I used to work at YouTube, and it was quite clear to me after I'd been there a while that the people in charge were basically dumbasses. Very rich dumbasses, but still dumbasses. They are incapable of thinking through possible scenarios in which it might be legitimate to display weapons, violence, or bigotry in a video, or at least, they prefer not to think about such things because there are no algorithms that can handle nuances like that. Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.
To anyone with half a brain, a video containing part of a racist rant by a Nazi waving a gun is only a good or bad depending on context. Is the video promoting this guy, or is it letting him hang himself with his own words? Or is it just saying, "This is what happened in this place, at this time"? These distinctions matter!
“Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.” Gets right to the heart of this, thank you
It's not quite that black and white. I *also* used to work at Google (not YouTube). Realistically, YT moderation could be way more hands off than it is. Web search for example is or was almost entirely algorithmically "moderated" with nowhere near this level of drama or problems, and the web is much larger than YouTube.
The difference isn't to do with what algorithms can do. The cause is philosophical differences between typical founder/engineer types and, to put it crudely, Susan Wojcicki - a woman who basically lucked her way into her position by being the sister of Sergey's wife and those two were the sisters that rented Larry and Sergey their first garage. The sort of people who built web search and indeed most Google services were hard headed engineers who got where they were by making tough decisions and defending them through rigorous debate with the rest of the company. Due to the totally open communication channels between teams they had, more or less anyone could comment on any other team's decision, and they did! The fierceness of discussions inside Google even 15 years ago would make most of corporate America feel dizzy: it wasn't an environment that rewarded milquetoast agreement with whoever was in front of you. At all. They *wanted* their services to be used by everyone because they were small and the best way to become successful was by serving everyone equally.
Clearly, Google is not the company it once was. Wojcicki is the exact opposite of that type of person: a woman who ended up running an already very successful service through a series of personal lucky breaks, rather than because she built it. Inevitably if you achieve great success by drifting through life and avoiding fights you end up making whatever decisions get you shouted at the least. YouTube is a textbook example of that mentality: people are banned and unbanned supposedly "without rhyme or reason" except there's a very simple rhyme and a very simple reason: bans are the result of whoever shouted at the YouTube leadership the loudest most recently. Typically SJW activist employees, but not always.
The only way to fix YouTube is to replace Wojcicki with an engineer who has spent years BUILDING the service instead of simply inheriting it, and who has a strong commitment to the original fairly libertarian principles that built the company. Google won't do that for two reasons:
1. Realistically 99% of candidates that'd fit that mould are men, and men are second class citizens now.
2. Sundar Pichai is exactly the same kind of person as Wojcicki. He is more genuinely successful: he did a good job of Chrome and other projects. But he is ultimately the same type: he drifts and does whatever gets him shouted at the least. I can't help suspecting that he was picked for that very reason.
I wasn't going to name names, because as others have noted, it's more to do with how the corporate system works than who is running it, but yes, Susan is the main person I was thinking of. But I really don't think Larry and Sergey (or most of the engineers for that matter) were much better. They always struck me as pretty shallow people. They don't want to "be evil" but they aren't willing or able to honestly examine what their company is doing to determine whether it's evil or not. Tech is ultimately a pretty shallow business. It's full of people who love gadgetry, love inventing stuff, and love the Silicon Valley dream of getting rich, but are mostly incapable of examining the consequences of their work.
As a tangential anecdote, one thing I saw at YouTube that really made me realize just how dumb some of those people are is that one of the YT buildings across the street from 901 is (or was when I was there) decorated with a theme of homages to the French fashion culture of the 1920s. On the third floor, where I worked, the area around the elevator is decorated with images of the famous fashion and perfume designer Coco Chanel, who happens to also have been a Nazi collaborator during the war -- not someone I would have picked.
Honestly I never liked the "don't be evil" catchphrase when I was there exactly because evil was never defined, and in fact can't really be defined. Evil is a cartoon word, a meaningless abstraction.
My understanding is that actually, in the very beginning, it had a very specific intention related to the behaviour of Microsoft in the late 90s towards Netscape and how they disbanded the IE team in an attempt to stop the web from developing, something that had alienated a lot of people in the industry and especially in a company whose entire mission revolved around the web. However even by the time I'd arrived the phrase had become unmoored from that and within a few years it was common for people to be describing boring, anodyne business decisions as "evil" if they disagreed with them, like what the background colour of ads should be, or whether to reskin Gmail. I very quickly learned to tune out accusations that something was "evil" at Google because it was always a petty complaint about nothing that could possibly do justice to the word.
I think Larry and Sergey were not comparable to the current leadership. They had strong, unusual opinions and were willing to defend them against criticism. They were willing to prove people wrong or overrule them in order to build the company Google became. When bolshie employees got up at TGIF and went on some epically unprofessional rant about miscellaneous nonsense like what was served for lunch that day, or how the new visual design for product X was evil, they'd just literally take the piss out of that person live in front of the company. And they were right to do so! Live by the sword, die by the sword. They were a million miles from the modern Google that appears to be apologise for its own existence the moment the militant leftist wing of their employee base fires up the outrage machine. L&S would tolerated that, which in hindsight was a mistake, but their decisions weren't affected by it.
There's a certain school of thought these days that tech companies should care more about the consequences of their work. I find that school to often be a cover for the left to demand that tech companies align those consequences more with their liking. When I joined Google it was a very libertarian place, my manager and the guy sent to train us were both hard-core and openly capitalist. The company did not pass judgement on its users or the web that it found, it merely made things easier to find. To the extent it made a moral judgement of humanity it was a positive one: give people information and the world will be a better place. To me that wasn't shallow, it was a philosophy of respect. The modern tech industry has been steadily attacked and overrun by people who have a very different outlook: humans are dumb, can't take care of themselves and we have a moral duty to manipulate them for their own good. That isn't caring about the consequences of their work, it's just a different take on it. And ultimately, one that leaves many people cold.
Quite lifted from comment above: “there are no algorithms that can handle nuances like that. Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.”
It's funny that bureaucracies everywhere -- doesn't matter if it's Prussia, the USSR, the Pentagon, or a US tech company -- display these same characteristics at the management level.
The pipe-fitters are constantly screamed at to fit pipes, but somehow never rise to the top despite having correctly fitted 100,000 pipes. It's almost like there's an inherent logic to the thing from which the pipe-fitters are excluded, despite their skill at fitting pipes, which is the nominal business of the enterprise.
In fairness, most of Google's top leadership are engineers. And it used to be all of them (except the head of sales but that's fair enough). It's one of the reasons the company was successful. The people who ran it were capable of fitting the pipes themselves, they just didn't have the time. YouTube is run by someone who hasn't really built anything themselves so they don't have the same stability of decision making found in those who have.
This, by the way, is very typical of companies/divisions in tech "middle age" - the original founders are busy flying around in their own 767 while day to day management is now in the hands of corporate types who move up and down based no where they went to school and how late they stay at the office. Google is now a corporation, with shareholders and the quintessential way to move up (kissing a$$, stealing ideas, backstabbing your rival, managing up/not down, get promoted).
The original idea of building it for everyone is long, long gone. Remember, "don't be evil" code of conduct from 2001 or so?
"the slogan was 'also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent'.
The slogan has gone from a “negative” right-don’t be evil/live and let live to a “positive” right “do the right thing”. This encapsulates the basic conflict in America between libertarian/traditional Constitutional freedoms and liberal/progressive/New Deal era busybody corporatism. Madison/Goldwater vs. Woodrow Wilson/FDR.
"It's now been replaced with, "do the right thing"
hahahaha they should make Spike Lee CEO based on his record of innovative filmmaking
Seriously, based on the highly informational comments from fellow commenters with history in the IT biz, the shift from engineering to advertising is fascinating. Could become a TK News bit
The mentality you detail describes 90% of people in managerial positions. However, I don't think replacing Wojcicki would solve the problem, because it's systematic. Even if she were replaced with a competent person who valued the importance of free expression and its documentation, the pressures from power brokers are such that whoever replaced her would be gone in a short time if certain demands of content were not complied with. "Authoritative content" as expressed in Matt's article is authoritarian content in reality. The internet was originally created with taxpayer funding and now it's being used to censor and propagandize against the public interest. Neutrality can only be achieved through legislation that avoids setting up an internet application as an arbiter of truth or a determiner of content priority.
But it seems that moderation of raw public statements has historically been absolutely necessary to prevent the unlimited spread of false, emotionally charged pseudo-information, which as has often been demonstrated, travels many times faster than reflective consideration of issues. If we cannot do some sort of moderation, terrible harm can result. Germany in the 1930s is an over-used but perfectly valid example of what can happen without moderation of mob mentality.
Germany had very serious censorship before Hitler took power in an attempt to stop him. Hitler was systematically banned from the radio, if I recall correctly, which is one reason he had to spend so much time flying around Germany to give speeches in person. Once he took power anyway despite the censorship, the laws, infrastructure and social acceptance of state control over media was already there and all he had to do was start using it.
I have not been able to find anything about Hitler being banned on radio, and I don't remember encountering anything about that in the past. That would be very interesting if it is true. Could you check your recollection?
The simple answer is that the publisher gets to decide. For example, most newspapers use their own employees to moderate comments. Under the usual interpretation of private enterprise information services, screening for false or obscene or politically extreme content is the responsibility of the private company. Also, there are "truth in advertising" laws which enable a viewer of an advertisement to sue the advertiser for false advertising.
Thank you very much for that very interesting information. So you think good automated moderation could be achieved? That is very encouraging. Can you indicate very generally how it would work?
Not the type of "moderation" that YouTube currently engages in, which is trying to enforce some undefined moral standards over content. I meant the sort of ranking that web search does, where the value function is far more precise: the best results are whatever the user was looking for, regardless of why they were looking for it. The moderation can be automated because it's just down-ranking content that's trying to manipulate the algorithms. Then if people do searches for bad things you just stay silent - it's a problem between that user and their society/legal system if they're searching for bad things, not between the user and their search engine.
This system has worked well for a long time. You do sometimes see stories like "murderer caught after police discover he was searching for how to hide bodies" and things like that, but nobody asserts the murder was Google's fault, no more than they would a library.
Gmail works the same way. Spam is whatever Gmail users say it is, via their "Report spam" button. It's a form of collective voting, not a value judgement by a few executives. Chrome blacklists websites when they're hosting phishing or malware, but that's because those sites interfere with the correct operation of the infrastructure itself. It's not because some random L4 SWE threw a hissy fit.
The sort of moderation YouTube is doing is inviting trouble because it's not so much a slippery slope as a vertical cliff-edge. Once you bow to requests to manually purge "bad" content, you end up in an endless loop in which there are always more requests for purges and the demands to do so get increasingly vicious. A strong and total stand of the form "we are merely dumb pipes" is the most effective way to stop a never ending purity spiral, and it's one some other products have done successfully: nobody ever asks Chrome to nuke websites even though they could, because everyone knows the answer will be a furious rejection of the request (at least up until now), so they don't even bother asking.
The heart of this is that there is currently there is no pain for YouTube to commit Type 1 error (cancelling legitimate journalism) compared to Type 2 error (not taking down something egregious that then brings pain).
Quick search produces "30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour" (YouTube). If YouTube demanded that videos be accurately labeled, how hard could it be to have staff monitoring troublesome labels?
So it's not about algos, in this case, it's about the Tubman's.
There is no sensible, responsible, intelligent Censorship. Never has been, never will be. That aside, this is a very astute analysis of how these managers make their Holy decisions.
"There is no sensible, responsible, intelligent Censorship." Cheers, Tom. Well put!
Censorship historically has been really hard to pull off effectively. It is typically easier to coerce people away from seeking to share information in the first place. Historically, hasn't it always been far more effective to empower people from one's own in-group to spy, apply pressure, and spread fear to keep information from spreading than to stop info from spreading via obstruction?
As for Tom's point, The Streisand Effect is already working. I woke up never having heard of some of these journalists and alternative outlets who sound like they are doing interesting work.
The floating desire for a strongman is wild, whether it's DJT, Ol' Joe, Elon, Jack, or Zuck.
My unsolicited advice for strongman-fanciers; examine your strongman carefully. He might be, y'know, Peron. If you want to live in Peronist Argentina, that's cool for you.
You're right that a computer vision algorithm detects objects without context. But as you likely know, contextual judgments are attainable with a broader suite of AI algorithms -- in this case maybe using an ensemble of computer vision/natural language processing/clustering. Complex models simply require lots of training. That arguably is challenging, but it's not impossible.
One simple example: A few years back Google got in hot water for a face recognition algo that wrongly identified a dude with African ancestry as a gorilla. We both probably know the reason -- it's not racism, it was inadequate model training. The algo wasn't trained on enough photos of dudes who looked like him to learn the required feature space and likely put too much probability-weight on abstract face color. If the algo had been trained predominantly on African people and few Caucasians, it may have identified a white guy as a maggot or a snowman, for example. As we know, it's only math and math doesn't know or care about human sensibilities. Google trained the model better and the problem was solved.
So training is everything. The question is: Can an AI algo be trained to navigate these contextual challenges? I think the answer is Yes, but it would require hard work and a lot of effort. The corporate cultural changes you reference may impede that sort of effort. More broadly, a company as large as Youtube or Google should design a workflow to narrow the possibility set and then kick questionable content up for internal live vetting. I'm editorializing now, but there's a public good aspect to fair moderation that they shouldn't be able to duck. In my view, creative and skilled engineering could ameliorate this problem and maybe eliminate it.
Actually, I vaguely remember reading that they didn't retrain the model. They just blocked it from classifying anything as a gorilla. I'm sure they fixed it with better training eventually but it presumably wasn't easy, if those reports were correct. People noticed by uploading photos of gorillas and observing Photos was no longer willing to recognise them.
I'm sure they did not retrain it immediately, as that takes a long time. What they have done since then I don't know. I feel sure that is a solvable problem. If a person can recognize a gorilla properly, and not mis-identify a person as a gorilla, I know of no reason why ML should fail to do so. Gorillas are really not very hard to recognize accurately as non-human primates.
You really can't judge a video without understanding it, and AI (one of the great misnomers of our time) cannot understand anything. So no, I don't believe automation can solve this problem. It can help, but you'd need final review by a human, and that human would need to be a reasonably intelligent, reasonably fair-minded person who won't just decide to block things they find personally disagreeable. A minimum-wage office worker with a list of simple rules like "no guns" won't do.
You actually could judge a video to a surprising degree.
Consider a system that 1) performs object recognition on videos, 2) uses natural language processing (NLP) on the video speech, 3) evaluates the broader cluster created by the video poster's other content and 4) uses these as inputs in a classification algorithm that predicts a probability that the flagged video represents -- for lack of a better phrase -- "hateful content".
If the poster were a journalist conducting an interview or reporting from the field, that will be revealed in the NLP algorithm and the cluster the video poster is in. If the poster is Aunt Polly at a picnic and the "gun" is a toy waved by a kid, that also can reveal itself in the NLP data.
This is doable today, right now, with current machine learning engineering.
It may not be able to be 100% automated, but it could help sift the triggering content and make fair-minded human supervision a bit easier. And it would continually adapt and improve.
But nothing can fix bad faith. If the tech giants want to be political censors for the Washington, DC power elite (aka "the Swamp"), there's not much we as general public can do about it other than not use their services.
Yeah. I think a lot of people at Google believe in the old "Don't be evil" slogan, but they have difficulty recognizing their own problems in that area. They're shallow enough to think that if they're doing what's right for their business, they must be doing what's right. It's not malice, just blindness.
Google has institutionalized incompetence as a cultural value without even realizing it. A mix of lazy, incompetent and isolated isn't going to go well for those who are outside of their bubble.
I disagree. All of big tech has merged with the state and is currently in the business of enforcing narratives. The most urgent one at the moment is the required isolation and disarming of dangerous Trumpers. Content that supports the notion that all problems lead to this group, will be allowed. Content that disproves (showing peaceful protesters) it will be removed.
This about the efforts to fold the US into the globalist power structure (Duck duck go: The Great Reset) {Google is censored}).
This is true-they are like the Sorcerers Apprentice in terms of getting overwhelmed with content-their algorithm is the only way they can do anything-and it has gotten away from them-not that they give a shit about that fact, or the intellectual rationale for free speech.
This really comes out in the Joe Rogan show with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and the Twitter chief counsel. They just can't afford to do the moderating they need to do. Dorsey talks about the staggering size and challenge of the job as if it's the public's fault that he's getting so much business.
So, do you have an opinion on what should be done? I'd personally be very upset if youtube had to disappear, because it's such a good resource for learning. I have learned a tremendous amount on youtube, mainly having no connection with politics.
I think our justice dept should be more active in going after non-competitive practices, both with big tech and legacy industry. They do better in the EU than we do.
So I don't want YT to go away. I just want them to have viable competition. I want more options.
I really don't know what it would take to level the playing field so that someone else can compete with YT. But breaking it apart from Google wouldn't break my heart.
Partially just because it can't be done at their scale. With millions of people posting new videos every day, they can't possibly review them all manually, and AI (a misnomer if there ever was one) is incapable of understanding. I also think they think they're being "fair" by establishing simple, objective rules like "no guns" that apply to everyone equally (though they don't really, of course). They're probably also getting guidance from their lawyers about potential liability issues, but I don't have any insight into that. Overall it's shallowness and a focus on their own business interests more than anything else.
That's the way I understood it after listening to the Rogan session. And thus my comment below. They started a wildfire and now they don't know how to put it out. Nor are they motivated to.
I also think the algo's are left-biased and that's why Parler turned into a "conservative platform". It was only because that's who got kicked off Twitter.
Algorithms aren't left-biased, but it may seem like that for social reasons.
Firstly, the left are much keener on controlling speech than the right (at least these days). So takedowns are going to often be driven by a leftist agenda simply because they're the ones demanding takedowns.
Secondly and relatedly, the AI driven takedowns are trained on human decisions, primarily I guess user flags. If one side of the political debate systematically responds to anything they disagree with by flagging it and one doesn't, the AI will inevitably learn to associate user flags with right wing content. And its job is to predict what content will be flagged, so it turns into a conservative detector. But that's not the fault of the AI. Similar dynamics can be seen on many online forums, where any post with a conservative theme will be downvoted like crazy even if it's polite and well written.
In turn that's not entirely the fault of the users. It's mostly our fault (programmers and product designers). We give users very vague tools with which to express views on content. Is the like/dislike button meant to express a values-neutral judgement of quality, or is it meant to just track who agrees or disagrees? On Reddit are you meant to upvote posts that are good even if you disagree, or are you meant to downvote wrongthink? The platform doesn't say! So it defaults to your base political values, which for the libertarian/conservative right is often "I may disagree but will defend your right to say it" and on the left is "Bad ideas spread, I'll vote them down to reduce their visibility".
Makes sense. So a mob that is intent on punishing or expelling a person or idea can do so with a coordinated attack no matter the platform. It seems to be happening in legacy media too. And they are doing it to something like 49% of our population. I doubt it will end well.
Mike, much truth in that except for one thing...have you watched the 90% negative comments on Joe Biden YT videos get removed, magically? I have. Following your logic, Biden should be removed from YT for hate speech. Someone is adjusting the levers behind the scenes. Reddit brigading was quite common, driving more conservative thinkers/posters in other directions.
They could be, but it could also be that negative comments about Biden get flagged by users far more than negative comments about Trump do. That is, if the average Trump supporter just ignores or laughs at or replies to negative comments about Trump, and the average Biden supporter flags them as abusive, any automated system will learn that.
To be clear I have no idea what the explanation is. But it doesn't <i>have</i> to be due to explicit actions by Google employees. It can also be due to different approaches by the users themselves.
"Is the like/dislike button meant to express a values-neutral judgement of quality, or is it meant to just track who agrees or disagrees?"
This. I don't even know WTF the "like" button is supposed to represent here. I just do it as a lazy "good post!" It doesn't mean I endorse every single idea contained in it; and behind that is a far more sinister concept; that "likes/dislikes" or "upvotes/downvotes" determine what is acceptable speech on the internet
So if it wasn't Twitter management that made Parler into what it became it was the left-wing Twitter mob. Does it matter? How long until another Parler except worse?
Craig, 10,000 editors can definitely review them manually with AI help. It's just expensive and well, that would mean Alphabet makes "less money" - same goes for Facebook and their deeply flawed Advertising model. It's not about proper content moderation, it's about maximizing $. In other words, "do evil" (as opposed to don't do evil) in the name of shareholder value. Besides, who cares about the small guy (independent journalists, small biz) when you can service, say, Kraft cheese or ABC with much bigger budgets.
Instead, Google/Facebook invest their $$ in some of the most useless people on the planet, yes the advertising sales people who give bad advice but encourage SMBs to, "increase your budget to scale better" - uh huh. If you want brain damage, answer one of their calls and follow their suggestions on how to scale ads into Chapter 11/BK. As one of my UK mentors once said, when confronted with this type of silliness, "FAAACK OFF"
I agree that moderation almost certainly cannot be done at scale. So what should happen to Youtube? In many respects, outside the political realm, it is a fantastic resource, unmatched in the history of humankind. Maybe all politics ought to be banned there? That, of course, may not be possible to achieve either. I really have no idea how these problems could or should be approached.
Do you have a suggestion for a better way Youtube could handle these problems? The impossibility of real moderation at scale is a very serious problem.
It's a difficult problem, admittedly. And as an unregulated private-sector entity, they are legally free to establish any policies they want. But I think they need to consider that they are one of the main ways for people to put out important information in video form, and it isn't just established media companies who are doing this, and put some effort into figuring out how to do better. I doubt they're even looking at this problem. I can't say I have a solution either (then again it's not my job), but one thought I have is that they could allow people to mark their channels as belonging to one of a handful of categories like "journalism", "advertising", "humor", "personal", and so on. "Personal" would be the default, and the only one that is free of charge. For a journalism channel, you'd have to pay a modest fee either as a monthly subscription or for each video posted, identity would have to be verified, and YT would need to have a complaint review process that involved a reasonably intelligent, reasonably unbiased human looking at the video and its content in that channel and deciding whether there was anything unacceptable about it. Over time they would also take the history of the channel and the history of the complainer into account; a complaint from someone with a history of invalid complaints against a channel that has been found to be high-quality could probably be ignored. Does this scale? It depends how easy and how costly it is to have a journalism channel, among other things, and what the thresholds are for trusting a channel or a complainer, how a channel or complainer can lose trust, etc. There will also be language issues, of course, so journalism channels might only be available in languages that are supported by YT's staff. There won't be a perfect solution to this, but something along these lines could be a lot better than what they do now. Automation simply can't solve this problem.
That's a pretty great solution. Of course, my preference is "anything goes" (essentially; no kiddie porn etc), but short of this, your idea is the best I've heard. Would hopefully be a generous verification process, to allow for people who are new to the field.
According to my understanding, any solution that relies on significant human participation -- such as "a reasonably intelligent, reasonably unbiased human looking at the video"(!) -- does not scale, because number of users will always eventually increase past the point where you can hire the necessary number of humans to do a demanding job. Nevertheless your approach is interesting. If an AI could do some of that job, it might work.
America is moving in the direction of a police state and it only works because big tech is in bed with the DemocratIc party and the establishment wing of the Republican party. Is this really about the 2nd amendment? Not even close - gun ownership is a right. Is it about Trump's speech or the pro-gun protests which a 5th grader can tell you did not incite violence? Nope. Big tech's censorship and control is simply about shutting down half of the country's free speech and opinions to strengthen and expand the liberal belief that people with values and ideology that are different from theirs do not deserve to be heard. They will continue to play this hand until someone steps up and fights back. Whether you liked Trump or hated Trump, he wasn't afraid to stand up to this nonsense.
I agree. And it’s not just big tech. We now have the capital of the US in military lockdown. Lockdown, meaning no one can protest. As someone who has protested and observed protests on the Mall and the streets of DC, I can’t see this as anything but a shameful effective way to create a false sense of unity. Biden just literally scrubbed the most political of places free of dissent.
There was a violent attack on the seat of government. That is why Biden locked down the area. No responsible president could have done otherwise. If you were president, how would you react to a highly destructive attack on a key government building by BLM, in which they beat to death one of your policemen? Would you ignore it and take no precautions?
I’m not a fucking conservative FYI. But I also don’t give a crap about political elites who are in business for themselves so I empathize with the breachers who were there due to frustration at an impotent government. I didn’t see it as a violent attack or an insurrection or coup. I thought it was pretty funny that it was so easy to breach the Capitol. Maybe govt should convene for the next few months via zoom like everyone else until it’s safe to come out.
I would beef up security w/o a military encampment. I think there’s a way to do that without troops lounging around infecting each other with Covid and sleeping in parking garages and preventing citizens from gathering to show dissent. Talk to me a year from now when they’re still there.
Now we are getting somewhere! And there are weird parallels between The Bonus Army and the original fascist movement in Italy which was mostly made up of soldiers returning from WWI hell bent on not allowing the ruling class to ever get them into a hellish war like that again...and then proceeded to pull an Oedipus and fulfill what they were trying to avoid. Kind of like Google did, too...
Read: The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O Paxton for a detailed history.
Word of advice - Fun Police = Cypher - 'A cypher is a message written in a secret code. ... Another kind of cypher is an unimportant person who's blank or devoid of personality — you might call a lifeless character in a book a cypher. The word has an Arabic root, sifr, "zero, empty, or nothing."
Mr Zero is back - in a new 'Bird-Whistle' nom de plume
Yeah Beetle Grisha. Of note about the eventual forced removal - it was led by Douglas McArthur who was Army Chief of Staff - is it even remotely possible that our current Army COS (had to look 'em up)
would consider suiting up - manning a mount on a steed - and having at 'em with a blackjack?
Now the betrayal is far more subtle, remote, and lucrative. Like Petraeus & Mattis - who build their 'brand' via the rank and file fighting and dying and then cash in with War Inc.
Another note I've read Beetle G - about how we now may be in a similar 'Phony War' - the lull of minor to non-existent ('39 & '40) fighting for England and France until the Blitz punched through the Ardennes - and the French folded and the Vichy prevailed - unlike Churchill who thwarted Halifax and the surrender monkeys.
So, yeah - parallels indeed.
Final unrelated side bar Beetle - I have arrived (thanks for the guidance) as a poster/blogger. Cypher was way not happy with my cribbing Webster's on cluing him on choice of post-nom de plum - check out the response -
Good point. I'm not a fan of MacArthur, but at least he was willing to get his hands dirty. To make my political position clear, I take the side of the Bonus Army.
I think Petraeus was always a careerist POS and people knew it. His nickname within the military was "BetrayUs." There was a long period of breathless, worshipful media coverage of him and McChrystal; they liked the cameras. This is well covered in the late Michael Hastings' book "The Operators."
I'm very disappointed in Mattis and McMaster. To be fair, I'm sure working with Trump wasn't easy. McMaster -- the guy who literally wrote the book on the mendacity of the general officer corps in Vietnam -- advocating for more of the same policies was skull-exploding for me.
I got all the F-Bombs you need and then some. I'm Slim Pickens riding an F-Bomb and yelling "YEE-HAW!"
If that is your criterion for success, you will be missing a lot of reasoned discourse. Do you want to provoke everyone to use an F-bomb? What purpose does angering people have? It can never be helpful in advancing a discussion, as far as I can see.
Very interesting. Thanks for that link. Seems from my quick read similar in terms of concerns about the govt not working for its citizens. And two protesters shot dead, one an immigrant.
I will talk to you in a year if they are still there. I am going to repeat part of another comment I just posted below:
If you were President, and BLM attacked a key government building, and even cooperated with the attackers, what would you do? Not call in the National Guard? If not, why not? It would be one of your powers. How could you justify not using it to protect the inauguration, assuming it was the second inauguration for Trump?
I would beef up security and go on with the show. Do you remember the violence during Trump’s inauguration? Somehow he wasn’t affected by it. There is a way to create a shield without 30000 troops installed. Either we have to admit that security forces are inept and can’t determine when an attack will come (as they claimed were possible)and need brute force or see the military response as unjustified, alarming and perilous to this tattered democracy.
I very much agree. If the Capitol police had even halfway done their job, the National Guard would never have been needed. The question is, why did the Capitol Police fail? I read that their budget is enormous by comparison with the nature of the job they do. Yet they applied very inadequate resources on that day. Why?
Let me answer your question with a question: this is what happened in 2018 at the supreme court. Look at it, and ask yourself honestly and realistically what would have happened if those doors had been forced open. It's only luck or incompetence that separate these two incidents. So what should have been done back then when this occurred?
And just to clarify, as CNN themselves describe in this video:
"Protesters opposed to Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the US Supreme Court swarmed over Washington -- massing at the Capitol, disrupting the confirmation vote in the Senate and banging on the Supreme Court building doors when Kavanaugh arrived to be sworn in."
Thank you for that link. All I can say is that there was adequate security that day and no one got in. I don't know anything else. One other point: no one in the crowd was wearing military-style gear. But the key point was that the security forces kept the crowd out. On 1/6/2021, the security forces failed.
If I were president or even speaker of the house, I would have listened to the requests for added security given 100k + demonstrators were expected. Nancy and Mitch should be fired just for that level of incompetence.
Really??? I thought that is what the police are for! (And your argument falls flat when you consider the death, destruction, and mayhem this summer, which included breeches of federal and state property.)
The death and destruction this summer are irrelevant to what we are discussing. The Capitol police did not handle the attack on the Capitol adequately. If you were President, and BLM attacked a key government building, and even cooperated with the attackers, what would you do? Not call in the National Guard? If not, why not? It would be one of your powers. How could you justify not using it to protect the inauguration, assuming it was the second inauguration for Trump?
The fact that the Capitol Police were unprepared (for reasons that still aren't clear) on Jan 6 has nothing to do with a prepared police force now. That is what the police are for. Fine, National Guard for the inauguration but why are they still there? If you say to guard against some possible violence during the impeachment trial, I'm not going along. We are getting dangerously close to a CCP style government. But you can't see it, so I am not going to try to convince you.
Given the No Comment coming from the House and Senate, it's obvious what happened. They were either incompetent or wanted something to happen. Not sure which one.
I don't have an answer. We have to inquire further, and find out when the National Guard is withdrawn. I believe their presence was warranted, but I have no information or ideas about when they should be withdrawn, except, of course, as soon as possible.
'The death and destruction this summer are irrelevant...'
What a pathetic excuse for a position. We are one year into this and yet to really feel the economic consequences of what you consider irrelevant - like - a MANUFACTURED DEPRESSION just in business closings and job losses alone.
And by the way for most of the 50k+ there peacefully to protest what they considered a stolen election - IT WAS TRUMPS 2ND INAUGURATION - cause they and I believe he won - possibly in a landslide.
Locking down the capital with 20k National Guard isn't a warning to the fellow Phoenician nut job wearing a buffalo head-dress and the other goof-ball now sitting in Prince George County because he messed with Goat Girl Pelosi's to-do list on her desk once he plunked down his Dr. Martins.
Tucker Carlson nailed it the other night on why - You are allowed to believe that Biden won - as I am that he is nothing more than a pathetic puppet installed illegally. He is incompetent and illegitimate and the pretext that you have bought into - if you are sincere - likewise puts your ability to make rational decisions suspect. We all are entitled to a Senior Moment Ralph. Not a delusional nightmare that you want to force on half the country.
There are 70+ million of us - and we are not going to curl into a fetal position or go away. We are going to re-install voter integrity - and stop these fascist-progs from stealing our republic.
I don't "get to determine". I just asserted that I think it is irrelevant to that narrow discussion. Repeating something I wrote above, I never said -- and I do not believe -- that the death and destruction this summer are unimportant. They are very important, just not relevant to a specific discussion of the Capitol situation on 1/6/2021.
I would like someone to explain why the “invaders” and “insurrectionists” did not bring guns if they were seriously trying to oust the “sacred democracy.”
We do know that some came with those plastic handcuffs. And one person (group?) actually did beat a policeman to death.
One big clarification I've learned from this batch of comments is that the most important problem is that the security failed. Regardless of anyone's intentions, if the crowd had not entered at all, there would have been no significant problem. So I am going to stop calling it an insurrection, etc., because it would have been a nothing-at-all if the security had held.
To put that another way, "intentions" of a group cannot easily be measured in a one-off like this because everyone has a different set to intentions. That is why security must hold: you never know what might happen if a crowd gets in somewhere. (And obviously they were not entering a public place, such as a shopping mall, where intentions might have to be analyzed, in retrospect anyway, if there were an attack.)
Thank you for this. I appreciate your decision to stop calling it an insurrection as the MSM/DNC is portraying it. I agree with you. My wife and I watched it live from our couch, with live feeds from various sources on the web. 90% of the folks there were peaceful and respectful of the Capitol. In several places the cops let them in, either thru fealty to the aims of the protestors or by order, maybe both at different times and places. Protestors taking happy selfies with the cops, walking deferentially between the velvet roped tour lines. There were indeed bad actors, many arrived before Trump even ended his speech. But from what I have seen at least a plurality of them were antifa, and called out as such by the protestors. Very, very few from the Trump contingent meant any harm to that sacred place. Remember, at base Trumpers are solid patriots. They love America, and the shrines that represent it. If you think otherwise you are deluded.
I want to circle back to why nobody has heard of David Bailey, the DC cop who evidently shot Ashli Babbit. If that was truly an "armed insurrection" and "coup" against our Republic, the cop who fired the shot that killed the prime "domestic terrorist" should be feted and welcomed as a hero! His name and deeds and stalwart defense of the Capitol and "our sacred democracy!" should be celebrated to the heavens by DNC and MSM!! But instead we have complete silence. Zero info from any investigation, zero interest and zero questions from the compliant MSM. Nobody knows his name. The truth does not fit the Narrative. The Narrative wants you to believe 5 people died because Trump Incited a Riot, worthy of Impeachement! Yeah, well... no. The DC cop David Bailey shot the unarmed Ashli Bobbit to death in the Capitol.
David Bailey shot unarmed protestor Ashli Bobbit to death in the Capitol. Just for clarity.
Several died of natural causes like heart attack, almost a given in a giant crowd like that. (How giant was the crowd? Nobody knows. That info is Not To Be Discussed.) DC cop Brian Sicknick walked away from the riot but died a day later from a head wound suffered during the riot. RIP. All evidence paints him as a man of honor and I have every reason to believe it.
To be clear I believe David Bailey may have been in the right of doing his job best he could. I have no reason to think he was a bad actor. Maybe he was the last line of defense before some cowering Congress Critters. Evidently he was security detail during the attack on Sen Scalise some years ago, and was wounded by the (Bernie Bro) assailant. Bailey's shot to the chest of the attacker was likely the mortal wound that stopped the attack. Add all that up and I could credit the man a hero. So how he came to shoot Ashli Babbit? Darn, if there was only an investigation. If only somebody cared enough to want to know the truth. But that does not fit the Narrative. You, Joe public, are just a serf to be played.
What they do not show you is much more important than what they holler to the skies.
I do not agree that antifa was involved in most of the instances of violence. Since most of the people who perpetrated violence or destruction have been arrested, and will be prosecuted, there is an opportunity to find out if they had connections with antifa. As for an investigation, my understanding is that an exhaustive investigation has already begun, and is expected to go on for a long time. How David Bailey came to shoot Ashli Babbit will surely be an important part of that investigation. Just try not to say it's not an investigation if the Democrats run it. They happen to be the party in power in both chambers, and whatever party that is usually controls investigations. If you want democracy, you have to accept that either party may be in power at any given time.
I disagree about Trump's speech, if you mean what he said to the crowd that went down to the Capitol. I say it did incite violence. How else can you interpret what he and Giuliani said?
And I definitely say the Democratic Party is not moving in the direction of a police state. No Democrat has ever advocated such a thing. You will not find a single Democrat who advocates anything of the sort. If you know of any, please reply because I want to know.
Trump's mistake was the event itself and expecting a change in outcome. His words were benign and he never suggested anyone should be violent. What is it the BLM "protesters" say, "silence is violence?" Well not speaking up and defending free speech by every democrat politician is supporting the ban on free speech including allowing twitter, youtube and facebook to silence the speech of the president of the US and those with a dissenting opinion. So that's every Democrat; not just one.
Trump said, "You cannot be weak, you have to be strong." That is incitement to violence when spoken to a crowd carrying weapons. And Giuliani suggested "trial by combat". How else can you interpret "trial by combat" than an incitement to violence? Suppose a black leader, speaking to a crowd of BLM supporters, suggested trial by combat. The BLM crowd then walked down and broke windows in the capitol, entered, and people were heard saying "Kill Pence", and they killed a policeman? Would you judge the words to be benign in that case? What would you have done as President after that happened?
The protestors were not carrying weapons of any real significance. Furthermore, telling the crowd to be strong and to peacefully protest at the capitol isn't an incitement to anything other than naivete. The playbook for that idiotic display was written over the summer. They didn't do anything that they haven't seen hundreds of times from those riots.
That said, using the capitol riot as a pretext to further disenfranchise anyone or anything on the right is unbelievably tone deaf. For God's sake, CNN is trying to build up support to censor Fox News because of an alleged pattern of disinformation and an incitement to violence. Honestly, I don't even know where to begin with that.
The best thing they could do is to treat these protestors with the same kid gloves that they have used for the thousands of protestors from the summer. Equal justice under the law could actually move the needle. Instead, they are pouring gasoline on this while they target, smear and harass American citizens. Anyone on the right is potentially guilty by association.
If I'm not mistaken, there were around 100k at the event. Several hundred of those protestors lost their shit. That is the definition of a mostly peaceful protest. I never blamed protestors over the summer who were there to exercise their right to assembly and to voice their grievances. I do blame the small percentage of them who were agitators and violent. The same applies for the capitol riot.
Antifa and BLM use revolutionary language as a standard practice. I have heard many protest leaders use language at these protests that were incredibly inflammatory. I don't remember them verbatim but they regularly encouraged activists to perform acts of violence and to directly overthrow our system of government.
In terms of, "direct action", they tried to burn down a federal courthouse with officers locked inside for well over a month. They set up autonomous zones in front of state capitols. That doesn't include all the people that were beaten and murdered by activists during that time. The resulting damage and loss of life was shocking for anyone who paid attention.
These people are the definition of extremists who really do want to overthrow and replace our government. I never mistook them for the vast majority of Americans on the left because that would be ridiculous. No group or ideology deserves to be defined by fringe elements that are tangentially related to them.
But it is clear that the right has lost the culture war and the left no longer has the right to call itself liberal. At this point, I kind-of hope that they get what they are asking for. I've got a great spot picked out to watch everything crumble.
I never thought I would see the day when the first amendment was up for debate. There is no nuance or discourse and civil libertarians are now white (or white adjacent) nationalists according to our moral superiors. It is really unbelievable that our great nation will be taken down by woke militants that have been coddled from birth. It's a fucking tragedy.
A common mistake I've seen these past months is equating a political mob (Trump supporters) with anarchists (Antifa) and racial justice rioters (BLM). All three are terrible taken together, but only one of these groups is supporting a political figure.
You are right. They are not comparable. The sheer size and scale of the summer riots puts them in their own category. There were literally hundreds of riots across the country. They were far more destructive to people, property and social order than the capitol riot could ever hope to be.
I really really doubt our great nation will be taken down by anything in the next few years. I don't see why you should be so pessimistic. Almost everyone who lives in the US wants it to survive!
The legacy media didn't attend or cover most of the riots so I had to rely on independent sources for information. Michael Tracey was one of the few journalists who actually covered them and those engaged in them through a cross country tour. He was assaulted in Portland because they didn't want him to stream the event. I watched as many live feeds as I could until I just couldn't stomach it anymore. There is no question that Antifa and some of the more militant BLM activists were the main agitators. I'm not going to dig up videos and police arrest records to prove that to you but they are widely available.
Your comment about Antifa and BLM rings hollow? They (both of them) are responsible for most of the $2.0 billion of damage and violent attacks this summer. They are the definition of fascism and marxism. Citing CNN and NPR weakens your argument.
Antifa and BLM share a common core of beliefs in revolutionary Marxism. I'm not going to dig for resources that you won't read anyway.
To some degree, you are correct about Antifa as a reactionary organization. There is no question that they will go out of their way to counter protest to anything that they perceive as fascist.
On inauguration day, Antifa protested and rioted against our newly elected president in Portland, Seattle, Denver and California. I guess you could say that they were reacting to a fascist regime taking power. You could also say that they were reacting to the existence of statues that they didn't like and DHS agents in a federal courthouse.
As for the rest, I don't really give a shit about who gets bused in and for what. I do take issue with violent extremism regardless of ideology.
Here's an example of BLM calling for destruction. I'll pre-emptively say, please don't insult anyone's intelligence by trying to argue that smashing into buildings and stealing stuff somehow doesn't count as "destruction":
“That is reparations,” Ariel Atkins, a BLM organiser told the broadcaster. “Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.
“I don’t care if someone decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store, because that makes sure that person eats,” she said. “That makes sure that person has clothes.”
You should spend 15 minutes researching the Capitol breach because you're dead wrong.
Trump's rally could not have motivated the crowd, the timing wasn't there. The insurgents were already on the Capitol steps a full half hour prior to Trump finishing, and everyone finishes a Trump rally. Further, the Capitol was breached one half hour after Trump finished even though navigating from Ellipse to Capitol would have taken over an hour.
Say that Trump's uncivil 2 months of #stopthesteal leaves him responsible - even though his people had never acted so violently, and all we wanted was a legit audit - that's fine. But claiming that his 1/6 rally had anything to do with it is just false.
What weapons? Now you’re just making things up or intentionally lying. In his speech Trump intentionally called for the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically”. And by the way, Black Lies Matter constantly call for the killing of police. And often actually do kill police.
Ralph, elections are won because the diehards flip enough of the wafflers in the middle to their side.
All of the discussion about the Capitol idiot-fest would be moot if Trump, when asked if he accepts blame for Covid response errors, would have said, "Mistakes were made. I won't play the blame game. But I'm the president and the buck stops here. I apologize. From here on out we will work harder & we will do better. Thank you."
In other words, if he'd have acted like an adult or a leader and not like the little kid whose mommy says, "Donald who broke the vase?"
"Wasn't me mom. Must have been the dog," when they don't even have a dog.
America is almost criminally forgiving of its presidents.
I think he'd still be president.
In my mind, Trump's complete lack of humility in the face of his own egregious stupidity just makes him the spiritual heir of George Bush who landed on an aircraft carrier festooned with MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banners, a big stupid grin plastered on his face, right before the real slaughter in Iraq got started. Don't recall any apologies from the Shrubster either. The only difference is that America was too busy shitting its collective pants during Bush's term to think clearly so they re-elected the idjit , justifying it with bits of popular wisdom such as, "Well Cleetus, Mr. Bush started us on this journey to the cliff's edge, so we might as well let the old boy drive us right over."
I think the phrase most describing America during the Bush years would be "Scared Stupid."
I agree with everything you wrote in that comment! Other countries imprison their ex-leaders with some regularity. What the political result might be if we did that here, I have no idea. Some questions are unanswerable. Either an approach is tried, and we get to find out the result, or the untried approach just... disappears. Kind of like evolution. A mutation happens and some offspring "try it out". If they survive, the mutation persists. If not, there is nothing to be remembered.
What I'm getting sick of is the Bible size justifications & obfuscations that swirl around Trump's stay in office these days.
Folk are really trying to make a martyr out of guy who, if he were a comic book character, would have a completely blank thought bubble above his head at least 60% of the time you looked at him. The other 40% of the time he just looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
The only time Dondsi came alive was during his periodic visits to the faithful where he worked the crowd like a demented Buddy Hackett.
Maybe you should ask why Trump got elected in the first place instead of misleading everyone into a justification and rationalization of the consequences of horrible leadership ??
I won't respond to grisha because he has been abusive in the past. I am by no means a bot. You can ask me any series of questions that a bot could not answer. So far, no bot can give you a coherent account spread over many responses. For a bot to do so would require a far different kind of machine learning architecture. I don't think it's impossible, but I am not aware of any current architecture that comes close. Admittedly I could be wrong, so if anyone can point to a bot implementation that could respond as I do, I would be eager to investigate it. I am torn between wanting the machines to be more intelligent and being nervous about the consequences.
I suspect you'll never understand there is no left or right, only top and bottom. That's all there's ever been and more than likely all they'll ever be.
Oh I definitely understand that; unfortunately my lazy, often imprecise, writing often leads me to use “easy” terminology (such as leftists) that is not the best terminology.
Democrats have almost always been the supporters of free speech even when utterly distasteful. There have always been Democrats that have promoted curbs on speech if not outright alien and sedition act-type stuff.
What is disturbing is the current vigor for curbing speech among Democrats.
Does it seem to anyone else that the political parties are switching polarity akin to what the planet does every so often? Can't put my finger on it....
There is a realignment happening. It’s slow starting but I think we’ll end up seeing a right/left populist anti-war movement happening. It’s why you see Glen Greenwald & Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson and not MSNBC.
I new something weird was going on when my Fox News watching Baby Boomer parents started becoming very anti-war and thinking Trump should pardon Snowden! Lol, this would’ve been unthinkable in the early aughts. Say what you want about Glen going on icky Fox News but he’s getting thru to some very right wing boomers out there and it’s AMAZING!!!
Interesting about your folks, KM. Pre-pandemic, I had a lot of regular interaction with people who supported Trump, but who's second choice was Bernie. We use Trump as a convenient label for 74 million people that are as diverse as any group I have ever tried to grok. Just as the tragedy in DC on Jan 6th was made up of a lot of people with very different motives as were the protests this summer following George Floyd's death.
Well, my parents are your typical suburban middle class Fox News watchers. They’re both retired but they’ve been voting republican since the 70’s. They were pretty dogmatically anti-liberal when I was growing up (80’s & 90’s) but we weren’t religious so I didn’t get the whole evangelical upbringing (though K have extended family that are very much religious fundamentalists).
So, my parents would be your typical right winger that would call Bernie a communist and yada yada. That’s the whole point, there are these people who’ve been dogmatically republican for over 40 years, that are starting to rethink all these things. There is no way my parents would’ve ever thought someone like Snowden should be pardon. Ever. They are totally on board now.
So, to all the so called liberals out there that give Glenn Greenwald or Eric Weinstein a hard time for going on Fox or think they’ve switched sides, they’re dead wrong. My parents have come around on issues like privacy, anti-war and anti-monopoly since watching shows like that. It’s anecdotal but if it can happen to my Regan devotee parents it can happen to anyone.
That's a very good point. If we could figure some of that out, it would be great. But there is no way to figure out the composition of a crowd without extensive surveillance and concerted investigation.
There is a group of Democrats trying to push that (including Biden) but luckily one of the squads own is trying to pass a resolution to block it. Rashida Tlaib says it will kill civil liberties. Makes me really really happy she’s around. We need her & other squad members to join w/ Rand Paul & Mike Lee to stop a new law going through.
I’m not sure. I do know that right now, they have every law on the book already to stop all kinds of domestic terrorism, they do not need to pass anything else. I’m mean, the whole Stop the Steal rally was largely planned on Face Book in brood daylight. All the info was floating around out there. The capital police were not prepared and no new domestic terrorism law would’ve helped that. This is massive NSA, FBI power grab. They want Apple to have to let them into the back door of phones. And as long as we the people let fear blind us, we will give away all of our civil rights and liberties.
You mean "led". "Lead" refers to the metal. "Led" is the past tense of the verb "lead", which makes the whole situation very confusing. In practice, I think the only way to get that distinction right is to have a lot of practice reading and writing.l
I am in no way a troll. I want a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately mule has been abusive in the past and so I had hoped not to respond to him. But I don't like to leave calumny without a response. A difficult dilemma.
They are calling for the isolation and gun confiscation of the half of the country that supported Trump. That does not sound problematic to you? If you are American, it should.
They are pulling down any content that does not comport with that goal, or support the false narrative behind it.
It's hard to understand if you do not realize that the very thing that we believed about Russia and China - that the state controlled all media. Happened long ago in this country. The thing is, they are now cracking down on the small fringe media outlets that they had let to exist. The reason for that will only be visible to you once you realize that fact about your media- that it's state media.
When you are open to that fact, you will see why Trump had to be 1000% maligned and lied about night and day- to the point wherein many victims of this stressful media onslaught cannot stand the mention of his name. Trump derangement syndrome is a manufactured condition, and many in this country will never be able to see what is behind it.
Democrats and Republicans swap power back and forth and remain civil because ultimately they have the same goal- which is convincing us they they have our interests at heart and that they answer to us. As this years exposed election fraud showed us, they do not. Their alignments are with big tech and big pharma.
Trump was a genuine outsider who they never thought would overcome their rigged systems. Once he did get in, they were desperate to stymie him and get him out ASAP (resist!). But all the while, they had to maintain the mirage of bi-partisanship. Not till the final hour - the electoral college vote (with the mercenary, paid violent rioters injected into the Trump rally) did the unilateral nature of their operation shine through.
In my experience, the dyed-in-the-wool party acolytes (especially Democrat) will never see their party and it's actions for anything other than what they were taught in grade school. But this blindness will cost us our country.
Preparing this bankrupt country for the Great Reset is the current goal of both parties is right now. You should research it. But use Duck Duck Go to search because Google is also controlled and censored.
Sorry for the bad news, but knowing is better than not knowing.
While I support Janine's right to make this comment, I think many of us would disagree heartily with some of the propositions. I would let it go except that many will paint all of us who disagree with Ralph's original and subsequent posts with a broad brush and throw us into what I think is a fringe view. I don't mean to disparage Janine, but most of us who are more measured and less likely to believe some of the hyperbole, would not sign on to your comment. I certainly don't! That being said, I find some bits of truth in Janine's comment, but Janine has merely put forth hypotheses (that many would call the misnomer "conspiracy theories") that must be satisfied by EVIDENCE before stating them as truth.
You seem to be casting about for explanations for what's going on in this country. While you do so, the country, as janine says, will be lost.
Janine nailed it, calling the sequence of events accurately. He/she did a whole lot more than "provide some bits of truth". Providing you are not a bot like Ralph, I'd suggest you keep an open mind and attempt to see all of this in a different light.
Easy to shut down someone by calling them a "bot." (Reminds me of shutting down people by automatically calling them a racist or whatever.) Although I disagree with Ralph on many of his posts, he is certainly not a bot. Just read his many posts and if you are honest, you will have to admit he is not a bot. As to the rest of your reply, I am not "casting about for explanations" at all. Unlike you, I don't hold a monopoly on the truth.
Thank you for accepting that I am not a bot. I suppose conceivably there could be a bot that writes like me, but that is in the future, if it ever can happen. I'd be grateful for a reply when you disagree with me, because my whole purpose here is to learn. Matt is trying to occupy a difficult territory, a sort of no-man's land between "right" and "left". It is a big puzzle.
I would never intentionally criticize one person for someone else's views. If I ever do so, I hope someone will point that out as I do not wish it at all. In fact I think that is one of the most powerful tendencies that are polarizing the country. Our current ideological split does not take into account that each person's views are different from any other person's views. The current two-party system appears to wipe out these differences. At the present time that is not an acceptable situation. We need some way of involving other parties or some similar arrangement. I unfortunately would not know how to make that happen, so I hope some people are looking into it.
It is a terrible tendency which is very much encouraged by the way Twitter works. Twitter automatically turns a mob on anyone who disagrees with something a much-followed person writes. I honestly think Twitter is a Bad Thing. I mention Twitter here only because I think the influence of Twitter spills over into everything else online.
Because it's a corporate fascist state they are advocating for. Who needs policy when you control the currency, are privy to all online and telecommunications conversations, have legalized torture, gulags, irradiated due process, and used a virus to lock people down and ruin their way of life to the point they end up living on the street ??
So funny to hear anyone try to defend either of the funding arms of the uniparty and it's owners !
Thanks for the chuckle and I hope you wake up soon.
I cannot find the post you are replying to. If it is one of mine, please help me figure out which one it is. Substack makes this quite difficult. Thanks.
The Dem alliance w hedge funds banks corps and Silicon Valley set enuf amigo not to mention police state censorship demanded by Dem senators Marley and Wyden !
Amen. The dems stole the republican funding and the police state agenda started by Ronnie Ray-gun. Ronnie was first and foremost a propagandist dating clear back to ww2 until the day he died.
I agree. It's not about algorithms; it's about politics. Go to YouTube and search for "how to clean a gun" or "how to shoot a gun" or even "how to build a gun". You'll get hundreds of results. And yet they censor videos that show gun rights rallies? That's not an algorithm doing that, it's a person.
Trump's fear is based on 'ignorance is bliss.' He's been able to 'weather' so many debacles due to others propping him up, like the GOP, wealthy Jews, his Dad, etc and so on. His innate talent is as Carnival Barker. He has no depth of understanding of almost everything. He has made it by his connections with others. I'm not trying to insult him or his followers, but he has a vocabulary of a spokesman who doesn't know anything, but can sell you on it, with highly exaggerated words and superlatives and phrases. "You're gonna win so often you're gonna get tired of winning." "You're gonna have the best healthcare anywhere." He's the prime seller of euphemism, and still his ignorance is a lot like mentally ill folks who have no filter in their brain, because they lack the necessary self-awareness, of, say, like the kinesthetic sense of your body that knows its appendages' location in space internally, without a mirror.
Another example, I wonder what Trump says of the amount of misinformation and disinformation that ceased across the Twitter network when he was taken off of Twitter? He has very little clue of the enormous power of the Presidency. And surprisingly, it's astounding he didn't do more damage than he did, because as stated, 'ignorance is bliss' and Brother Trump, well, he perhaps thought of himself as a player of a tiny local fiefdom, not at all of an entire world Empire (in decline, but still).
Funny how most people think The Federalist Society has been around for hundreds of years when it was started by Ed Meese and friends as part of the reaction to Justice Powell's memo "The Memo".
Sorry, Cypher. My comment was an attempt to add info to what I thought was a good, response-worthy point in your post.
Although I say that TFS is more pro-corporate than anti-civil liberties. It's just civil liberties tend to be a threat to corporations.
Honestly, my source for the reaction was a Bill Moyers interview from a decade or so ago now. But I saw recently it is still available on his show's website. LMK if you have trouble locating a link.
In today’s world, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry would be kicked off of Twitter and FB and deplatformed by Amazon. Censorship is allowed by a cowardly populace that clings to the status quo, no matter how repressive it is.
There is a growing body of the populace that sees through the merger of state+media+big-tech. Unfortunately, many in this country are sound asleep and do not realize that everything they watch on television is controlled by state interests (thus the 1000% negative Trump coverage [if you are ready to throw "Fox" at me, then you haven't watched Fox lately]). Now the focus is on marginalizing anyone who supported Trump in any way, and creating a terror-scare towards the goal of isolating them and confiscating their guns.
The reason for this goal, is so the US can be absorbed into the globalist power structure.
(Duck Duck Go: The Great Reset {Google is censored}) The Fed is bankrupt, and the ruling class is complicit is this goal. Don't take my word for it; research it for yourself.
It's why the election fraud was broadly swept under the rug- (Zero evidentiary hearing have been made in any court, but cases are still sitting on the Supreme Courts docket. Why has the media ignored that fact and outright lied about the existence of evidence?).
I (an incurable romantic) fully believe that heroine/hero is out there but she/he does not want to get involved in American politics as presently constituted.
Not much heroism in a constitutionally limited republic awash in otherworldly wealth - where the dissolute / mentally ill set minority businesses on fire to "protest" racism or charge into the capitol to take photos in a bison hat.
We are much more likely to see heroism in places where students and freedom fighters risk their lives to be heard, or for simply speaking about freedom (Hong Kong, China, Nicaragua etc)
My opinions on it only got me a B+ in my Politics Science thesis ;-)
That country is such a mess, I don't know where to start anymore. How about this, I have friends who trained contras in Honduras. I have friends who were contras. I have friends who were shot. I know land owners who were killed when they refused to sign over property to the Sandinistas. And I have personal accounts of paying extra taxes to Somoza because the Guardia showed up with automatic weapons to make extra "tax collections" - so many, many stories.
While not an easy migration, I'm moving away from Google, YouTube and Facebook. I've enjoyed their services immensely over the years but I just can't tolerate censorship from corporations in this manor. I have no issue if an Independent Content Creator uploads a video committing a crime or encouraging others to do so but none of these stories are of Creators violating the law. It seems the common thread is those Independent Content Creators and other users of Big Tech are more and more, people like me. I question the Narrative, I don't believe Corporate Media or Government without a healthy does of skepticism. I don't consume Corporate Media at all, that's one reason I'm here right now. I only consume Independent Journalism and Content Creators.
It seems evident to me that the Duopoly of political parties, NeoCon/NeoLibs, working with Corporations are doing an end run around the 1st amendment citing "private property" as their cheap veneer.
Close out your Facebook, move to Gab. Close out Twitter move to .....too late (another victim of the vertical monopoly). Move away from YouTube for Odysee, Bitchute, Rumble. Close out your gmail/hotmail/outlook/yahoo email accounts for protonmail or Tutanota.
They're crude by comparison but they're not in the Elite Corporate/Government/Narrative club.
Big Tech and their cabal have power because we give it to them.
I too have been leaving the big tech platforms (for several years now). It's not that hard (I use Brave, Duck-duck-go, protonmail, Locals, and I NEVER buy from Amazon.) However, there is no viable alternative to Youtube and therein lies the rub for Status Coup and other independent news outlets. (Thankfully The Hill Rising has managed to rise above but their content is not that challenging.)
I stopped using google for search years ago. It's actually not great search. Most people use it out of habit or for lack of "searching" for alternatives. Saying google is good at search is like saying Microsoft makes great operating systems. Ubiquity does not equal excellence.
Reading Matt's column and Glenn Greenwald's I get so depressed, between the left wanting more censorship and the right not willing to do anything are we doomed? Seriously it feels like there is no bottom and both the democrats and republicans could care less.
Have you ever watched NFL football? The commercials, I mean. Ad after ad for cops shows and military dramas (think SEAL Team) showcase guns. Firearms. Not only guns, but men and women pointing them in the general direction of other people. All these "gun" ads for violent shows that our kids see are accepted as "normal," yet a few firearms at a rally violate YouTube's policy?
If we wanted to enforce a firearm/violence policy on American TV, half the shows would go off the air.
If memory serves, Wile E Coyote preferred TNT and cannon balls. Assume they will get rid of those. ACME has to be an allegory for white supremacy as well.
These are not "pro-gun" protests. They are "civil rights" and "pro-Constitution" protests.
1/6 was not a "riot" or "insurrection". It was a "mostly peaceful protest". No person has been charged with "insurrection" which begs the question of how Trump can be impeached for inciting insurrection.
It was not "Twitter" that expected follow on violent protests on 1/17. It was FBI agents gaslighting on Twitter hoping to cause violent protests on 1/17.
Progressives are getting caught up in their own creation of cancel culture and technocratic tyranny. Cry me a river. For example, "I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is saying, “Go get your guns, get out there,” that’s really dangerous. But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. If they start pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it’s basically a death sentence for outlets like ours." JC's cognitive dissonance is blinding.
"Hate Speech" is not a thing in the USA....yet.
"In the hands of alternative media, however, the tool posed another problem, in the form of simply showing offensive reality." - "Offense" is subjective. For example, I am not the least bit offended by any person's words because I am not mentally weak.
Language matters Matt. Please be precise and stop using the nomenclature of the enemies of our country(The Misleadia's Newspeak Minders).
Well Said. What should have been a beautiful exercise in democracy - the same kind of evidentiary hearing put before the respective legislatures - the receipts as Bannon put it on War Room - just died on the spot - and the Dems have been overplaying the event ever since.
That Nanny Goat came out today and announced HR 1 as her #1 legislative priority openly reveals just what joke the Kabuki Impeachment is really all about - keep the mob/great unwashed distracted while they install a Californian-style coup - Big Tech and Big Gov all the time - the end of the Westphalian tradition - an end to the individual as sovereign - an end to our republican form of self-governance.
That is why MT's article is so important - because we have seen just how on-board the MSM is to assist.
At every step they reveal their globalist agenda - and so it is with supporters here. Anti-democratic at their core. Their obsession with repealing the 2nd amendment or at least regulating it to the point of irrelevance is self-evident - and - explains why the Soros approved and funded NY Attorney General attacked a wounded (by its own infighting) NRA - and in doing so crippled the organizations usual ability to help Republicans with election Ground Game....
That lawfare manipulation is but one of many progressive 'projects' that has led us to this crucial point - and again - I believe the country is waking up.
I like how Google's motto for years was "don't be evil." To me, that's the equivalent of going on a date, and they first thing they say is "I'm not a serial killer"
There is zero chance of gaining any regulatory relief from the federal government under the current administration. If Republicans are smart - an "if" large enough to hide a couple galactic clusters inside - they look at their recent House wins, and start running NOW on a free speech platform for 2022.
Yes, private businesses can limits what is posted to their servers.
But the attempts to shut down alternative services are grotesque violations of anti-trust, and need to be treated as such. The coordinated efforts to not only kick Parler off Amazon servers, but to pressure their attorneys, their domain hosts, even their flippin' accountants, into dropping them as clients, are or ought to be illegal.
It's already illegal under civil law to conspire to deny others the opportunity to earn a living through campaigns of harassment. It's time to start going after these clowns.
Absolutely. If Parlor isn't the final straw I can't imagine what could be. These are monopolies that must be brought to heel to restore free expression - and MT's article is but a growing flood of evidence.
Great interview! This is kind of related to the interview Jimmy Dore had with a member of the Boogaloo Boys. It was a really good interview and surprising. It turns out the Boogaloo are not white supremacist racists. At all. There’s so much the msm is either willfully keeping from us in order to keep the sides divided or they just live in a bubble and are not aware of the common interests of so many of these groups.
Without these independent media outlets we would be kept in the dark about so much. This summer Michael Tracey went to Minneapolis and filmed interviews with locals, reported on people who had their businesses looted, burned and very damaged due to the riots. It is so incredible how derelict our media is in reporting any kind of truth. They have a narrative and they will NOT deviate from it whatsoever. It is so shameful and disgusting.
I support and will continue to support as much independent media as I can afford to. I’m so sick of being only able to choose from the red or blue team. I just want the straight, unvarnished truth no matter what. Follow the facts wherever they lead. Ideology kills, literally.
Dude followed all the rules scrupulously and still got shot by police. Castile's case just tells me this: "If a cop asks you whether you're carrying, say 'no.'" His crime was being honest. He's dead. Does it pay to be honest?
Maybe it's not all about race, actually? I understand the frustrations of a lot of the BLM folks, but it also seems like there's a strenuous MSM effort to redirect this conversation to race-not-class.
He followed all the rules until the cop told him to stop reaching into his pocket and then he did not follow the rules. I am not defending the actions of the cop, but it is not as cut and dried as you make it sound.
But I do agree that the MSM is redirecting the conversation to race when it should be more about class.
Lulu. It doesn't appear to be that simple. Yanez, the cop who killed Philando Castile appeared to be scared simply because the presence of a gun was announced as the law demands. It's part of what makes Castile's death so tragic.
Castile's partner, Reynolds, is obviously not afraid of Yanez. She instantly recognized the situation was getting out of hand due mostly to Yanez being scared and over-reacting rather than actually listen to what was being said.
It's also why Yanez freaked out as soon as he realized what he had done.
I don't disagree with that, which is why I said I am not defending the actions of the cop. Overall there is always a lot more to each story than what they media tries to portray them to be.
So many people are not curious enough to look into the details. They are happy with one version of the story (highlighting certain aspects) being presented to them and will never question that there could be more.
What you describe is what separates childish minds from adult minds, Lulu. Just assuming there is more to a story is a learned behavior. You've succeeded...I'm still working on it. : )
Funny how humans tend to forget the source of info far before they forget the info. I really think that is the root of a lot of our collective foibles.
I love that the majority of commenters on here are challenging each other to think about things in different ways AND are able to do so in a respectful way! The comments sections for both Matt and Glenn are full of so many different thoughts and opinions...for sure many angles that I would not have found on my own. :-)
Michael Tracey was one of the few journalists who actually covered the human impact for those riots by speaking to those who were actually affected by them. What he uncovered in a few informal interviews from random people on the street was incredibly revealing and heart breaking.
OMG! Yes, I just couldn’t believe how candid those interviews were. I absolutely cannot believe what the corporate media are willfully ignoring. These people will remember this. Those cities will be living through the after shocks of these riots for many years. Watts California was never the same.
I couldn't agree more. Legacy media is in shambles. They present themselves as the arbiters of truth and morality. In and of itself, that is really scary because that is what authoritarians and religious zealots do. The majority of journalists have become empty, hateful mouthpieces.
Where did curiosity go? What happened to questioning authority? We have raised a generation of adult children who seem to be incapable of critical thought. They want to feel safe from dissenting views that may challenge their preconceptions of the world.
The unholy alliance of tech overlords, the legacy media and the illiberal political establishment keeps me up at night. Post modernism is eating everything.
I've never liked that "incitement" is not protected by the First Amendment, and I've been extremely dismayed lately by how its lack of protection is almost universally accepted, by liberals especially, though this dreadfulness is understandable because the illegality of incitement has been validated by the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. Nonetheless, think about what outlawing incitement means. Does it not invoke, and answer in the affirmative on everyone's behalf, the sententious question asked of children, "If someone told you to go jump off a bridge, would you do it?"
Banning incitement is infantilizing and dehumanizing. With this concept, we've made an unseemly, morally obtuse concession to the trope of the Mob, a long-standing, anti-democratic slander in political theory that goes back to Plato and neutralizes the responsibility of those who listen to an inciter to restrain themselves (assuming they are moved), and not commit crimes afterwards. Proof: the disavowal of responsibility by some of those who stormed the Capitol on the ground that Trump incited them. In essence, these idiots are saying, and asking the rest of us to accept, that they were lemmings and should be treated as such. This is not morally valid in a would-be free, democratic society.
But if you don't buy that, I am here to inform you that, as we speak, the concept of incitement is being negligently and willfully stretched to encompass "incitements" beyond the current legal standard that supposedly circumscribes its unwarranted extension, and that doing this has been a project of the political establishment and its officious intellectuals, e.g. Cass Sunstein, for a long time. Glenn Greenwald just did a very fine run down of how this expansion is unfolding, and the threat to freedom of speech it poses is obvious. Therefore, watch out: if you encourage this development, then all the limits on the concept's current misapplication to less than indisputable incitements to "imminent lawless action", as the dubious saying goes, will fall away, leaving any government stooge or tech monopoly free to claim that it also applies to unauthorized thoughts and speech where the threat of violence is unquestionably non-existent.
10. Suspend rule of law - Free speech, Patriot Act, Shooting at Protesters (check)
*** Cannot say we were not warned. Hedges talked about sacrifice zones. Dr. West talked about the neo-fascist and neoliberal elements of the elite clashing and consolidating. Thomas Frank reminds us that the corporate left and moderate right have merged with the intelligence community, big media and tech companies to form the merger between state, business, and military - very definition of fascism.
Tell tale sign is to look out across our country and look at all the indifference from 400,000 to 500,000 deaths, as capital seeks business as usual and the wealthy are seeking normalcy. People who are struggling want healthcare, non-penury education, and affordable housing, but this would eat into the profit streams of people who are in moral bankruptcy -- so they choose to forget. This is how you can tell we are fucked as a nation. Every person for themselves (YOYO - you're on your own) just does not work. It is a fable, a story tale from an exploitative business class pissed off that Roosevelt beat them for so long --- not taking inventory and shoving Taibbi's vampire squid up our asses, ridiculing even the most minor attempts at socialist policies to help people survive because ....
wait for it
wait for it
It's "commy-u-nest" - when any first year course in economics could explain that all to most economies across the world find a way to balance capital and labor needs.
Alas, this kind of thinking is what will be the death of us and our country - Agnotology 101
#1, Big Tech is a misnomer. This is Big Low Tech of user generated content webpages, cookies and advertising sales. It is certainly not an essential tech. Remove their liability protection on one hand and strengthen the ability to sue by users, force them to produce reporting to individual users on what data they collected and what they sold it for and their business models will collapse and new players will emerge. Google today is almost useless as a basic info research tool. Pages and pages of ads followed by product marketing masquerading as info and reviews. Force them to make a pure info search options available. Force twitter to cough up identities of cancel mobs participants and give users the ability to sue them.
A Blue Checkmark fighting dozens of lawsuits in number of states will think twice before advocating cancelling anyone. There is nothing more dangerous to 1st amendment and our freedom to think and debate than the current social media monopolies. Apple and Google on the other hand should be divested of of the app stores so alternatives to these monopolies can appear and grow. Amazon can easily be told that discrimination against any American because of their political views will automatically disqualify them from bidding on any government contracts be there for cloud services or toilet paper. All of the above can be done within the boundaries of the Constitution.
Gotta give my usual spiel here. Allowed users to sue platforms for third party content (revoking section 230) won't go the way you're picturing. Big Tech would benefit from it, because they'd be the only ones who could afford the necessary lawyers. Smaller sites would cease to exist overnight, and there would be no more startups because of the legal liability.
That said I absolutely agree about the app stores. The way they're being pressured to remove Instagram because people MIGHT be using it to plan bad things in a way that the government can't spy on is spine chilling. I'd say this calls for government regulation, expect the government is actively contributing to the problem! In a more sane world, a choice of app stores would be ideal. You can still do this if you're technically inclined, but it's not for the feint of heart, and certain things just don't exist on any alternative app store.
The social media outlets for news are like public utilities. They are similar to a phone line. Or even a book. We don't shut down people's phones because they may be saying something we don't like. Society did try book banning and book burning, but the need for dialogue is too strong to be suppressed forever. If the oligarchs control our access to ideas, it's all over. This is a huge threat to my right to choose where I get my ideas and which sources I trust in the end.
Gotta disagree on that one. An ISP is more similar to a phone line. Comcast, Cox, etc. They exist (more or less) to agnostically move electric signals from one place to another. There's MUCH more going on with a social media platform. The infrastructure is several orders of magnitude more complicated. The service is, by its nature, much different, being more interactive and involving the owner of the service much more than, say, a phone call.
That's not to say social media giants shoudn't be regulated, I just don't know know what they should be regulated AS. I don't think utility is it. I'm not sure the proper category actually EXISTS yet.
Would a book store be a better analogy? Or a news stand? It is hard to find a perfect comparison. If we were to regulate Google, FB, Twitter, etc., what would that look like?
Censorship is hard to fine tune. Aside from shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, we've wisely not set limits on speech.
There was a case some years ago in California where some people were making political speeches in a mall. It went to court, and the could ruled that even though it was private property, it was a public space, and the political speech had to be allowed.
I don't see this US Supreme Court adopting that kind of fine tuning. Maybe social media is sui generis and we will have to be creative. The question is: is there consensus that even hate speech is protected? Most people fail to understand that the First Amendment was designed to protect the minority and not the majority. Most people want to curtail speech they don't agree with - which obviously doesn't work.
This is an excellent comment and I am in a similar state of bafflement. My sticky wicket is that participation in social media networks is entirely voluntary. I don't know who I would want or trust to "regulate" them, or in what way. I dislike censorship on Twitter, but I'm also like, "Y'know, you can not go on Twitter."
That’s the thing-it’s about ideological oversight, not $$$. You don’t see people begrudging the utility companies their honest payment for services-but you would see an uprising if they denied service to legit accounts. I agree 1000% with the internet getting put in the same category as ConEd or CG&E or whomever.
Me too. I resisted this forever because of free market dogma but 2020 has shown me that this is too important in the hands of a few people. Libertarianism is as much utopianism as socialism. Neither work in reality.
This. I have bought a book from a used bookstore in Wisconsin off Amazon that wasn’t available anywhere else-a publisher’s combo edition of James Bond novels. 20 years ago would I have launched an obsessive personal search of used bookstores within a 1,000 mile radius for said book-of course not. But that’s just me. Now people are too lazy to go to friggin Taco Bell w/out Uber Eats........
Not long ago Congress published a major 450 page report on -- Silicon Valley tech. giants monopolies. It was expected that major action will be on breaking up Amazon, Facebook and Google into well defined pieces.
This appears not likely since Democrat oligarchs and their WS and arms/intelligence industry donors are grateful for silencing Democrat party and Biden-family corruption (Hunter's laptops, etc.) facts and now -- massive silencing of independent news stories.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. are completely integrated into surveillance apparatus -- they are playing a key role in limiting remnants of free speech in the US -- a fascism packaged as "fight against fascism". A more polite term used for fascism in the US is -- authoritarianism...
Only a 3rd, 4th, etc. viable parties will reduce the two-party monopoly of one party with two wings - wings formed to polarize population into "red" and "blue" factions.
Also remember -- DSA "party" is part of Democrat party formed solely to harness and corrupt "progressives" ala TYT, The Intercept, select members of Congress/Senate. DNC cabal of oligarchs are afraid of progressives -- they closely collaborate with GOP on their common interests.
I used to work at YouTube, and it was quite clear to me after I'd been there a while that the people in charge were basically dumbasses. Very rich dumbasses, but still dumbasses. They are incapable of thinking through possible scenarios in which it might be legitimate to display weapons, violence, or bigotry in a video, or at least, they prefer not to think about such things because there are no algorithms that can handle nuances like that. Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.
To anyone with half a brain, a video containing part of a racist rant by a Nazi waving a gun is only a good or bad depending on context. Is the video promoting this guy, or is it letting him hang himself with his own words? Or is it just saying, "This is what happened in this place, at this time"? These distinctions matter!
“Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.” Gets right to the heart of this, thank you
It's not quite that black and white. I *also* used to work at Google (not YouTube). Realistically, YT moderation could be way more hands off than it is. Web search for example is or was almost entirely algorithmically "moderated" with nowhere near this level of drama or problems, and the web is much larger than YouTube.
The difference isn't to do with what algorithms can do. The cause is philosophical differences between typical founder/engineer types and, to put it crudely, Susan Wojcicki - a woman who basically lucked her way into her position by being the sister of Sergey's wife and those two were the sisters that rented Larry and Sergey their first garage. The sort of people who built web search and indeed most Google services were hard headed engineers who got where they were by making tough decisions and defending them through rigorous debate with the rest of the company. Due to the totally open communication channels between teams they had, more or less anyone could comment on any other team's decision, and they did! The fierceness of discussions inside Google even 15 years ago would make most of corporate America feel dizzy: it wasn't an environment that rewarded milquetoast agreement with whoever was in front of you. At all. They *wanted* their services to be used by everyone because they were small and the best way to become successful was by serving everyone equally.
Clearly, Google is not the company it once was. Wojcicki is the exact opposite of that type of person: a woman who ended up running an already very successful service through a series of personal lucky breaks, rather than because she built it. Inevitably if you achieve great success by drifting through life and avoiding fights you end up making whatever decisions get you shouted at the least. YouTube is a textbook example of that mentality: people are banned and unbanned supposedly "without rhyme or reason" except there's a very simple rhyme and a very simple reason: bans are the result of whoever shouted at the YouTube leadership the loudest most recently. Typically SJW activist employees, but not always.
The only way to fix YouTube is to replace Wojcicki with an engineer who has spent years BUILDING the service instead of simply inheriting it, and who has a strong commitment to the original fairly libertarian principles that built the company. Google won't do that for two reasons:
1. Realistically 99% of candidates that'd fit that mould are men, and men are second class citizens now.
2. Sundar Pichai is exactly the same kind of person as Wojcicki. He is more genuinely successful: he did a good job of Chrome and other projects. But he is ultimately the same type: he drifts and does whatever gets him shouted at the least. I can't help suspecting that he was picked for that very reason.
I wasn't going to name names, because as others have noted, it's more to do with how the corporate system works than who is running it, but yes, Susan is the main person I was thinking of. But I really don't think Larry and Sergey (or most of the engineers for that matter) were much better. They always struck me as pretty shallow people. They don't want to "be evil" but they aren't willing or able to honestly examine what their company is doing to determine whether it's evil or not. Tech is ultimately a pretty shallow business. It's full of people who love gadgetry, love inventing stuff, and love the Silicon Valley dream of getting rich, but are mostly incapable of examining the consequences of their work.
As a tangential anecdote, one thing I saw at YouTube that really made me realize just how dumb some of those people are is that one of the YT buildings across the street from 901 is (or was when I was there) decorated with a theme of homages to the French fashion culture of the 1920s. On the third floor, where I worked, the area around the elevator is decorated with images of the famous fashion and perfume designer Coco Chanel, who happens to also have been a Nazi collaborator during the war -- not someone I would have picked.
Honestly I never liked the "don't be evil" catchphrase when I was there exactly because evil was never defined, and in fact can't really be defined. Evil is a cartoon word, a meaningless abstraction.
My understanding is that actually, in the very beginning, it had a very specific intention related to the behaviour of Microsoft in the late 90s towards Netscape and how they disbanded the IE team in an attempt to stop the web from developing, something that had alienated a lot of people in the industry and especially in a company whose entire mission revolved around the web. However even by the time I'd arrived the phrase had become unmoored from that and within a few years it was common for people to be describing boring, anodyne business decisions as "evil" if they disagreed with them, like what the background colour of ads should be, or whether to reskin Gmail. I very quickly learned to tune out accusations that something was "evil" at Google because it was always a petty complaint about nothing that could possibly do justice to the word.
I think Larry and Sergey were not comparable to the current leadership. They had strong, unusual opinions and were willing to defend them against criticism. They were willing to prove people wrong or overrule them in order to build the company Google became. When bolshie employees got up at TGIF and went on some epically unprofessional rant about miscellaneous nonsense like what was served for lunch that day, or how the new visual design for product X was evil, they'd just literally take the piss out of that person live in front of the company. And they were right to do so! Live by the sword, die by the sword. They were a million miles from the modern Google that appears to be apologise for its own existence the moment the militant leftist wing of their employee base fires up the outrage machine. L&S would tolerated that, which in hindsight was a mistake, but their decisions weren't affected by it.
There's a certain school of thought these days that tech companies should care more about the consequences of their work. I find that school to often be a cover for the left to demand that tech companies align those consequences more with their liking. When I joined Google it was a very libertarian place, my manager and the guy sent to train us were both hard-core and openly capitalist. The company did not pass judgement on its users or the web that it found, it merely made things easier to find. To the extent it made a moral judgement of humanity it was a positive one: give people information and the world will be a better place. To me that wasn't shallow, it was a philosophy of respect. The modern tech industry has been steadily attacked and overrun by people who have a very different outlook: humans are dumb, can't take care of themselves and we have a moral duty to manipulate them for their own good. That isn't caring about the consequences of their work, it's just a different take on it. And ultimately, one that leaves many people cold.
Y'all are missing the part where high tech blended with the state and are now enforcing it's interests. https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Quite lifted from comment above: “there are no algorithms that can handle nuances like that. Algorithms cannot tell the difference between a gun in a video promoting violence, a gun in a video discussing violence, and a gun in documentary footage. Since the technology doesn't allow them to algorithmically moderate content in a sensible, responsible, intelligent way, they prefer to moderate content in a simplistic, socially irresponsible, idiotic way.”
Thanks for that link, Janine.
...b-b-but "Lean In"
It's funny that bureaucracies everywhere -- doesn't matter if it's Prussia, the USSR, the Pentagon, or a US tech company -- display these same characteristics at the management level.
The pipe-fitters are constantly screamed at to fit pipes, but somehow never rise to the top despite having correctly fitted 100,000 pipes. It's almost like there's an inherent logic to the thing from which the pipe-fitters are excluded, despite their skill at fitting pipes, which is the nominal business of the enterprise.
In fairness, most of Google's top leadership are engineers. And it used to be all of them (except the head of sales but that's fair enough). It's one of the reasons the company was successful. The people who ran it were capable of fitting the pipes themselves, they just didn't have the time. YouTube is run by someone who hasn't really built anything themselves so they don't have the same stability of decision making found in those who have.
This, by the way, is very typical of companies/divisions in tech "middle age" - the original founders are busy flying around in their own 767 while day to day management is now in the hands of corporate types who move up and down based no where they went to school and how late they stay at the office. Google is now a corporation, with shareholders and the quintessential way to move up (kissing a$$, stealing ideas, backstabbing your rival, managing up/not down, get promoted).
The original idea of building it for everyone is long, long gone. Remember, "don't be evil" code of conduct from 2001 or so?
"the slogan was 'also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent'.
It's now been replaced with, "do the right thing"
The slogan has gone from a “negative” right-don’t be evil/live and let live to a “positive” right “do the right thing”. This encapsulates the basic conflict in America between libertarian/traditional Constitutional freedoms and liberal/progressive/New Deal era busybody corporatism. Madison/Goldwater vs. Woodrow Wilson/FDR.
Still hoping for an edit function...
"It's now been replaced with, "do the right thing"
hahahaha they should make Spike Lee CEO based on his record of innovative filmmaking
Seriously, based on the highly informational comments from fellow commenters with history in the IT biz, the shift from engineering to advertising is fascinating. Could become a TK News bit
The mentality you detail describes 90% of people in managerial positions. However, I don't think replacing Wojcicki would solve the problem, because it's systematic. Even if she were replaced with a competent person who valued the importance of free expression and its documentation, the pressures from power brokers are such that whoever replaced her would be gone in a short time if certain demands of content were not complied with. "Authoritative content" as expressed in Matt's article is authoritarian content in reality. The internet was originally created with taxpayer funding and now it's being used to censor and propagandize against the public interest. Neutrality can only be achieved through legislation that avoids setting up an internet application as an arbiter of truth or a determiner of content priority.
But it seems that moderation of raw public statements has historically been absolutely necessary to prevent the unlimited spread of false, emotionally charged pseudo-information, which as has often been demonstrated, travels many times faster than reflective consideration of issues. If we cannot do some sort of moderation, terrible harm can result. Germany in the 1930s is an over-used but perfectly valid example of what can happen without moderation of mob mentality.
Germany had very serious censorship before Hitler took power in an attempt to stop him. Hitler was systematically banned from the radio, if I recall correctly, which is one reason he had to spend so much time flying around Germany to give speeches in person. Once he took power anyway despite the censorship, the laws, infrastructure and social acceptance of state control over media was already there and all he had to do was start using it.
I have not been able to find anything about Hitler being banned on radio, and I don't remember encountering anything about that in the past. That would be very interesting if it is true. Could you check your recollection?
Ahhh...but who is going to determine what is false, emotionally charge pseudo-information"?
The simple answer is that the publisher gets to decide. For example, most newspapers use their own employees to moderate comments. Under the usual interpretation of private enterprise information services, screening for false or obscene or politically extreme content is the responsibility of the private company. Also, there are "truth in advertising" laws which enable a viewer of an advertisement to sue the advertiser for false advertising.
Thank you very much for that very interesting information. So you think good automated moderation could be achieved? That is very encouraging. Can you indicate very generally how it would work?
Not the type of "moderation" that YouTube currently engages in, which is trying to enforce some undefined moral standards over content. I meant the sort of ranking that web search does, where the value function is far more precise: the best results are whatever the user was looking for, regardless of why they were looking for it. The moderation can be automated because it's just down-ranking content that's trying to manipulate the algorithms. Then if people do searches for bad things you just stay silent - it's a problem between that user and their society/legal system if they're searching for bad things, not between the user and their search engine.
This system has worked well for a long time. You do sometimes see stories like "murderer caught after police discover he was searching for how to hide bodies" and things like that, but nobody asserts the murder was Google's fault, no more than they would a library.
Gmail works the same way. Spam is whatever Gmail users say it is, via their "Report spam" button. It's a form of collective voting, not a value judgement by a few executives. Chrome blacklists websites when they're hosting phishing or malware, but that's because those sites interfere with the correct operation of the infrastructure itself. It's not because some random L4 SWE threw a hissy fit.
The sort of moderation YouTube is doing is inviting trouble because it's not so much a slippery slope as a vertical cliff-edge. Once you bow to requests to manually purge "bad" content, you end up in an endless loop in which there are always more requests for purges and the demands to do so get increasingly vicious. A strong and total stand of the form "we are merely dumb pipes" is the most effective way to stop a never ending purity spiral, and it's one some other products have done successfully: nobody ever asks Chrome to nuke websites even though they could, because everyone knows the answer will be a furious rejection of the request (at least up until now), so they don't even bother asking.
The heart of this is that there is currently there is no pain for YouTube to commit Type 1 error (cancelling legitimate journalism) compared to Type 2 error (not taking down something egregious that then brings pain).
Excellent example !
Fat fingers...bad copy and paste, ug.
Quick search produces "30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour" (YouTube). If YouTube demanded that videos be accurately labeled, how hard could it be to have staff monitoring troublesome labels?
So it's not about algos, in this case, it's about the Tubman's.
There is no sensible, responsible, intelligent Censorship. Never has been, never will be. That aside, this is a very astute analysis of how these managers make their Holy decisions.
"There is no sensible, responsible, intelligent Censorship." Cheers, Tom. Well put!
Censorship historically has been really hard to pull off effectively. It is typically easier to coerce people away from seeking to share information in the first place. Historically, hasn't it always been far more effective to empower people from one's own in-group to spy, apply pressure, and spread fear to keep information from spreading than to stop info from spreading via obstruction?
As for Tom's point, The Streisand Effect is already working. I woke up never having heard of some of these journalists and alternative outlets who sound like they are doing interesting work.
Might there be a third world mentality oozing through the ranks of the tech world?
Why not? There's a 3rd world mentality oozing through its (the tech world) users.
The floating desire for a strongman is wild, whether it's DJT, Ol' Joe, Elon, Jack, or Zuck.
My unsolicited advice for strongman-fanciers; examine your strongman carefully. He might be, y'know, Peron. If you want to live in Peronist Argentina, that's cool for you.
You're right that a computer vision algorithm detects objects without context. But as you likely know, contextual judgments are attainable with a broader suite of AI algorithms -- in this case maybe using an ensemble of computer vision/natural language processing/clustering. Complex models simply require lots of training. That arguably is challenging, but it's not impossible.
One simple example: A few years back Google got in hot water for a face recognition algo that wrongly identified a dude with African ancestry as a gorilla. We both probably know the reason -- it's not racism, it was inadequate model training. The algo wasn't trained on enough photos of dudes who looked like him to learn the required feature space and likely put too much probability-weight on abstract face color. If the algo had been trained predominantly on African people and few Caucasians, it may have identified a white guy as a maggot or a snowman, for example. As we know, it's only math and math doesn't know or care about human sensibilities. Google trained the model better and the problem was solved.
So training is everything. The question is: Can an AI algo be trained to navigate these contextual challenges? I think the answer is Yes, but it would require hard work and a lot of effort. The corporate cultural changes you reference may impede that sort of effort. More broadly, a company as large as Youtube or Google should design a workflow to narrow the possibility set and then kick questionable content up for internal live vetting. I'm editorializing now, but there's a public good aspect to fair moderation that they shouldn't be able to duck. In my view, creative and skilled engineering could ameliorate this problem and maybe eliminate it.
Actually, I vaguely remember reading that they didn't retrain the model. They just blocked it from classifying anything as a gorilla. I'm sure they fixed it with better training eventually but it presumably wasn't easy, if those reports were correct. People noticed by uploading photos of gorillas and observing Photos was no longer willing to recognise them.
I think the correct answer is for everyone to just turn into gorillas. "Return to Monke!"
1960s DC Comics were way ahead of the curve: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/gLgAAOSwp7taVbl2/s-l1600.jpg
I'm sure they did not retrain it immediately, as that takes a long time. What they have done since then I don't know. I feel sure that is a solvable problem. If a person can recognize a gorilla properly, and not mis-identify a person as a gorilla, I know of no reason why ML should fail to do so. Gorillas are really not very hard to recognize accurately as non-human primates.
You really can't judge a video without understanding it, and AI (one of the great misnomers of our time) cannot understand anything. So no, I don't believe automation can solve this problem. It can help, but you'd need final review by a human, and that human would need to be a reasonably intelligent, reasonably fair-minded person who won't just decide to block things they find personally disagreeable. A minimum-wage office worker with a list of simple rules like "no guns" won't do.
You actually could judge a video to a surprising degree.
Consider a system that 1) performs object recognition on videos, 2) uses natural language processing (NLP) on the video speech, 3) evaluates the broader cluster created by the video poster's other content and 4) uses these as inputs in a classification algorithm that predicts a probability that the flagged video represents -- for lack of a better phrase -- "hateful content".
If the poster were a journalist conducting an interview or reporting from the field, that will be revealed in the NLP algorithm and the cluster the video poster is in. If the poster is Aunt Polly at a picnic and the "gun" is a toy waved by a kid, that also can reveal itself in the NLP data.
This is doable today, right now, with current machine learning engineering.
It may not be able to be 100% automated, but it could help sift the triggering content and make fair-minded human supervision a bit easier. And it would continually adapt and improve.
But nothing can fix bad faith. If the tech giants want to be political censors for the Washington, DC power elite (aka "the Swamp"), there's not much we as general public can do about it other than not use their services.
"it may have identified a white guy as a maggot or a snowman, for example."
The Abominable Snowman a.k.a Yeti! He's a mighty humble bumble!
https://christmas-specials.fandom.com/wiki/The_Abominable_Snowmonster_of_the_North
Good to know this perspective - you feel it's not evil intent but rather lazy stupidity, correct?
Yeah. I think a lot of people at Google believe in the old "Don't be evil" slogan, but they have difficulty recognizing their own problems in that area. They're shallow enough to think that if they're doing what's right for their business, they must be doing what's right. It's not malice, just blindness.
Google has institutionalized incompetence as a cultural value without even realizing it. A mix of lazy, incompetent and isolated isn't going to go well for those who are outside of their bubble.
Also institutionalize evil, snatching it from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in The Vatican ...
Really good to know. Thank you!
I disagree. All of big tech has merged with the state and is currently in the business of enforcing narratives. The most urgent one at the moment is the required isolation and disarming of dangerous Trumpers. Content that supports the notion that all problems lead to this group, will be allowed. Content that disproves (showing peaceful protesters) it will be removed.
This about the efforts to fold the US into the globalist power structure (Duck duck go: The Great Reset) {Google is censored}).
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Moderating in a sensible responsible way would make them unprofitable.
They've created a wildfire and they are profiting off it while holding the public and the truth accountable to deal with the damages.
This is true-they are like the Sorcerers Apprentice in terms of getting overwhelmed with content-their algorithm is the only way they can do anything-and it has gotten away from them-not that they give a shit about that fact, or the intellectual rationale for free speech.
This really comes out in the Joe Rogan show with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and the Twitter chief counsel. They just can't afford to do the moderating they need to do. Dorsey talks about the staggering size and challenge of the job as if it's the public's fault that he's getting so much business.
So, do you have an opinion on what should be done? I'd personally be very upset if youtube had to disappear, because it's such a good resource for learning. I have learned a tremendous amount on youtube, mainly having no connection with politics.
I like YouTube too. It has a lot of great stuff.
I think our justice dept should be more active in going after non-competitive practices, both with big tech and legacy industry. They do better in the EU than we do.
So I don't want YT to go away. I just want them to have viable competition. I want more options.
That's very interesting. As long as I can search across youtube-like sites, I'm in favor of stopping non-competitive process and breaking up youtube.
I really don't know what it would take to level the playing field so that someone else can compete with YT. But breaking it apart from Google wouldn't break my heart.
Thanks for speaking out.
Do you think they do a bad job of this because:
a. They are too dumb?
b. They are too cheap?
c. They are too ideological?
d. All of the above?
Partially just because it can't be done at their scale. With millions of people posting new videos every day, they can't possibly review them all manually, and AI (a misnomer if there ever was one) is incapable of understanding. I also think they think they're being "fair" by establishing simple, objective rules like "no guns" that apply to everyone equally (though they don't really, of course). They're probably also getting guidance from their lawyers about potential liability issues, but I don't have any insight into that. Overall it's shallowness and a focus on their own business interests more than anything else.
That's the way I understood it after listening to the Rogan session. And thus my comment below. They started a wildfire and now they don't know how to put it out. Nor are they motivated to.
I also think the algo's are left-biased and that's why Parler turned into a "conservative platform". It was only because that's who got kicked off Twitter.
Algorithms aren't left-biased, but it may seem like that for social reasons.
Firstly, the left are much keener on controlling speech than the right (at least these days). So takedowns are going to often be driven by a leftist agenda simply because they're the ones demanding takedowns.
Secondly and relatedly, the AI driven takedowns are trained on human decisions, primarily I guess user flags. If one side of the political debate systematically responds to anything they disagree with by flagging it and one doesn't, the AI will inevitably learn to associate user flags with right wing content. And its job is to predict what content will be flagged, so it turns into a conservative detector. But that's not the fault of the AI. Similar dynamics can be seen on many online forums, where any post with a conservative theme will be downvoted like crazy even if it's polite and well written.
In turn that's not entirely the fault of the users. It's mostly our fault (programmers and product designers). We give users very vague tools with which to express views on content. Is the like/dislike button meant to express a values-neutral judgement of quality, or is it meant to just track who agrees or disagrees? On Reddit are you meant to upvote posts that are good even if you disagree, or are you meant to downvote wrongthink? The platform doesn't say! So it defaults to your base political values, which for the libertarian/conservative right is often "I may disagree but will defend your right to say it" and on the left is "Bad ideas spread, I'll vote them down to reduce their visibility".
Makes sense. So a mob that is intent on punishing or expelling a person or idea can do so with a coordinated attack no matter the platform. It seems to be happening in legacy media too. And they are doing it to something like 49% of our population. I doubt it will end well.
Mike, much truth in that except for one thing...have you watched the 90% negative comments on Joe Biden YT videos get removed, magically? I have. Following your logic, Biden should be removed from YT for hate speech. Someone is adjusting the levers behind the scenes. Reddit brigading was quite common, driving more conservative thinkers/posters in other directions.
They could be, but it could also be that negative comments about Biden get flagged by users far more than negative comments about Trump do. That is, if the average Trump supporter just ignores or laughs at or replies to negative comments about Trump, and the average Biden supporter flags them as abusive, any automated system will learn that.
To be clear I have no idea what the explanation is. But it doesn't <i>have</i> to be due to explicit actions by Google employees. It can also be due to different approaches by the users themselves.
"Someone is adjusting the levers behind the scenes."
And if you're not on Reddit or Youtube or Twitter all day you're unlikely to see it.
Biden's outrageous, senile behavior has been extensively documented on video. I wonder how far the tech companies will be willing to go to scrub it.
"Is the like/dislike button meant to express a values-neutral judgement of quality, or is it meant to just track who agrees or disagrees?"
This. I don't even know WTF the "like" button is supposed to represent here. I just do it as a lazy "good post!" It doesn't mean I endorse every single idea contained in it; and behind that is a far more sinister concept; that "likes/dislikes" or "upvotes/downvotes" determine what is acceptable speech on the internet
this is why social media sucks
So if it wasn't Twitter management that made Parler into what it became it was the left-wing Twitter mob. Does it matter? How long until another Parler except worse?
What made Parler "bad?" Sincere question. I never got on it.
Twitter was bad enough for me.
Craig, 10,000 editors can definitely review them manually with AI help. It's just expensive and well, that would mean Alphabet makes "less money" - same goes for Facebook and their deeply flawed Advertising model. It's not about proper content moderation, it's about maximizing $. In other words, "do evil" (as opposed to don't do evil) in the name of shareholder value. Besides, who cares about the small guy (independent journalists, small biz) when you can service, say, Kraft cheese or ABC with much bigger budgets.
Instead, Google/Facebook invest their $$ in some of the most useless people on the planet, yes the advertising sales people who give bad advice but encourage SMBs to, "increase your budget to scale better" - uh huh. If you want brain damage, answer one of their calls and follow their suggestions on how to scale ads into Chapter 11/BK. As one of my UK mentors once said, when confronted with this type of silliness, "FAAACK OFF"
Was your UK mentor Malcolm Tucker?
Ha, no, he was a Footballer from Liverpool.
I agree that moderation almost certainly cannot be done at scale. So what should happen to Youtube? In many respects, outside the political realm, it is a fantastic resource, unmatched in the history of humankind. Maybe all politics ought to be banned there? That, of course, may not be possible to achieve either. I really have no idea how these problems could or should be approached.
e. All big tech has merged with the state and are enforcing it's narratives. https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Do you have a suggestion for a better way Youtube could handle these problems? The impossibility of real moderation at scale is a very serious problem.
It's a difficult problem, admittedly. And as an unregulated private-sector entity, they are legally free to establish any policies they want. But I think they need to consider that they are one of the main ways for people to put out important information in video form, and it isn't just established media companies who are doing this, and put some effort into figuring out how to do better. I doubt they're even looking at this problem. I can't say I have a solution either (then again it's not my job), but one thought I have is that they could allow people to mark their channels as belonging to one of a handful of categories like "journalism", "advertising", "humor", "personal", and so on. "Personal" would be the default, and the only one that is free of charge. For a journalism channel, you'd have to pay a modest fee either as a monthly subscription or for each video posted, identity would have to be verified, and YT would need to have a complaint review process that involved a reasonably intelligent, reasonably unbiased human looking at the video and its content in that channel and deciding whether there was anything unacceptable about it. Over time they would also take the history of the channel and the history of the complainer into account; a complaint from someone with a history of invalid complaints against a channel that has been found to be high-quality could probably be ignored. Does this scale? It depends how easy and how costly it is to have a journalism channel, among other things, and what the thresholds are for trusting a channel or a complainer, how a channel or complainer can lose trust, etc. There will also be language issues, of course, so journalism channels might only be available in languages that are supported by YT's staff. There won't be a perfect solution to this, but something along these lines could be a lot better than what they do now. Automation simply can't solve this problem.
Ralph gets off on getting posters to make efforts on his behalf.
That's a pretty great solution. Of course, my preference is "anything goes" (essentially; no kiddie porn etc), but short of this, your idea is the best I've heard. Would hopefully be a generous verification process, to allow for people who are new to the field.
According to my understanding, any solution that relies on significant human participation -- such as "a reasonably intelligent, reasonably unbiased human looking at the video"(!) -- does not scale, because number of users will always eventually increase past the point where you can hire the necessary number of humans to do a demanding job. Nevertheless your approach is interesting. If an AI could do some of that job, it might work.
America is moving in the direction of a police state and it only works because big tech is in bed with the DemocratIc party and the establishment wing of the Republican party. Is this really about the 2nd amendment? Not even close - gun ownership is a right. Is it about Trump's speech or the pro-gun protests which a 5th grader can tell you did not incite violence? Nope. Big tech's censorship and control is simply about shutting down half of the country's free speech and opinions to strengthen and expand the liberal belief that people with values and ideology that are different from theirs do not deserve to be heard. They will continue to play this hand until someone steps up and fights back. Whether you liked Trump or hated Trump, he wasn't afraid to stand up to this nonsense.
I agree. And it’s not just big tech. We now have the capital of the US in military lockdown. Lockdown, meaning no one can protest. As someone who has protested and observed protests on the Mall and the streets of DC, I can’t see this as anything but a shameful effective way to create a false sense of unity. Biden just literally scrubbed the most political of places free of dissent.
There was a violent attack on the seat of government. That is why Biden locked down the area. No responsible president could have done otherwise. If you were president, how would you react to a highly destructive attack on a key government building by BLM, in which they beat to death one of your policemen? Would you ignore it and take no precautions?
I’m not a fucking conservative FYI. But I also don’t give a crap about political elites who are in business for themselves so I empathize with the breachers who were there due to frustration at an impotent government. I didn’t see it as a violent attack or an insurrection or coup. I thought it was pretty funny that it was so easy to breach the Capitol. Maybe govt should convene for the next few months via zoom like everyone else until it’s safe to come out.
I would beef up security w/o a military encampment. I think there’s a way to do that without troops lounging around infecting each other with Covid and sleeping in parking garages and preventing citizens from gathering to show dissent. Talk to me a year from now when they’re still there.
There are weird parallels between what's been going on in the past few weeks and the Bonus Army of 1932: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Grisha:
Now we are getting somewhere! And there are weird parallels between The Bonus Army and the original fascist movement in Italy which was mostly made up of soldiers returning from WWI hell bent on not allowing the ruling class to ever get them into a hellish war like that again...and then proceeded to pull an Oedipus and fulfill what they were trying to avoid. Kind of like Google did, too...
Read: The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O Paxton for a detailed history.
Word of advice - Fun Police = Cypher - 'A cypher is a message written in a secret code. ... Another kind of cypher is an unimportant person who's blank or devoid of personality — you might call a lifeless character in a book a cypher. The word has an Arabic root, sifr, "zero, empty, or nothing."
Mr Zero is back - in a new 'Bird-Whistle' nom de plume
Yeah Beetle Grisha. Of note about the eventual forced removal - it was led by Douglas McArthur who was Army Chief of Staff - is it even remotely possible that our current Army COS (had to look 'em up)
would consider suiting up - manning a mount on a steed - and having at 'em with a blackjack?
Now the betrayal is far more subtle, remote, and lucrative. Like Petraeus & Mattis - who build their 'brand' via the rank and file fighting and dying and then cash in with War Inc.
Another note I've read Beetle G - about how we now may be in a similar 'Phony War' - the lull of minor to non-existent ('39 & '40) fighting for England and France until the Blitz punched through the Ardennes - and the French folded and the Vichy prevailed - unlike Churchill who thwarted Halifax and the surrender monkeys.
So, yeah - parallels indeed.
Final unrelated side bar Beetle - I have arrived (thanks for the guidance) as a poster/blogger. Cypher was way not happy with my cribbing Webster's on cluing him on choice of post-nom de plum - check out the response -
Got my first F-Bomb. I have arrived. Hooray!
Good point. I'm not a fan of MacArthur, but at least he was willing to get his hands dirty. To make my political position clear, I take the side of the Bonus Army.
I think Petraeus was always a careerist POS and people knew it. His nickname within the military was "BetrayUs." There was a long period of breathless, worshipful media coverage of him and McChrystal; they liked the cameras. This is well covered in the late Michael Hastings' book "The Operators."
I'm very disappointed in Mattis and McMaster. To be fair, I'm sure working with Trump wasn't easy. McMaster -- the guy who literally wrote the book on the mendacity of the general officer corps in Vietnam -- advocating for more of the same policies was skull-exploding for me.
I got all the F-Bombs you need and then some. I'm Slim Pickens riding an F-Bomb and yelling "YEE-HAW!"
If that is your criterion for success, you will be missing a lot of reasoned discourse. Do you want to provoke everyone to use an F-bomb? What purpose does angering people have? It can never be helpful in advancing a discussion, as far as I can see.
Very interesting. Thanks for that link. Seems from my quick read similar in terms of concerns about the govt not working for its citizens. And two protesters shot dead, one an immigrant.
The bonus army camped and stayed; these deranged, uncouth ruffians and lunatics came, rioted, invaded, and then left to avoid arrest.
I will talk to you in a year if they are still there. I am going to repeat part of another comment I just posted below:
If you were President, and BLM attacked a key government building, and even cooperated with the attackers, what would you do? Not call in the National Guard? If not, why not? It would be one of your powers. How could you justify not using it to protect the inauguration, assuming it was the second inauguration for Trump?
I would beef up security and go on with the show. Do you remember the violence during Trump’s inauguration? Somehow he wasn’t affected by it. There is a way to create a shield without 30000 troops installed. Either we have to admit that security forces are inept and can’t determine when an attack will come (as they claimed were possible)and need brute force or see the military response as unjustified, alarming and perilous to this tattered democracy.
I very much agree. If the Capitol police had even halfway done their job, the National Guard would never have been needed. The question is, why did the Capitol Police fail? I read that their budget is enormous by comparison with the nature of the job they do. Yet they applied very inadequate resources on that day. Why?
Let me answer your question with a question: this is what happened in 2018 at the supreme court. Look at it, and ask yourself honestly and realistically what would have happened if those doors had been forced open. It's only luck or incompetence that separate these two incidents. So what should have been done back then when this occurred?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRnmnxVtDqg
And just to clarify, as CNN themselves describe in this video:
"Protesters opposed to Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the US Supreme Court swarmed over Washington -- massing at the Capitol, disrupting the confirmation vote in the Senate and banging on the Supreme Court building doors when Kavanaugh arrived to be sworn in."
Thank you for that link. All I can say is that there was adequate security that day and no one got in. I don't know anything else. One other point: no one in the crowd was wearing military-style gear. But the key point was that the security forces kept the crowd out. On 1/6/2021, the security forces failed.
If I were president or even speaker of the house, I would have listened to the requests for added security given 100k + demonstrators were expected. Nancy and Mitch should be fired just for that level of incompetence.
Nancy and Mitch ain't getting fired until they die. That's the Permanent Government right there.
Were they warned in advance, do you know?
Really??? I thought that is what the police are for! (And your argument falls flat when you consider the death, destruction, and mayhem this summer, which included breeches of federal and state property.)
The death and destruction this summer are irrelevant to what we are discussing. The Capitol police did not handle the attack on the Capitol adequately. If you were President, and BLM attacked a key government building, and even cooperated with the attackers, what would you do? Not call in the National Guard? If not, why not? It would be one of your powers. How could you justify not using it to protect the inauguration, assuming it was the second inauguration for Trump?
The fact that the Capitol Police were unprepared (for reasons that still aren't clear) on Jan 6 has nothing to do with a prepared police force now. That is what the police are for. Fine, National Guard for the inauguration but why are they still there? If you say to guard against some possible violence during the impeachment trial, I'm not going along. We are getting dangerously close to a CCP style government. But you can't see it, so I am not going to try to convince you.
Given the No Comment coming from the House and Senate, it's obvious what happened. They were either incompetent or wanted something to happen. Not sure which one.
I don't have an answer. We have to inquire further, and find out when the National Guard is withdrawn. I believe their presence was warranted, but I have no information or ideas about when they should be withdrawn, except, of course, as soon as possible.
This is hysterical nonsense
'The death and destruction this summer are irrelevant...'
What a pathetic excuse for a position. We are one year into this and yet to really feel the economic consequences of what you consider irrelevant - like - a MANUFACTURED DEPRESSION just in business closings and job losses alone.
And by the way for most of the 50k+ there peacefully to protest what they considered a stolen election - IT WAS TRUMPS 2ND INAUGURATION - cause they and I believe he won - possibly in a landslide.
Locking down the capital with 20k National Guard isn't a warning to the fellow Phoenician nut job wearing a buffalo head-dress and the other goof-ball now sitting in Prince George County because he messed with Goat Girl Pelosi's to-do list on her desk once he plunked down his Dr. Martins.
Tucker Carlson nailed it the other night on why - You are allowed to believe that Biden won - as I am that he is nothing more than a pathetic puppet installed illegally. He is incompetent and illegitimate and the pretext that you have bought into - if you are sincere - likewise puts your ability to make rational decisions suspect. We all are entitled to a Senior Moment Ralph. Not a delusional nightmare that you want to force on half the country.
There are 70+ million of us - and we are not going to curl into a fetal position or go away. We are going to re-install voter integrity - and stop these fascist-progs from stealing our republic.
No, it is not hysterical nonsense. That is a distracting, provocative comment meant to disrupt.
Ralph Dratman13 hr ago
The death and destruction this summer are irrelevant to what we are discussing.
Since when do you get to determine what's relevant to the conversation ?
Both riots were aimed at government just at different levels. Are you saying local government is irrelevant ?
Are you implying that you actually believe these idiots were going to overthrow the US government ?
That's just hilarious on it's face !
Welcome to your own foreign policy being practiced domestically....
So funny how Americans will buy anything DC sells as long as twitter, face book, and the cable monopolies back it up.
It's a convenient way to shut down any discussion of a double standard.
I don't "get to determine". I just asserted that I think it is irrelevant to that narrow discussion. Repeating something I wrote above, I never said -- and I do not believe -- that the death and destruction this summer are unimportant. They are very important, just not relevant to a specific discussion of the Capitol situation on 1/6/2021.
Who did David Bailey shoot to death? Anybody want to say her name?
Bailey is alleged to be the policeman that shot and killed Ashli Babbitt.
Could you please explain your question? I don't understand.
I would like someone to explain why the “invaders” and “insurrectionists” did not bring guns if they were seriously trying to oust the “sacred democracy.”
That's a very good question.
We do know that some came with those plastic handcuffs. And one person (group?) actually did beat a policeman to death.
One big clarification I've learned from this batch of comments is that the most important problem is that the security failed. Regardless of anyone's intentions, if the crowd had not entered at all, there would have been no significant problem. So I am going to stop calling it an insurrection, etc., because it would have been a nothing-at-all if the security had held.
To put that another way, "intentions" of a group cannot easily be measured in a one-off like this because everyone has a different set to intentions. That is why security must hold: you never know what might happen if a crowd gets in somewhere. (And obviously they were not entering a public place, such as a shopping mall, where intentions might have to be analyzed, in retrospect anyway, if there were an attack.)
Thank you for this. I appreciate your decision to stop calling it an insurrection as the MSM/DNC is portraying it. I agree with you. My wife and I watched it live from our couch, with live feeds from various sources on the web. 90% of the folks there were peaceful and respectful of the Capitol. In several places the cops let them in, either thru fealty to the aims of the protestors or by order, maybe both at different times and places. Protestors taking happy selfies with the cops, walking deferentially between the velvet roped tour lines. There were indeed bad actors, many arrived before Trump even ended his speech. But from what I have seen at least a plurality of them were antifa, and called out as such by the protestors. Very, very few from the Trump contingent meant any harm to that sacred place. Remember, at base Trumpers are solid patriots. They love America, and the shrines that represent it. If you think otherwise you are deluded.
I want to circle back to why nobody has heard of David Bailey, the DC cop who evidently shot Ashli Babbit. If that was truly an "armed insurrection" and "coup" against our Republic, the cop who fired the shot that killed the prime "domestic terrorist" should be feted and welcomed as a hero! His name and deeds and stalwart defense of the Capitol and "our sacred democracy!" should be celebrated to the heavens by DNC and MSM!! But instead we have complete silence. Zero info from any investigation, zero interest and zero questions from the compliant MSM. Nobody knows his name. The truth does not fit the Narrative. The Narrative wants you to believe 5 people died because Trump Incited a Riot, worthy of Impeachement! Yeah, well... no. The DC cop David Bailey shot the unarmed Ashli Bobbit to death in the Capitol.
David Bailey shot unarmed protestor Ashli Bobbit to death in the Capitol. Just for clarity.
Several died of natural causes like heart attack, almost a given in a giant crowd like that. (How giant was the crowd? Nobody knows. That info is Not To Be Discussed.) DC cop Brian Sicknick walked away from the riot but died a day later from a head wound suffered during the riot. RIP. All evidence paints him as a man of honor and I have every reason to believe it.
To be clear I believe David Bailey may have been in the right of doing his job best he could. I have no reason to think he was a bad actor. Maybe he was the last line of defense before some cowering Congress Critters. Evidently he was security detail during the attack on Sen Scalise some years ago, and was wounded by the (Bernie Bro) assailant. Bailey's shot to the chest of the attacker was likely the mortal wound that stopped the attack. Add all that up and I could credit the man a hero. So how he came to shoot Ashli Babbit? Darn, if there was only an investigation. If only somebody cared enough to want to know the truth. But that does not fit the Narrative. You, Joe public, are just a serf to be played.
What they do not show you is much more important than what they holler to the skies.
I do not agree that antifa was involved in most of the instances of violence. Since most of the people who perpetrated violence or destruction have been arrested, and will be prosecuted, there is an opportunity to find out if they had connections with antifa. As for an investigation, my understanding is that an exhaustive investigation has already begun, and is expected to go on for a long time. How David Bailey came to shoot Ashli Babbit will surely be an important part of that investigation. Just try not to say it's not an investigation if the Democrats run it. They happen to be the party in power in both chambers, and whatever party that is usually controls investigations. If you want democracy, you have to accept that either party may be in power at any given time.
They had just watched Monty Python's bit. Come at me with a loaded banana. MPFC makes a lot more sense than our polity.
I disagree about Trump's speech, if you mean what he said to the crowd that went down to the Capitol. I say it did incite violence. How else can you interpret what he and Giuliani said?
And I definitely say the Democratic Party is not moving in the direction of a police state. No Democrat has ever advocated such a thing. You will not find a single Democrat who advocates anything of the sort. If you know of any, please reply because I want to know.
Trump's mistake was the event itself and expecting a change in outcome. His words were benign and he never suggested anyone should be violent. What is it the BLM "protesters" say, "silence is violence?" Well not speaking up and defending free speech by every democrat politician is supporting the ban on free speech including allowing twitter, youtube and facebook to silence the speech of the president of the US and those with a dissenting opinion. So that's every Democrat; not just one.
Trump said, "You cannot be weak, you have to be strong." That is incitement to violence when spoken to a crowd carrying weapons. And Giuliani suggested "trial by combat". How else can you interpret "trial by combat" than an incitement to violence? Suppose a black leader, speaking to a crowd of BLM supporters, suggested trial by combat. The BLM crowd then walked down and broke windows in the capitol, entered, and people were heard saying "Kill Pence", and they killed a policeman? Would you judge the words to be benign in that case? What would you have done as President after that happened?
The protestors were not carrying weapons of any real significance. Furthermore, telling the crowd to be strong and to peacefully protest at the capitol isn't an incitement to anything other than naivete. The playbook for that idiotic display was written over the summer. They didn't do anything that they haven't seen hundreds of times from those riots.
That said, using the capitol riot as a pretext to further disenfranchise anyone or anything on the right is unbelievably tone deaf. For God's sake, CNN is trying to build up support to censor Fox News because of an alleged pattern of disinformation and an incitement to violence. Honestly, I don't even know where to begin with that.
The best thing they could do is to treat these protestors with the same kid gloves that they have used for the thousands of protestors from the summer. Equal justice under the law could actually move the needle. Instead, they are pouring gasoline on this while they target, smear and harass American citizens. Anyone on the right is potentially guilty by association.
If I'm not mistaken, there were around 100k at the event. Several hundred of those protestors lost their shit. That is the definition of a mostly peaceful protest. I never blamed protestors over the summer who were there to exercise their right to assembly and to voice their grievances. I do blame the small percentage of them who were agitators and violent. The same applies for the capitol riot.
Antifa and BLM use revolutionary language as a standard practice. I have heard many protest leaders use language at these protests that were incredibly inflammatory. I don't remember them verbatim but they regularly encouraged activists to perform acts of violence and to directly overthrow our system of government.
In terms of, "direct action", they tried to burn down a federal courthouse with officers locked inside for well over a month. They set up autonomous zones in front of state capitols. That doesn't include all the people that were beaten and murdered by activists during that time. The resulting damage and loss of life was shocking for anyone who paid attention.
These people are the definition of extremists who really do want to overthrow and replace our government. I never mistook them for the vast majority of Americans on the left because that would be ridiculous. No group or ideology deserves to be defined by fringe elements that are tangentially related to them.
But it is clear that the right has lost the culture war and the left no longer has the right to call itself liberal. At this point, I kind-of hope that they get what they are asking for. I've got a great spot picked out to watch everything crumble.
I never thought I would see the day when the first amendment was up for debate. There is no nuance or discourse and civil libertarians are now white (or white adjacent) nationalists according to our moral superiors. It is really unbelievable that our great nation will be taken down by woke militants that have been coddled from birth. It's a fucking tragedy.
A common mistake I've seen these past months is equating a political mob (Trump supporters) with anarchists (Antifa) and racial justice rioters (BLM). All three are terrible taken together, but only one of these groups is supporting a political figure.
You are right. They are not comparable. The sheer size and scale of the summer riots puts them in their own category. There were literally hundreds of riots across the country. They were far more destructive to people, property and social order than the capitol riot could ever hope to be.
I really really doubt our great nation will be taken down by anything in the next few years. I don't see why you should be so pessimistic. Almost everyone who lives in the US wants it to survive!
I'm just planning ahead.
The legacy media didn't attend or cover most of the riots so I had to rely on independent sources for information. Michael Tracey was one of the few journalists who actually covered them and those engaged in them through a cross country tour. He was assaulted in Portland because they didn't want him to stream the event. I watched as many live feeds as I could until I just couldn't stomach it anymore. There is no question that Antifa and some of the more militant BLM activists were the main agitators. I'm not going to dig up videos and police arrest records to prove that to you but they are widely available.
Your comment about Antifa and BLM rings hollow? They (both of them) are responsible for most of the $2.0 billion of damage and violent attacks this summer. They are the definition of fascism and marxism. Citing CNN and NPR weakens your argument.
Antifa and BLM share a common core of beliefs in revolutionary Marxism. I'm not going to dig for resources that you won't read anyway.
To some degree, you are correct about Antifa as a reactionary organization. There is no question that they will go out of their way to counter protest to anything that they perceive as fascist.
On inauguration day, Antifa protested and rioted against our newly elected president in Portland, Seattle, Denver and California. I guess you could say that they were reacting to a fascist regime taking power. You could also say that they were reacting to the existence of statues that they didn't like and DHS agents in a federal courthouse.
As for the rest, I don't really give a shit about who gets bused in and for what. I do take issue with violent extremism regardless of ideology.
Here's an example of BLM calling for destruction. I'll pre-emptively say, please don't insult anyone's intelligence by trying to argue that smashing into buildings and stealing stuff somehow doesn't count as "destruction":
“That is reparations,” Ariel Atkins, a BLM organiser told the broadcaster. “Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.
“I don’t care if someone decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store, because that makes sure that person eats,” she said. “That makes sure that person has clothes.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/blm-protests-chicago-looters-police-a9665861.html
I never said anything about Google, Twitter or FB. I don't know whether they should be regulated.
You should spend 15 minutes researching the Capitol breach because you're dead wrong.
Trump's rally could not have motivated the crowd, the timing wasn't there. The insurgents were already on the Capitol steps a full half hour prior to Trump finishing, and everyone finishes a Trump rally. Further, the Capitol was breached one half hour after Trump finished even though navigating from Ellipse to Capitol would have taken over an hour.
Say that Trump's uncivil 2 months of #stopthesteal leaves him responsible - even though his people had never acted so violently, and all we wanted was a legit audit - that's fine. But claiming that his 1/6 rally had anything to do with it is just false.
Ralph don't do research- you do it for him.
In Soviet America, Ralph research YOU!
Pure calumny, insult, totally false. I am reading and searching and writing most of every single day.
Thank you for that excellent information. Is there an online article or something that lays out that point in detail, do you know?
Search for 'capitol breach timeline' (ignore your fav leftist rags), but here's one:
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/ex-capitol-police-chief-says-pelosi-mcconnells-sergeants-at-arms-refused-security-measures-while-new-timeline-proves-trump-incitement-claims-bogus/
What weapons? Now you’re just making things up or intentionally lying. In his speech Trump intentionally called for the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically”. And by the way, Black Lies Matter constantly call for the killing of police. And often actually do kill police.
I guess you are right. It seems they did not have real weapons.
No, I was not making things up or lying. I was mistaken. I actually thought they did have guns.
No one, or at least no significant number of the crowd had guns, is that correct?
Ralph, elections are won because the diehards flip enough of the wafflers in the middle to their side.
All of the discussion about the Capitol idiot-fest would be moot if Trump, when asked if he accepts blame for Covid response errors, would have said, "Mistakes were made. I won't play the blame game. But I'm the president and the buck stops here. I apologize. From here on out we will work harder & we will do better. Thank you."
In other words, if he'd have acted like an adult or a leader and not like the little kid whose mommy says, "Donald who broke the vase?"
"Wasn't me mom. Must have been the dog," when they don't even have a dog.
America is almost criminally forgiving of its presidents.
I think he'd still be president.
In my mind, Trump's complete lack of humility in the face of his own egregious stupidity just makes him the spiritual heir of George Bush who landed on an aircraft carrier festooned with MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banners, a big stupid grin plastered on his face, right before the real slaughter in Iraq got started. Don't recall any apologies from the Shrubster either. The only difference is that America was too busy shitting its collective pants during Bush's term to think clearly so they re-elected the idjit , justifying it with bits of popular wisdom such as, "Well Cleetus, Mr. Bush started us on this journey to the cliff's edge, so we might as well let the old boy drive us right over."
I think the phrase most describing America during the Bush years would be "Scared Stupid."
I agree with everything you wrote in that comment! Other countries imprison their ex-leaders with some regularity. What the political result might be if we did that here, I have no idea. Some questions are unanswerable. Either an approach is tried, and we get to find out the result, or the untried approach just... disappears. Kind of like evolution. A mutation happens and some offspring "try it out". If they survive, the mutation persists. If not, there is nothing to be remembered.
Accountability? For America's elite? What heresy.
Personally Ralph, I've always liked heresy.
What I'm getting sick of is the Bible size justifications & obfuscations that swirl around Trump's stay in office these days.
Folk are really trying to make a martyr out of guy who, if he were a comic book character, would have a completely blank thought bubble above his head at least 60% of the time you looked at him. The other 40% of the time he just looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
The only time Dondsi came alive was during his periodic visits to the faithful where he worked the crowd like a demented Buddy Hackett.
Your mom would like her iPad back now.
Ha! Funny! I guess you made that up.
Bot !
To whom are you responding? It is really hard to trace that back on sub stack if the comment to which you are replying is far up on the page.
I pine for the future in which all real humans have left the Internet and it's just bots fighting bots all day.
Maybe you should ask why Trump got elected in the first place instead of misleading everyone into a justification and rationalization of the consequences of horrible leadership ??
I suspect leftists like yourself project “inciting violence” in every and anything said by Trump and those supporting him.
Trump: “What a nice sunny day we have”
Ralph: “OMG WTF Trump just murdered 12 indigenous transsexual greenpeace activists that were peacefully protesting! Call out the Army!”
Todd, unsolicited word of advice:
"Ralph Dratman" isn't a "leftist." He's a bot. Steer clear away from "him" and EmKay.
How do you know that? (Just curious)
DM me.
ah shit, no DMs
I won't respond to grisha because he has been abusive in the past. I am by no means a bot. You can ask me any series of questions that a bot could not answer. So far, no bot can give you a coherent account spread over many responses. For a bot to do so would require a far different kind of machine learning architecture. I don't think it's impossible, but I am not aware of any current architecture that comes close. Admittedly I could be wrong, so if anyone can point to a bot implementation that could respond as I do, I would be eager to investigate it. I am torn between wanting the machines to be more intelligent and being nervous about the consequences.
You never say anything coherent, so as a bot, you do have that going for you.
I suspect you'll never understand there is no left or right, only top and bottom. That's all there's ever been and more than likely all they'll ever be.
Oh I definitely understand that; unfortunately my lazy, often imprecise, writing often leads me to use “easy” terminology (such as leftists) that is not the best terminology.
No I do not.
Not at all. I would never write something so absurd.
Who's "we"? RACIST!
How stupid !
So the push by the Dems for a new domestic terrorism law does not disturb you?
Democrats have almost always been the supporters of free speech even when utterly distasteful. There have always been Democrats that have promoted curbs on speech if not outright alien and sedition act-type stuff.
What is disturbing is the current vigor for curbing speech among Democrats.
Does it seem to anyone else that the political parties are switching polarity akin to what the planet does every so often? Can't put my finger on it....
There is a realignment happening. It’s slow starting but I think we’ll end up seeing a right/left populist anti-war movement happening. It’s why you see Glen Greenwald & Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson and not MSNBC.
I new something weird was going on when my Fox News watching Baby Boomer parents started becoming very anti-war and thinking Trump should pardon Snowden! Lol, this would’ve been unthinkable in the early aughts. Say what you want about Glen going on icky Fox News but he’s getting thru to some very right wing boomers out there and it’s AMAZING!!!
Interesting about your folks, KM. Pre-pandemic, I had a lot of regular interaction with people who supported Trump, but who's second choice was Bernie. We use Trump as a convenient label for 74 million people that are as diverse as any group I have ever tried to grok. Just as the tragedy in DC on Jan 6th was made up of a lot of people with very different motives as were the protests this summer following George Floyd's death.
Well, my parents are your typical suburban middle class Fox News watchers. They’re both retired but they’ve been voting republican since the 70’s. They were pretty dogmatically anti-liberal when I was growing up (80’s & 90’s) but we weren’t religious so I didn’t get the whole evangelical upbringing (though K have extended family that are very much religious fundamentalists).
So, my parents would be your typical right winger that would call Bernie a communist and yada yada. That’s the whole point, there are these people who’ve been dogmatically republican for over 40 years, that are starting to rethink all these things. There is no way my parents would’ve ever thought someone like Snowden should be pardon. Ever. They are totally on board now.
So, to all the so called liberals out there that give Glenn Greenwald or Eric Weinstein a hard time for going on Fox or think they’ve switched sides, they’re dead wrong. My parents have come around on issues like privacy, anti-war and anti-monopoly since watching shows like that. It’s anecdotal but if it can happen to my Regan devotee parents it can happen to anyone.
That's a very good point. If we could figure some of that out, it would be great. But there is no way to figure out the composition of a crowd without extensive surveillance and concerted investigation.
Hurray for your parents and all against killing innocents abroad!
There is a group of Democrats trying to push that (including Biden) but luckily one of the squads own is trying to pass a resolution to block it. Rashida Tlaib says it will kill civil liberties. Makes me really really happy she’s around. We need her & other squad members to join w/ Rand Paul & Mike Lee to stop a new law going through.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/domestic-terror-laws-us-rashida-tlaib-capitol-b1791542.html%3famp
First time the Squad has stood up for something worthwhile.
Shitpost:
Tlaib's the best, AOC's the worst.
Tlaib doesn't post makeup tips on TikTok. AOC will probably go much further.
There's a difference between Michigan and NYC. The difference is the relative level of narcissism.
Either that or it's more controlled opposition. So far that's all the "squad" has been able to muster besides helping Pelosi keep her seat as speaker.
Thank you for the information! Is the text of the bill available?
I’m not sure. I do know that right now, they have every law on the book already to stop all kinds of domestic terrorism, they do not need to pass anything else. I’m mean, the whole Stop the Steal rally was largely planned on Face Book in brood daylight. All the info was floating around out there. The capital police were not prepared and no new domestic terrorism law would’ve helped that. This is massive NSA, FBI power grab. They want Apple to have to let them into the back door of phones. And as long as we the people let fear blind us, we will give away all of our civil rights and liberties.
That is more good information. Thank you.
"Google" is your friend. Even friendlier, duckduckgo
HR 4192, Adam Schiff 116th Congress.
I read the bill. Not sure that is necessary but really don't know. Do you have an opinion on that?
Thank you! I really appreciate that.
I have no idea what is in the bill. How can I react to it?
Once again, Ralph wants to be lead by the hand. How old are you , Ralph?
You mean "led". "Lead" refers to the metal. "Led" is the past tense of the verb "lead", which makes the whole situation very confusing. In practice, I think the only way to get that distinction right is to have a lot of practice reading and writing.l
I am 69 years old. How old are you?
Try googling it : )
Good reply. Ralph's a troll- just wants to be fed.
I am in no way a troll. I want a reasoned discussion. Unfortunately mule has been abusive in the past and so I had hoped not to respond to him. But I don't like to leave calumny without a response. A difficult dilemma.
If you are following it, please suggest a reference you like or agree with.
They are calling for the isolation and gun confiscation of the half of the country that supported Trump. That does not sound problematic to you? If you are American, it should.
They are pulling down any content that does not comport with that goal, or support the false narrative behind it.
It's hard to understand if you do not realize that the very thing that we believed about Russia and China - that the state controlled all media. Happened long ago in this country. The thing is, they are now cracking down on the small fringe media outlets that they had let to exist. The reason for that will only be visible to you once you realize that fact about your media- that it's state media.
When you are open to that fact, you will see why Trump had to be 1000% maligned and lied about night and day- to the point wherein many victims of this stressful media onslaught cannot stand the mention of his name. Trump derangement syndrome is a manufactured condition, and many in this country will never be able to see what is behind it.
Democrats and Republicans swap power back and forth and remain civil because ultimately they have the same goal- which is convincing us they they have our interests at heart and that they answer to us. As this years exposed election fraud showed us, they do not. Their alignments are with big tech and big pharma.
Trump was a genuine outsider who they never thought would overcome their rigged systems. Once he did get in, they were desperate to stymie him and get him out ASAP (resist!). But all the while, they had to maintain the mirage of bi-partisanship. Not till the final hour - the electoral college vote (with the mercenary, paid violent rioters injected into the Trump rally) did the unilateral nature of their operation shine through.
In my experience, the dyed-in-the-wool party acolytes (especially Democrat) will never see their party and it's actions for anything other than what they were taught in grade school. But this blindness will cost us our country.
Preparing this bankrupt country for the Great Reset is the current goal of both parties is right now. You should research it. But use Duck Duck Go to search because Google is also controlled and censored.
Sorry for the bad news, but knowing is better than not knowing.
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
While I support Janine's right to make this comment, I think many of us would disagree heartily with some of the propositions. I would let it go except that many will paint all of us who disagree with Ralph's original and subsequent posts with a broad brush and throw us into what I think is a fringe view. I don't mean to disparage Janine, but most of us who are more measured and less likely to believe some of the hyperbole, would not sign on to your comment. I certainly don't! That being said, I find some bits of truth in Janine's comment, but Janine has merely put forth hypotheses (that many would call the misnomer "conspiracy theories") that must be satisfied by EVIDENCE before stating them as truth.
You seem to be casting about for explanations for what's going on in this country. While you do so, the country, as janine says, will be lost.
Janine nailed it, calling the sequence of events accurately. He/she did a whole lot more than "provide some bits of truth". Providing you are not a bot like Ralph, I'd suggest you keep an open mind and attempt to see all of this in a different light.
Easy to shut down someone by calling them a "bot." (Reminds me of shutting down people by automatically calling them a racist or whatever.) Although I disagree with Ralph on many of his posts, he is certainly not a bot. Just read his many posts and if you are honest, you will have to admit he is not a bot. As to the rest of your reply, I am not "casting about for explanations" at all. Unlike you, I don't hold a monopoly on the truth.
Thank you for accepting that I am not a bot. I suppose conceivably there could be a bot that writes like me, but that is in the future, if it ever can happen. I'd be grateful for a reply when you disagree with me, because my whole purpose here is to learn. Matt is trying to occupy a difficult territory, a sort of no-man's land between "right" and "left". It is a big puzzle.
I would never intentionally criticize one person for someone else's views. If I ever do so, I hope someone will point that out as I do not wish it at all. In fact I think that is one of the most powerful tendencies that are polarizing the country. Our current ideological split does not take into account that each person's views are different from any other person's views. The current two-party system appears to wipe out these differences. At the present time that is not an acceptable situation. We need some way of involving other parties or some similar arrangement. I unfortunately would not know how to make that happen, so I hope some people are looking into it.
I very much appreciate that you do not fall into this trap!
It is a terrible tendency which is very much encouraged by the way Twitter works. Twitter automatically turns a mob on anyone who disagrees with something a much-followed person writes. I honestly think Twitter is a Bad Thing. I mention Twitter here only because I think the influence of Twitter spills over into everything else online.
Because it's a corporate fascist state they are advocating for. Who needs policy when you control the currency, are privy to all online and telecommunications conversations, have legalized torture, gulags, irradiated due process, and used a virus to lock people down and ruin their way of life to the point they end up living on the street ??
So funny to hear anyone try to defend either of the funding arms of the uniparty and it's owners !
Thanks for the chuckle and I hope you wake up soon.
I cannot find the post you are replying to. If it is one of mine, please help me figure out which one it is. Substack makes this quite difficult. Thanks.
The Dem alliance w hedge funds banks corps and Silicon Valley set enuf amigo not to mention police state censorship demanded by Dem senators Marley and Wyden !
Amen. The dems stole the republican funding and the police state agenda started by Ronnie Ray-gun. Ronnie was first and foremost a propagandist dating clear back to ww2 until the day he died.
That's funny. You forgot to add the /s for sarcasm at the end.
Please explain what is funny.
You defending one of the corporate fascist parties is what I find funny.
I agree. It's not about algorithms; it's about politics. Go to YouTube and search for "how to clean a gun" or "how to shoot a gun" or even "how to build a gun". You'll get hundreds of results. And yet they censor videos that show gun rights rallies? That's not an algorithm doing that, it's a person.
So true.
Trump's fear is based on 'ignorance is bliss.' He's been able to 'weather' so many debacles due to others propping him up, like the GOP, wealthy Jews, his Dad, etc and so on. His innate talent is as Carnival Barker. He has no depth of understanding of almost everything. He has made it by his connections with others. I'm not trying to insult him or his followers, but he has a vocabulary of a spokesman who doesn't know anything, but can sell you on it, with highly exaggerated words and superlatives and phrases. "You're gonna win so often you're gonna get tired of winning." "You're gonna have the best healthcare anywhere." He's the prime seller of euphemism, and still his ignorance is a lot like mentally ill folks who have no filter in their brain, because they lack the necessary self-awareness, of, say, like the kinesthetic sense of your body that knows its appendages' location in space internally, without a mirror.
Another example, I wonder what Trump says of the amount of misinformation and disinformation that ceased across the Twitter network when he was taken off of Twitter? He has very little clue of the enormous power of the Presidency. And surprisingly, it's astounding he didn't do more damage than he did, because as stated, 'ignorance is bliss' and Brother Trump, well, he perhaps thought of himself as a player of a tiny local fiefdom, not at all of an entire world Empire (in decline, but still).
Funny how most people think The Federalist Society has been around for hundreds of years when it was started by Ed Meese and friends as part of the reaction to Justice Powell's memo "The Memo".
Very interesting! Thank you for that information. Ed Meese!
Sorry, Cypher. My comment was an attempt to add info to what I thought was a good, response-worthy point in your post.
Although I say that TFS is more pro-corporate than anti-civil liberties. It's just civil liberties tend to be a threat to corporations.
Honestly, my source for the reaction was a Bill Moyers interview from a decade or so ago now. But I saw recently it is still available on his show's website. LMK if you have trouble locating a link.
In today’s world, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry would be kicked off of Twitter and FB and deplatformed by Amazon. Censorship is allowed by a cowardly populace that clings to the status quo, no matter how repressive it is.
There is a growing body of the populace that sees through the merger of state+media+big-tech. Unfortunately, many in this country are sound asleep and do not realize that everything they watch on television is controlled by state interests (thus the 1000% negative Trump coverage [if you are ready to throw "Fox" at me, then you haven't watched Fox lately]). Now the focus is on marginalizing anyone who supported Trump in any way, and creating a terror-scare towards the goal of isolating them and confiscating their guns.
The reason for this goal, is so the US can be absorbed into the globalist power structure.
(Duck Duck Go: The Great Reset {Google is censored}) The Fed is bankrupt, and the ruling class is complicit is this goal. Don't take my word for it; research it for yourself.
It's why the election fraud was broadly swept under the rug- (Zero evidentiary hearing have been made in any court, but cases are still sitting on the Supreme Courts docket. Why has the media ignored that fact and outright lied about the existence of evidence?).
Re Google and the state: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
And my oldest kid wants to be Edward Snowden...what have I done...
You have created a hero who cares about the American people.
I (an incurable romantic) fully believe that heroine/hero is out there but she/he does not want to get involved in American politics as presently constituted.
To your point,
Not much heroism in a constitutionally limited republic awash in otherworldly wealth - where the dissolute / mentally ill set minority businesses on fire to "protest" racism or charge into the capitol to take photos in a bison hat.
We are much more likely to see heroism in places where students and freedom fighters risk their lives to be heard, or for simply speaking about freedom (Hong Kong, China, Nicaragua etc)
I'd love to hear your opinion about the Sandinista/Contra war in the '80s, fully aware that it's a rabbit hole not worth your time.
My opinions on it only got me a B+ in my Politics Science thesis ;-)
That country is such a mess, I don't know where to start anymore. How about this, I have friends who trained contras in Honduras. I have friends who were contras. I have friends who were shot. I know land owners who were killed when they refused to sign over property to the Sandinistas. And I have personal accounts of paying extra taxes to Somoza because the Guardia showed up with automatic weapons to make extra "tax collections" - so many, many stories.
Snowden's lucky he's alive. I admire his courage but I wouldn't recommend his career path to anyone.
So true.
While not an easy migration, I'm moving away from Google, YouTube and Facebook. I've enjoyed their services immensely over the years but I just can't tolerate censorship from corporations in this manor. I have no issue if an Independent Content Creator uploads a video committing a crime or encouraging others to do so but none of these stories are of Creators violating the law. It seems the common thread is those Independent Content Creators and other users of Big Tech are more and more, people like me. I question the Narrative, I don't believe Corporate Media or Government without a healthy does of skepticism. I don't consume Corporate Media at all, that's one reason I'm here right now. I only consume Independent Journalism and Content Creators.
It seems evident to me that the Duopoly of political parties, NeoCon/NeoLibs, working with Corporations are doing an end run around the 1st amendment citing "private property" as their cheap veneer.
Close out your Facebook, move to Gab. Close out Twitter move to .....too late (another victim of the vertical monopoly). Move away from YouTube for Odysee, Bitchute, Rumble. Close out your gmail/hotmail/outlook/yahoo email accounts for protonmail or Tutanota.
They're crude by comparison but they're not in the Elite Corporate/Government/Narrative club.
Big Tech and their cabal have power because we give it to them.
I too have been leaving the big tech platforms (for several years now). It's not that hard (I use Brave, Duck-duck-go, protonmail, Locals, and I NEVER buy from Amazon.) However, there is no viable alternative to Youtube and therein lies the rub for Status Coup and other independent news outlets. (Thankfully The Hill Rising has managed to rise above but their content is not that challenging.)
I stopped using google for search years ago. It's actually not great search. Most people use it out of habit or for lack of "searching" for alternatives. Saying google is good at search is like saying Microsoft makes great operating systems. Ubiquity does not equal excellence.
Except for McDonald’s french fries...
Reading Matt's column and Glenn Greenwald's I get so depressed, between the left wanting more censorship and the right not willing to do anything are we doomed? Seriously it feels like there is no bottom and both the democrats and republicans could care less.
Yes. Pick a spot to watch the carnage and stock up on ammo if you are so inclined.
Stocking up on ammo is tough right now!
Have you ever watched NFL football? The commercials, I mean. Ad after ad for cops shows and military dramas (think SEAL Team) showcase guns. Firearms. Not only guns, but men and women pointing them in the general direction of other people. All these "gun" ads for violent shows that our kids see are accepted as "normal," yet a few firearms at a rally violate YouTube's policy?
If we wanted to enforce a firearm/violence policy on American TV, half the shows would go off the air.
Queen Latifah is to be morally trusted with guns, no ordinary law abiding citizens with permits.
Especially not Philando Castile. You nailed it.
Yes
If memory serves, Wile E Coyote preferred TNT and cannon balls. Assume they will get rid of those. ACME has to be an allegory for white supremacy as well.
ACME - a classic
Meep Meep.
Those will be gone soon too. The new New Looney Tunes is a gun free zone...
https://www.tvovermind.com/what-we-learned-from-the-new-looney-tunes-cartoons-trailer/
In our social milieu, words are violence, often equated or worse than gun violence.
Only if it goes against the dogma of the left - not if it's to disparage anyone who could be said to have supported Trump in any way.
"equated to"
Some clarifications for Matt:
These are not "pro-gun" protests. They are "civil rights" and "pro-Constitution" protests.
1/6 was not a "riot" or "insurrection". It was a "mostly peaceful protest". No person has been charged with "insurrection" which begs the question of how Trump can be impeached for inciting insurrection.
It was not "Twitter" that expected follow on violent protests on 1/17. It was FBI agents gaslighting on Twitter hoping to cause violent protests on 1/17.
Progressives are getting caught up in their own creation of cancel culture and technocratic tyranny. Cry me a river. For example, "I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is saying, “Go get your guns, get out there,” that’s really dangerous. But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. If they start pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it’s basically a death sentence for outlets like ours." JC's cognitive dissonance is blinding.
"Hate Speech" is not a thing in the USA....yet.
"In the hands of alternative media, however, the tool posed another problem, in the form of simply showing offensive reality." - "Offense" is subjective. For example, I am not the least bit offended by any person's words because I am not mentally weak.
Language matters Matt. Please be precise and stop using the nomenclature of the enemies of our country(The Misleadia's Newspeak Minders).
Well Said. What should have been a beautiful exercise in democracy - the same kind of evidentiary hearing put before the respective legislatures - the receipts as Bannon put it on War Room - just died on the spot - and the Dems have been overplaying the event ever since.
That Nanny Goat came out today and announced HR 1 as her #1 legislative priority openly reveals just what joke the Kabuki Impeachment is really all about - keep the mob/great unwashed distracted while they install a Californian-style coup - Big Tech and Big Gov all the time - the end of the Westphalian tradition - an end to the individual as sovereign - an end to our republican form of self-governance.
That is why MT's article is so important - because we have seen just how on-board the MSM is to assist.
At every step they reveal their globalist agenda - and so it is with supporters here. Anti-democratic at their core. Their obsession with repealing the 2nd amendment or at least regulating it to the point of irrelevance is self-evident - and - explains why the Soros approved and funded NY Attorney General attacked a wounded (by its own infighting) NRA - and in doing so crippled the organizations usual ability to help Republicans with election Ground Game....
That lawfare manipulation is but one of many progressive 'projects' that has led us to this crucial point - and again - I believe the country is waking up.
Who's that walking over my bridge?
I agree. It's getting weird.
“It never got weird enough for me.”
I like how Google's motto for years was "don't be evil." To me, that's the equivalent of going on a date, and they first thing they say is "I'm not a serial killer"
There is zero chance of gaining any regulatory relief from the federal government under the current administration. If Republicans are smart - an "if" large enough to hide a couple galactic clusters inside - they look at their recent House wins, and start running NOW on a free speech platform for 2022.
Yes, private businesses can limits what is posted to their servers.
But the attempts to shut down alternative services are grotesque violations of anti-trust, and need to be treated as such. The coordinated efforts to not only kick Parler off Amazon servers, but to pressure their attorneys, their domain hosts, even their flippin' accountants, into dropping them as clients, are or ought to be illegal.
It's already illegal under civil law to conspire to deny others the opportunity to earn a living through campaigns of harassment. It's time to start going after these clowns.
Absolutely. If Parlor isn't the final straw I can't imagine what could be. These are monopolies that must be brought to heel to restore free expression - and MT's article is but a growing flood of evidence.
Great interview! This is kind of related to the interview Jimmy Dore had with a member of the Boogaloo Boys. It was a really good interview and surprising. It turns out the Boogaloo are not white supremacist racists. At all. There’s so much the msm is either willfully keeping from us in order to keep the sides divided or they just live in a bubble and are not aware of the common interests of so many of these groups.
Without these independent media outlets we would be kept in the dark about so much. This summer Michael Tracey went to Minneapolis and filmed interviews with locals, reported on people who had their businesses looted, burned and very damaged due to the riots. It is so incredible how derelict our media is in reporting any kind of truth. They have a narrative and they will NOT deviate from it whatsoever. It is so shameful and disgusting.
I support and will continue to support as much independent media as I can afford to. I’m so sick of being only able to choose from the red or blue team. I just want the straight, unvarnished truth no matter what. Follow the facts wherever they lead. Ideology kills, literally.
I too had no idea Boogaloo were not racists , until I read the article 30 most bytes ago.
Fwiw, Philando Castile was a martyr for the 2nd Amendment-you’ll never hear that narrative from the msm.
Dude followed all the rules scrupulously and still got shot by police. Castile's case just tells me this: "If a cop asks you whether you're carrying, say 'no.'" His crime was being honest. He's dead. Does it pay to be honest?
Maybe it's not all about race, actually? I understand the frustrations of a lot of the BLM folks, but it also seems like there's a strenuous MSM effort to redirect this conversation to race-not-class.
He followed all the rules until the cop told him to stop reaching into his pocket and then he did not follow the rules. I am not defending the actions of the cop, but it is not as cut and dried as you make it sound.
But I do agree that the MSM is redirecting the conversation to race when it should be more about class.
Lulu. It doesn't appear to be that simple. Yanez, the cop who killed Philando Castile appeared to be scared simply because the presence of a gun was announced as the law demands. It's part of what makes Castile's death so tragic.
Castile's partner, Reynolds, is obviously not afraid of Yanez. She instantly recognized the situation was getting out of hand due mostly to Yanez being scared and over-reacting rather than actually listen to what was being said.
It's also why Yanez freaked out as soon as he realized what he had done.
I don't disagree with that, which is why I said I am not defending the actions of the cop. Overall there is always a lot more to each story than what they media tries to portray them to be.
So many people are not curious enough to look into the details. They are happy with one version of the story (highlighting certain aspects) being presented to them and will never question that there could be more.
What you describe is what separates childish minds from adult minds, Lulu. Just assuming there is more to a story is a learned behavior. You've succeeded...I'm still working on it. : )
Funny how humans tend to forget the source of info far before they forget the info. I really think that is the root of a lot of our collective foibles.
Lulu, thanks for the comment.
I am very often guilty of reductive reasoning/concise framing. It's a habit honed by Twitter.
I believe we should all think about what the Internet (especially social media sites) is doing to our brains.
I love that the majority of commenters on here are challenging each other to think about things in different ways AND are able to do so in a respectful way! The comments sections for both Matt and Glenn are full of so many different thoughts and opinions...for sure many angles that I would not have found on my own. :-)
Same here. I also watched Traceys footage and it was very sobering as someone who participated locally and supports defund the police.
Yes and quit a few of those small business owners were immigrants and poc.
Michael Tracey was one of the few journalists who actually covered the human impact for those riots by speaking to those who were actually affected by them. What he uncovered in a few informal interviews from random people on the street was incredibly revealing and heart breaking.
OMG! Yes, I just couldn’t believe how candid those interviews were. I absolutely cannot believe what the corporate media are willfully ignoring. These people will remember this. Those cities will be living through the after shocks of these riots for many years. Watts California was never the same.
I couldn't agree more. Legacy media is in shambles. They present themselves as the arbiters of truth and morality. In and of itself, that is really scary because that is what authoritarians and religious zealots do. The majority of journalists have become empty, hateful mouthpieces.
Where did curiosity go? What happened to questioning authority? We have raised a generation of adult children who seem to be incapable of critical thought. They want to feel safe from dissenting views that may challenge their preconceptions of the world.
The unholy alliance of tech overlords, the legacy media and the illiberal political establishment keeps me up at night. Post modernism is eating everything.
I've never liked that "incitement" is not protected by the First Amendment, and I've been extremely dismayed lately by how its lack of protection is almost universally accepted, by liberals especially, though this dreadfulness is understandable because the illegality of incitement has been validated by the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. Nonetheless, think about what outlawing incitement means. Does it not invoke, and answer in the affirmative on everyone's behalf, the sententious question asked of children, "If someone told you to go jump off a bridge, would you do it?"
Banning incitement is infantilizing and dehumanizing. With this concept, we've made an unseemly, morally obtuse concession to the trope of the Mob, a long-standing, anti-democratic slander in political theory that goes back to Plato and neutralizes the responsibility of those who listen to an inciter to restrain themselves (assuming they are moved), and not commit crimes afterwards. Proof: the disavowal of responsibility by some of those who stormed the Capitol on the ground that Trump incited them. In essence, these idiots are saying, and asking the rest of us to accept, that they were lemmings and should be treated as such. This is not morally valid in a would-be free, democratic society.
But if you don't buy that, I am here to inform you that, as we speak, the concept of incitement is being negligently and willfully stretched to encompass "incitements" beyond the current legal standard that supposedly circumscribes its unwarranted extension, and that doing this has been a project of the political establishment and its officious intellectuals, e.g. Cass Sunstein, for a long time. Glenn Greenwald just did a very fine run down of how this expansion is unfolding, and the threat to freedom of speech it poses is obvious. Therefore, watch out: if you encourage this development, then all the limits on the concept's current misapplication to less than indisputable incitements to "imminent lawless action", as the dubious saying goes, will fall away, leaving any government stooge or tech monopoly free to claim that it also applies to unauthorized thoughts and speech where the threat of violence is unquestionably non-existent.
useless comment intended to boost this comment: ten billion likes for this comment
Naomi Wolf's 10 steps to Fascism - 2007
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy (check)
2. Create a gulag - domestic prison pipeline and Guantanamo/Black sites overseas (check)
3. Develop a thug caste - police, proud boys, gunmen in the state capitol buildings (check)
4. Set up a surveillance system - See NSA's Bluffdale in Utah's Wasatch Range (check)
5. Harass citizen groups - Protests like Black Lives Matter, Occupy WS, XL Pipeline (check)
6. Arbitrary detention and release - racism/classism in America for forever (check)
7. Target key individuals - "Glenn Greenwald, just got blamed for Lauren Wolf firing (check)
8. Control the Press - CNN, MsNBC, Fox (Two party duopoly fairway of topics (check)
9. Dissent = Treason - Intelligence community operations Russiagate; Assange (check)
10. Suspend rule of law - Free speech, Patriot Act, Shooting at Protesters (check)
*** Cannot say we were not warned. Hedges talked about sacrifice zones. Dr. West talked about the neo-fascist and neoliberal elements of the elite clashing and consolidating. Thomas Frank reminds us that the corporate left and moderate right have merged with the intelligence community, big media and tech companies to form the merger between state, business, and military - very definition of fascism.
Tell tale sign is to look out across our country and look at all the indifference from 400,000 to 500,000 deaths, as capital seeks business as usual and the wealthy are seeking normalcy. People who are struggling want healthcare, non-penury education, and affordable housing, but this would eat into the profit streams of people who are in moral bankruptcy -- so they choose to forget. This is how you can tell we are fucked as a nation. Every person for themselves (YOYO - you're on your own) just does not work. It is a fable, a story tale from an exploitative business class pissed off that Roosevelt beat them for so long --- not taking inventory and shoving Taibbi's vampire squid up our asses, ridiculing even the most minor attempts at socialist policies to help people survive because ....
wait for it
wait for it
It's "commy-u-nest" - when any first year course in economics could explain that all to most economies across the world find a way to balance capital and labor needs.
Alas, this kind of thinking is what will be the death of us and our country - Agnotology 101
also it's funny that DJT was relentlessly smeared as "fascist" by MSM when what is coming is going to be a lot more fascist by Wolf's definition
what's the old credo? "Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations."
This irony was not lost on me.
I've always loved Naomi's Cassandra Calls.
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#1, Big Tech is a misnomer. This is Big Low Tech of user generated content webpages, cookies and advertising sales. It is certainly not an essential tech. Remove their liability protection on one hand and strengthen the ability to sue by users, force them to produce reporting to individual users on what data they collected and what they sold it for and their business models will collapse and new players will emerge. Google today is almost useless as a basic info research tool. Pages and pages of ads followed by product marketing masquerading as info and reviews. Force them to make a pure info search options available. Force twitter to cough up identities of cancel mobs participants and give users the ability to sue them.
A Blue Checkmark fighting dozens of lawsuits in number of states will think twice before advocating cancelling anyone. There is nothing more dangerous to 1st amendment and our freedom to think and debate than the current social media monopolies. Apple and Google on the other hand should be divested of of the app stores so alternatives to these monopolies can appear and grow. Amazon can easily be told that discrimination against any American because of their political views will automatically disqualify them from bidding on any government contracts be there for cloud services or toilet paper. All of the above can be done within the boundaries of the Constitution.
Gotta give my usual spiel here. Allowed users to sue platforms for third party content (revoking section 230) won't go the way you're picturing. Big Tech would benefit from it, because they'd be the only ones who could afford the necessary lawyers. Smaller sites would cease to exist overnight, and there would be no more startups because of the legal liability.
That said I absolutely agree about the app stores. The way they're being pressured to remove Instagram because people MIGHT be using it to plan bad things in a way that the government can't spy on is spine chilling. I'd say this calls for government regulation, expect the government is actively contributing to the problem! In a more sane world, a choice of app stores would be ideal. You can still do this if you're technically inclined, but it's not for the feint of heart, and certain things just don't exist on any alternative app store.
Or, they could curate content less and not have to worry about lawyers at all, is I think the idea. Good point regardless
Good point about the app stores.
Turns out it's not YouTube, it's ThemTube.
The social media outlets for news are like public utilities. They are similar to a phone line. Or even a book. We don't shut down people's phones because they may be saying something we don't like. Society did try book banning and book burning, but the need for dialogue is too strong to be suppressed forever. If the oligarchs control our access to ideas, it's all over. This is a huge threat to my right to choose where I get my ideas and which sources I trust in the end.
Gotta disagree on that one. An ISP is more similar to a phone line. Comcast, Cox, etc. They exist (more or less) to agnostically move electric signals from one place to another. There's MUCH more going on with a social media platform. The infrastructure is several orders of magnitude more complicated. The service is, by its nature, much different, being more interactive and involving the owner of the service much more than, say, a phone call.
That's not to say social media giants shoudn't be regulated, I just don't know know what they should be regulated AS. I don't think utility is it. I'm not sure the proper category actually EXISTS yet.
Would a book store be a better analogy? Or a news stand? It is hard to find a perfect comparison. If we were to regulate Google, FB, Twitter, etc., what would that look like?
Censorship is hard to fine tune. Aside from shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, we've wisely not set limits on speech.
There was a case some years ago in California where some people were making political speeches in a mall. It went to court, and the could ruled that even though it was private property, it was a public space, and the political speech had to be allowed.
I think it would be something like that.
I don't see this US Supreme Court adopting that kind of fine tuning. Maybe social media is sui generis and we will have to be creative. The question is: is there consensus that even hate speech is protected? Most people fail to understand that the First Amendment was designed to protect the minority and not the majority. Most people want to curtail speech they don't agree with - which obviously doesn't work.
This is an excellent comment and I am in a similar state of bafflement. My sticky wicket is that participation in social media networks is entirely voluntary. I don't know who I would want or trust to "regulate" them, or in what way. I dislike censorship on Twitter, but I'm also like, "Y'know, you can not go on Twitter."
They should be public utilities already. $$$$$
That’s the thing-it’s about ideological oversight, not $$$. You don’t see people begrudging the utility companies their honest payment for services-but you would see an uprising if they denied service to legit accounts. I agree 1000% with the internet getting put in the same category as ConEd or CG&E or whomever.
Me too. I resisted this forever because of free market dogma but 2020 has shown me that this is too important in the hands of a few people. Libertarianism is as much utopianism as socialism. Neither work in reality.
#metoo
For a long time I was like, "Nobody is making you use Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. That's your decision."
Now I'm like, "Fuck. It's become very difficult to talk to people and purchase necessary products without some kind of intermediary."
This. I have bought a book from a used bookstore in Wisconsin off Amazon that wasn’t available anywhere else-a publisher’s combo edition of James Bond novels. 20 years ago would I have launched an obsessive personal search of used bookstores within a 1,000 mile radius for said book-of course not. But that’s just me. Now people are too lazy to go to friggin Taco Bell w/out Uber Eats........
Not long ago Congress published a major 450 page report on -- Silicon Valley tech. giants monopolies. It was expected that major action will be on breaking up Amazon, Facebook and Google into well defined pieces.
This appears not likely since Democrat oligarchs and their WS and arms/intelligence industry donors are grateful for silencing Democrat party and Biden-family corruption (Hunter's laptops, etc.) facts and now -- massive silencing of independent news stories.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. are completely integrated into surveillance apparatus -- they are playing a key role in limiting remnants of free speech in the US -- a fascism packaged as "fight against fascism". A more polite term used for fascism in the US is -- authoritarianism...
Only a 3rd, 4th, etc. viable parties will reduce the two-party monopoly of one party with two wings - wings formed to polarize population into "red" and "blue" factions.
Also remember -- DSA "party" is part of Democrat party formed solely to harness and corrupt "progressives" ala TYT, The Intercept, select members of Congress/Senate. DNC cabal of oligarchs are afraid of progressives -- they closely collaborate with GOP on their common interests.