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The ‘War on Terror’ Comes Home

11 points by wrycoder 6y ago

aidenn0 6y ago
I'm fairly pro free-speech. I'm also not as isolationist as ron paul the same way a spotlight is not as bright as the sun. There is nuance here though. If I tweet that the sky is purple, then maybe Twitter puts a fact check on that noting that I haven't presented any evidence of the sky being purple, and the general consensus is that the sky is, in fact, blue. Sure, whatever. If in a forum other than Twitter I incite a riot over the sky being purple[1], then any future tweets I make about the color of the sky should be taken in that context and are arguably no longer peaceful. 1: I honestly haven't heard the full Trump speech on Wednesday, so I'm not going to say if Trump is or is not guilty of inciting to riot. TFA claims that because the tweets were peaceful, they should not be removed from twitter; my comment here is a rebuttal of that claim.
jim-jim-jim 6y ago
> Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era. > “Big Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas. Whether it was ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, “Arab Spring,” the destruction of Syria and Libya, and so many more, the big US tech firms were happy to partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those out of favor. It's nice to hear this from Paul. I assumed he would have engaged in the usual lolbertarian hand-waving about private enterprise. And he's right of course. I said it in a poorly-received comment earlier, but we should stop expecting American social media platforms and tech infrastructure to be neutral carriers of information—that's delusional. Like all other media, they are publishing houses with specific agendas. Unsurprisingly that agenda is pro-market, pro-intervention, and anti-populist, due to the material interests of the fabulously wealthy people that own these firms. It's not a mistake that these interests overlap with those of US intelligence agencies and ghoulish NGOs either. You can't beg such people to play fair; you have to disengage and set up parallel institutions. I don't know how to do that of course.
deleted 6y ago
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11 points by wrycoder 6y ago

I'm fairly pro free-speech. I'm also not as isolationist as ron paul the same way a spotlight is not as bright as the sun. There is nuance here though. If I tweet that the sky is purple, then maybe Twitter puts a fact check on that noting that I haven't presented any evidence of the sky being purple, and the general consensus is that the sky is, in fact, blue. Sure, whatever. If in a forum other than Twitter I incite a riot over the sky being purple[1], then any future tweets I make about the color of the sky should be taken in that context and are arguably no longer peaceful. 1: I honestly haven't heard the full Trump speech on Wednesday, so I'm not going to say if Trump is or is not guilty of inciting to riot. TFA claims that because the tweets were peaceful, they should not be removed from twitter; my comment here is a rebuttal of that claim.

jim-jim-jim 6y ago

> Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era. > “Big Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas. Whether it was ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, “Arab Spring,” the destruction of Syria and Libya, and so many more, the big US tech firms were happy to partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those out of favor. It's nice to hear this from Paul. I assumed he would have engaged in the usual lolbertarian hand-waving about private enterprise. And he's right of course. I said it in a poorly-received comment earlier, but we should stop expecting American social media platforms and tech infrastructure to be neutral carriers of information—that's delusional. Like all other media, they are publishing houses with specific agendas. Unsurprisingly that agenda is pro-market, pro-intervention, and anti-populist, due to the material interests of the fabulously wealthy people that own these firms. It's not a mistake that these interests overlap with those of US intelligence agencies and ghoulish NGOs either. You can't beg such people to play fair; you have to disengage and set up parallel institutions. I don't know how to do that of course.

deleted 6y ago

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