I just want to point out, that on the screen cap from the tweet they quoted, the Parler post was from 9 secs ago. Maybe it's legit or maybe not, think of it what you will.
I'm getting a little tired of seeing this specious meme floating around. It's barely more sensical than the one that Parler is a free speech zone.
The reason for the Amazon ban is not the simple fact that Parler had people making threats. Per Amazon's email to Parler, it's that they had seen an on-going escalation of credible (much more so than the two tweets you linked) incitements to violence, Parler had a history of dragging its feet about responding to specific complaints about infringing content, Parler failed to furnish a tenable plan for how to implement an effective content moderation policy, and public communication by executives indicated that they had no good-faith intent to do so.
Furthermore, while I agree that Twitter doesn't do as great a job at stuff like this as one would like, either, this is just a really ill-chosen place for Parler's supporters to try and make their stand. The cast iron pot does not help its case by calling the steel kettle black.
> Parler had a history of dragging its feet about responding to specific complaints about infringing content, Parler failed to furnish a tenable plan for how to implement an effective content moderation policy, and public communication by executives indicated that they had no good-faith intent to do so.
So, I don't think I could have explained the key thing that's different about Twitter any better than it was done in this evening's court filing from Amazon:
Parler’s Complaint is replete with insinuations that AWS had equal grounds to suspend Twitter’s account and thus discriminated against Parler. . . But AWS does not host Twitter’s feed, so of course it could not have suspended access to Twitter’s content.
That's ok, I'm just asking the question in general. It's not that Amazon just decided to do it out of nowhere, people demanded it. So shouldn't Twitter be shut down by their cloud service provider, DDOS protection provider, domain registrar, payment processor or whatever service they do business with? Because I don't see anyone arguing for that.
Just as an aside, did they really tried to argue in court that AWS should suspend Twitter too despite not having anything to do with them? Jesus Christ, the incompetence in some of these people.
The problem with JAQing off is that, even when it's done after taking the time to fully understand the situation, that generally isn't evident. So it typically inserts vastly more noise than signal into the discussion.
I don't know. For example, did anyone argued for shutting Facebook down entirely when they refused to remove holocaust denial? I think this is precisely what people mean with this "meme" and it is a fair point.
And even suggesting otherwise furthers the whole, "I reject reality in order to substitute my own narrative that better supports the position I'm trying to take," thing.
And, in this particular context, it's also a non sequitur. Go read the court filings. The story of what actually happened is being told there. It's a public record.
The reason I was asking is because I legitimately haven't seen anyone doing that, which suggested to me that this opinion certainly wasn't anywhere near as popular as the opinion that tech companies should take down basically everything that was ever associated with Trump. Most people generally accept that strictly legally speaking tech companies have a right to shut down anyone they want, as long as it doesn't violate the contract (I personally disagree that it should work like this), but I just don't think that is the point.
Please point to an example from last Summer of large-scale left-wing coordination on Twitter to subvert and/or overthrow our system of government! Bonus points if it resulted in a putsch....
CHAZ was radically smaller in scale and scope. It was a far, far cry from violently storming the nation's capital. I'm not condoning it, but it was never an existential threat to our democracy.
If given the opportunity, do you think the protesters would have burned down the federal courthouse in Portland like they did the third police precinct in Minneapolis?
And we have responded to these near constant threats by providing the president with the best security protection money can buy. Seems reasonable? I don't understand what your point is.
Presumably they get a visit from the Secret Service, which is arguably much worse than a Twitter ban. Meetings with Federal Agents are not exactly easy going under normal circumstances. I can't imagine how it must feel if the the outcome of a poor interview is Federal prison.
It is much worst than what Trump ever said and his tweets got blocked much more quickly... If they want to filter the flow of information, they need to do it equally to everyone.
Impeachment wouldn't strip him of anything (despite the many tweets and stories about it, there is nothing special about a second impeachment).
If he is impeached and the Senate votes to convict, then he will lose benefits. At the moment, however, it is believed that the Secret Service detail will remain in place regardless.
Presumably Congress could strip a former President of those benefits as they have in general in the past, which was then reversed during the Obama administration. I assume they could even strip a specific individual of those benefits while leaving them intact for others.
There's a galaxy-brain idea that the Constitution says you can't be banned from Twitter from accidentally inciting an accidental sacking of the Capitol
People will repeatedly attempt to complain this is unfair by attempting to find 'double standards' - here, the idea is if anyone tweets 'kill trump' and we can find the tweet an hour later, clearly Twitter has a bias towards Duh Dems
Thinking people will find these concerns obviated by the platforms consistently kicking off groups when things turn violent. It's just that the only examples of this until now were international and off most people's radar.
This community has been talking about the problems with social media for years. Breaking up Facebook or Twitter has been a call for ages. What is going on now?
Maybe Twitter should be changed in some dramatic way if they can’t keep these calls for violence off the platform.
As a disclaimer, I know that this is controversial, but I'm against censorship. I think that it's up to the law enforcement to deal with legitimate threats, and S230 exists for this precise reason.
That being said, I can't think of any good solution if you'd like to keep that kind of stuff of your platform. I think it's basically impossible. The only solution that could deal with that amount of posts would be AI. But the problem with AI is that:
1. It's imperfect and generates false positives. There were stories about people being locked out of their Google accounts for no reason, without any possibility to appeal, because their support is also ran by AI.
2. It can get too perfect and thus extremely dangerous in wrong hands. (I think it's already in the wrong hands, but you get the point)
What's also not fine in my opinion is pulling down other services for their inability to deal with such content, when Twitter and Facebook themselves can't keep this stuff out.
I don't know. All I know is that it seems weird that a community that has beaten these drums for years has down an about-face. Every event where businesses have chosen not to work with facebook has been met with cheers, for example.
HN is a lot of people with a lot of different views. Unless you can point to specific individuals, I don’t think you can say “the community” supports anything.
If, after a reasonable amount of time has passed, and they still haven’t been taken down, you’ll have a point then. Otherwise, if it is taken down in a reasonable amount of time, then your point is moot.
What is that period of time, a tweet is only really good for what 4 hours. After that what is the point no one is going to scroll that far. It has been roughly 6 hours now and no action on either of the reported tweets.
So, it’s been a while, and it still hasn’t been taken down, and I fully acknowledge that. However, I would also say that the account has two posts and one follower, so the reach of this post isn’t very wide.
Nonetheless, you have a point, and despite both of us reporting it, it’s still up, and shouldn’t be. In any case, that doesn’t change my point about parler, however, AWS or whoever would be well within their rights to cite this as a mark against Twitter too.
If only there were a well-known, long-standing government agency that would protect the president and investigate threats against government officials. Some sort of service... Y'know, we could give them a cool name like 'Secret Service'. We should've thought about this after multiple early presidents were assassinated. /s
The Secret Service investigates these types of things. What relevance is this to bomb threats at the data center of a company?
I get whataboutitism is retort de jure for anything that touches on politics these days. But at least try harder.
You can and should report them. It typically takes some time and multiple reports till small accounts are locked, but reporting makes it possible at least.
This isn't problematic for a platform that is unmoderated. It's only problematic when the platform is unwilling to respond to user content that represents a clear and present danger.
There are alot more thought and there seem to be no moderation:
@xxx
someone just fuckin kill trump already
6:11 PM · Jan 7, 2021
I removed the username to not expose her.
The problem is that you can close down any site with user generated content and point to your ToS while looking through the fingers concerning sites you like, like Twitter. Imagine having some full time employee generaring illegal content to get your competitors closed down where Twitter are immune. It is way too easy.
The post you linked joined this month (January 2021), a tweet which is very recent, with no likes or retweets, from an account with zero followers. I don't see a good way for Twitter to handle this automatically.
It also isn't a credible threat of violence: It has no specific plans, locations, or times, it does not have the support of thousands of people and high-ranking politicians to gather and enact those plans, etc. If this manifested in a large movement that resulted in serious damage and harm (e.g. like the attacks on the Capitol) then this comparison would be a lot better supported.
Please note that I do not condonce violence of any kind, and I am okay with Parler being shut down. That said, I saw this tweet as a reply
> They are banned from social media because they were inciting violence.
>
> Their platform is being shutdown because they were inciting violence.
>
> And now they are inciting violence because of that?
Some of these angry users obviously don't appreciate being silenced, no matter how awful their message is. I totally get silencing their message if it's threatening someone, but how else can they voice their opposition to Parler being shut down? They become deplatformed, and no one is willing to listen to them or publish their message.
At some point, they'll just reach a breaking point where they feel the only way to be listened is to use extreme measures. I frankly don't know what we can do to defuse this situation other than punishing those directly associated with hateful messages instead of deplatforming everyone on it.
You seem to assume deplatforming is not effective, is that true? Or do you disagree with it on moral grounds?
I mean, 'we' (as in 'the west') try to deplatform Jihad based terrorism. I think it's a pretty effective strategy, just not complete. Why should we _not_ deplatform far right white supremacy violence and terror?
Of course you also need a deradicalization approach, but that doesn't scale to the current levels of extremism. We need to stop this massive rise of fascist violence rooted in conspiracy thinking from spreading, which was amplified by social media in the first place, only then can a targeted deradicalization approach be effective.
I'm not saying it's ineffective, I'm worried about unintended consequences that deplatforming could bring if they constantly feel silenced and how the violence could escalate from the resentment it can foster in these individuals.
> I'm worried about unintended consequences that deplatforming could bring if they constantly feel silenced and how the violence could escalate from the resentment it can foster in these individuals.
I understand where you are coming from but that's pretty much textbook "negotiating with terrorists". It's coddling a group of violent (or at least violent-speech) people out of fear that if we don't give them a space to be horrible then they might act out.
It’s not like the idea that countries shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists is universal. Some countries do choose to negotiate with terrorists. I think there’s two frameworks to evaluate how we should act, one based on Justice and one based on Power. It’s idealistic to assume that we should approach everything from a “because it’s the right thing to do” perspective, as that can lead to more harm. Sometimes you have to acknowledge a groups power to do harm, and work to mitigate that harm. Not everything is going to have a clean solution. I don’t know how much power the far right has at this point. We may be about to find out, and if so we’ll see how long it takes for the country to get weary of a terrorist insurgency.
We need to get off the internet and civilly talk to our actual neighbors. For these aggrieved folks it's likely best to just listen and not push back on things yet. Let them vent their frustrations verbally.
Forget about the social media for a second, just wait until people will come after their employment and PayPal or even banks will shut down their accounts.
i don't see the problem? he isn't getting on the news because he isn't doing anything newsworthy - the appearances mentioned are all fluff. if he has something actually important to talk about, it will be reported on and covered.
in fact, i would say by now Trump has lost the benefit of being aired live and uncut. you can't spout untruths constantly and expect people to just keep mainlining your BS to every TV in the country.
it sounds to me that you think that if Trump doesn't get full, unrestricted, on-demand use of american companies' broadcast facilities, he's being censored and oppressed. Sadly, he's President not King. Just because he's President doesn't mean anything that he says has value to anyone any more than anything i have to say.
The transition from a situation in which public officials can speak to the public directly to one in which they can only do so at the whim of corporate titans is not a safe precedent.
> The transition from a situation in which public officials can speak to the public directly to one in which they can only do so at the whim of corporate titans is not a safe precedent.
Public officials have not lost any ability they ever had to speak directly to the public. They have at the same time always had an additional ability to do so mitigated by the need to get other private parties (including, but not limited to, “corporate titans”) to relay their speech, whether it was newspapers which existed before the founding and expanded over time, broadcast media starting in the early 20th century, or online media starting in the late 20th century.
And it's not a new phenomenon that some subset of current incumbent politicians might lose some degree of the favor they have had with one of those mechanisms that relies on the exercise of First Amendment rights by some intermediary.
Except, of course, he still has the biggest bully pulpit in the nation and could hold a press conference or rally whenever he wanted. Of all the people butt-hurt about being deplatformed the president has no leg to stand on being mad about it.
Right. By "I am not worried that X", I didn't mean that X is the case, yet I am not worried about it. I meant that I am not concerned that X could occur.
I understand there may be a large number of people on HN that don't share my beliefs and the beliefs of many Trump supporters, but the reality is we have a huge swath of the population that claim to be Christians that are following Trump instead of Christ... almost literally following Trump. Chasing him to his rallies and even following him on social media and whatever social platform he goes to. I believe Trump is exposing, and will assist in separating, the chaff from the wheat. I'm praying for everyone.
The "time ago" for comments on Parler was always a little suspect to me. I was poking around on there and noticed how so many of the comments were from seconds ago. The timestamps could be legit but it also seemed like maybe an engagement hack. You could argue someone might be more likely to respond to a comment that they think someone literally just wrote.
9s before the screenshot was taken, as shown in a tweet from 2 days ago. I don’t have enough info to say when the screenshot was taken, but the leaked copies of all the Parler data should be able to confirm/refute the veracity.
I’m sure someone will chime in saying that person is simply participating in a robust debate on free speech and is simply steelmanning an argument against political violence by blowing up a data center IRL to test a hypothesis. NOT destroying us-east-1 would stifling both science and liberty!
That kind of latency is routine for scrapers and archivers, and of course any time you click on message replies you get the most recent ones at the top. This doesn't seem so weird to me.
Are you saying the post was deliberately fabricated to provoke outrage? It's really not that far out of the realm of what really was happening on Parler. That doesn't mean it was a concrete threat, but assuming that Amazon is deliberately inventing threats against its own data centers seems a bit much.
I just... I mean I don't understand what's happening to discourse on the right of the US political spectrum right now. Our capitol was just sacked. The Oregon state house was invaded. The governor of Michigan was the target of a kidnapping plot... But everyone wants to pretend that none of these things should inform our priors about the potential for right wing violence?
The right sees post-BLM riots which have led to numerous deaths and millions in damage and Antifa running amok in the Pacific Northwest and think the same thing.
We are too divided and it’s because of the media, both social and mainstream.
I think the poster meant that the Polarization is so acute at this point that the Polarization itself needs to be treated as distinct phenomenon (and remedied to some degree) before any progress can be made.
An analogy might be the phenomenon of Complexity in software.
That's not what it sounded like to me. It sounded like they were putting the blame for hazardous actions of others on the media (of an all-encompassing scope) for discussing the hazardous actions being committed.
Which to me seems like slinging jargon rather than registering any kind of context. To me, it sounds like a misreading of McLuhan more than anything. In fact, McLuhan's point was exactly that kind of misunderstanding and misreading should be avoided by not taking the context for granted.
But the presence of BLM-related riots simply isn't relevant to the stuff under discussion, where an upthread poster made a sideways argument that evidence for right wing violence was presumptivly suspect in the fact of multiple examples of exactly that kind of thing. The police station in Minneapolis that was burned down (to pick what most people would accept as the worst example of BLM-related violence) just shouldn't be part of a discussion about whether or not there was a threat against Amazon's data centers from the right.
This is pure whataboutism, basically. Even if you're right (for the record, I think you're right), you're applying it to deflect an argument against "your" side. Isn't that making the problem you are explaining WORSE and not better?
Surely you'd agree that step one to being less divided is to stop reflexively defending "our" side when bad things happen, right?
Right wing and left wing violence and divisive rhetoric is at an all time high and each side wants to act like it's not happening despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Generally it gets lost in the "who is worse than who" and some unmentioned desire for a regression to the mean. The problem is that a regression to the mean is either prompted by an event or time.
BLM riots didn't just loiter in government buildings, they burned them down. How many BLM leaders were banned from Twitter from inciting that with unambiguous "burn America to the ground" kind of stuff?
In recent times, yes. The left and the right have collectively agreed that discourse is dead. That leaves everyone in between scratching their heads.
The beautiful thing about your comment is that you assume I have some indefensible, reductionist view of the world. I don't. I've provided examples on this website of that violence and the divisive rhetoric.
Sorry, I'm not trying to assume anything about you. I was responding to the "each side wants to act like it's not happening despite clear evidence to the contrary." as a way of using challenges to your point to confirm your point. I didn't word that well originally.
It doesn't seem like there is a lot of evidence that this 2019 shooting was politically motivated. I think the perpetrator had serious mental problems and also strong political feelings. Maybe he just wanted to "outdo" the El Paso shooting.
> I think the perpetrator had serious mental problems
This is bias. I can't think of a shooter or murderer who probably doesn't have mental health issues. It does not change whether it's left or right wing violence.
It looks like it pretty well aligns with my understanding as it can be understood from the data we have today.
Two notes:
- not all violence is terrorism
- the definition of terrorism stays within an upper bound and lower bound of tolerance, but nonetheless is constantly in flux
Generally speaking, left wing violence (even in history) is coordinated by loosely connected cells. This makes things quite difficult to track. I always hark back to my days in the military and how hard of a time between 2009 and 2012 they had understanding disjointed cells of terror with respect to the Taliban.
They're better understood now, but it took a long time. The only benefit that I had in understanding the organization of these cells was that I was on IRC as a young person and got to watch organizations like Anonymous flourish. I can see left wing violence but I can't point to a specific organization or person leading it. I won't speculate on why left-wing groups do this, but it is of strategic advantage even in history. The bombings of the 1970's are a great example of this, if we choose not to pay attention. [0]
This is in contrast to right wing violence that has big names like Gavin McInnes, Richard Spencer, at times Donald Trump or go by names like The Proud Boys, The Alt-Right, the KKK, etc... When you have a name and a domain you're a whole lot easier to track and it's easier to talk about substantively and definitively.
The above explains why left-wing violence is just plain missing from this graph. It misses my overall point though.
My overall point is that any violent group deters discourse. Any group that deters discourse is a threat to democracy. I would suspect even if we tracked them equally that right-wing violence would outpace left-wing violence. That's a neat comparison for a graph but has very little substance at the end of the day. We are not single task machines and we can certainly focus on shutting down two groups that are a threat to democracy.
Any violence which is used to deter discourse deserves to be shut down and it is most effectively shut down by the people who belong to the groups most closely related to it. That's to say, if you're a Republican you can more easily shut down the Alt-Right because you have better access to understanding and tools within the RNC to get rid of them. The same would go for Democrats who could easily shut down left-wing violence and divisive rhetoric, but like Republicans have let it create a home.
My last point is rhetoric, which of course is not captured by CSIS. Both of these groups (violence aside) have toxified public and online spaces with hate speech and divisive rhetoric. I cannot count how many left-wing people have entered into these spaces and accused anyone and everyone of some moral crime to the point that people are starting to posit that it sounds like a religion. Having grown up in a repressive religion, I have very little to argue against this point with. On the other hand, right wing groups have saturated online spaces with hate that has driven down diversity in communities and has created this constitution looking rule systems. They both use similar methods: brigading, harassment, stalking, doxxing, etc...
I suspect all of the above are interconnected. All of them are worth stopping. It just takes people who don't mind saying, "enough is enough".
> "The company also has implemented new service update restrictions at some data centers this week, reflecting the growing concern for a potential cyber attack or volatility in its service in the coming days." https://outline.com/P3tAMN
Pure speculation, but I wonder if they're also trying to protect themselves against insider threats as well with this move.
A deploy freeze is meant to stop production from potentially needing to be rolled back when bugs are introduced at a time engineers are away (holidays) or fighting other fires (earnings calls, DDOS, Prime Day, etc).
You don't want engineers breaking things when you've got something else distracting you.
Blocked days are done pre-emptively. Consider: many changes aren't instant. They can take hours to complete. What if things start to happen when you're half way through?
Simpler to just stop making big changes that aren't 100% required to happen just in case. If it can't wait, approvals from someone senior who agrees it can't wait suffices.
We should hold resourceful politicians with their megaphones accountable for what they advocate instead of silencing people or groups that are following them which will only irritate them.
Banning them is holding them accountable. Their irritation is not rational, they are quite "irritated" by the peaceful transition of power; no more coddling of these bad faith actors, when they stop fomenting chaos in our society then they can be allowed to shitpost on twitter once again, because of course, restricting the freedom to stoke violence online is the real story here, not their literal attack on democracy.
But what's the alternative? Should we just let people incite violence to their heart's content, and then be surprised when people actually carry out the violence because they have been brainwashed? How is that better?
It's worth pointing out that a lot of other countries on Earth have laws that prohibit hate speech. Quite a few countries have libel laws, too. The US does not have either of those at the federal level, making it much more difficult to use the law to stop people from inciting violence and spreading blatant lies.
> The US does not have [libel laws] at the federal level
It's true--I think--that there is no federal libel statute (though perhaps someone can correct me on this), but that assertion is misleading without a little more context. Whether it is a state or federal law doesn't really mean much in the American legal system. In the U.S., most such laws are state, not federal laws. That doesn't make them less important or enforceable.
Every state that I know of recognizes libel as a tort (i.e., you can sue someone for it), and you can do so in federal court if the required ents for federal jurisdiction are met. (In this case, probably that the plaintiff and defendant are from different states.) And, in any case, what's wrong with state courts? A judgement in a state court is just as good as one in federal court.
Thanks, I didn't intend to mislead. Ianal :) It's my understanding that most US state-level libel laws don't have a lot of teeth, and that they are quite a patchwork, which is why I didn't mention them.
So getting banned from a website because of TOS violations is a step too far, but prosecution by the government is the reasonable alternative? Social media addiction has really distorted society's perspective on what's important.
You didn't say it was too far, I interpreted your reply that way because of the context of the conversation - you replied to someone discussing the banning of users that incite violence. So am I wrong to suggest you think it's too far or are you merely telling me "I didn't reveal my position on the issue".
They're already enraged and they have no desire to engage in civil discourse anyway because they'd rather believe in conspiracy theories.
I liken it to having a toxic person in your life who can't admit that their actions are ever wrong - what do you do in a situation like that? At some point, you just have to cut them off.
You have a fair point, except for the fact that it ignores the elephants in the room which have been incentivizing and profiting off of extremism for years now across the world
I've been thinking that Amazon ought to be protecting distribution centers (likely a little less hardened than data centers), and their distribution and delivery network (much softer targets).
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Amazon has a much larger attack surface.
I'm pretty sure designing with the expectation that people might try to drive a truck/plane into the building is pretty normal for data center design. People have been aware of destructive people for a while.
I worked for a defense contractor in the early 1980s.
I think it was 1983, just after I started there, that an edict came down to "truck-proof" the building. If I remember, 1983 was when Hammas blew up the US embassy in Beirut with a truck bomb.
They put up those "anti-truck" columns in front of the doors.
No doubt, but it's probably emotionally easier to work with that knowledge and attempt at foresight in the abstract, than how it would feel to receive a letter from your employer saying something akin to "brace yourselves".
Amazon, unlike say, Google, does not disclose their carbon emissions. Like at all. It is important to have this information public, for the sake of our planet. Amazon gets an F for disclosure, while Google is getting some A's:
I assume the reason is that doing a GHG assessment gives a lot of information about the operations of your company, so Amazon would rather be secretive about its operations. Knowing the location of datacentres allows you to deduce what power grid they're attached to. Scope 2 emissions depend a lot on where the electricity is coming from, and they're likely the vast majority of Amazon's emissions due to the size of AWS. Their Scope 3 emissions due to deliveries might also be significant, but it's harder to be secretive about that.
I don't think potential chaos sowers would have much difficulty finding the data centers themselves. All they'd need to do is to narrow the location to a town or several towns, go there, and start asking pizza delivery people for directions.
Pretty secret, it's easy to make shell companies to disguise who actually owns and operates the building. My job we have no external markings on our IT building so customers don't get confused and try to come manage their 401k there instead of our retail locations.
I would have thought so, too. But I know for certain that with enough accurate measurements around a network, you can determine the location of an unknown with pretty good accuracy. I've seen it done.
There were geostatistical methods that made certain assumptions about routing, network propagation speeds, etc. and with a large enough targeted sample using places with known geolocations, you could narrow down to a somewhere around 50 miles (this was many years ago). I imagine techniques have improved since then (as have counter measures to add noise to the data).
If you know the general area you can probably use public satellite imagery to narrow it down a bit. I suspect there some other clever information you could use to find the locations if you really wanted to.
Even with all the information I'm not sure how feasible it is for any small group to orchestrate a real disruption given how distributed data AWS centers are. Lots of failovers exist and probably a lot people outside AWS know little about.
Most of it was confined to Northern Ireland, but there were several bombings in GB, at least one in Dublin, and one in Germany. Several IRA members were killed while planning an operation in Gibraltar.
This makes peaceful resolution very difficult, as we're dealing with two groups who largely live apart from one another, with different geography, culture, and social mores. I think it's important to emphasize, there are a lot of people who genuinely believe that systemic voting irregularities influenced our last election, to the point of having changed the outcome, and don't view Joe Biden as having been legitimately elected. Furthermore, they believe that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, refused to even hear their case, and that Congress would in no way give their grievances with the process an open debate, before accepting results they viewed as fraudulent. This puts them into a position of desperation. The videos of people being arrested at the airport do not help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwJ5HXSzuA
Given the geography. I expect to see red-hats (Trump people) going into the cities where the blue-hats (centrists) and the black-hats (Antifa/BLM) live, and then retreating into the rural areas, where supportive sheriffs are more likely to run interference against other law-enforcement agencies. To some extent, this is what we already saw at the Capitol Building, as well in places like Kenosha where people like Kyle Rittenhouse came from out-of town (albeit within reasonable driving distance) to the city where violence was occurring.
EDIT: better link
EDIT 2: The phrase "I've thought a lot about this" suggests that one has thought more of themselves thinking about the issue, than about the issue itself. As such It has been removed.
I think the real fault line may be the same as the civil war, but it's no longer segregated by a large scale geographic border. The conflict is between the agrarian vision of America and the industrial/cosmopolitan vision of America.
Agrarian: traditional, religious, rigid social roles, rigid hierarchies determined by gender/race/etc., suspicion of change, and fiscally conservative with a suspicion of debt or loose monetary policy.
Industrial/cosmopolitan: fluid, either non-religious or liberal religion, fluid social roles, hierarchies only as-needed (e.g. corporate hierarchies that are opt-out), welcoming to rapid change, and fiscally liberal with a pragmatic attitude toward things like monetary policy and debt.
The wrinkle in this model is that the top of the hierarchy of "red America" seems to be located in urban centers. Trump is from New York. Most 4chan /pol users are in cities. The people operating Fox News and other further-right news sources almost all live in cities. So it's sort of like you have this minority of urban America either sympathizing with or puppeteering a rural revolt against modernity.
Of course I wonder if the civil war was different. Banks, governments, and major property owners in urban areas profited a lot more from slavery than poor and middle class farmers and skilled laborers in the South. Quite a lot of the profit from slavery ended up in New York, Boston, DC, and even London.
Maybe part of the answer to this is for rural Americans to turn off Fox News and OAN and the /pol orbit and all the rest of that "ruralist propaganda from urbanites" and figure out what they really think and articulate it themselves. What emerges may well be something toward which urban "elites" could be more sympathetic.
I didn't mention class because it doesn't break cleanly along class lines. Look at the capitol stormers... several were CEOs of medium sized companies or middle to upper middle class skilled workers. It wasn't a bunch of poor folks.
I reckon electoral maps are fundamentally useless when most districts are gerrymandered to the wazoo.
They also do not reflect movements that are fundamentally leninist in organization, where a small cohesive nucleus of activists defines the agenda and directs action. Without a Fox News stoking and directing anger, there is no "red rage", and Fox people are urban people. Without someone running 4chan, there is no Anon/QAnon, and the likes of 4chan are run by urban geeks. Trump always defined himself as a proud NewYorker. And so on and so forth.
What is true is that nowadays people can live in socially-isolated bubbles that do not communicate with other bubbles. This is not a function of geographical location, though, but hyper-personalized media consumption. It happened already in the 70s on the left, for example, where people who only read "alternative" media could not understand how their points of view where not as hegemonic as they thought. Now it's just spread to everyone thanks to the web: at some point you'll gravitate to a media bubble and probably stay there forever.
>I reckon electoral maps are fundamentally useless when most districts are gerrymandered to the wazoo.
Littlestymear linked a map in another reply to my comment that seems to break it down purely by population in clusters of 250,000: https://xkcd.com/2399/
That map still suggests that clusters of blue in highly urban areas are surrounded by clusters of red in "less urban" areas, and never the opposite. Rural, or less urban environments have different cultures than highly urban environments, and this is readily observable.
>They also do not reflect movements that are fundamentally leninist in organization, where a small cohesive nucleus of activists defines the agenda and directs action.
I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by this. Please be more explicit.
>Without a Fox News stoking and directing anger, there is no "red rage", and Fox people are urban people.
This is a misconception. One blames the media for the information purveyed rather than the sorts of people amenable to Fox's viewpoint in their news. If there was prima facie no distinction between those who adore Pres. Trump, and those who despise him, prior to their exposure to Fox News, then this might be a tenable position, but given that there are two different demographics, both of which have access to Fox News and yet react distinctly differently to it, tells us that there are other factors at play.
>What is true is that nowadays people can live in socially-isolated bubbles that do not communicate with other bubbles. This is not a function of geographical location, though, but hyper-personalized media consumption.
And yet geography seems to be at play in which media bubble you end up in, as do a number of other factors. Perhaps the media bubbles are as much a function of existing divisions as the exacerbated divisions are of the bubbles?
> Rural, or less urban environments have different cultures than highly urban environments
But that is not something that changed of recent. New York has always been different from St. Louis, but both "universes" could coexist and now they seemingly cannot. That doesn't look to me like a function of geography.
What has changed is that it's now easier to be an "undercover radical stlouite" in NY and viceversa.
> I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Trump's organization is fundamentally bolshevik in nature, with a small inner circle of "avantgarde" that decides everything and then pushes decisions down to the masses. It's why significant chunks of his own party don't like him, because there is little or no policy elaboration even slightly down the pyramid. Both Clinton and Obama did it to an extent in their first few years, but nobody has done it as much as Trump. Trump could make it stick because the social web reduces the need to cozy-up to the larger press ecosystem for his message to spread. It's the sort of qualitative jump that early-XX century parties did with radio and films, which removed a lot of influence from local bigwigs in favours of national leaders.
> One blames the media for the information purveyed rather than the sorts of people amenable to Fox's viewpoint in their news.
Amenable people still need to articulate and support their views to be effective, and for the message to be efficiently evangelized and legitimized. Dedicated media does that work for them. Without that work, they wouldn't be as effective.
> there are other factors at play.
Of course there are, but the likes of Fox are important factors. Their tone has been extremely divisive since the '90s, this is a long wave coming.
> And yet geography seems to be in play in which media bubble you end up in
Yes, but this was always the case and it's arguably much less so now that local papers are dying off. The point is what is changing, and geography has largely not changed; but the media landscape has, and pretty dramatically too.
I presently live in the outer suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, and I saw more Biden signs than Trump signs in the last election. Poll and electoral results show the same. The population density threshold for "urban" is shifting toward less and less dense with the suburbs starting to turn blue.
It really is becoming country vs. anything even remotely close to a city. The only exceptions seem to be rural college towns and hipster/artist enclaves. There are some good examples of the latter in Appalachia.
> The main divide doesn't seem to be between states, but between urban and rural. […] This makes peaceful resolution very difficult, as we're dealing with two groups who largely live apart from one another, with different geography, culture, and social mores.
Randall Munroe did a twitter thread[0] on the election map he did for xkcd 2399[1] and he actually discusses about the bias in common election maps: in fact there is no such geographic split.
Or, as he puts it:
> There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than NY, more Trump voters in NY than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
I'm sorry, I really don't see how that map is particularly contradictory to my point. Swap "rural" for "exurban" or merely "less urban," if you wish, and take a look at the map you linked. Most of the time, The red dots surround the clusters of blue dots, and never vice versa. The clusters of blue dots are large cities, or "highly urban" areas, and the clusters of red dots surrounding them are outlying "less urban" areas.
Don't take the map literally, the key ideas are in the Twitter thread. The main point of his thread, is that maps aren't good at saying where voters are and are fundamentally biased (“You can be a Biden voter in a Trump household in a Biden precinct in a Trump county in a Biden district in a Trump state in a Biden country. Then what color is your land? Dirt-colored, I guess! Not only does land not vote, it doesn’t even have a preference.”). He made his map as a counterpoint to nationwide maps, but he could have made the same map at the state, or even the district level: there are trumps voter in the middle of San Francisco and Bidden voters in the middle of nowhere in rural California. In fact, there are more Trump voters in LA alone than in 80% of the red areas in nationwide maps.
Politicians who want to gin up anger and money from their supporters and stigmatize their political opponents, intelligence agencies and defense contractors who will see increased power and funding, a variety of NGOs and corporations who will be delegated power to “fight domestic terror”. Whoever benefited from the original Patriot Act. Plus lots of clicks and views for media outlets that have found a new panic now that the current president who generates all their traffic is leaving.
The answer is “nobody”. Giving credence to fringe conspiracy theories is actively damaging society and you should consider weighing probabilities of explanations from multiple points of view before committing to one, certainly before typing a comment online.
Don't you remember the last war on terrorism (that is still going on, btw)?
Weren't there a bunch of politicians, government agencies, and corporations (i.e. Dick Cheney + Halliburton) who gained billions of dollars and permanently revoked constitutional rights (i.e. Joe Biden who helped author the Patriot Act)?
The answer to the question of "who profits from a war on terror"? Is plainly and historically obvious: the military police industrial complex.
If anything recent events demonstrate how much chuff can be cut out of the defense budget. 670 bUSD/yr and a blank check to spy on citizens and they can’t keep a medium sized mob from threatening the legislative head. That doesn’t conjure up a feeling of revoking citizen rights. That conjures up a feeling that the entire defense and intelligence command structure should be revisited, and potentially burned down.
I agree we should reduce defense spending, but the rest of your comment is actually proving my point. People saying the system should be burned down (whether thats the left or the right saying that) only incites the system to tighten its grip on power.
I don't believe I'm giving credence to any "conspiracies" with that comment, nor was it my intention in the least. May I suggest you stand by your words and consider a skeptic point of view on this alleged threat?
I'm not sure what your point is. I'll bet Bezos was plenty concerned about gallows outside his house, but I don't know what that has to do with literally any of this. Is he supposed to send out a memo to employees warning them to be vigilant in case gallows show up outside their houses too, or outside of amazon data centers?
Poor guy can’t get a break. They bring out the guillotine in the summer with “eat the rich” signs, then the gallows rolls out in the winter. Tough being one of the worlds richest men.
A dangerous terror cell, which has already invaded the US Capitol, is now threatening to bomb critical infrastructure. If this was the Taliban you wouldn't be asking this question.
Last night, a checkpoint near the center of Kunduz called Houz, which fired mortars at civilians, was destroyed.
Two tanks were destroyed, one soldier was killed and three others, including two commanders (Aman and Majid), were captured alive.
Also, 2 tanks of the auxiliary enemy were destroyed, 1 soldier was killed and many weapons and ammunitions were recovered from them.
It's not a question of property damage, this is the great foretold National Security Emergency. We've spent twenty years giving up our privacy for this.
If you want to bring up costs, it's only fair to call into question the damage to the US reputation internationally. Having this type of security threat on a national scale is terrible for trade and strategic relations. I'm a Canadian, I don't trust my closest neighbour right now. That's an entirely incalculable cost.
Which group tried to murder members of Congress and fundamentally alter or stop our constitutional process because they were mad they didn’t get they’re way? Who is threatening to have armed rallies to finish the job?
Please, tell me why refusing to follow the constitution or ending the country is on par with a Target being burned down. I’ll wait.
I'd be careful with us pretending one of these groups is less violent or more dangerous than the other. The right just got done making that same logical mistake. It's a long way to the bottom when you claim the high ground.
Why the false equivalency? BLM's stated goal is to end police oppression of people of color. White Nationalists' stated goal is to "cleanse" the country by force.
I think _that's_ the false equivalency right there. The right does the exact same thing, only it looks something like this...
> "Why the false equivalency? Trump's stated goal is to bring back jobs and protect America. BLM's stated goal is Marxism and the destruction of the western nuclear family."
A "left-wing activist" actually shot the house majority whip in 2017, and he was actively trying to assassinate other republican politicians as well. [0]
I'll never vote for another republican for as long as Trumpism remains a part of the party, but we can't pretend that only one side has been radicalized to the point of violence.
To be fair, a difference here is that it was one sole person committing that act, and they generally were not paraded around as heroes by people of similar political leaning. One-off stuff like that happens all the time and is not necessarily indicative of any kind of trend.
> I'll never vote for another republican for as long as Trumpism remains a part of the party
As someone who used to vote for the occasional republican, neither can I. In fact, as far as I am concerned the republican brand is now unsalvageable and any sane conservative would have to be running under a different label since I can't trust the reasoning of anyone who'd run under that one anymore.
I agree that the lone wolf nature of the attack makes a difference, but if we are going to paint other lone wolf shooters as products of their political beliefs then we have to apply the same standard in this case.
>they generally were not paraded around as heroes by people of similar political leaning
I would invite you to look at discussions of the incident on reddit, it might change your mind. That said, I agree that the celebration of politically motivated violence is despicable, and the unwillingness of some the members and supporters of the republican party to condemn the recent riot is a terrible mistake.
My main goal with my first comment was to remind everyone that painting the people we have political disagreements with as irredeemable monsters can drive people from both sides to violence.
I'd also like to thank you for taking the time to reply instead of downvoting and moving on, this is a tough subject and I don't think my hasty 1st comment was sufficient to the task.
I don't want to defend that. I want to instead ask, what would the damage be if members of Congress were killed? I think the long-term damage would be much, much worse.
Not the "group" you're thinking of. Groups exist along a spectrum of cohesiveness, and a political party and/or political cult centered around one individual, is several orders of magnitude more cohesive than grassroots social movements with loosely affiliated themes, during whose protests some unaffiliated rioters and looters caused the majority of the damage. In effect, you're comparing incidental property damage to a calculated, targeted, and rallied-for/single-leader-inspired insurrection; it's like comparing storm damage to arsonists.
And how do I know it wasn't just random unaffiliated violent individuals causing most of the damage during the insurrection? Because they freaking wore matching hats and chanted Trump slogans...
I don't think the guillotine was meant as a literal threat to his life personally. It was a wage protest lead by a former Amazon employee and IIRC was never violent.
>I don't think the guillotine was meant as a literal threat to his life personally
Isn't the narrative the exact opposite for capitol attack? eg. "these rioters had gallows set up and everything, could you imagine what would have happened if congress wasn't evacuated in time?"
They had gallows outside, armed participants broke into the building, some participants that got into the senate chambers were carrying soft cuffs, one group didn’t stop trying to get to capitol staff and Congresspeople until a women with them was shot.
If I was Bezos I wouldn’t shrug off a guillotine but you have to ignore a lot of what happened in DC to try to make the events and intent equal.
Which people do you mean by “these”? The insurrectionists had pipe bombs and molotovs. No idea about the BLM or the anticapitalism stuff in the summer.
And it'll be forever hard to answer what the people in the Capitol had with them because they were just let out and weren't arrests didn't really start until that evening when supporting LE finally came in.
Having watched a chronological, narration-less series of footage from the day it does appear there was an organized contingent operating among the larger chaos.
I meant literally the people that went inside the Capitol we know those things were floating around in the crowd generally but not what the people inside had. I also saw that one LARP group heading up the stairs looking organized but IDK if they were spotted with anything particularly bad, haven't watched everything that happened for sure though.
Yeah, there are at least sub-factions in that group that would actually very much like to put that gallows to actual use and seemingly came prepared to actually take hostages when they got inside.
The gallows were clearly for show in my opinion, but the same group also did actually storm the building and send a bunch of cops to the hospital, killing one.
I've been reading Trump spaces online for a long time and I feel strongly that a subset of those protesters absolutely would have murdered members of Congress if they got that far in time.
I think there's a line between prop to get attention and a threat which comes down to will you use it given the chance (or can you use it). At the very least they never tried to break into anywhere Bezos actually was...
It may meet the threshold for assault, depending on jurisdiction.
In the U.S., the crime of assault consists of acting as if you are about to hurt someone, including verbal and gestural threats. Actually harming them comes under the umbrella of the separate crime of "battery", hence the phrase "assault and battery".
So yes, if you go to someone else's house, set up a "slicey boi", and behave as if you fully intend to use it, you could be charged with a violent crime.
While possible, given recent events it is hardly stretching the imagination to believe this is legitimate is it?
Need you be reminded that a group of armed radical right wing extremists forcibly invaded a session of congress with the expressed intent of executing politicians?
Honestly, it is difficult to believe that anyone saying further right-wing violence is unlikely is arguing in good faith.
They are right wing, radical, extremists. They forced their way into the capital building during a session of congress. They chanted "Hang Mike Pence", among other things, and were armed.
Please elaborate on which part of my characterization you disagree with.
Well, they were also so outrageous and out of control that there are pictures of them standing behind the velvet ropes as they moved through the building.
I've not seen any photos of them being armed either.
They brought bombs and at least one cooler full of molotov cocktails. Bombs were planted in the capital building and at least the RNC headquarters, and possibly the DNC headquarters IIRC
https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/134811382832466739...