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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
So we (accidentally) import a Chinese virus, and now we “need” to import Chinese totalitarian control? Not just no, but hell no!
Do these super genius writers realized that when they are advocating for the government to have all this power, they will be giving Donald Trump power to censor the internet and act like a dictator? At least then I could start my new career of hunting and oppressing social justice warriors as the Man. You see, that’s the problem about incredible dictatorial powers – you might not be the dictator. You might be the guy getting dragged out of his office and made to disappear.
That’s one way to destroy any remaining credibility of the WHO.
The speech-controllers at YouTube, Facebook, etc….if we give the most benign explanation to their behavior…seem to be thinking about Americans only as Consumers, who must be protected from harming themselves based on dangerous misinformation…and not a Citizens, who make the ultimate decisions about public policy.
The argument being made here…that the citizen is an officer of the state…makes a lot of sense to me, and is very relevant in this context.
I haven’t seen any of that damage.
I seriously doubt their goal had any such specificity. They just wanted to promote chaos. How is this different than anything they have done in any other previous American presidential election?
Please define what you mean by “exploit” and specify what damage was done specifically and directly by the Russians and their two-bit phishing trip.
Again, please cite specifically how the hit-and-run phishing attack has in-and-of-itself been troublesome.
Thanks in advance.
Sandy, I did read the whole thing, admittedly quickly. In part, I think that you are right, and that the authors are pointing out that some major private platforms are behaving rather like Chinese censors. But they also seem to be advocating that our government do the same thing as China:
This last part is most disturbing. They want government to “play a large role” in the “[s]ignificant monitoring and speech control” that are “inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet.” This really seems to be saying that our government should act like the Chinese censors, too.
There is an alternative, I think, which is to require the major platforms to allow free speech. If they do not, they lose their immunity from suit, which was only granted on the premise that they were mere platforms, not publishers choosing content.
These authors do not advocate the free-speech alternative, as far as I can tell.
I agree. I lean toward this simple language always, when it becomes necessary to refer to one or the other of the sides in the cultural, political, and spiritual war that we are engaged in.
But “pro-American” can be read as either
So I either describe the two warring factions as “liberal” and “anti-liberal”, or I use my preferred term–“American”–and qualify it, to make it clear that I refer to adherence to a certain belief system, not to some national group who are concerned only about helping themselves and hurting or destroying every other tribe.
Given Sandy’s explanation (I still haven’t read further myself) this may not be a good example of that danger.
From Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News:
The youtube video from Dr Dan Ericskson and Dr Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care of Bakersfield, CA., which criticized the logic of whether California’s stay at home coronavirus order is necessary, has been deleted by Youtube, a subsidiary of Google, Inc. for violating Youtube’s terms of service after racking up 3 million views.
The video said:
In the clip, Erickson asserts that there is only a “0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California,”prompting him to ask:
iWe,
The jackass at the Atlantic is so wrong here that it is hard to decide where to start. He fundamentally doesn’t understand the nature of a Marxist totalitarian state. For anyone educated after the fall of the Soviet Union, this is like a post-holocaust Jew not grasping the nature of the Nazi regime.
A free society is all that stands between us and a genocidal monstrous horror that could never produce a gram of prosperity on its own and will produce mass death because it has no respect for the moral choice of the individual. The Atlantic deserves contempt for allowing this pathetic piece of intellectual tripe the space to spew forth his stupidity. China is completely wrong about the net, about the virus, about the murderous tyranny & destruction of its own citizens, about the extortion & aggression it is exercising against its neighboring states.
Kevin Williamson is so very lucky not to be at the Atlantic. The Atlantic is rotting from the head and stinks to high heaven.
Regards,
Jim
Yeah, that’s the line where you yeet them into the Negative Zone. The people who define “society’s norms and values” for the purposes of control and coercion, however that’s manifested, never advocate the Norms and Values of today, but the bleeding edge of what they believe the Norms and Values should be.
The Norms and Values of most people include things like “well, uh, no, men can’t have babies,” but the Norms and Values of Twitter disagree. The Norms and Values of this country are more culturally Christian than any other religion; would they demand government play a large role to ensure that a flourishing, mature internet reflects those ideas? Insert Bugs Bunny “it is to laugh” gif here.
On second thought, maybe they would; don’t know their politics. But the culture is ever yanked from its foundation by those who are the most keen to school the rubes and make the moral laggards shut up, and they’re the ones who will set the rules in the end.
If we were to do this, let’s start with anyone and everyone who has ever written for the Atlantic.
China? Of all the countries in the world, they used China as their standard for regulating social media? Is there no regulation in Europe? Either they’re trolling for page clicks or yes, the inner Commie is indeed busting out on the Left. So many things about this crises they don’t ever want to end. Dependency, lockdown, massive borrowing, end of sports/church, etc.
No.
I’m not sure what “damage” is, other than what we do to ourselves.
They’re often the ones finding themselves in a basement room, with a floor slightly tilted toward a sewer drain, wondering why the guards are telling them to stand against the wall, and to shut up.
#Lubyanka
That’s how government ensures that people’s actions are compatible with a society’s norms and values.
Many on the right have increasingly gone along with the general thrust of centralization for about 100 years. I rather suspect all prosperous successful places began as bottom up and once a more successful group became relatively more wealthy they centralized power which works but corrupts and eventually over concentrates and causes civilization death. It’s interesting that recovering from such death is rare. The Brits were too diverse and spread out, with too many rivers estuaries and usable port like coasts to control contraband, and didn’t get control for most of its history, and free internal trade was born. Our founders studied it and explicitly adopted means to guarantee that the center never gained self destroying control. However, just look at the centralized Washington bureaucracy. It’s good at what it does, probably better than local folks, but it’s abstract at best, always seeped in self interest because as competent as they may appear, they’re human and we already see the rot. Our current massive impossibly diverse economy is thought by centralizers to need central control, but it’s just the opposite. It can’t be controlled nor does it need it, but big is bigger and that’s the issue. The struggle is now more obvious because the virus has provided the centralizers a new leverage.
I’m nervous about this potential solution. If Ricochet deletes certain posts or comments for offensiveness, would that make it a Publisher, and hence subject to liability for anything published on the platform?
There is actually a precedent for this: the Stratton Oakmont case, in which an on-line service (I believe it was Prodigy) was found liable for comments posted there which supposedly defamed a brokerage…the consequence was that web hosting services felt very constrained in getting rid of unwanted customers, for example, a highly offensive and unpleasant-to-deal-with porn site, for fear of being reclassified as a publisher and finding themselves liable for everything hosted on the site.
There may be another alternative. In the days of “company towns”…for example, a mining site remote from other towns, where all land & buildings were owned by the mining companies…courts found that even though the owner was a private entity, they were required to offer some form of “public square” free speech.
Interesting. I hope these proposals get a lot of discussion.
In addition, I would like to governments enact policies by which they will not use social media that censor political speech. For example, if any social media platform censors speech that contradicts official government policy, then governments should refuse to make use of those platforms for their own communication with the public.
I like this thinking.
The internet freed authors and muscians to self-publish their works, bypassing the traditional publishers and music labels. The internet also freed individuals to become their own reporters and pundits, which is currently what digital platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are trying to shut down because of the “wrong” viewpoints being put forward. Human being are clever and coniving. They’ll find a way around the digital censorship wall somehow . . .
Probably with members of ricochet, but I have an acquaintance who will proudly tell anyone that his “guru for economic matters is Paul Krugman” and his “guru for moral and social issues is David Brooks”. He admitted that he “is a bit tribal” and being slow on the uptake, I didn’t understand at first.
They will, but it doesn’t matter. As long as you can fool some of the people some of the time, you stand a good chance of attaining your political objectives.
add to that undermine the family structure and discredit religion.
@arizonapatriot See my comments at #20, #21, #25, and #26 If you agree, you may feel a bit better. I do think, though, that the article was too easy to misread, and that they might have been more clear in making their argument. I watched last night as Tucker Carlson, who also misread them, slammed them (without naming them) and also slammed the Atlantic.
Well, to my understanding, you can police comments to some extent without becoming a publisher. For example, you can obviously remove illegal content like child porn or fraud. Other stuff, like obscene content, true threats, advertising spam, etc.
On the Xi-ification of Harvard University: John Batchelor interviews Professor Arthur, a career Harvard academic. Do we really need students from the PRC, now a publicly declared hostile power?
I do not think that the critics here are misreading the article. Although as you document most of the text describes the organic growth of censorship, the key paragraph unequivocally states the opinion that liberty (the United States) is wrong and censorship is right, and that more censorship would be a good thing. The authors even chose that opinion to be the subtitle for the article (and I’m pretty sure writers of magazine articles have more say on headlines than to newspaper reporters). If the conclusions I and the other critics here is a misreading of the magazine piece, I suggest then the authors did a poor job of constructing their writing.
@iwe and @philo and (almost) all: Rather than answering the points some of you have made against my argument, I will refer you to the authors’ response, which is on the Hoover website. It was pretty obvious that they would be misinterpreted and roundly attacked because their writing is overly subtle, in my opinion.
They begin their response by saying that “Neither of us has ever written anything that has been as misinterpreted as this piece in the Atlantic.”
I will just quote one paragraph, but of course there is a lot more.
If you read the article, you will see that we do not remotely endorse China-style surveillance and censorship, or claim that the United States should adopt China’s practices. The piece was meant as a wake-up call about how coronavirus surveillance and speech-control efforts were part of a pattern rather than a break in one, and why, and what the stakes were.
Let us try again. (We will be also discussing these issues on a Lawfare live event tomorrow.)
Interesting. The more they post the less I like these guys.
Rather than respond to the nonresponsive comment (and the doubling down on the offensive material in the linked response), I will just bow out with my impression of these busy bodies:
By the way, I don’t think the guards usually tell them to stand against a wall. Maybe I just got this idea from Arthur Koestler, but the usual technique is to have the prisoner walk along, sometimes in a dank underground passage, and shoot him in the back of the head as he walks around a corner or as you let him take a few steps away from you. Wherever I first got that idea long ago, that’s usually pretty close to the technique portrayed in Russian movies of the Perestroika era and beyond. The closest portrayal to your description was in a long television series based on the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre (Once Upon a Time in Rostov). After the trial where the factory leaders of the protest were sentenced to death, the worker who ratted on them was told to go take a shower after his hard day’s work, and was shot while he was enjoying his shower. The first part of that series seems to be a reasonable depiction of the history as far as we know it, but I’m not sure this execution was part of the actual history. Might have been.