these lies - including the endless war aspect - and was one of the first leading candidates to ever do so. It's a similar reason why Bernie Sanders came so close to the Presidency twice, a large group of people on both sides are very angry and have had enough of the same old status quo (which the elites in power have an interest in perpetuating forever). Those trillions of dollars wasted in the Middle East should have been in a Social Security wealth fund, and some of it should have been put toward infrastructure.

Tens of millions of white people - those core Trump voters - are getting increasingly angry about all of it. Most of them probably have no idea what to do, so they're flailing for something different (if you're not an experienced fighter and you get hit in the face, your only capable reaction may be to flail). Those voters are not supposed to be upset about anything (so goes the fantasy social theory), because of their privilege. How is their privilege looking compared to a white person in Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Britain, France, the Netherlands or Sweden? I'd say many of them are increasingly worse off and they know it when they look around. Those standards are what white people in the US look at to compare their well-being, and that's where they start to get increasingly upset.

Michael Moore was right about what he said about Trump voters prior to the 2016 election, why they were seeking to elect him. Those voters wanted to throw a molotov cocktail at the system. And they were not thinking particularly rationally, angry people rarely do.

People tend to vote for radical options when they're desperate. One can think less of them for voting for Trump, say they chose wrong, shit all over them, call them stupid, mock them, call for their arrest or purging, call for them to be blacklisted, try to suppress their speech and so on. One can shake one's head and proclaim that if they only voted Democrat they could have all of those things they want (which also begs the question on how the Democrats screwed up so badly that they lost the poor and lower class white voter that they used to have). Those voters feel attention-abandoned by the Democrats - which is an ongoing mistake by the Dems - and Trump scooped them up by paying attention to them. They're angry regardless of anyone's thoughts about them, they're increasingly lost regardless, and they're going to get more so as time goes on and as things fail to improve, as their lot in life fails to improve. They're angry because their point of comparison isn't what some people think it should be, it's what they think it should be. White lower & middle class people are never going to bounce around happy because they're better off than a poor black person in the US (which is what the premise of throwing white privilege statements at them is meant to accomplish), that is never going to be their point of comparison no matter what anybody says to them; their point of comparison is going to be other affluent white people around the world (that is not a politically correct thing to say, of course, it's the actual truth of their perspective and what's really going on).

Telling people that they shouldn't be angry does not work, particularly when they've been dealing with decades of standard of living erosion and have little hope for the future being better. The elites have been conspiring against their interests forever at this point, it's little wonder they're staggering around in a daze with little clue as to what direction to go. It's a mistake for the Democrats to obsess over blaming and castigating those people, instead of focusing on convincing them, swaying them, educating them, peeling away voters and ultimately delivering real life improvements (the big part of that) if they truly believe they have a better path to offer for their future. The Democrats have power again (narrowly), and they need to deliver a lot better than they did in 2009-2010 with their mostly squandered super majority.

Of course if you can be pinpoint, objectively accurate with your censorship of "calls for violence" then that's great (not being sarcastic). But the world doesn't really work that way.

There is always a line between black and white that some human has to look at and decide "yeah this is ban-worthy" or not. Sometimes it's obvious - sometimes it's not so much.

One example: remember that "documentary" "Loose Change" that came out after 9/11 and questioned if it was an inside job? I watched it out of curiosity at the time. It was later debunked - but if it had been just immediately removed from every site and nearly impossible to watch I think that could have had a reverse effect. Instead I was able to evaluate the details (or "misinformation", in some cases) from both sides.

So, I believe the previous poster is implying there are always going to be subjective, biased, and sometimes morally questionable issues that arise when censoring information across multiple major platforms - similar to the issue of allowing encryption vs banning it. If you could ban encryption only for child pornography distribution purposes then yes that would be great, but unfortunately that comes at a cost (and it's not like people/politicians haven't tried to do just that).

I don't think we have stepped into full great firewall of China level censorship or anything, but this is a step in that direction - for better or for worse.

No need to sue if you can just ban your opponent from the internet.

The problem is that the pro-censorship crowd is openly using the internal open communication channels with full support and engagement from both HR and upper management.

Having numbers doesn't equate to having equal or greater power.

The more cable news you watch the stupider you get. You can actually feel your IQ dropping minute by minute as you watch Fox or MSNBC. They aren't there to make you more informed, their sole purpose is to say whatever will keep you engaged long enough to sell you deodorant, prescription pharmaceuticals and pickup trucks. They are a Dunning-Kruger effect generator. Whenever someone mentions something they saw on CNN last night my opionion of them drops.

The good news is that your cognitive function is not permanently lost, it can be quickly recovered by just turning off the TV and reading a book, playing with the dog or going on a long walk.