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That is the most depressing part for me - how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. Turns out they don't have to be threatened

by smsm42 6y ago

That is the most depressing part for me - how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. Turns out they don't have to be threatened with overwhelming force. They don't need to be threatened with death, starvation or torture. They don't need to be threatened by economic ruin or untold suffering. No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) and it's time to panic now - and poof, all noble ideals fly out of the window. It doesn't take nukes, it doesn't take Russians or Chinese, it doesn't take death and destruction - it takes Facebook, Twitter and CNN. I am still dumbfounded about how easy it was.

frostburg 6y ago
They're (correctly) scared because they've seen how many of them would support the insurrection.
- babesh 6y ago
  I am far more scared of you and what you would support.
  - stolen_biscuit 6y ago
    Perhaps you are not in the population of people that would be put in harms way if the people who stormed the capitol were successful?
    - smsm42 6y ago
      Successful in what? Stealing Pelosi's podium? Yes, she'd have to order a new one. And a new laptop. And probably fix some windows That's terrible, but what "population of people" do you mean here, beyond folks that need to clean up that shit (and who have my wholehearted compassion, it must have sucked)?
      - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
        > Successful in what Successful in killing/hold hostage those elected officials they deemed against their cause. This could have ended so much worse than it did. For example, what do you think would've happened if AOC or one of the other congresswomen maligned by Trump ended up in front of these maniacs? Do you think they would have stopped at stealing podiums/laptops?
        ganoushoreilly 6y ago
        What would have happened if any of the riots this past year escalated to violence because of heavy handed actions of the "left". In fact, we know what happened, death and destruction. Why is this not viewed in the same way? It's a complete attack on our country and government, but was somehow sanctioned?
        stolen_biscuit 6y ago
        Because people rioting over centuries of racial abuse and systematic racially motivated murder at the hands of policeman is not the same thing as storming your nations capitol because you don't like the results of a free and fair election
        ganoushoreilly 6y ago
        Oh so lets scream ACAB, remove our police, allow crime to grow and that will fix things? How many of the protests / riots were started in response to a police shooting and then months later it is clearer that the use of force was justified? I was 100% onboard with reformation of policing, increasing training, and the likes. When rioters attacked small business, used strong arm tactics to establish autonomous zones in us Cities, burned down police stations, attacked innocent bystanders.. etc.. you lost my empathy. I'm 100% for equality, I'm 100% for people loving whome ever they want. You have my support. But when the demonization of anyone that doesn't 100% toe the line becomes standard you lose me and a large portion of America. Both sides are going crazy and until both sides acknowledge that, it's only going to get worse. Media and big tech taking these actions will escalate not de-escalate.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Is this new information? Something like 1/4 of all Americans support their state seceding from the union. It’s not a new sentiment.
  - frostburg 6y ago
    It's not the same thing (a lot less oppression of others involved in that) and critically it's not the same grouping of people; it's like how Congress has extremely low approval rates but people often support their specific incumbent.
- smsm42 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25828247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25828247 Let's say there were people who support violently overthrowing US government (I personally don't think there were many at Capitol on Jan 6, but I am willing to entertain your point and even go much further than that). In fact, we know such people existed, long before today, but let's say there are more of them. How that changes anything? There always were hundreds of millions of people who would like nothing better than US government to fall. There were many governments actually falling, including as a result of violent - or non-violent - revolutions. Most of us who are out of elementary school probably could remember several examples they witnessed (hopefully not in person, but at least via the news). Somehow it didn't cause people to say "well, if that could happen, probably free speech is stupid, we just need to let our betters on Facebook/Twitter rule us now, people are clearly too stupid to handle free speech". To be clear, I am not claiming those violent people are right or not supporting them. I am just surprised that existence of such people - which shouldn't be any news for anyone - suddenly makes somebody to give up on such core ideals as free speech, and not as a result of some civilization-shattering catastrophic event with millions of deaths but as a result of a TV picture.
  - frostburg 6y ago
    Please consider how immersed in the QAnon belief system the whole thing is. The scary thing is how large amounts of people are apparently willing to attack democracy (broadly against their own interests) on the impetus of completely baseless hogwash. Society apparently has little defense against this sort of viral, distributed cult and people are scrambling. I'm pretty sure that ad-hoc ostracism effected by large social media companies isn't the best approach, but the cost of not doing anything is terrible.
    - smsm42 6y ago
      > The scary thing is how large amounts of people are apparently willing to attack democracy You mean, like set up an autonomous zone in a center of the city and kick the police out? Burn down a federal court? Destroy the police station? Take over capitol building and occupy it for several weeks? Attack an elected official's family at their own home because you don't like their policies? Yeah, that happened, but not sure how immersed in QAnon belief system (whatever it is) that was. All I know the democracy survived all that.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  I think they're scared because people like the ones who stormed the capitol, would happily kill any of them without a second thought. The attackers were completely under the influence of their propaganda. The depressing thing is that while you may share some beliefs with that side of the political spectrum, these are not the kind of people who will be reasonable when they come for 'nonbelievers' in the night. That shifts the terrain considerably as far as the security situation is concerned. Even if I agree with some of the tenets of their politics. Frankly that goes for the extremists on the other side of the political spectrum as well. These extremists have just shown tendencies that are way too dangerous.
  - emphatizer2000 6y ago
    "would happily kill any of them without a second thought" Bullshit
    - girvo 6y ago
      They killed a police officer, and savagely beat others. What makes you think they wouldn’t extend that to others?
      - emphatizer2000 6y ago
        May I ask where you get your information from? I am genuinely curious. I googled it, and while the exact circumstances don't seem to be clear yet, it doesn't sound like murder to me. It sounds as if most likely the officer was hurt in a brawl between rioters and police (being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher). While that is still awful, murder requires murderous intent and planning (afaik). Therefore, it seems really interesting what sources gave you the impression it was murder. On the other hand I remember a police officer being shot during BLM riots, while he tried to protect a business. So by your logic, is it reasonable to assume that BLM activists would murder their opponents without second thought? Did people throw bricks during BLM protests? That seems roughly the equivalent to throwing fire extinguishers, accepting that somebody could be severely hurt or even die.
smsm42 6y ago
And suppose there even were an insurrection. Strike that - suppose there was a war. We have 20th century behind us. It's not something that happened before history was invented by Herodotus. There are still people alive who have seen shit by their own eyes that would make average twitterati literally wet their pants on the spot just to think about it - and emerged through it without their ideals shattered. We still have Mein Kampf and Communist Manifesto sold on Amazon - and nobody is scared of it. Nobody abandons free speech because actual Gulags and actual Nazis actually, not metaphorically, happened. But now somehow people come out and say "maybe free speech isn't that good an idea. I know about Hitler. I know about Stalin. I know about Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Radio Of Thousand Hills. None of it have ever shaken me, I knew freedom of speech is important. But now, that's different!" What is going on, seriously? How does it make any sense? Are we being targeted by CIA for one of those mind control experiments again?
cccc4all 6y ago
I wouldn't stress over it one way or the other. This has been going on for many years, if not hundreds or thousands of years in human history. One group of people has always tried to take control over another group of people, by propaganda or force as necessary. Simply pick any history book and read about difficult times. Being depressed or in despair actually makes it easier for the propaganda to work. Seek out the truth, as the saying goes, the truth is out there. One thing about people in tech are that they are aware of patterns. Certain patterns seems to work and certain patterns don't seem to work. Ask why certain patterns are pushed by central authorities and mainstream popular media and certain patterns are suppressed.
- ska 6y ago
  The difficult thing here for a lot of Americans is that they believe even as an article of faith that "things are different here". So it's tough to see evidence that maybe that isn't as true as you had thought.
joshuamorton 6y ago
On the other hand, I'm amazed by how easily people are handwaving away what was a hairs breath from the murder and kidnapping of multiple elected officials, not to mention constitutional crisis/breakdown. > TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" It meets the definition though. There seems to be a lack of willingness to acknowledge an attempted coup as a coup, or a failed insurrection as an insurrection. And I get why. It's terrifying to acknowledge that. It's uncomfortable to realize how close we came to really bad things (and admittedly, hard to quantify how close we came. Trying to figure out what would have happened if Pence rejected the results, or if he was killed on the 6th is difficult. Many things could have happened). > it doesn't take Russians or Chinese Erm, Russians are 100% implicated in stoking civil unrest and conspiracies that built towards the events of the 6th. The Chinese may be, but I don't know. The problem is that people refuse to acknowledge that and take the threat seriously, which is how we got here.
- fastball 6y ago
  Which elected officials were a hairs breath from being murdered, exactly? Seems like mostly just Mike Pence. Who was apparently (if you believe the angry mobs chants) going to be hung by the same people that elected him. Not exactly what I normally think of when I hear "coup" or "violent insurrection". And at the same time, how different is that from people on the other end of the spectrum erecting a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos' house?
  - compiler-guy 6y ago
    Both things are reprehensible, but one of them is an attempt on our very democracy. That makes it way worse.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > going to be hung by the same people that elected him. Not exactly what I normally think of when I hear "coup" or "violent insurrection". Right, because he violated the trumpian cult of personality. How is that not scarier: murder someone unless he violated his oath to the constitution in order to keep an authoritarian leaning election-losing person in power. Killing government officials to result in a transfer of power. It's a sudden, violent, illegal seizure of government power. That's a coup.
boxed 6y ago
The US is the richest only on average, and not the safest by an stretch of the imagination.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Which civilization in history was safer? Tell me you criterion of safety and your example, let's see if I need to be corrected.
  - chrononaut 6y ago
    > Which civilization in history was safer? "Safer" in what respects? Personal safety? The US is 94/230 for countries with highest intentional murders per capita.[0] St. Louis and Baltimore rank 9 and 11 as highest murders per capita by cities across the entire world.[1] US ranks 14/116 with the highest rapes per capita.[2] There are plenty of governments and societies safer than the US with regards to personal safety. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate [2] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent-crime/Rapes-per-million-people https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violen... > Tell me you criterion of safety and your example, let's see if I need to be corrected. You are aware you're the one who made the argument that the US is the "most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet", and you are not specifying what the criteria you used to evaluate that?
notatoad 6y ago
> how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. This has always been the great lie behind the American concept of "freedom". At some point, one group's freedom starts to impinge on on another group's freedon, and you have to decide who gets the freedom and who doesnt. Unrestricted freedom for everybody is a fallacy that sounds good on campaign posters but ends up with somebody's freedom being ignored. Do you think the freedom to say whatever you want on Twitter is more important? Or is a private companies' freedom to define how their platforms are used more important?
- donny2018 6y ago
  Private companies’ freedom to define how their platforms are used should depend on the “private company” growing out of its niche and becoming what’s basically a public utility, a railroad owning one of the very few means of information delivery. Then, I think, different regulations should apply. I don’t know how this is going to be implemented in real life though. We clearly see that Twitter and FAANG have power to shut down such attempts and even more so after entering a mutually beneficial symbiosis with certain political groups. It’s hard to see where this is going.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    > freedom... should depend I completely agree with you. But the point I was trying to make wasn't what the limits on freedom should be, just that people need to accept that there will be limits on freedom and agree on what those limits should be ahead of time, rather than pretending freedom is a thing that can be unlimited and then after we get into a situation where it can't be, trying to roll back freedoms we thought we had.
skulk 6y ago
what you miss in your whole comment, and what the parent should have mentioned is unprecedented interconnectedness. That's the core problem, not freedom of expression. We don't know how to deal with such a fully connected social network, but we jumped right into it and are dealing with the fallout. Should we place limits on global megaphones? I think so. But how to do it in the most utilitarian way? I dunno.
yongjik 6y ago
People are witnessing a serious threat to their country and calling for a commensurate response. Framing it as "a bunch of talking heads on TV" vs. "giving up their freedom" merely shows your bias.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pradn 6y ago
A few things to note: 1) The American conception of free-speech absolutism is unique and an extreme point compared to the rest of the world. For example, Germany forbids Nazi symbols and India forbids speech that may rile up religious/communal violence and Britain has stronger libel laws than in the US. These are codified in the laws of these countries. Even in the US, there has always been a tension between the absolutist wording of the First Amendment, the law as interpreted by federal and state courts, and ground-reality enforcement. It's hard to argue against some restrictions on free speech - most everyone agrees you shouldn't be able to say "fire" in a crowded theater. And practically-speaking, the speech of leftists and Black civil rights agitators has been policed, literally. We've been able to forget the "paradox of tolerance" since we haven't been in a "post-truth" society until recently (for a sizable segment of the population anyway.) But now, we're having to deal with that issue. The questions have lurked beneath the surface. 2) The conception of individual rights is an Enlightenment idea. There are other ways to base a society - for example, starting from justice as the primary concern instead of rights, or starting from proper conduct according to some religious authority. Of course, we in America are heavily biased toward the Enlightenment approach to founding a political order. In a multi-valent world, we are having to confront these other political philosophies. So, I'd urge you to look at the "rights" discourse from other angles from the one that's "authorized" by the founders. In a way, little holds together America except the repeated affirmation that we are Americans and that we believe in the sacred principles of the Constitution. This, of course, makes it hard to question these fundamentals. So, in summary, I'm trying to note that American free-speech values exist in a continuum and are historically contingent. They aren't fixed, and we might move to alternate interpretations and approaches over time.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  > It's hard to argue against some restrictions on free speech - most everyone agrees you shouldn't be able to say "fire" in a crowded theater Heh, most everyone, except for the Supreme Court. That argument was overturned. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
wbsss4412 6y ago
It’s quite flippant of you to assert that people who are interpreting a set of facts contrary to your own interpretation, are doing so because they were “told” to by CNN. There’s plenty of evidence out there for people to make the case that the label of “insurrection” is appropriate. For some reason right wingers (not asserting this is you, I don’t know your affiliation) seem to have an obsession with “sheeple” and can’t comprehend how someone can have a contrary opinion, other than it being due to pure propaganda.
geofft 6y ago
I don't object to free speech because I'm scared and I want the government and the media to protect me from the scary people I see on TV. I object to freedom of speech because it doesn't still seem like an ideal to me in the first place. Don't attack a straw man. What is the argument that free speech is an ideal? That it promotes a more vibrant discourse? That it permits political positions that the powerful dislike to be communicated? That we can drive out bad speech with more speech? That the court of public opinion decides well? That it ensures everyone can participate in matters of public debate? Has it done so? Again, I'm not talking about the insurrection at all, so let's set aside the debate over whether your comments about it are factual. Look at the last several decades. Do you think that the social norm - the ideal - of freedom of speech has improved our society? Can you concretely describe an example? I believe in the right to freedom of speech as a limitation on government power. I don't want the government throwing anyone in prison for what they said. I don't believe in it as an ideal, as an aspiration for either individual communities or our society as a whole. Or, bluntly: Do you believe HN would be a better community without downvotes and moderation?
- geofft 6y ago
  I'd like to thank the folks who downvoted this comment to the point of invisibility for making my point for me more eloquently than I ever could. This community is a better place because it does not treat free speech as an ideal and people don't have to see ideas they disagree with. :)
- jimz 6y ago
  It's less about the absolute goodness of free speech but rather, a problem of the moderator model that you speak of, that the Constitution is explicitly addressing. There are many forms of speech that are unlawful - child pornography, defamation, violation of copyrights, imminent threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc. They're not generally controversial, but they affect and intrude upon the rights of others in clear-cut ways, or have been defined by the courts in a way that there can be such a determination. But if you want some sort of broader, categorical and preemptive prohibition coming from the state you run into the problem we have with policing generally - that even well-intentioned authorities frequently create enormous unforeseen damage down the line, and we just had the president essentially spend a huge amount of time openly trying to coerce private companies into carrying his fringe message with quasi-legal proclamations and in some cases, actually using state coercion in the form of denying fair competition over contracts. HN is a private platform, if you get kicked off here there's very little real consequence. The government makes the stakes instantly higher because without enforcement the laws are more or less just words on paper but the criminal justice system's inequities are well known and well documented enough that merely having state moderation can actually push things in a worse direction real quick. See: the PHilippines for example. Private platform moderation is in a sense the ideal solution if platforms are actually willing to do it. The Constitution protects their first amendment rights too, and that is the right to decide who can and can't use your platform. The tradeoff is that the state for the most part can't force you to carry messages you don't want to carry, in exchange the state also can't easily force you to act as their auxiliary in enforcing only content that the state likes. It's not really a matter of speech in itself in a philosophical sense but rather, appropriate ways to actually prevent things like violent insurrections or lynchings or agitprop being spread in a world where outside of the few and already prohibited forms there's some room for interpretation, and also, some room for bad faith from either side. It's less about how much free speech has quantifiably benefitted our society - which one can certainly make an argument for - but rather, the consequence of giving reins to a moderator that has the power to literally deny one's liberty and ruin someone's life in an officially sanctioned and prolonged fashion when there's no guarantee that the moderator would be able or willing to act in a way that isn't arbitrary but still effective. Every other platform is built on the basis of consent - as in one joins it at their will and one gets removed from it at the will of the moderators. The law works through coercion. The stakes are quite different. And speech itself is only the most immediate manifestation of bigger problems in society anyway. The underlying sentiments don't go away, they just become clandestine and fester. It's not something punitive punishment can readily solve. Prohibition didn't work here, the war on drugs is an abject failure, the myriads of exclusionary laws congress passed from the 1880s to the 1940s both failed to actually stop people of different ethnic backgrounds from having relationships and at the same time contributed to a particularly cruel handling of refugees that added to the holocaust death tolls. In more authoritarian countries, China's porn ban, which is actively enforced with sites being taken down constantly, does almost nothing to actually prevent access (nor did it bring the moral salubriousness that it was supposed to bring). Internal passports didn't stop people from seeking work elsewhere and becoming second class citizens. Our own immigration system becomes more disastrous in every possible way as soon as we decided to actively enforce it. The DMCA and CFAA, both with punitive criminal and civil liabilities, have failed to stop piracy or computer intrusion (especially since that part of the CFAA was a response to a pre-WWW Matthew Broderick movie) but did encourage a lot of companies that sell ineffective solutions backed with FUD and hamper effective open disclosure and penetration testing for quite some time. The underlying incentives haven't changed. Banning the symptoms is easy and possibly even politically expedient but represents a bandaid over a gashing bleeding wound. Good speech can make bad speech irrelevant in some cases but it's neither reliable nor address the underlying problems. There's a far right nationalist movement in Germany again. Mere censorship can only go so far. Unless you can come up with a way to, without resorting to mass coercion, create a system that can fairly act as this moderator and be accepted as fair across the board, it's almost certainly worse, not better, to allow active state interference.The deplatforming case is actually about exercising one (comapny)'s free speech rights, AWS can't violate the 1st amendment rights of Parler. And if they can't find some sketchier but less takedown-happy bulletproof-ish server overseas to host their shit, it's their own fault, they're not entitled for official promotion of their viewpoints. Allowing government regulation of speech will allow that.
Lazare 6y ago
I agree with almost everything you say except... > a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) It didn't succeed, and in retrospect, it didn't look very effective. Many (but by no means all) of the participants were clowns. However, it was absolutely an attempt. People died in an attempt to storm a seat of government and install a different regime. People were chanting "hang Mike Pence", constructed an actual gallows, and then went looking for him. And they did this, let's reiterate, in an attempt to overturn the election. The people trying to track him down had specific objectives in mind (however realistic or otherwise they may have been) and they weren't "giving him a bouquet of flowers and a hearty thank you for performing his entirely ceremonial role in the election process". We can argue about how incompetent the insurrection was (clearly, very), and how close it came to achieving any of its objectives (still quite unclear). And we can certainly argue about whether a single failed insurrection attempt justifies the response; I think a very valid case can be made for the "no" argument. But words have meaning, and the word "insurrection" means precisely this.
- smsm42 6y ago
  > However, it was absolutely an attempt Attempt at what? Takeover of the power in the US? B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. > People were chanting "hang Mike Pence", People chant a lot of shit. People were chanting "hang Trump" for four years, nobody ever called it an insurrection. Before that, they were chanting against Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. Nobody ever has been hanged. Pretending not to understand the difference between chanting slogans and actually hanging somebody is silly. > And they did this, let's reiterate, in an attempt to overturn the election. There's no possible way of overturning any election this way. It's like I point a finger at you and say "bang!" and you'd claim I tried to murder you with a gun. It is literally impossible to change result of the election by jumping on a desk in a Congress. It was an act of protest, that went out of the way and grew violent, but it is no more insurrection than pointing a finger is gun violence. Let's not mimic an idiot school principal that calls the police on a elementary schooler that shows the other kid a finger gun and complain about "gun violence". There were no attempt to overthrow anything because it's not possible to overthrow anything this way. > But words have meaning, and the word "insurrection" means precisely this. Nope, the word "insurrection" means armed violent action in order to overtake the government, and this is no more insurrection than finger gun is a mass shooting.
vowelless 6y ago
> them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) Even if this was an insurrection, I don't see how that means you need to clamp down on freedom of speech.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
I watched the ProPublica streams and while it indeed came across as a Wallmart insurrection compared to say the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania it would have been vastly different outcome if the crowd actually managed to get their hands on Pence or any senior house/senate member.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some former general (or someone) talking about how the capitol riots are similar to Iraq. They compared the IEDs at the capitol to the IEDs that NATO troops faced in Iraq and how various right-wing groups could be considered "insurgents" not unlike the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, we might expect NPR and other media outlets to be sensationalist. Blah blah blah about the digital media environment and its market incentives. But otherwise intelligent people parrot this sort of thing as well, calling them terrorists and insurrectionists (and yeah, I'm sure some technical argument can be made for these things, just like critics of the BLM riots made technical arguments for why those rioters were terrorists, but questionable technicalities don't merit responses in proportion to bonafide terrorism or insurrection). There's a lot of stuff to actually criticize here: a violent riot incited by the POTUS over false pretenses, directed at the capitol, leaving several dead. It's already bad, but we can't seem to content ourselves with reality, we have to go further. We have to compare a bunch of MAGA rioters with actual insurgents. Man, I really don't like this sort of race-to-the-bottom-ism, where whatever reprehensible thing the other side does becomes permission for our side to lower our own moral bar ("Why are you criticizing us?! Can't you see that what they're doing is worse?!"--never mind that I'm criticizing 'them' as well, and in proportion). At some point we have to come up from our outrage binger and realize that we can't just steamroll half the country; we have to figure out how to get along (and if you find yourself about to type, "get along with literal Nazis?!", you've missed the point).
babygoat 6y ago
A couple things: 1) Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater isn’t protected speech, so why should explicit calls to violence be? 2) The government hasn’t silenced anyone. The 1st amendment doesn’t oblige anyone else to broadcast hate speech or plots to subvert a democratic election process.
tw04 6y ago
Hang on: so because they failed at killing elected officials, there's nothing to worry about? You can tell us for certain that had one of the officers not lead them away from Pence he would've been safe? Based on...? Should we let the Michigan militia that was going to murder the governor off, since they just talked about it but didn't actually do it... Because they were caught.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Based on his politics - he tacitly supports the politics of those, so he turns a blind eye, like many in the tech community and on here (a significant minority.) It's sad, but not surprising given the population of this site. Anybody who supports democracy should be against everything that Trump has said and done as well as the riots and those who support it. Those are the most direct attacks on our way of life since the civil war. But they won't because Trump does what they like - it's bad faith, and always has been. It's not about free speech and never has been. Just more projection and attacks from the typical actors.
- slibhb 6y ago
  You're responding to a sentiment that was never expressed. No one said they should be "let off". Even if Pence had been killed, American democracy would not be in danger. Presidents have been killed and democracy survived intact.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) This is completely off-base and devalues the rest of your comment. The capitol was stormed which delayed the process for the peaceful transfer of power, and people on here are still OK with it because of their politics. This is wrong. Do not accept this response. We will not accept it. Anybody who doesn't view this as a direct attack on our way of life is just wrong - they don't want to believe, because your politics.
jmull 6y ago
The previous poster isn’t “scared”. They have observed the what happens when people feel free of the consequences of their speech. Making this out as if it were about fear rather than direct issues doesn’t help. Can there be a free speech social platform that isn’t a cesspool? If so, how? Is it inevitable that a free platform will be used to recruit, radicalize, and organize for violence? Or is there a way to prevent that? Ignore these questions and you let them fester. > “insurrection” Here’s a definition from Merriam-Webster: “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government”. Seems to fit what happened at the Capitol pretty well, doesn’t it?
girvo 6y ago
They killed a police officer. While storming your Capitol building during your democratic process. What else do you call it then?
seneca 6y ago
> No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) and it's time to panic now I must say, it's reassuring to read someone else saying this. This whole ordeal is perhaps the largest tempest in a teapot in history, and it's shocking to me how many people are buying it. The ability for politically motivated coordinated propaganda to control the zeitgeist in the modern world is, however, quite horrifying.
ineptech 6y ago
I'm surprised such a condescending comment is still visible. Parler didn't go dark because your outgroup "abandoned their ideals", it went dark because a bunch of for-profit companies don't want to do business with them, because doing so would lead to a loss in revenue. Sucks for them, but not a free speech issue.
jb775 6y ago
This is possibly the most perfect response I've ever read on HN...hits the nail ON the head. People need to clear their heads, forget politics for a second, and put some more thought into this. I'm literally dumbstruck as to how so many intelligent people aren't able to comprehend the importance of the bigger picture here. And if you try to have a rational & zoomed-out conversation, they insist on zooming-in on small-picture partisan details which exist on a foundation of misrepresented/skewed/artificially framed information.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  The sky isn't falling, freedom of speech is not gone, and America will get along. You are being hysterical.
jacquesm 6y ago
Easily? Sorry, but that wasn't all that easily, and there are still plenty of people for whom the coin hasn't dropped. Ideals are easy to keep when they aren't being challenged. Then, when they are being challenged and suddenly all those absolute positions don't look so comfortable anymore what are you going to do? People wouldn't mind risking terrorism, childporn and ordinary crime. But what if the price of free speech absolutism was democracy itself?
snowwrestler 6y ago
I don’t feel like I’ve given up any freedom ideals. My notion of freedom extends equally to Amazon and Google and Twitter, not just their customers. I feel the opposite from you: I’m amazed that losing one election has been enough to make so-called conservatives start talking about using the government to seize private companies and force them to provide service to everyone whether they want to or not.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
An alternate take on current events is that Americans are correctly updating on new evidence around right to amplification, in a direction you don't personally prefer.
lostlogin 6y ago
> No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" Is it the richest and safest? What would you call the event that happened that day?
unethical_ban 6y ago
You fundamentally blow off the concept of symbolism, or the fact that the attempt itself matters, not just its success. You make light of a violent mob chanting "hang Pence" as they march toward him, and yes, in light of "not being able to overthrow the government", you fail to convince me some would not have tried to capture or kill politicians. In short, you are waving your hand and claiming persecution as if Truth, Justice and the American Way has been defeated because Trump is off Twitter. The sky has not fallen.

by smsm42 6y ago

frostburg 6y ago

They're (correctly) scared because they've seen how many of them would support the insurrection.

babesh 6y ago
I am far more scared of you and what you would support.
- stolen_biscuit 6y ago
  Perhaps you are not in the population of people that would be put in harms way if the people who stormed the capitol were successful?
  - smsm42 6y ago
    Successful in what? Stealing Pelosi's podium? Yes, she'd have to order a new one. And a new laptop. And probably fix some windows That's terrible, but what "population of people" do you mean here, beyond folks that need to clean up that shit (and who have my wholehearted compassion, it must have sucked)?
    - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
      > Successful in what Successful in killing/hold hostage those elected officials they deemed against their cause. This could have ended so much worse than it did. For example, what do you think would've happened if AOC or one of the other congresswomen maligned by Trump ended up in front of these maniacs? Do you think they would have stopped at stealing podiums/laptops?
      - ganoushoreilly 6y ago
        What would have happened if any of the riots this past year escalated to violence because of heavy handed actions of the "left". In fact, we know what happened, death and destruction. Why is this not viewed in the same way? It's a complete attack on our country and government, but was somehow sanctioned?
        stolen_biscuit 6y ago
        Because people rioting over centuries of racial abuse and systematic racially motivated murder at the hands of policeman is not the same thing as storming your nations capitol because you don't like the results of a free and fair election
        ganoushoreilly 6y ago
        Oh so lets scream ACAB, remove our police, allow crime to grow and that will fix things? How many of the protests / riots were started in response to a police shooting and then months later it is clearer that the use of force was justified? I was 100% onboard with reformation of policing, increasing training, and the likes. When rioters attacked small business, used strong arm tactics to establish autonomous zones in us Cities, burned down police stations, attacked innocent bystanders.. etc.. you lost my empathy. I'm 100% for equality, I'm 100% for people loving whome ever they want. You have my support. But when the demonization of anyone that doesn't 100% toe the line becomes standard you lose me and a large portion of America. Both sides are going crazy and until both sides acknowledge that, it's only going to get worse. Media and big tech taking these actions will escalate not de-escalate.
rayiner 6y ago
Is this new information? Something like 1/4 of all Americans support their state seceding from the union. It’s not a new sentiment.
- frostburg 6y ago
  It's not the same thing (a lot less oppression of others involved in that) and critically it's not the same grouping of people; it's like how Congress has extremely low approval rates but people often support their specific incumbent.
smsm42 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25828247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25828247 Let's say there were people who support violently overthrowing US government (I personally don't think there were many at Capitol on Jan 6, but I am willing to entertain your point and even go much further than that). In fact, we know such people existed, long before today, but let's say there are more of them. How that changes anything? There always were hundreds of millions of people who would like nothing better than US government to fall. There were many governments actually falling, including as a result of violent - or non-violent - revolutions. Most of us who are out of elementary school probably could remember several examples they witnessed (hopefully not in person, but at least via the news). Somehow it didn't cause people to say "well, if that could happen, probably free speech is stupid, we just need to let our betters on Facebook/Twitter rule us now, people are clearly too stupid to handle free speech". To be clear, I am not claiming those violent people are right or not supporting them. I am just surprised that existence of such people - which shouldn't be any news for anyone - suddenly makes somebody to give up on such core ideals as free speech, and not as a result of some civilization-shattering catastrophic event with millions of deaths but as a result of a TV picture.
- frostburg 6y ago
  Please consider how immersed in the QAnon belief system the whole thing is. The scary thing is how large amounts of people are apparently willing to attack democracy (broadly against their own interests) on the impetus of completely baseless hogwash. Society apparently has little defense against this sort of viral, distributed cult and people are scrambling. I'm pretty sure that ad-hoc ostracism effected by large social media companies isn't the best approach, but the cost of not doing anything is terrible.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    > The scary thing is how large amounts of people are apparently willing to attack democracy You mean, like set up an autonomous zone in a center of the city and kick the police out? Burn down a federal court? Destroy the police station? Take over capitol building and occupy it for several weeks? Attack an elected official's family at their own home because you don't like their policies? Yeah, that happened, but not sure how immersed in QAnon belief system (whatever it is) that was. All I know the democracy survived all that.
bilbo0s 6y ago
I think they're scared because people like the ones who stormed the capitol, would happily kill any of them without a second thought. The attackers were completely under the influence of their propaganda. The depressing thing is that while you may share some beliefs with that side of the political spectrum, these are not the kind of people who will be reasonable when they come for 'nonbelievers' in the night. That shifts the terrain considerably as far as the security situation is concerned. Even if I agree with some of the tenets of their politics. Frankly that goes for the extremists on the other side of the political spectrum as well. These extremists have just shown tendencies that are way too dangerous.
- emphatizer2000 6y ago
  "would happily kill any of them without a second thought" Bullshit
  - girvo 6y ago
    They killed a police officer, and savagely beat others. What makes you think they wouldn’t extend that to others?
    - emphatizer2000 6y ago
      May I ask where you get your information from? I am genuinely curious. I googled it, and while the exact circumstances don't seem to be clear yet, it doesn't sound like murder to me. It sounds as if most likely the officer was hurt in a brawl between rioters and police (being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher). While that is still awful, murder requires murderous intent and planning (afaik). Therefore, it seems really interesting what sources gave you the impression it was murder. On the other hand I remember a police officer being shot during BLM riots, while he tried to protect a business. So by your logic, is it reasonable to assume that BLM activists would murder their opponents without second thought? Did people throw bricks during BLM protests? That seems roughly the equivalent to throwing fire extinguishers, accepting that somebody could be severely hurt or even die.

smsm42 6y ago

And suppose there even were an insurrection. Strike that - suppose there was a war. We have 20th century behind us. It's not something that happened before history was invented by Herodotus. There are still people alive who have seen shit by their own eyes that would make average twitterati literally wet their pants on the spot just to think about it - and emerged through it without their ideals shattered. We still have Mein Kampf and Communist Manifesto sold on Amazon - and nobody is scared of it. Nobody abandons free speech because actual Gulags and actual Nazis actually, not metaphorically, happened. But now somehow people come out and say "maybe free speech isn't that good an idea. I know about Hitler. I know about Stalin. I know about Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Radio Of Thousand Hills. None of it have ever shaken me, I knew freedom of speech is important. But now, that's different!" What is going on, seriously? How does it make any sense? Are we being targeted by CIA for one of those mind control experiments again?

cccc4all 6y ago

I wouldn't stress over it one way or the other. This has been going on for many years, if not hundreds or thousands of years in human history. One group of people has always tried to take control over another group of people, by propaganda or force as necessary. Simply pick any history book and read about difficult times. Being depressed or in despair actually makes it easier for the propaganda to work. Seek out the truth, as the saying goes, the truth is out there. One thing about people in tech are that they are aware of patterns. Certain patterns seems to work and certain patterns don't seem to work. Ask why certain patterns are pushed by central authorities and mainstream popular media and certain patterns are suppressed.

ska 6y ago
The difficult thing here for a lot of Americans is that they believe even as an article of faith that "things are different here". So it's tough to see evidence that maybe that isn't as true as you had thought.

joshuamorton 6y ago

On the other hand, I'm amazed by how easily people are handwaving away what was a hairs breath from the murder and kidnapping of multiple elected officials, not to mention constitutional crisis/breakdown. > TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" It meets the definition though. There seems to be a lack of willingness to acknowledge an attempted coup as a coup, or a failed insurrection as an insurrection. And I get why. It's terrifying to acknowledge that. It's uncomfortable to realize how close we came to really bad things (and admittedly, hard to quantify how close we came. Trying to figure out what would have happened if Pence rejected the results, or if he was killed on the 6th is difficult. Many things could have happened). > it doesn't take Russians or Chinese Erm, Russians are 100% implicated in stoking civil unrest and conspiracies that built towards the events of the 6th. The Chinese may be, but I don't know. The problem is that people refuse to acknowledge that and take the threat seriously, which is how we got here.

fastball 6y ago
Which elected officials were a hairs breath from being murdered, exactly? Seems like mostly just Mike Pence. Who was apparently (if you believe the angry mobs chants) going to be hung by the same people that elected him. Not exactly what I normally think of when I hear "coup" or "violent insurrection". And at the same time, how different is that from people on the other end of the spectrum erecting a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos' house?
- compiler-guy 6y ago
  Both things are reprehensible, but one of them is an attempt on our very democracy. That makes it way worse.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > going to be hung by the same people that elected him. Not exactly what I normally think of when I hear "coup" or "violent insurrection". Right, because he violated the trumpian cult of personality. How is that not scarier: murder someone unless he violated his oath to the constitution in order to keep an authoritarian leaning election-losing person in power. Killing government officials to result in a transfer of power. It's a sudden, violent, illegal seizure of government power. That's a coup.

boxed 6y ago

The US is the richest only on average, and not the safest by an stretch of the imagination.

smsm42 6y ago
Which civilization in history was safer? Tell me you criterion of safety and your example, let's see if I need to be corrected.
- chrononaut 6y ago
  > Which civilization in history was safer? "Safer" in what respects? Personal safety? The US is 94/230 for countries with highest intentional murders per capita.[0] St. Louis and Baltimore rank 9 and 11 as highest murders per capita by cities across the entire world.[1] US ranks 14/116 with the highest rapes per capita.[2] There are plenty of governments and societies safer than the US with regards to personal safety. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate [2] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent-crime/Rapes-per-million-people https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violen... > Tell me you criterion of safety and your example, let's see if I need to be corrected. You are aware you're the one who made the argument that the US is the "most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet", and you are not specifying what the criteria you used to evaluate that?

notatoad 6y ago

> how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. This has always been the great lie behind the American concept of "freedom". At some point, one group's freedom starts to impinge on on another group's freedon, and you have to decide who gets the freedom and who doesnt. Unrestricted freedom for everybody is a fallacy that sounds good on campaign posters but ends up with somebody's freedom being ignored. Do you think the freedom to say whatever you want on Twitter is more important? Or is a private companies' freedom to define how their platforms are used more important?

donny2018 6y ago
Private companies’ freedom to define how their platforms are used should depend on the “private company” growing out of its niche and becoming what’s basically a public utility, a railroad owning one of the very few means of information delivery. Then, I think, different regulations should apply. I don’t know how this is going to be implemented in real life though. We clearly see that Twitter and FAANG have power to shut down such attempts and even more so after entering a mutually beneficial symbiosis with certain political groups. It’s hard to see where this is going.
- notatoad 6y ago
  > freedom... should depend I completely agree with you. But the point I was trying to make wasn't what the limits on freedom should be, just that people need to accept that there will be limits on freedom and agree on what those limits should be ahead of time, rather than pretending freedom is a thing that can be unlimited and then after we get into a situation where it can't be, trying to roll back freedoms we thought we had.

skulk 6y ago

what you miss in your whole comment, and what the parent should have mentioned is unprecedented interconnectedness. That's the core problem, not freedom of expression. We don't know how to deal with such a fully connected social network, but we jumped right into it and are dealing with the fallout. Should we place limits on global megaphones? I think so. But how to do it in the most utilitarian way? I dunno.

yongjik 6y ago

People are witnessing a serious threat to their country and calling for a commensurate response. Framing it as "a bunch of talking heads on TV" vs. "giving up their freedom" merely shows your bias.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pradn 6y ago

A few things to note: 1) The American conception of free-speech absolutism is unique and an extreme point compared to the rest of the world. For example, Germany forbids Nazi symbols and India forbids speech that may rile up religious/communal violence and Britain has stronger libel laws than in the US. These are codified in the laws of these countries. Even in the US, there has always been a tension between the absolutist wording of the First Amendment, the law as interpreted by federal and state courts, and ground-reality enforcement. It's hard to argue against some restrictions on free speech - most everyone agrees you shouldn't be able to say "fire" in a crowded theater. And practically-speaking, the speech of leftists and Black civil rights agitators has been policed, literally. We've been able to forget the "paradox of tolerance" since we haven't been in a "post-truth" society until recently (for a sizable segment of the population anyway.) But now, we're having to deal with that issue. The questions have lurked beneath the surface. 2) The conception of individual rights is an Enlightenment idea. There are other ways to base a society - for example, starting from justice as the primary concern instead of rights, or starting from proper conduct according to some religious authority. Of course, we in America are heavily biased toward the Enlightenment approach to founding a political order. In a multi-valent world, we are having to confront these other political philosophies. So, I'd urge you to look at the "rights" discourse from other angles from the one that's "authorized" by the founders. In a way, little holds together America except the repeated affirmation that we are Americans and that we believe in the sacred principles of the Constitution. This, of course, makes it hard to question these fundamentals. So, in summary, I'm trying to note that American free-speech values exist in a continuum and are historically contingent. They aren't fixed, and we might move to alternate interpretations and approaches over time.

nickysielicki 6y ago
> It's hard to argue against some restrictions on free speech - most everyone agrees you shouldn't be able to say "fire" in a crowded theater Heh, most everyone, except for the Supreme Court. That argument was overturned. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

wbsss4412 6y ago

It’s quite flippant of you to assert that people who are interpreting a set of facts contrary to your own interpretation, are doing so because they were “told” to by CNN. There’s plenty of evidence out there for people to make the case that the label of “insurrection” is appropriate. For some reason right wingers (not asserting this is you, I don’t know your affiliation) seem to have an obsession with “sheeple” and can’t comprehend how someone can have a contrary opinion, other than it being due to pure propaganda.

geofft 6y ago

I don't object to free speech because I'm scared and I want the government and the media to protect me from the scary people I see on TV. I object to freedom of speech because it doesn't still seem like an ideal to me in the first place. Don't attack a straw man. What is the argument that free speech is an ideal? That it promotes a more vibrant discourse? That it permits political positions that the powerful dislike to be communicated? That we can drive out bad speech with more speech? That the court of public opinion decides well? That it ensures everyone can participate in matters of public debate? Has it done so? Again, I'm not talking about the insurrection at all, so let's set aside the debate over whether your comments about it are factual. Look at the last several decades. Do you think that the social norm - the ideal - of freedom of speech has improved our society? Can you concretely describe an example? I believe in the right to freedom of speech as a limitation on government power. I don't want the government throwing anyone in prison for what they said. I don't believe in it as an ideal, as an aspiration for either individual communities or our society as a whole. Or, bluntly: Do you believe HN would be a better community without downvotes and moderation?

geofft 6y ago
I'd like to thank the folks who downvoted this comment to the point of invisibility for making my point for me more eloquently than I ever could. This community is a better place because it does not treat free speech as an ideal and people don't have to see ideas they disagree with. :)
jimz 6y ago
It's less about the absolute goodness of free speech but rather, a problem of the moderator model that you speak of, that the Constitution is explicitly addressing. There are many forms of speech that are unlawful - child pornography, defamation, violation of copyrights, imminent threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc. They're not generally controversial, but they affect and intrude upon the rights of others in clear-cut ways, or have been defined by the courts in a way that there can be such a determination. But if you want some sort of broader, categorical and preemptive prohibition coming from the state you run into the problem we have with policing generally - that even well-intentioned authorities frequently create enormous unforeseen damage down the line, and we just had the president essentially spend a huge amount of time openly trying to coerce private companies into carrying his fringe message with quasi-legal proclamations and in some cases, actually using state coercion in the form of denying fair competition over contracts. HN is a private platform, if you get kicked off here there's very little real consequence. The government makes the stakes instantly higher because without enforcement the laws are more or less just words on paper but the criminal justice system's inequities are well known and well documented enough that merely having state moderation can actually push things in a worse direction real quick. See: the PHilippines for example. Private platform moderation is in a sense the ideal solution if platforms are actually willing to do it. The Constitution protects their first amendment rights too, and that is the right to decide who can and can't use your platform. The tradeoff is that the state for the most part can't force you to carry messages you don't want to carry, in exchange the state also can't easily force you to act as their auxiliary in enforcing only content that the state likes. It's not really a matter of speech in itself in a philosophical sense but rather, appropriate ways to actually prevent things like violent insurrections or lynchings or agitprop being spread in a world where outside of the few and already prohibited forms there's some room for interpretation, and also, some room for bad faith from either side. It's less about how much free speech has quantifiably benefitted our society - which one can certainly make an argument for - but rather, the consequence of giving reins to a moderator that has the power to literally deny one's liberty and ruin someone's life in an officially sanctioned and prolonged fashion when there's no guarantee that the moderator would be able or willing to act in a way that isn't arbitrary but still effective. Every other platform is built on the basis of consent - as in one joins it at their will and one gets removed from it at the will of the moderators. The law works through coercion. The stakes are quite different. And speech itself is only the most immediate manifestation of bigger problems in society anyway. The underlying sentiments don't go away, they just become clandestine and fester. It's not something punitive punishment can readily solve. Prohibition didn't work here, the war on drugs is an abject failure, the myriads of exclusionary laws congress passed from the 1880s to the 1940s both failed to actually stop people of different ethnic backgrounds from having relationships and at the same time contributed to a particularly cruel handling of refugees that added to the holocaust death tolls. In more authoritarian countries, China's porn ban, which is actively enforced with sites being taken down constantly, does almost nothing to actually prevent access (nor did it bring the moral salubriousness that it was supposed to bring). Internal passports didn't stop people from seeking work elsewhere and becoming second class citizens. Our own immigration system becomes more disastrous in every possible way as soon as we decided to actively enforce it. The DMCA and CFAA, both with punitive criminal and civil liabilities, have failed to stop piracy or computer intrusion (especially since that part of the CFAA was a response to a pre-WWW Matthew Broderick movie) but did encourage a lot of companies that sell ineffective solutions backed with FUD and hamper effective open disclosure and penetration testing for quite some time. The underlying incentives haven't changed. Banning the symptoms is easy and possibly even politically expedient but represents a bandaid over a gashing bleeding wound. Good speech can make bad speech irrelevant in some cases but it's neither reliable nor address the underlying problems. There's a far right nationalist movement in Germany again. Mere censorship can only go so far. Unless you can come up with a way to, without resorting to mass coercion, create a system that can fairly act as this moderator and be accepted as fair across the board, it's almost certainly worse, not better, to allow active state interference.The deplatforming case is actually about exercising one (comapny)'s free speech rights, AWS can't violate the 1st amendment rights of Parler. And if they can't find some sketchier but less takedown-happy bulletproof-ish server overseas to host their shit, it's their own fault, they're not entitled for official promotion of their viewpoints. Allowing government regulation of speech will allow that.

Lazare 6y ago

I agree with almost everything you say except... > a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) It didn't succeed, and in retrospect, it didn't look very effective. Many (but by no means all) of the participants were clowns. However, it was absolutely an attempt. People died in an attempt to storm a seat of government and install a different regime. People were chanting "hang Mike Pence", constructed an actual gallows, and then went looking for him. And they did this, let's reiterate, in an attempt to overturn the election. The people trying to track him down had specific objectives in mind (however realistic or otherwise they may have been) and they weren't "giving him a bouquet of flowers and a hearty thank you for performing his entirely ceremonial role in the election process". We can argue about how incompetent the insurrection was (clearly, very), and how close it came to achieving any of its objectives (still quite unclear). And we can certainly argue about whether a single failed insurrection attempt justifies the response; I think a very valid case can be made for the "no" argument. But words have meaning, and the word "insurrection" means precisely this.

smsm42 6y ago
> However, it was absolutely an attempt Attempt at what? Takeover of the power in the US? B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. > People were chanting "hang Mike Pence", People chant a lot of shit. People were chanting "hang Trump" for four years, nobody ever called it an insurrection. Before that, they were chanting against Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. Nobody ever has been hanged. Pretending not to understand the difference between chanting slogans and actually hanging somebody is silly. > And they did this, let's reiterate, in an attempt to overturn the election. There's no possible way of overturning any election this way. It's like I point a finger at you and say "bang!" and you'd claim I tried to murder you with a gun. It is literally impossible to change result of the election by jumping on a desk in a Congress. It was an act of protest, that went out of the way and grew violent, but it is no more insurrection than pointing a finger is gun violence. Let's not mimic an idiot school principal that calls the police on a elementary schooler that shows the other kid a finger gun and complain about "gun violence". There were no attempt to overthrow anything because it's not possible to overthrow anything this way. > But words have meaning, and the word "insurrection" means precisely this. Nope, the word "insurrection" means armed violent action in order to overtake the government, and this is no more insurrection than finger gun is a mass shooting.

vowelless 6y ago

> them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) Even if this was an insurrection, I don't see how that means you need to clamp down on freedom of speech.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

I watched the ProPublica streams and while it indeed came across as a Wallmart insurrection compared to say the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania it would have been vastly different outcome if the crowd actually managed to get their hands on Pence or any senior house/senate member.

throwaway894345 6y ago

I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some former general (or someone) talking about how the capitol riots are similar to Iraq. They compared the IEDs at the capitol to the IEDs that NATO troops faced in Iraq and how various right-wing groups could be considered "insurgents" not unlike the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, we might expect NPR and other media outlets to be sensationalist. Blah blah blah about the digital media environment and its market incentives. But otherwise intelligent people parrot this sort of thing as well, calling them terrorists and insurrectionists (and yeah, I'm sure some technical argument can be made for these things, just like critics of the BLM riots made technical arguments for why those rioters were terrorists, but questionable technicalities don't merit responses in proportion to bonafide terrorism or insurrection). There's a lot of stuff to actually criticize here: a violent riot incited by the POTUS over false pretenses, directed at the capitol, leaving several dead. It's already bad, but we can't seem to content ourselves with reality, we have to go further. We have to compare a bunch of MAGA rioters with actual insurgents. Man, I really don't like this sort of race-to-the-bottom-ism, where whatever reprehensible thing the other side does becomes permission for our side to lower our own moral bar ("Why are you criticizing us?! Can't you see that what they're doing is worse?!"--never mind that I'm criticizing 'them' as well, and in proportion). At some point we have to come up from our outrage binger and realize that we can't just steamroll half the country; we have to figure out how to get along (and if you find yourself about to type, "get along with literal Nazis?!", you've missed the point).

babygoat 6y ago

A couple things: 1) Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater isn’t protected speech, so why should explicit calls to violence be? 2) The government hasn’t silenced anyone. The 1st amendment doesn’t oblige anyone else to broadcast hate speech or plots to subvert a democratic election process.

tw04 6y ago

Hang on: so because they failed at killing elected officials, there's nothing to worry about? You can tell us for certain that had one of the officers not lead them away from Pence he would've been safe? Based on...? Should we let the Michigan militia that was going to murder the governor off, since they just talked about it but didn't actually do it... Because they were caught.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Based on his politics - he tacitly supports the politics of those, so he turns a blind eye, like many in the tech community and on here (a significant minority.) It's sad, but not surprising given the population of this site. Anybody who supports democracy should be against everything that Trump has said and done as well as the riots and those who support it. Those are the most direct attacks on our way of life since the civil war. But they won't because Trump does what they like - it's bad faith, and always has been. It's not about free speech and never has been. Just more projection and attacks from the typical actors.
slibhb 6y ago
You're responding to a sentiment that was never expressed. No one said they should be "let off". Even if Pence had been killed, American democracy would not be in danger. Presidents have been killed and democracy survived intact.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

> No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) This is completely off-base and devalues the rest of your comment. The capitol was stormed which delayed the process for the peaceful transfer of power, and people on here are still OK with it because of their politics. This is wrong. Do not accept this response. We will not accept it. Anybody who doesn't view this as a direct attack on our way of life is just wrong - they don't want to believe, because your politics.

jmull 6y ago

The previous poster isn’t “scared”. They have observed the what happens when people feel free of the consequences of their speech. Making this out as if it were about fear rather than direct issues doesn’t help. Can there be a free speech social platform that isn’t a cesspool? If so, how? Is it inevitable that a free platform will be used to recruit, radicalize, and organize for violence? Or is there a way to prevent that? Ignore these questions and you let them fester. > “insurrection” Here’s a definition from Merriam-Webster: “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government”. Seems to fit what happened at the Capitol pretty well, doesn’t it?

girvo 6y ago

They killed a police officer. While storming your Capitol building during your democratic process. What else do you call it then?

seneca 6y ago

> No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) and it's time to panic now I must say, it's reassuring to read someone else saying this. This whole ordeal is perhaps the largest tempest in a teapot in history, and it's shocking to me how many people are buying it. The ability for politically motivated coordinated propaganda to control the zeitgeist in the modern world is, however, quite horrifying.

ineptech 6y ago

I'm surprised such a condescending comment is still visible. Parler didn't go dark because your outgroup "abandoned their ideals", it went dark because a bunch of for-profit companies don't want to do business with them, because doing so would lead to a loss in revenue. Sucks for them, but not a free speech issue.

jb775 6y ago

This is possibly the most perfect response I've ever read on HN...hits the nail ON the head. People need to clear their heads, forget politics for a second, and put some more thought into this. I'm literally dumbstruck as to how so many intelligent people aren't able to comprehend the importance of the bigger picture here. And if you try to have a rational & zoomed-out conversation, they insist on zooming-in on small-picture partisan details which exist on a foundation of misrepresented/skewed/artificially framed information.

unethical_ban 6y ago
The sky isn't falling, freedom of speech is not gone, and America will get along. You are being hysterical.

jacquesm 6y ago

Easily? Sorry, but that wasn't all that easily, and there are still plenty of people for whom the coin hasn't dropped. Ideals are easy to keep when they aren't being challenged. Then, when they are being challenged and suddenly all those absolute positions don't look so comfortable anymore what are you going to do? People wouldn't mind risking terrorism, childporn and ordinary crime. But what if the price of free speech absolutism was democracy itself?

snowwrestler 6y ago

I don’t feel like I’ve given up any freedom ideals. My notion of freedom extends equally to Amazon and Google and Twitter, not just their customers. I feel the opposite from you: I’m amazed that losing one election has been enough to make so-called conservatives start talking about using the government to seize private companies and force them to provide service to everyone whether they want to or not.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

An alternate take on current events is that Americans are correctly updating on new evidence around right to amplification, in a direction you don't personally prefer.

lostlogin 6y ago

unethical_ban 6y ago

You fundamentally blow off the concept of symbolism, or the fact that the attempt itself matters, not just its success. You make light of a violent mob chanting "hang Pence" as they march toward him, and yes, in light of "not being able to overthrow the government", you fail to convince me some would not have tried to capture or kill politicians. In short, you are waving your hand and claiming persecution as if Truth, Justice and the American Way has been defeated because Trump is off Twitter. The sky has not fallen.