What speech that makes him uncomfortable has he banned exactly ? Asking out of curiosity because I see posts on twitter all the time calling him Nazi, blah-blah.
There are tens of thousands of posts with the word "cisgender" at the moment on X. So, I think this "ban" is currently only in one's febrile imagination. Putin does not allow tens of thousands of opposition politicians, so the analogy also does not hold.
Its an extremely big difference from the Biden era where any post critical of the vaccine and backed up with papers was taken down pronto. This was even confirmed in several senate hearings.
As a non-American, I was very happy when Musk bought out twitter - it was ridiculous being unable to criticize vaccines - you couldn't even articulate the Indian government's stance on Pfizer and how Pfizer refused to provde test data. "Freedom of speech" was utterly non-existent in that era.
> “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” Mr Musk wrote in June.
> “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.”
> The newly enforced policy, first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, saw some users greeted with a full-screen warning when trying to publish a post using the terms on the X mobile app.
The fact that this is arbitrarily enforced isn't exactly painting it as a haven for free speech. The only thing worse than absolute censorship (which is obvious and can be routed around) is stochastic, inconsistent censorship - which gives him and his defenders a fig leaf[1] to hide behind.
Look, maybe you prefer the new brand of censorship X has adopted. It sounds like you do. Great. But what you can't do is call it a free speech platform, while keeping a straight face.
[1] I would like to point out, as an example: that China doesn't censor the internet - you just mysteriously have your connection go to shit and drop out if you try to search for 4/15.
So, posts are NOT being banned, but only visibility tagged as that article mentions and as many users also explicitly tested. No one reported a ban - only a warning with a visibility setting. Seems perfectly fine. Your speech is NOT banned as you incorrectly claim. And your account is still valid.
Did you ever try writing a mRNA-vaccine critical post during the Biden administration on twitter, quoting factual sources and linking to scientific papers ? Your account got banned pronto.
And as we all know now - it was done at the behest of the US white house.
Firstly, it's absolutely bonkers that any alleged 'free speech absolutist' could consider 'cisgender' to be a slur. It's like saying that 'man' is a slur.
And that's not an argument that you're going to win. Because the claim is utterly pants-on-head, irredeemably farcical, as is anyone who would stand behind it.
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But, secondly, if you read the screenshots in the link, you'll see that the posts are being suppressed.
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And thirdly, you don't see me claiming that pre-Musk Twitter was any kind of bastion of 'free speech absolutism'. I'm not making that argument.
The argument I'm making is that post-Musk Twitter definitely isn't one.
Not sure what the next best option here is. There was a thought experiment once where it would require the president to kill the key holder in order to launch a nuclear attack (the launch codes would be embedded in the designated key holder's heart). In theory this would make sure the president knew the seriousness of his or her actions, but it was never seriously considered as a protocol.
The chain of command is designed to be resilient enough to do so without having to bail the VIPs out of the frying pan they landed themselves and the rest of the world in.
They need to have as much skin in the game as everyone else.
We would instead have HaaS, with monthly subscriptions for a license to use the house. Which can be randomly revoked at any moment if the company doesn't feel like supporting it is profitable enough, or if an AI thinks your electricity usage is suspicious and permabans you from using a home in the entire town.
2. A mob of people doesn't need to be armed to be a deadly threat. In fact, just the prior year, someone - successfully - made the same argument for killing two unarmed people at a protest. The courts ruled in his favor.
3. Not a single person among those prosecuted has been acquitted by a jury. Only two were acquitted at bench trials. But I'm sure your opinion on this matters more than the findings of the courts... It's strange how juries of their peers kept voting to convict them.
> Not strolling around as if on a guided tour.
Is it common for guided tours where you come from to be trying to break through a doorway, on the other side of which is an armed policeman, warning them that they'll be shot if they come any closer? Or to attack policemen with flagpoles? Or to climb the walls of a building?
Or to smear human shit over the walls of someone's office? Steal documents from them?
What do you think Trump would order done to a mob of a thousand people climbing over the fences and breaking into the White House, in an effort to overthrow him? Think he'd be smiling and directing them to the gift shop?
It was, of course, quite unfortunate that the footsoldiers carrying out an illegal coup faced sanction, while their leaders got off scot-free. (Well, most of them, Guiliani seems to be deeply fucked, and now that he's no longer useful to the regime, has been thrown overboard.)
(I'm sure someone will now chime in to explain to us how no, it's quite normal for a mob that's trying to overturn the results of a democratic election to break into a capital building while congress is in session, putting it under lockdown. And then someone else will chime in how it's exactly like a bunch of college students protesting by sitting down in the hallways of a campus building that they on any normal day have full access to and refusing to leave.)
Incidentally, the organizers of that putsch are now imprisoning people without trial in foreign concentration camps, and are refusing court orders to have them released. This is also, of course, above-board behaviour, and demonstrates that they have nothing but the deepest respect for both the law, the democratic process, and the checks and balances that safeguard us.
Pretty sure the shithead that killed a family in King County two years ago, while doing 110 in a 40 zone (after already wrecking two cars) didn't give two figs about street design.
Casual speeders would benefit from better street engineering. Excessive speeders don't care. They just don't understand the concept of consequences.
A speed governor would have likely saved four lives, and that 18-year old man from a 17 year prison sentence, but sure, let's all wring our hands about why this is a worse alternative to taking away someone's license.
Everyone speeds a little when they think it's safe, but some people speed excessively.
This is about making a remedy available to judges, as an alternative to other, less effective, or more draconic (or both less effective and more draconic), forms of punishment.
And judges deal with outlier cases every single day. They job is to look at and weigh all the special cases and considerations, provided by two sides in a dispute, and prescribe one of the many remedies available to them by law.
There's nothing fundamentally immoral, tyrannical, or unfair about requiring an repeat offender who has demonstrated their inability to follow the rules of the road to have a conditional license if they want to keep driving, and there's nothing immoral or unethical about using mechanical mechanisms to enforce those conditions.
Because the alternative is a full revocation (which is catastrophic to the ability to make a living in this country), or prison (which is catastrophic for a whole lot of other reasons). There's a reason that prescribing ignition interlocks for DUIs results in a dramatically lower recividism rate than license suspensions, and a dramatically lower overall social harm than prison.
Locks keep honest people honest, and they put up enough of a hurdle for most less-than-always-honest people to not consistently act like anti-social dipshits. You can circumvent them with effort, but we still use them. They are part of a defense in depth.
At least in WA State there's not-reckless speeding, which is something like 1-14 mph over the posted limit (I argue it should be more like a _percent_ E.G. going 40 mph in a 25 is WAY worse than going 75 on a 60 mph freeway).
Then there's 'reckless endangerment' tier which is +15 over the limit.
The example of that guy going 100 in a 40 is beyond even that. It's SO far outside of the range of permissible I don't even know that there's a good legal construct for it.
That's the vehicular version of taking an otherwise legal handgun and for relative examples. Not just happening to fire it somewhere you maybe shouldn't have but in a way that was safe. Nor the really stupid but often OK if there aren't people around act of a celebratory shot 'up'. No, that example has gone even further beyond and is like blind-firing at the side of a brick building, headless of how thin those are, of any windows, etc.
My argument is that tracking, inhibitors, etc should be too far for the other cases, and not enough for a case like the individual in question. Someone clearly made a product and wants to make money by offering it as a form of limiting other people's freedoms.
The problem is that the speed limit itself has nothing to do with safety. To take your example of Seattle, there are 4 lane main roads with a 25 mph speed limit that in any other city would be 35 to 45. And everybody drives 40-45 on the anyway.
Those are the worst, because there's always a huge speed differential between the "law-abiders" who stay at 25, and the others who drive the speed the road was obviously designed for (40). Felt a lot safer when the limit on them was actually 40 and everyone was more or less going the same speed.
> My argument is that tracking, inhibitors, etc should be too far for the other cases,
I'm sure the judge is more qualified than you are to make this determination.
But if you disagree, let me pose a simple question:
In a situation when a judge would suspend someone's license.
Why are you opposed to giving them this as an alternative? (If they refuse to comply with this, the judge would happily offer them the suspension instead.)
How is it any of your business to prevent someone from choosing this as a lesser punishment? All the harms you've listed are harms to the defendant, but for most defendants, they pale in comparison to the harm of a suspension.
Ankle bracelet monitors have all the same concerns that you've listed, yet you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would prefer sitting in prison over being ordered by a court to wear one. If the lesser punishment serves the desires of the prosecution and the courts, and the defendant agrees to it, why do either of them need your consent?
Slippery slope. It'd be assigned in way more cases because they can, because the _perceived_ impact is lower to someone else. Because it can be handled like yet another tax on offenders, including the poor. Because the companies selling it to the government would continue to lobby to sell it more often for more classes of offense.
Take the suspended license situation. At what point is the impact to society enough to just require assigning the person unlimited use of professional drivers to get around instead because the impact to society would be less? Or doing that after they spend time in jail? (As another question, is jail even effective at reform?)
The sort of person who repeatedly drives not just fast, but in ways that are clearly unwarranted danger, perhaps shows a larger defect. An individual who might have medical conditions that make rational thought and risk evaluation fail.
Sometimes, a person of adult age just isn't a true adult. Some device to limit a car's speed isn't going to prevent that sort of person from running a red light or over a jaywalker.
This is... a regressive tax on... Reckless drivers who, after multiple convictions keep putting the lives on the public in deadly danger? Do people stumble into that kind of criminal history by accident, or something? How many times do they have to be hauled before a judge before they knock it off? Are these Jean Valjean crimes of necessity, or something?
Look, what those people need to do is never be allowed to drive ever again. This is a technological compromise in their favor.
You're valuing a few thousand dollars of their financial welfare above the welfare of the people around them? Why?
No, this device won't stop them from driving into a pedestrian, just like it won't stop them from robbing a convenience store at gunpoint or committing tax fraud. The point of censuring someone for reckless driving isn't to prevent every single other bad behavior they will ever commit in the future. The point of it is to stop them from doing more of it, to the extent possible, without being overly draconian.
And if you think that this light a consequence is inappropriate for those people, what consequences do you think are appropriate? Can any of them pass the no-slippery slope standard you're setting for it?
How is it that they are neatly fitting into your two buckets of 'These are good people who somehow keep doing this but this device is unfair and repressive to them' and 'If they can't physically speed, they'll literally start running people down instead and this will not reduce recidivism at all'? Partitioning people into those two perfect buckets stretches credulity.
Not to mention that similar devices (breathalizer ignition interlocks) dramatically reduce recidivism, compared to other, both more and less serious punishments. How is it that that technological solution manages to statistically mitigate (but not cure) a health and addiction and judgement issue, while this one can be dismissed out of hand?
Again, slippery slope. As use of this tool expands to _any_ driving related offense. As it applies only to those who must themselves drive.
The dangers? I think I covered that just fine with the end of my previous post. People who aren't operating as adults require different solutions. You could have the death penalty as a punishment for this and it would not change their behavior.
EDIT:
Replying within this post since this has spun out of control. What solution? If someone can't behave like an adult they aren't an adult, don't let them run around without a guardian and supervision, though the specifics are WELL beyond any random person like me to iron out.
> In a situation when a judge would suspend someone's license.
> Why are you opposed to giving them this as an alternative? (If they refuse to comply with this, the judge would happily offer them the suspension instead.)
Nobody would be opposed to it if that were really the only situation it could be used. The problem is that now that it's available, it's going to get used in tons of situations that wouldn't have been a suspension otherwise.
> it's going to get used in tons of situations that wouldn't have been a suspension otherwise.
Good! It's about time we took road safety seriously.
Far too many people drive in a completely inappropriate manner, yet are treated with kid gloves, because nothing short of putting them in prison will fix that behavior, and the courts are, for obvious reasons, reticent to use that remedy.
Ignition interlocks have gone a long way to solving this problem for DUIs.
But doesn't "better street engineering" passively reduce speed because the road is full of bends that's difficult to negotiate at high speed and/or will make you much likely to crash into bollards/tree/stationary cars and/or will wreck your suspension with speed bumps ?
My understanding is that a good engineered road will not gently suggest you to drive at this or that speed, but will make you so forcibly.
Honestly that just seems more of a case that 18 year olds shouldn't be allowed to drive. If you're not old enough to smoke or drink alcohol, you're not old enough to operate heavy machinery that can kill people.
Europe has been dealing with unexploded ordinance from the fallout of European wars for over a century.
Of the countries you listed, its the US that has not actually known war. A few of its cities being reduced to rubble and a few thousand of its children losing limbs to land mines might convince some more of its people that war isn't quite the swell adventure they think it is.
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