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Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

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Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#621
post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased. "This site we host was just used to plan a violent revolution. It's more trouble than it's worth, let's dump them." Is this what you mean by "bias"?

No, the bias is assuming that is true and acting on it without sufficient evidence.

What do you consider sufficient evidence here? There were multiple documented posts on Parler that have been documented running up to the events on Jan 6'th that show people organizing and preparing for it. The evidence was present before the decision by AWS. I know folks who were collecting that events weeks before the event and predicting violence based on what they were seeing. The evidence for it is only increasing now but there more than sufficient evidence on the day of the event to indicate that Parler was going to be a liability to anyone hosting them.

Bias in this case works both ways. It makes some ignore the evidence that was already present. Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. This was about getting rid of a high risk client who had made clear that they will not be changing their high risk behavior. There is no reason AWS needs to share in that risk after giving them the opportunity to change.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, this is the exact refusal to engage in good faith that I'm talking about. The red scare really did do a number on y'all. Geopolitically speaking, opposition to colonialism and imperialism (and their neo- variants) are generally considered to be leftist ideals. Internationalism skews left and globalism skews right, despite American conservatives' pearl-clutching in that regard. Decentralisation of power (with the…

I noticed that instead of responding to my examples of actual leftist governments, with a series of your own examples of major leftist governments that are "not super evil", or are more fair examples, you instead responded with general ideals. Yeah, no. If someone is going to call AOC or Bernie Sanders as "centrists", then I am going to need you to point to an actual, real life example of a true "leftist" government…

The left-right spectrum is, literally, about ideals - social, political, economic. It is not a scale of "good vs evil", despite what Calvinism has imposed on people's brains. If your stance is that leftism is evil, you are entirely free to say or think so, but it still does not change what the ideals of leftism are, and it still doesn't make trying to change the definitions of those ideals so that you can call yourself/others leftists (for what reason?) any less intellectually barren.

It doesn't make claiming that I'm making stuff up when I'm referring to actual, much-written-about schools of thought that have been critiqued and analysed by people all over the spectrum any less intellectually barren. Reading is free, and many of the works in question are in the public domain.

> and wash you hands with the actual, real life examples of how your "ideals" turned out in real life.

As if you don't?

All your boogeymen (boogeymen that I'm willing to wager have never actually had an effect on your life) are communists. All _my_ boogeymen are capitalists, to this very moment: the UK, France, the Western world in general, first with literal colonisation and currently with a decades-long trail of neocolonialism and outsourcing the cruelty and inequity needed to sustain their economic systems to the parts of the world nobody really cares about. It's incredibly telling which of the atrocities of the 20th century get dragged out all the time and which get swept under the rug.

> When talking about this stuff, the only actual thing that I will except is real life examples of your ideal government. Because, if I don't do that, then leftists will just make a bunch of stuff up, that is not grounded in reality.

You know the funny thing about this? My proto-ideal society (cannot really be described or named as a government, because it was acephalous communalism) did exist, and fragments of it still remain. But then the British came.

And that's essentially the story of the late 19th and the 20th century - nascent right-wing politics and economics running roughshod over nascent leftism, particularly violently so. First with a new wave of colonisation in Africa and Asia to fuel the growth of imperialist capitalism, squashing and integrating various societies that traditionally leant left along the way. And a few decades later with the fascism that swept Western Europe (the quote that free speech advocates like to bring up does not start out with "first they came for the socialists/trade unionists" apropos of nothing). The leftist movements that survived were the ones that were big enough and violent enough to resist destruction, and like I have already said without strong systems such movements were doomed to turn totalitarian. Much like right-wing economics was doomed to turn into this current mess of cronyism, de facto oligarchy, and murder for profit.

But, again, understanding that would require engaging in good faith and recognising that there are multiple factors that influence this topic, which you seem somewhat loath to do.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that instead of responding to my examples of actual leftist governments, with a series of your own examples of major leftist governments that are "not super evil", or are more fair examples, you instead responded with general ideals. Yeah, no. If someone is going to call AOC or Bernie Sanders as "centrists", then I am going to need you to point to an actual, real life example of a true "leftist" government…

The left-right spectrum is, literally, about ideals - social, political, economic. It is not a scale of "good vs evil", despite what Calvinism has imposed on people's brains. If your stance is that leftism is evil, you are entirely free to say or think so, but it still does not change what the ideals of leftism are, and it still doesn't make trying to change the definitions of those ideals so that you can call yourse…

> It is not a scale of "good vs evil"

> If your stance is that leftism is evil

You are hyper focused on that one word that I used, when that wasn't really my main point. If you don't like that word, then how about I'll rephase. So how about this: "You did not provide any examples of a major leftist government that did not go horrible wrong, and have lots of problems."

> I'm making stuff up

By "making stuff up", I was saying that you were not referencing actual examples that I can look at, that exist in the real world, and are instead talking about hypotheticals that do not reflect how those hypotheticals exist in the real world.

> to this very moment: the UK, France, the Western world in general

And I am going to say that I would much rather live in any of these countries, than any real life examples of leftist governments.

Based on that, and based on comparing real world examples, I am going to say that I would deal with less problems by living in a western country.

> My proto-ideal society did exist, and fragments of it still remain. But then the British came.

Sounds like your ideal society didn't work out so great then and has a lot of horrible problems. If all the leftist governments implode because they can't defend themselves, then it sounds like that is a pretty big problem, and I would never want to live in such a society.

> Much like right-wing economics was doomed

Well at least it is a lot better to live in than the alternative leftist governments! I would still much prefer living in the right wing economies than in any of the leftist ones.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in the AUP does not make it routine FFS. There is a mountain of shit in every ToS that rarely gets exercised. It’s like you’re pointing out that pilots can kick passengers off of a flight at their discretion. Completely irrelevant when the question is about how frequently they do it for what sounds like a rare reason. That’s why I was interested in actual stats of how frequently they take down comment that is ‘…

Suppose a group of passengers started a violent revolution against the pilot, and killed a flight attendant. Would you say that the pilot was being reasonable to throw them off the flight?

It’s a simple question about stats. How often does Amazon kick off services because of weak moderation and not because of illegal content? It’s not like these posts were not called out by government officials as illegal needing takedown that Parler refused to comply with.

Your analogy is shitty because there was no violent revolution conducted by Parler against Amazon.

The correct Analogy is the airline pilot kicking off any Parler employees traveling for business. That’s it.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#625
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship. Well the fact that the riots were organized on Facebook for the month leading up to it certainly looks inconsistent. > If Big Tech really, truly wanted to censor conservative opinions for partisan benefit... why did they wait until months after the presidential election to do it? You mean un…

> Well the fact that the riots were organized on Facebook for the month leading up to it certainly looks inconsistent. That's misleading. While there was definitely unacceptable activity that slipped through Facebook's moderation, they were making attempts to stop it. IIRC, a lot of the organization activity on Facebook acted as a funnel to places like Parler. E.g. a protest event on Facebook, calculated to comply wi…

Facebook is so large that their moderator to user ratio is the same approximation as the moderator to user ratio of Parler. Parler was just more honest about not being able to realistically moderate people.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose a group of passengers started a violent revolution against the pilot, and killed a flight attendant. Would you say that the pilot was being reasonable to throw them off the flight?

It’s a simple question about stats. How often does Amazon kick off services because of weak moderation and not because of illegal content? It’s not like these posts were not called out by government officials as illegal needing takedown that Parler refused to comply with. Your analogy is shitty because there was no violent revolution conducted by Parler against Amazon. The correct Analogy is the airline pilot kicking…

That analogy makes very little sense, because an airline carrying Parler employees is in no meaningful sense an operational part of Parler's business, while AWS clearly is. I think you're reaching.

It doesn't much matter; this case is dead in the water.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#627
post #621
post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the bias is assuming that is true and acting on it without sufficient evidence.

What do you consider sufficient evidence here? There were multiple documented posts on Parler that have been documented running up to the events on Jan 6'th that show people organizing and preparing for it. The evidence was present before the decision by AWS. I know folks who were collecting that events weeks before the event and predicting violence based on what they were seeing. The evidence for it is only increasi…

> What do you consider sufficient evidence here?

If I became convinced the expulsion had nothing to do with Jan 6 and was part of a standard process of review that AWS conducted for all their customers then that'd be sufficient.

There were, generously, a few hundred people involved in the Capitol storming. It isn't obvious how organised they were organised since they lacked guns and riots sometimes start spontaneously from protests. AWS didn't have time to work out who they were, what they were trying to achieve, how they were organising, what there motivations were or what was going to happen next. Using that as a trigger to ban Parler - when they could easily have been organising on Facebook or in person - would be strong evidence of political bias.

> Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt.

I don't mind if AWS is biased, but part of the fun of kibitzing is assessing whether decisions are good or bad. AWS making decisions on bias rather than rational thought process would be bad. People who use evidence and can think in a consistent manner have a big advantage.

Twitter made the mistake of trying to rationalise their bias, giving us a memorial of them trying to rationalise "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." as a call to violence. It is a legitimate concern that the same sort of evidence-free thinking could take root in AWS's leadership - they might easily be drawing their leadership from similar pools of people to Twitter since the big tech companies are acting in the same direction at the same time.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#628
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does “clearly” mean you have evidence? It sounds like your argument is that everyone will cheat if they have the chance.

Most people will cheat in high stakes games. That's why I give it a high probability in a high stakes game like the last election. I know everyone wants hard evidence but I'm establishing motives. I cannot possibly prove any of this to you. Certainly not enough of anything to convict anyone just to point out that the likelihood of cheating on both sides was very high in the last election.

> Most people will cheat in high stakes games.

Citation required.

> I cannot possibly prove any of this to you.

So why bother saying it?

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local and State governments and representation are important parts of the Republic Why? What even is a state, if not its people? What even is a local or state government, if not the people in the city or state? Can you even have a state or a state government if there are no people in the state? What's special about the state or state government specifically that it should get its representation separate from the pe…

> What's special about the state or state government specifically that it should get its representation separate from the people it governs? The United States is a union of states. The people have representation at the federal level, and the state level. > Are the state or state government's aims and objectives different from the people of the state? If so, why, and what legitimacy does it have? If not, why have it r…

> people crying about foundational aspects of my country because they lost an election

It's more a genuine concern that continuing on this path will result in a federal government whose policies don't reflect the views of the vast majority of the nation. You can already see this on issues such as cannabis.

> The People are represented twice as said before (House and EC)

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree that the EC adequately represents the people, since it takes the Senate numbers into account.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 230 is a valuable grant of liability protection, and thus morally obligates platforms to act as a public forum. At the very least, moderation decisions should be written down and reviewable by a third party. The law should be reformed to reflect that.

> Section 230 is a valuable grant of liability protection, and thus morally obligates platforms to act as a public forum. That makes no sense, since the entire, explicit purpose of Section 230 was to free platforms from preexisting disincentives si that they could be free to “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent…

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