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Fascist Liberals Break Cover
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
Wow. In The Atlantic, no less, argued by a Harvard Law Professor and one in Arizona. I think this whole quarantine thing is making people more willing to say what they really think. This article, and snippet, should be captured and wheeled out every time a liberal opens their mouth.
I don’t believe in speech control – but I would that those who do believe in shutting down dissenting voices should learn what it feels like to be suppressed.
Published in General
Wow. Stunning.
There’s been more growth in knowledge because of the Internet than has ever occurred in human history.
Interestingly, the dictatorships that arose in response to the revolutions that swept Western Europe in 1848 shut down the press as one of their first steps. In fact, the European governments became masters at accomplishing oppression. It’s a scary story.
Each of our rights is part of the protection for the other rights we have. Start pulling them out one by one and there’s no protection left for the remaining rights.
This sort of thing is why we should drop the right/left, conservative/progressive/liberal labels, and just go with “pro-American” and “anti-American.”
Americans are extremists. It’s not taught that way and I think neglecting to acknowledge it leaves many people vulnerable to the “grass is always greener on the other side” dreams. No other country in the world allows as much freedom of expression as we have.
That’s another vital point: freedom of speech is only one aspect of the greater freedom of expression. That’s why the 1st Amendment includes speech, press, religion, petition, and assembly in one statement. Freedom of expression is not limited to utterance, writing, and publication.
All freedoms are tradeoffs. We relinquish securities and order for the precious opportunities of free choice. Without honestly acknowledging those exchanges, political predators can pretend to discover the drawbacks and claim they are damning flaws to be corrected without sacrifice.
In any case, it has been clear for a decade or more that half of Americans no longer support this extreme preference for freedom. They think Europe is better off. Many Europeans believe they are better off too, and support ever more draconian restrictions.
Limited government is not a common inclination. Most human beings want to be ruled by powerful but like-minded judges. Multiculturalism is not sustainable. A people can only pretend not to need a common cultural foundation for so long.
Here’s a telling video of a “teacher” yelling at kids playing catch with a football in a public. She ends up her rant with “I hope you die a long, painful death.” I don’t know if it is TDS or Wuhan Flu Derangement (WFDS), but the fascists are coming out of the woodwork. It used to be that people came together to recover from a natural disaster. I am starting to think this Commie virus is designed to alter the brains of people.
You left out the why part.
Just goes to show that there are things more dangerous than coronavirus. Some of them are university professors.
From the link:
Enlighteningly scary.
This part made me giggle…until I cried.
This entire paragraph in uncritical narrative regurgitation. (You can tell because it goes [on] with “As Barack Obama noted…) I had to stop there…this is just inane stupidity. I may never read anlother offering from The Atlantic.
Not surprising; there has been a lot of “thinking” like this on the Left. They are indeed becoming much more blatant about it.
YouTube…a subsidiary of Google…has stated that they will take down any videos about Covid-19 that contradict WHO recommendations.
On January 14, WHO tweeted that: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel Coronavirus” So I guess that if this YouTube policy had then been in effect, they would have taken down any video suggesting that human-to-human transmission *was* a risk.
Or they control the press… look at NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN… all have lost credibility
The bill of rights is a restraint on government power not an incitement for citizens to act.
The protection of individual liberty and property rights is quintessentially American (Frederic Bastiat).
Do we have to use phones to track and trace?
What about ankle bracelets?
Or that key device they use for drunk drivers?
the road to tyranny:
no free press
stifle political dissent
very strict gun control laws
I’m not so sure about growth in knowledge… there has been growth of words and opinions but I’m not so sure about knowledge…
I thought that was obvious. The political conflict in the U.S. today is not between one group that tend to be conservative, and one group that tend to be liberal or progressive. It is between one group that has some degree of commitment to American ideals (such freedom of speech/press, etc), and another group that has some degree of hostility to such. The first group are often called conservatives, Republicans, or dangerous alt-right-wing white supremacists. The latter are called left, liberal, progressive, woke, or The Atlantic. Naturally, there are people on both sides that identify as libertarians, or as many other labels.
The presumption, of course, is that America is a creedal nation. Those hostile to the creed may be American by legal citizenship (or not), but are anti-American by their beliefs and actions.
<Devil’s advocate mode on>
Or is isolation causing mental degeneration to the point at which ridiculous ideas seem reasonable to them?
<Devil’s advocate mode off>
They’re all Pravda and TASS now . . .
This essay is quite shocking, especially as the lead author is Jack Goldsmith. I don’t know Goldsmith or his work, but he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution — along with Peter Robinson, Richard Epstein, and other Ricochet contributors. It is surprising, to me, to find that he is at the Hoover Institution.
Then what was their excuse before?
Interesting that all the authors can see is harm in free speech, and thus why they apparently think greater control of such speech is needed. As I read the article, they don’t even acknowledge the good that comes from free speech.
I also note that new technologies are put to use to counter past attempts to control communication. The printing press meant information could be disseminated by people free of the restrictions imposed by the powerful who had large numbers of scribes under their control. The photocopier meant information could be disseminated by people free of the restrictions imposed by the powerful who controlled the capital investment needed for a printing press. The fax machine meant information could be disseminated by people free of the restrictions of the powerful who controlled physical distribution networks. Digital communications meant information could be distributed by people free of the restrictions of the powerful who controlled the telephone network.
I don’t know what will allow people to distribute information free of the restrictions of the powerful who currently control digital communication networks, and it may take a while, but history suggests that trying to control the flow of information to prevent perceived harm is not likely to be a long term success.
I don’t think you all are understanding what these two are arguing. The authors are not expressing pleasure with the developments they describe. What they are saying is that the private sector has managed to achieve in the West what authoritarian governments have achieved elsewhere: the collection of massive amounts of data on all of us and increasing control over what we are allowed to see. They argue that there are inherent problems with digital information that have led to this crisis. Read the whole thing, or just these final five paragraphs or any one of them.
Apple and google have told critics that their partnership will end once the pandemic subsides. Facebook has said that its aggressive censorship practices will cease when the crisis does. But when COVID-19 is behind us, we will still live in a world where private firms vacuum up huge amounts of personal data and collaborate with government officials who want access to that data. We will continue to opt in to private digital surveillance because of the benefits and conveniences that result. Firms and governments will continue to use the masses of collected data for various private and social ends.
The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded, the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.
The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.
COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. At the moment, activists are pressuring Google and Apple to build greater privacy safeguards into their contact-tracing program. Yet the legal commentator Stewart Baker has argued that the companies are being too protective—that existing privacy accommodations will produce “a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracking infections.” Even some ordinarily privacy-loving European governments seem to agree with the need to ease restrictions for the sake of public health, but the extent to which the platforms will accommodate these concerns remains unclear.
We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.
@philo Perhaps you should have read just past Barack Obama. You would have seen this: Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. This is the more-or-less conservative argument that the Russians did not elect Trump, nor were they trying to. Rather they were trying to make our election look illegitimate. In that they succeeded, probably beyond even their dreams.
With all the talk about Russia and social media, people have tended to ignore the much more serious influence campaign being carried out by the Chinese regime, which is largely based on things other than social media. China’s economic power is much greater than that of Russia; this gives them great influence over things like American movies, the producers of which do not want to include anything that might foreclose the very large Chinese market to them. Something like 86 “Confucius Institutes,” sponsored by the Chinese government, are present on American university campuses. Businesses of all types go to great lengths to avoid offending the Chinese regime; see for example this appalling story about Bloomberg.
See my related post So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?
I didn’t read the article (my Google Chrome ad blocker won’t let me in). I agree with the five paragraphs quoted unequivocally. We are in big trouble because of the data being amassed. As much as I admire American businesses, they really sold us out on this. They might as well work for the government.
I read a chilling book about this two years ago by William Ammerman: The Invisible Brand. I wish everyone in America would read it.
Thanks…but to be clear, I did read the entire paragraph. I stand by my assessment…it is crap. Poorly written crap (intentional?)…but crap, nonetheless.
First, focus on sentence you cite. The kernel of truth: Russia executed a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy during the 2016 election. It had no effect at all on the actual voting in the election. Beyond that, Russia did not “use” it for anything, in fact Russia did nothing with it, all of this “disrupt the legitimacy” (whatever that silly construct is supposed to mean) crap was done by domestic political operatives aligned with the loosing party well after the election was over. With that more proper understanding the next sentence [is] equally nonsensical:
What? How? What the ever loving effff are they talking about?
Sorry, but with all due respect, I don’t see this as “more-or-less the conservative anything”…again, it appears to be nothing but uncritical narrative regurgitation to me.
I do appreciate that by stopping where I did I may not have gathered the full intent of the authors but getting past the intellectual emptiness of this one paragraph is proving to be difficult for me.
The authors exactly do NOT say the Russians had any effect on voting. That was the Progressive “argument.” But the Russians surely did cause the election to be viewed as illegitimate, or at least contribute to that sense. Russian experts like David Satter noted at the time that this was Russia’s goal when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Russia wasn’t trying to elect Hillary, but rather that “Russia’s actions are consistent instead with an attempt to turn Americans against each other and sow distrust between the president and the American intelligence services.” And the Russians did exploit our “relatively unregulated digital network,” and did a lot of damage, so that is a problem, no?
@philo By the way, why did the authors quote Barack Obama? It seems pretty clear that it is because the quote shows him admitting that the Russian efforts were not “elaborate” or “sophisticated,” just enough to be extremely troublesome (to this day). Why would you quote a conservative when you can cite Obama himself ?
The problem isn’t what the Russians did; it’s what the American media did with what the Russians did. The America media (maybe I should call it the anti-American “American” media) decided to become stooges for Russia and create the effect that Russia may have wanted but didn’t do themselves. If the media hadn’t bought, amplified, and rearranged what the Russians did, what the Russians did would have remained the insignificant blip on the landscape that it really was.
At the same time, the whole idea of a pluralistic society is under serious attack. Here’s an example: Whitney Tilson–a retired hedge fund manager, nonreligious/Jewish–decided to help out Samaritan’s Purse. Read about the reactions he got.
Well sure, indict the American media, too, but the Russians and other of our enemies make trouble wherever they can, and certainly over the internet, which is now where the American media lives.
This comes from the mindset that many believe there is no such thing as valid disagreement , the left is good and the right is evil so any means at all can be used to fight it.