When Does a "Fake" Pandemic Become "Real"?

You might want to learn about the first amendment before wondering if it’s being violated. That would save everyone time.

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I think Dems could use a lesson in it, that’s for damn sure.

Maybe there’s no money in it.

Liberal in the classical sense. Which means fascist and racist today.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a liberal sentiment but today’s so called liberals, with their cancel culture and fragile egos, can’t see their beliefs coexisting with contradictory ones. Hence, terms like micro-aggression and micro-assault. Ideas they disagree with are literally physical offenses as they cause them physical distress.

Yes, the educated. Look at Antifa and tell me how well educated they are. Look at BLM and ask yourself the same thing. Thomas Sowell is well educated; the founders of BLM are not.

But, on the bright side, they are not extremists who don’t believe in reality.

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I have a question, what are you considering a ‘denier’?

Being a nut does not supersede your first amendment rights. Certainly, there are plenty of psychic nut jobs not being censored. They just happen to support the cult ideology of Intersectionality.
The idea behind freedom of speech is to protect even the speech you don’t like or disagree with.
If you do not like what she said, you are free to contradict it. But it should not be repressed.

It utterly floors me that being liberal or Democrat today means you have to support the suppression of speech. Didn’t people use to claim the DNC is the party of free speech? Or did I confuse it with being the party of slavery and Jim Crow? Wait… Oh!

Sure, a racially, culturally and ideological pure society is always going to function more smoothly. And it doesn’t hurt that the population is pretty damn small on top of that. That shit is easy, Japan is much the same way. Even with a larger population, but still racially, ideologically, and culturally homogeneous.

The challenge comes when you have a racially, ideologically, and culturally diverse society that all have to share a country. The problems and clashes become infinitely more complex. What works for some doesn’t work for others, but you want to somehow make it work. That was the idea behind the Constitution a list of rules to constrain the government, not the people. Was it perfect? Nope, that’s why the government was designed to be adversarial and the Constitution editable. Not easily editable, but editable.

But the founders also knew that there had to be some lines that cannot be crossed and hence we had the Bill of Rights. But now that seems to be in jeopardy. Now, of all things, the 1st amendment is being tested. People seem to be celebrating the shutting down the voices of dissent with raucous applause. And it all seems to be coming from the left.
Yet, to few people seemed concerned. After all, it was one nut job here another there, and more and more people are being censored, still too few care. But if you think it will stop with conservatives, you are mistaken.
The problem with a slippery-slope, is once you start down the path, you always end up at the bottom.

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Plenty of countries that have these things function worse (sometimes far worse, see Somalia) than the US. I hear this as the reason for Norway succeeding, but plenty of other countries have a homogenous society, and fare worse than the US. IMO, it is something else.

Are those being censored spreading potentially dangerous misinformation? I haven’t seen (not saying it hasn’t happened) conservatives being censored for things outside of misinformation. Hodge twins are still on YouTube, I have watched Fox News clips. IMO, the censoring seems to be focused on guys like Alex Jones. IMO, he says so many verifiable false things, and crosses the line into libel so frequently that he deserves it. He should be free to self publish his material (still will be susceptible to libel law suits and such), but I don’t think YouTube has a responsibility to display his material.

No doubt, just about every nation in the world is far worse than the U.S. But, homogeneous countries are easier to run because virtually everybody is on the same page.
Somalia is what ANTIFA is shooting for…

It doesn’t matter. All misinformation is potentially dangerous and there is a metric shit-ton of it on twitter, probably most if it is misinformation. People still have a write to speak and inform or misinform. Supposedly authoritative sources lie with impunity all the time. And you don’t combat bad information with suppression, you combat it with more information.

You calling the Hodge Twins, potentially dangerous misinformation? Racist! (I kid.)
Alex Jones nor Farrakhan should be banned on supposedly open platforms. But to answer your question, yes increasingly even moderate conservatives and some centrist liberals have been suspended or banned on these platforms.
I don’t know if you payed attention to the twitter hacks, but what did leak out was twitter’s administrative panel. They can shadow ban, the can search block, lock, demonetize, etc. In other words they can do all sorts of stuff Jack Dorsey told congress his company does not do.

Youtube has to make a decision, either they are a ‘platform’ with the same rules for everybody or they are a ‘publisher’ where they control the content. If they pick the latter, that will end them.

Personally, I think it’s high time to anti-trusts the mega-platforms like Alphabet (Google, youtube, Waze, etc. etc.), Facebook, twitter, Amazon. The control of information is mostly controlled by a handful of people. Literally 4 people control most of the information in the U.S. particularly, and the world. The rest of it is controlled by China… talk about a nightmare situation.

Yeah. The English found out it was easy to run a colony of Brits.

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I watch their videos for more perspective. I miss the lifting videos though. I don’t see anything in their lifting or political videos that would cause censorship.

I agree to this.

I am for them being open platform, but I also recognize they have a right to be a publisher. Just like Twitter, FB, Insta has that right…

This always gets me, too. I am always surprised that those that seem to say “what about freedom of speech?” the most often have never taken the time to understand what it means.

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I see some places like Miami have new laws mandating masks outside, this makes no sense. Mandatory masks inside businesses is one thing, but this i totally ridiculous.

Mask traps:

One woman, Johanna Gianni, says she removed her mask in the parking lot of a Publix grocery store in North Miami Beach, when a police officer approached her and wrote her a ticket for not wearing a mask. Gianni told the Herald the parking lot was nearly empty and that she felt set up by police.

Dean Gonzalez was fined while leaving a North Miami Beach Publix because his mask didn’t cover his nose. The encounter was captured on video; in it, an officer can be heard telling Gonzalez that improper mask usage is as bad as not wearing a mask at all. Gonzalez accused the cops of setting up a “mask trap” and said that they threatened him with arrest if he didn’t sign the ticket he was issued.

The Herald article includes several other examples of people being fined while wearing masks, including a customer at a barber shop who lowered his mask to take a sip of water right as a police officer entered the business.

Cool, I think we are mostly on the same page.
Just realize that ‘platform’ and ‘publisher’ are two different standards under the law. Being a ‘platform’ protects a company from retribution from people who get hurt on the platform. Once they become a publisher, they lose that right and they then are open to lawsuits from every member.
It’s called Code 230 protection. What this law does, is protect open platforms, say like this one, from being sued if some member is hurt, bothered, doxed, or otherwise ‘injured’ by another member. But it requires that these platforms have a level playing field where everybody is treated equally with in the guidelines.
When you start to misapply the guidelines unfairly, targeting some people for violations while others who do virtually the same things are not affected based on ideology, race, gender, religion, politics, sex, national origin, etc, you run then run the risk of being a publisher who can be sued.
So say your kid was bullied on Facebook and the kid ended up committing suicide, as a platform Facebook cannot be sued. If that status changes to ‘publisher’, every parent who can make a claim of Facebook bullying can sue Facebook and therefore bury them.
A lot of people think 230 reform is necessary, when these oligarchs start discriminating political speech. I agree, but I also deem these companies monopolies, i.e. nobody can reasonably compete with them in the space these companies own.
I want to see 230 reform and anti-trust suits brought against these tech giants. There is waaaaay too much power in the hands of very few people. I just don’t see how that is not dangerous.

Look up classical liberalism from the enlightenment/Renaissance.

That is liberal. What we see in politics now is leftism/prison gangs.

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Oil. BTW, Norwegians like their neighbors Swedes were borderline starving in mid 19th century. They didn’t settle in Minnesota and Wisconsin without a reason.

That was the problem. Both the army officers and members of the UK political establishment had a problem with fighting fellow Englishmen, not to mention the nascent public opinion. Had the colonists not been English, they would have been subjected to much harsher measures (see Indian Mutiny and the Second Boer War) and probably roundly defeated.

I buy that (oil) as being a component of the large scale of their success. However, Sweden which doesn’t have much oil has savings, not debt IIRC. IMO, management of their income and government is part of the equation.

I probably wouldn’t be here if not for Scandinavian immigration to my state.

I agree with this. We will see what happens down the line. Will the extreme ideas of the far left cause a good percent of the classic liberals to switch, is the GOP also so extreme in their views to prevent it? Not sure.

I’ve seen a lot of pressure to form an independent/centrist party from people I know who were a good mix of both but not far to the left or right.

They’re seeing both parties as not representative of their views, which also seems pretty accurate to me.

I have no idea if “the Dems” need a lesson in it or not. But you not knowing what it is was what I was talking about and why I said you needed to brush up on it before talking about it.

Maybe as much as it floors me that small government conservatives demand that companies can’t make their own decisions here. Again what you’re really arguing for is that Trump should be able to pick the platform he wants to use and lie and that the issue isn’t with Trump lying all the time but that he is corrected on the platform he lies on (which isn’t a free speech violation). It’s not a problem that the President of the United States during a pandemic is giving credence to theories and misinformation by people who believe our problems are from dream fucking demons. The problem is the site that says no we aren’t ok with this being the message sent out.

Lol that one never gets old. Hey remember when the people who hated black people were Dems and not Republican?

I don’t necessarily disagree but we talked about this on another thread and again everyone hammers Facebook and Twitter but neither of those are growing and if something like that was going to happen it would have made more sense when they were bigger (speaking only of those two). Your avenues for speech online are beyond numerous. Again what you really want to say is the President should be able to lie and spread demonstrably false medical information during a pandemic and a company shouldn’t be allowed to say we don’t want that happening. It’s not that people don’t have tons of outlets other than Twitter. That’s just what he prefers. It’s not even them changing everything he says. He has thousands of tweets with no changes ever.

It’s also odd for the right to have no problem saying this small amount of companies need broken up or controlled by the government but have no problem at all with a small amount of people controlling the majority of wealth in the country. Seems like either both would be bad or fine to me.