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Shameful Display of Anarchy and Violence

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21 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

Yep. You just explained how it is false that only the left has broad free-speech protections.

Really? You think that the near-100% support of the Left by businesses and publishers is all free and consensual?

Let's assume for a minute that there was no election fraud and that Biden won. Even given that assumption, he didn't win by 95% to 5% or anything, it was more like 51% to 49%.

If that is the case, why aren't the businesses and publishers also split 51% to 49%? That would make sense, right?

Instead, there are a very few brave publishers on the Right side -- and they have to fight just to stay in business.

If it's really 51% to 49% then the publishers on the Right should be doing almost as well as the ones on the Left, since they have nearly the same number of customers. But they are not. Why not?

There is such a thing as "indirect coercion," and there's plenty of evidence that it is happening here.

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2 hours ago, necrovore said:

If it's really 51% to 49% then the publishers on the Right should be doing almost as well as the ones on the Left, since they have nearly the same number of customers. But they are not. Why not?

Different demographics. They should be different. What you said is like when a woke leftist argues that if a company has 5% black employees, and the population of the US is 15% black, racism must be the cause of the difference. 

 

Edited by Eiuol
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12 hours ago, Eiuol said:

All in all, she got exactly what she deserved ... She probably didn't deserve to die ...

This doesn't make sense. If she deserved to be shot then she deserved to die. Police don't usually shoot to wound. They shoot to stop you cold. In this case, the exterior door guards moved away and let the mob continue breaking down the door. The lady was then shot by a guard inside the door. She was just someone at the front of the mob. The guy inside probably killed her to send a message to the others. I don't blame the cop and I don't blame her for storming the capitol and breaking down the door. This is political conflict between two hostile sides. And people die in violent political struggles.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/video-shows-fatal-shooting-of-ashli-babbitt-at-u-s-capitol/2535527/

Edited by MisterSwig
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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

Different demographics. They should be different. What you said is like when a woke leftist argues that if a company has 5% black employees, and the population of the US is 15% black, racism must be the cause of the difference.

Good point.

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1 hour ago, MisterSwig said:

This doesn't make sense. If she deserved to be shot then she deserved to die.

I admit that this is hard to word correctly. I'm trying to distinguish between shooting to kill, and shooting as a way to repel someone. That part is easy enough, but sometimes shooting to repel a person implies shooting them in a highly risky manner that includes death, and the risk is justified by its proportion to the attempted violation of rights. I would say that the risk of death was equal for both of them, but since she initiated, she was at fault and deserved to have the dice rolled. But bad luck isn't deserved or not. 

Edited by Eiuol
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7 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

This is political conflict between two hostile sides. And people die in violent political struggles.

Next we'll say a domestic violence case is a violent political struggle because the husband was a communist and the wife was a capitalist.

It can't be as simple as someone illegally entering and being shot by police.

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I suppose on the "speech has consequences" front, Glenn Greenwald has written a pretty good article citing a 1982 Supreme Court case which ruled that, if you speak, you can't automatically be held legally responsible for "inciting" the actions of people who commit violence, of their own will, as a result of your speech.

Quote

These calls for censorship, online and official, are grounded in the long-discredited, oft-rejected and dangerous view that a person should be held legally accountable not only for their own illegal actions but also for the consequences of their protected speech: meaning the actions others take when they hear inflammatory rhetoric. That was the distorted mentality used by the State of Mississippi in the 1970s to try to hold NAACP leaders liable for the violent acts of their followers against boycott violators after hearing rousing pro-boycott speeches from NAACP leaders, only for the Supreme Court in 1982 to unanimously reject such efforts on the ground that "while the State legitimately may impose damages for the consequences of violent conduct, it may not award compensation for the consequences of nonviolent, protected activity," adding that even "advocacy of the use of force or violence does not remove speech from the protection of the first amendment."

The same legal reasoning would apply to Donald Trump. Even if some people were inspired to violence as a result of his speech, his speech is still protected under the First Amendment.

The same reasoning applies to Stephen King, too, who has written (decades ago now) about how a very small number of his fans have turned out to be creepy serial killers and such. Even if such people find Stephen King inspiring, that is not Stephen King's fault. I'm sure he'd rather not have them as fans. But, importantly, he is not legally liable for their illegal actions, either.

Luckily he wasn't dragged into court, the way the band Judas Priest was, when two of their fans committed suicide and it was alleged that their music "caused" the suicides. (The band won that case.)

I'm sure that Donald Trump has had some fans that he'd rather not have.

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On 1/9/2021 at 7:43 AM, Easy Truth said:

Also, if Trump had not divided the Republicans they most likely would have won Georgia and the Senate.

Well then, if they didn't have the bigger picture and the greater value in mind - holding the Senate - those divided Republicans will get, have gotten, what's coming to them.

I'd think it was somewhat more the Republicans who allowed themselves a division rather than Trump 'dividing' them.

Impossible to estimate, when one speaks of -the cause- of who and what a population will vote for, and why. It is seldom a rational choice by the individual when frenzied emotions are stirred up by the media. Again, as seen with the pandemic and nation-wide rioting, the Left taking full advantage of bad circumstances to empower itself.

That it all came down to a single state was - unfortunate.

Edited by whYNOT
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16 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Retaliation of some kind was justified, but it wasn't proportional. My opinion is the same as it was back then. 

 

If the effort to subdue a resisting suspect/criminal with increasing brute force leads to his death, I'd think still, that's a dereliction of a cop's duty and excessive force. In this case, all the cop had to go on was trespass by an individual. The woman wasn't resisting arrest. She wasn't a clear and present threat to anyone. So this is much worse and amounts to gratuitous use of maximum force. Only that I don't know if the cop's finger slipped on his trigger in his nervousness, or what the full situation was, do I hesitate to call this killing cold-blooded. 

Edited by whYNOT
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And reverse the circumstances. A Democrat supporter shot dead while thousands protested at the Capitol against Trump.

The media: Of course that was his/her democratic right to be in there! A foul murder caused by Fascist Trump's police state! Defund the Police!

And if the victim would have been black, subsequent events would be predictable.

Intellectuals have all allowed constant, double standards by the left to prevail.

Edited by whYNOT
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1 hour ago, whYNOT said:

 Only that I don't know if the cop's finger slipped on his trigger in his nervousness, or what the full situation was, do I hesitate to call this killing cold-blooded. 

I take this back. I watched the video and a clearer case of a cold-blooded killing there can't be. You see the firearm go up, be leveled and fired directly at the woman, through the glass from point blank range.

Edited by whYNOT
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8 hours ago, whYNOT said:

She wasn't a clear and present threat to anyone.

There was a mob. They were pounding on the windows and trying to break the windows. They were yelling. Many of them saw the gun, and shouted that they saw it (good indication that the guard was ready to resist with force). On the video, we don't know if the guard shouted anything, and we don't know if anyone in the mob had a visible gun. It was also reported that she shouted "Go go!" before being lifted up over whatever barrier (which you can see happening in the video). Only then did she get shot.

Your characterization is misleading. You aren't wrong about what happened, but you make it sound like she was standing by the door on the sidelines, not pushing her way in. There were clear warnings from everyone, all around her, yet she still insisted on making her way in. That reveals intent on her part to be in that dangerous situation, even on the front lines. No, the intent doesn't on its own answer if deadly force against her was justified, but it does show how she wasn't a bystander observing the situation.

All these facts are sufficient to indicate a threat. She was not merely trespassing. If she was only trespassing, I would agree with you. Furthermore, this was a mob approaching, not only one individual, meaning that whatever threat the mob showed, she showed as well. If force would protect you from an approaching mob as well as the specific individual approaching you, force is appropriate (in proportion of course). 

Edited by Eiuol
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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

There was a mob...

I agree with that analysis. Even though I think the representatives had it coming, the people in the capitol at the time still had a right to defend themselves against the mob. Anyone, including the representatives, has the right to self-defense. One might make a case that the assault on the capitol was itself an act of self-defense, depending on what the protest leaders were saying about the representatives. But motivations are complex and various within a large group. I guess they generally wanted to rage against Congress. Whether each individual had a valid reason for raging is beyond me. Some probably did. Some probably didn't. Does the breakdown matter? How would you determine such a thing? Are their reasons automatically invalid because they support Trump? Why is that? At what point do we say that any group of individualists would be justified in storming the capitol?

The fact that this mob was not well-organized indicates to me that it was comprised mostly of individualists seeking some outlet for their frustrations against the government.

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Trump attacked Secretary of State Raffensperger and Governor Kemp and pressured Senators Loeffler and Perdue to join in such attacks.  Trump contributed a lot to division within the Republican party.

Trump also encouraged Republicans to mistrust the electoral process, thereby reducing turnout.

Trump also distracted voters from the runoff with his endless talk of a stolen election, even spending a speech which was supposed to plug Loeffler to instead rehash his stolen election claims.

The Perdue-Ossoff election was very close and the Loeffler-Warnock election was pretty close.

It seems very likely that Trump's actions cost the Republicans at least one Senate seat, which would have been enough to make the difference in Senate control.  

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28 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

It seems very likely that Trump's actions cost the Republicans at least one Senate seat, which would have been enough to make the difference in Senate control.  

There's also the theory that since Senator McConnell fought the stimulus checks, that gave the opportunity to the Democrats to "buy votes" with those checks. If Senator McConnell had decided to side with Trump and hand out the checks, the Republicans would have been on a more even footing.

Which is sad, really. Printing checks like that is a violation of the separation of state and economics (which we don't have, but we should want to have). It causes inflation, distorts incentives, and ruins the economy, too.

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On another note, I think banning Parler is shameful behavior on the part of AWS (even if it is legal).

It means that AWS is much less reliable than they advertise themselves to be -- at least for certain people.

I did not realize that Amy Peikoff was the Chief Policy Officer at Parler.

I wonder if companies like Parler should start demanding a contractual guarantee that they won't have their service canceled for lawful conduct, no matter how controversial. Would providers be able to make such a guarantee? A provider that did make such a guarantee could take a lot of business away from providers that didn't make it, especially in these controversial times.

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3 hours ago, necrovore said:

On another note, I think banning Parler is shameful behavior on the part of AWS (even if it is legal).

It means that AWS is much less reliable than they advertise themselves to be -- at least for certain people.

I did not realize that Amy Peikoff was the Chief Policy Officer at Parler.

I wonder if companies like Parler should start demanding a contractual guarantee that they won't have their service canceled for lawful conduct, no matter how controversial. Would providers be able to make such a guarantee? A provider that did make such a guarantee could take a lot of business away from providers that didn't make it, especially in these controversial times.

 

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From one of the linked articles:

A spokesperson for Google confirmed in a statement to Fox News that its "longstanding policies" require that apps with user-generated content have measures in place to remove certain obscene content – including posts that incite violence. Developers agree to those terms...

Ignorance regarding the onus of responsibility for actions alluded to earlier is not common-sense knowledge.

<edit> It is the proliferation of the mindset that communication incites violence, that can lead to greater violence, left unchecked.</edit>

Edited by dream_weaver
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Technologically there is nothing to prevent a person from creating another app and buying servers that are not amazon or google etc.

It may in fact take way Google's stranglehold with google play.

In other words trying to get rid of free speech in this country is going to be like getting rid of a virus. Everyone will have to agree for that to happen and since half of the population does not agree, it will never happen. So these outages are only a temporary issue.

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@Easy Truth

In light of the complaints observed on Facebook and a few other platforms, more emotional capital is being spent whining about how private concerns (like Facebook, Google and others that choose to erect artificial intellectual fences) conduct their affairs than discovering and touting business concerns that would satiate customers that pursue them with service fit rational beings.

Edited by dream_weaver
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