771–780 of 984 posts
Thank God Jeff Bezos is protecting us from these vile terrorists. We need to take down Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The insurrectionists were customers and bafflingly, these companies don't moderate their texts or phone calls whatsoever.
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I think the discussion shouldn't be about what should be censorship but rather who decides it. So if you put, lets say illegal pornography, on your page, then there is a law that forbids it. Especially in a good system the person who posted it gets prosecuted. On the other hand if companies act like judge and low, it can lead to bad things I think.
Inciting violence and overthrowing a government is already as illegal as child pornography is. Would you rather have all child pornography kept online up until a judge has declared that person guilty?
Doing it is illegal, advocating for it is explicitly legal. Most of this discussion is about the latter.
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" She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria…
She said Muhammad was a pederast, which is correct, according to the Quran.
The child of that came to be known as.. Jesus.
Which should be a stark reminder that all Abrahamic religions have their roots based in such absurd and ancient practices that none of them hold up much to scrutiny under modern standards except when framed solely around an entirely fictional "Good guy miracle making baby Jesus".
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> Who would be President on Jan 20?' - if the vote to approve the electoral results on Jan 6th were not completed [...] Bonus points if you can tell us how the 20th Amendment clarifies that for us. Nancy Pelosi. Amendment XX: “The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January [...] If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, o…
"If a President shall not have been chosen before ..." "If, by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify ...” So Biden will not have been 'chosen' or did not 'qualify' ? If the Jan 6 vote did not happen or if the results were not approved - Joe Biden was still unambiguously 'chosen' by in a free and fair election by all accounts? Would the factual legitimacy of his election r…
The only account that has any force under the Constitution is the one made by Congress of the electoral votes cast by the States. That's why it was the target of the insurrection; if that could be manipulated, whether by giving courage to secret allies who might otherwise have a failure of conviction in Congress (what Trump overtly called on the crowd to do), or intimidation, or by forcibly removing members who were obstacles, then the election results could be undone; the “steal” could be “stopped”.
> Would the factual legitimacy of his election result in SCOTUS validating his claim to the Presidency?
Almost certainly not, and if it did it would be the Supreme Court voiding the Constitutional reservation of the role of judging electoral results from Congress, a different kind of coup.
> Would Democrats even remotely accept anything other that Biden as President?
No, if it was clear that the count was going to be obstructed and incomplete, rather than completed with a different outcome, but the House was capable of acting, they'd probably just elect Biden Speaker.
> If the 'election was rigged' - doesn't that invalidate the entire Congress as well? Including Pelosi? And all the Senators?
Legally, they are separate elections held at the same time, so, no, not in the eyes of the law, even if the first part was a conclusion of law, rather than a propaganda point to rationalize an application of raw power, which is what it would be.
> If a free and fair election were already held in November, and it was overturned for political reasons, what would be the point of having another one, if the results can be ignored on the basis of populism?
The same reason authoritarian regimes usually have elections; purely performative, rather than substantive.
> It would be total chaos.
Well, yeah, that's not really in dispute.
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The question is how do you fix that? We should want domain experts in a lot of these government roles, but the primary way you become an expert in an industry is working in that industry. Let's image we put a ban in place to prevent this revolving door. Why would someone working in the industry be willing to forfeit their post-government career, especially if they are a political appointee and might only have the rol…
I think for starters it's important to recognise that the expectation of a "post-government" career is itself a part of this problem. If we instead built long term competence within public institutions, including competitive remuneration and career development like training programmes, there wouldn't be a need to have a door between the private and public sector quite as much in the first place. The reward should be…
That sounds great in theory, but the problem is that many of these leadership roles if not elected directly are nominated by the president and therefore they are political in nature and those politics can flow down through the organization.
For example the FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, is resigning this week. Would he have resigned if Trump was reelected or would he have been re-upped for another term? Is Biden obligated to find this Republican a job somewhere else in his administration? Is Pai just supposed to retire at 48 years old? Can he go back to working for Verizon like he did for a period earlier in career? How many other people at the FCC have or soon will leave the agency due to the change in leadership?
Is this really new? It certainly feels new, but I don't think it is. There are two issues here. 1) You should be very careful about having your business too dependent on a single supplier or partner. You need to have a backup plan in case that relationship goes bad. That is undeniably true, good advice for all startups, and it has always been true. 2) The more specific case of Parler? Again it feels new, but I don't…
Such portability can pay off in other ways as well. Example: a competitor to Amazon in the retail space told us they would not buy our IoT product with an AWS back end, so we had to port it to an alternative cloud provider.
This probably won't scale well when you get to a level of hundreds of millions of unique users, though.
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There is a difference between saying it was a call, and saying you believe it was a call. There is evidence to the contrary, so we at best cannot be sure without some kind of due process. People are free to believe what they want, of course. If someone is going to claim they are not trumpeting a narrative and are making fact based claims, and not opinions based on their interpretation of words and events, then I will…
At some point you have to start reading the intended rather than literal meaning. Otherwise "it would be shame if your shop burned down" is just a friendly warning for the future, not an extortion. There's a lot of grey area which can be interpreted in context of what people usually do, where their interest lies and what they don't immediately speak out against. As usual, Simpsons already did it, and claiming there's…
Of course, people will disbelieve it, and soon enough, someone like me pointing out the obvious problems with such claims will just be called an insurrectionist sympathizer and be arrested under the new terror laws. So eventually people like the OP can stop worrying their claims will be questioned.
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For a valid reason. The government isn't a tech company or an infrastructure provider. You wouldn't ask the government to build their own roads or bridges, so like everything else software and services need to be contracted out as well. Of course that doesn't mean they should use AWS by default, but asking every single government agency to build their own data centers and CDNs is foolish.
Who builds your roads? You contract out road building because it's too difficult for the government to do? Where do you live?
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Gov is pretty sure has a far stronger leverage than AWS. For example, if AWS cancels unilaterally Gov contracts, Gov will show that as Exhibit A of the need of Anti Trust. Anyway, if Gov can procure cloud services, they should procure multiple providers and design their service as a cloud agnostic system.
The government can shut down Amazon. Amazon can't shut down the government.
That is the most depressing part for me - how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. Turns out they don't have to be threatened with overwhelming force. They don't need to be threatened with death, starvation or torture. They don't need to be threatened by economic ruin or untold suffering. No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to gi…
I don't object to free speech because I'm scared and I want the government and the media to protect me from the scary people I see on TV. I object to freedom of speech because it doesn't still seem like an ideal to me in the first place. Don't attack a straw man. What is the argument that free speech is an ideal? That it promotes a more vibrant discourse? That it permits political positions that the powerful dislike…
Private platform moderation is in a sense the ideal solution if platforms are actually willing to do it. The Constitution protects their first amendment rights too, and that is the right to decide who can and can't use your platform. The tradeoff is that the state for the most part can't force you to carry messages you don't want to carry, in exchange the state also can't easily force you to act as their auxiliary in enforcing only content that the state likes. It's not really a matter of speech in itself in a philosophical sense but rather, appropriate ways to actually prevent things like violent insurrections or lynchings or agitprop being spread in a world where outside of the few and already prohibited forms there's some room for interpretation, and also, some room for bad faith from either side. It's less about how much free speech has quantifiably benefitted our society - which one can certainly make an argument for - but rather, the consequence of giving reins to a moderator that has the power to literally deny one's liberty and ruin someone's life in an officially sanctioned and prolonged fashion when there's no guarantee that the moderator would be able or willing to act in a way that isn't arbitrary but still effective. Every other platform is built on the basis of consent - as in one joins it at their will and one gets removed from it at the will of the moderators. The law works through coercion. The stakes are quite different.
And speech itself is only the most immediate manifestation of bigger problems in society anyway. The underlying sentiments don't go away, they just become clandestine and fester. It's not something punitive punishment can readily solve. Prohibition didn't work here, the war on drugs is an abject failure, the myriads of exclusionary laws congress passed from the 1880s to the 1940s both failed to actually stop people of different ethnic backgrounds from having relationships and at the same time contributed to a particularly cruel handling of refugees that added to the holocaust death tolls. In more authoritarian countries, China's porn ban, which is actively enforced with sites being taken down constantly, does almost nothing to actually prevent access (nor did it bring the moral salubriousness that it was supposed to bring). Internal passports didn't stop people from seeking work elsewhere and becoming second class citizens. Our own immigration system becomes more disastrous in every possible way as soon as we decided to actively enforce it. The DMCA and CFAA, both with punitive criminal and civil liabilities, have failed to stop piracy or computer intrusion (especially since that part of the CFAA was a response to a pre-WWW Matthew Broderick movie) but did encourage a lot of companies that sell ineffective solutions backed with FUD and hamper effective open disclosure and penetration testing for quite some time. The underlying incentives haven't changed. Banning the symptoms is easy and possibly even politically expedient but represents a bandaid over a gashing bleeding wound. Good speech can make bad speech irrelevant in some cases but it's neither reliable nor address the underlying problems. There's a far right nationalist movement in Germany again. Mere censorship can only go so far.
Unless you can come up with a way to, without resorting to mass coercion, create a system that can fairly act as this moderator and be accepted as fair across the board, it's almost certainly worse, not better, to allow active state interference.The deplatforming case is actually about exercising one (comapny)'s free speech rights, AWS can't violate the 1st amendment rights of Parler. And if they can't find some sketchier but less takedown-happy bulletproof-ish server overseas to host their shit, it's their own fault, they're not entitled for official promotion of their viewpoints. Allowing government regulation of speech will allow that.