A Win for the First Amendment, and a Loss for Partisans Who Want to Weaponize Censorship
One thing is clear about Missouri v. Biden: The decision cannot be understood by viewing it through a polarized lens.

On America's birthday, yet another front in the culture war opened over the meaning of free speech.
The provocation? On July 4, a federal court ordered Joe Biden's White House and a bevy of federal agencies and officials not to pressure social media platforms to delete or suppress broad categories of information, including posts on the pandemic, the 2020 election, and Hunter Biden's laptop.
Initial reporting on Judge Terry A. Doughty's 155-page opinion in Missouri v. Biden reflected our polarized times. The Washington Post labeled the decision a "win for the political right" while The New York Times called it "a victory for Republicans." The headline for the Post story placed quotation marks around the word censorship.
But shouldn't this just be considered a win for the First Amendment and not a partisan matter? After all, most of us should be able to agree it's a bad idea for government officials to huddle in back rooms with corporate honchos to decide which social media posts are "truthful" or "good" while insisting, Wizard of Oz–style, "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
The constitutional principle involved is straightforward. As Judge Richard Posner explained in Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, a government official who "threatens to employ coercive state power to stifle protected speech violates a plaintiff's First Amendment rights, regardless of whether the threatened punishment comes in the form of the use (or, misuse) of the defendant's direct regulatory or decisionmaking authority…or in some less-direct form."
The problem with Missouri v. Biden is that the political noise surrounding the case is distracting attention from the important First Amendment principles at stake. And the even bigger problem is that the noise is coming from all sides—including those who brought the case, some of the reactions to it, and Doughty's opinion itself.
Unlikely Defenders of the Constitution
Start with the fact that the lead plaintiffs in the case are the attorneys general (A.G.s) of Louisiana and Missouri, who, along with four individuals, claim that the Biden White House (and other federal agencies) engaged in a pressure campaign to get social media companies to take down conservative posts. This has been a cause célèbre on the right since Donald Trump occupied the White House, based on the claim that "woke" liberal owners and workers at Big Tech companies primarily take down conservative-leaning content.
Other red states, like Texas and Florida, have tried to regulate social media platforms directly—so far with mixed results—with most courts finding that the First Amendment protects the companies' private moderation decisions. So this case represents a change in tactics but with the same desired outcome. If blunt-force speech regulation doesn't work because the First Amendment has too many defenders, why not join them?
A cynic might suggest that this newfound interest in freedom of expression is merely a ploy used for political advantage. After all, state A.G.s are unlikely defenders of the First Amendment given the members of that fraternity who make their political bones by mounting anti-speech crusades. There's a reason NAAG—the National Association of Attorneys General—is also known as the National Association of Aspiring Governors. (Or, as with former A.G.s Josh Hawley and Kamala Harris, aspiring senators and beyond.)
Now, it could be that these public officials, having taken oaths to defend the Constitution, have had epiphanies and decided to honor that promise. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey described Doughty's opinion as "a huge win for the right to freely speak without government censorship" and pledged to "continue to lead the way in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms." Nice words, indeed.
But the same day Missouri v. Biden came down, Bailey was one of seven state A.G.s who sent a threatening letter to Target warning that the sale of LGBTQ-themed merchandise as part of a "Pride" campaign might violate state obscenity laws. The "merchandise" that raised their concerns included such things as T-shirts with the words Girls Gays Theys, and what the letter described as "anti-Christian designs," such as one that included the phrase Satan Respects Pronouns.
Say what you will about Target's merchandise decisions, the claim that such messages could violate obscenity law would embarrass a first-year law student. And by signing on to the Target letter while simultaneously issuing press releases praising Doughty's decision, Bailey showed his attitude toward constitutional freedoms is, well, flexible.
A Perplexing Decision
Doughty's opinion raised many questions of its own. It begins with the statement that the issues involved "go beyond party lines" and that the case "does not concern whether speech is conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, or somewhere in between. What matters is that Americans, despite their views, will not be censored or suppressed by the Government." So far, so good.
But the opinion veers off from there and credulously accepts plaintiffs' claims that almost all of the contacts with government officials (and some civilians) were coercive, and it uncritically accepts assertions that "only conservative viewpoints were allegedly suppressed." These conclusions are supposedly buttressed by voluminous evidence unearthed in discovery, which accounts for the length of the opinion (including an 82-page discussion of the facts) and its 721 footnotes. However, there's a lot of chaff in these findings, and Doughty makes little effort to identify the wheat, thus contributing to the perception that he has signed on to a side in the culture war.
There's also the fact that Doughty was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2017 and confirmed in 2018, a fact universally reported in the stories on Missouri v. Biden. But, remind me—weren't we pretty outraged when Trump habitually criticized court decisions he disliked as being written by "Obama judges"? That practice led to a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who publicly said "we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges," and that "an independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for." That's the ideal, anyway.
Unlike politicians, federal judges are required to "show their work," and it is through that we can all decide for ourselves how close they come to the ideal. Here, Doughty gives us 155 pages to work with, including the breathless claim in the opening paragraph that "the present case involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history."
Really?
Measured against the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that were passed to punish critics of the John Adams administration; the wholesale suppression of abolitionist literature before the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, which led to the lawless arrests of a dozen critical newspaper editors and the closure of nine newspapers; Anthony Comstock's four-decade crusade to outlaw any literature he considered immoral; the 2,000-plus prosecutions of World War I dissenters under the Espionage and Sedition Acts; Franklin D. Roosevelt's investigations and tax audits of unfriendly journalists; the Cold War abuses of McCarthyism; JFK's misuse of the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine to muzzle right-wing commentators; Richard Nixon's illegal campaigns against the press; and Trump's designation of the press as the "enemy of the people," the allegations raised in this case are a pretty tepid candidate for the top censorship spot.
Tech writer Mike Masnick does an excellent job of sorting through the findings in Missouri v. Biden and concluding that the court identified a number of examples where administration contacts with social media companies appeared to cross the line into coercion, but that many of the examples cited by Doughty included "perfectly reasonable conversations about how to respond to actually problematic content as 'censorship' and 'coercion,' despite there being little evidence of either in many cases." Examples include sharing information about foreign trolls seeking to disrupt elections with false information and conversations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as part of an effort to understand the COVID-19 pandemic.
And then there's the Hunter Biden laptop story. This has been a Holy Grail among conservatives looking for social media conspiracies, and Doughty found the FBI's "failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling."
Wait, what? Rather than complaining that the administration was pressuring social media companies to take information down, the problem, apparently, was that the FBI didn't advise social media companies not to moderate this story. Or, as Masnick summed it up, the thrust of the opinion was "don't communicate with social media companies, except if your communication boosts the storylines that will help Donald Trump."
And then there's the problem of timing. As anyone who has consulted a calendar lately will tell you, the laptop story broke in fall 2020, before the election and when Trump was still president. Doughty even acknowledges that government officials began publicly threatening social media companies in 2018, halfway through the Trump administration, but that the threats "intensified and became more direct" in the wake of COVID-19 and the 2020 election. And while he notes that efforts to coordinate cybersecurity responses "started in 2018," he inexplicably concludes that "there is no indication or evidence produced in this litigation that the Trump Administration had anything to do with it." OK, but it is far-fetched to believe the A.G.s driving this case went out of their way to present evidence of Trump abuses "in this litigation."
It seems so long ago, so it may be hard for some to remember that the threats and efforts to bully social media companies were pretty damn intense during the Trump years. So much so that the free expression organization PEN America, whose members include writers and journalists, even sued Trump in 2020 to stop his practice of threatening and intimidating media organizations.
Allegations in PEN America v. Trump included claims that the president leveraged antitrust actions against critical media companies, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses, and denied White House credentials to disfavored reporters. At the same time this was happening, social media companies were another favorite Trump target, and, among other things, he made frequent threats to revoke or reinterpret Section 230, the federal law that shields online platforms from liability for users' posts.
If what Trump was up to was problematic under the First Amendment—and I believe it was—it is a little cheeky to suggest that the many contacts between members of the Biden administration and social media companies were just fine. Key allegations in PEN America survived a motion to dismiss, but the case never proceeded to discovery because the Trump administration ended, mooting the case.
But having served as co-counsel in PEN America v. Trump, I am convinced that if that case had reached discovery, the resulting record likewise would have merited a 155-page opinion detailing the inside story underlying Trump's unceasing barrage of abusive tweets and his other threatening pronouncements. And, as lead counsel in Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, I believe the types of direct and implied threats at issue would have violated the First Amendment test for unconstitutional intimidation.
Nothing To See Here?
There is little question that Doughty's opinion is overhyped and many of its findings are exaggerated, but it doesn't mean it is wrong.
The sheer volume of contacts revealed in discovery, including numerous meetings, emails, and demands for information, including "requests" related to particular content and what the companies planned to do about it, is cause for concern. And there were veiled (and some not-so-veiled) threats of adverse regulatory action if the companies hesitated to be cooperative "partners."
Biden's then–press secretary warned there would be "legal consequences" if the social media companies failed to more aggressively police their platforms, suggesting this could take the form of "a robust antitrust program." The White House communications director also announced the administration was reviewing Section 230 and seeking to determine "whether social media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms and examining how misinformation fits into the liability granted by Section 230."
The imperious tone used by some of the officials sounds downright Trumpy. Rob Flaherty, then Biden's director of digital strategy, was in constant contact with the social media companies, demanding reports, suggesting content that he believed should be removed, and reminding the companies that his concerns were "shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House." On one occasion when he didn't get the response he wanted from Facebook, Flaherty demanded to know, "Are you guys fucking serious?" And he added, "I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."
A charitable spin would be to suggest that the officials merely were seeking cooperation from corporate citizens in service of a noble cause. But that take would seem more reasonable if the message didn't come across as sounding like, "You got a nice business here—it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
Doughty described this as "unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world," and given the frequency and regularity of the meetings, emails, phone calls, and demands by various administration officials relating to the companies' moderation decisions, he has a point.
What To Do About It
One fair critique of Doughty's decision is that it provides no coherent rule for when government contacts with social media platforms are appropriate and when they are not. The terms of the preliminary injunction are too broad, cover too many people (including many who are not even government officials), and are riddled with opaque and impossible-to-implement exceptions.
The injunction reaches a host of federal authorities, including the White House, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CDC, the Census Bureau, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as named individuals in each of the named departments. It even reaches nongovernmental entities, such as Stanford University's Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Partnership, and the Virality Project, all nonparties to the case, by barring the government defendants from coordinating with them.
And then there's the breadth of the prohibition: The injunction bars, among other things, communications with social media companies that flag content or posts on social media platforms "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." It similarly prohibits communications urging companies to alter their moderation guidelines.
But apparently recognizing that the First Amendment does not bar all contacts between government and social media companies, the order exempts from the prohibition such things as postings involving criminal activity, national security threats, extortion or other threats, criminal efforts to suppress voting, cyber attacks against election infrastructure, foreign attempts to influence elections, threats to public safety, postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures, and communications seeking to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity.
Perhaps my favorite is the catchall exemption for "permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern." What does that even mean? Your guess is as good as mine, and Doughty offers nothing to clarify it.
The Department of Justice sought an emergency stay of the injunction from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, and argued, among other things, that the exceptions are undefined and unexplained. It observed that, according to Doughty's opinion, government actors violated the First Amendment when they informed social media that state or local election officials had flagged "disinformation aimed at their jurisdiction," yet the exceptions allow communications that inform social-media companies "of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures."
One might sympathize with any government lawyer tasked with the job of deciphering these mixed directives. But only to a point. Congress and state legislatures routinely pass broad and poorly defined speech restrictions, and the Justice Department generally has no qualms about defending them and even exploiting their expansive reach. So now the shoe is on the other foot.
Perhaps it is too much to imagine that this experience will lead the Department of Justice to be more sensitive to First Amendment vagueness and overbreadth concerns. But then, in this case, we have state A.G.s swearing they really care about the First Amendment, so I guess anything is possible.
In the meantime, what should be done about Doughty's injunction? The Fifth Circuit granted the motion for stay, putting the injunction on hold during the appeal. This seems like the right call given the scope of the order and the many questions it raises. But what should the court do when it gets to the merits of the appeal?
Some—including a few longtime First Amendment advocates—have advocated overturning the injunction on appeal. However, while the court of appeals should clarify and narrow the terms of the injunction, reversing it would be a mistake. It doesn't require an active imagination to predict how far a future administration (of either party) might venture if the courts greenlighted this level of governmental meddling in private moderation decisions.
Rather than reversing Doughty's decision, the 5th Circuit on appeal should use this as an occasion to reaffirm the rule in Dart, that a governmental entity "is entitled to say what it wants to say—but only within limits." There are many good reasons for government officials to communicate with social media platforms, but they are "not permitted to employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens."
This is not always an easy line to draw, but a reviewing court could do worse than to consult the Santa Clara Principles on transparency and content moderation devised by a broad coalition of human rights organizations, advocates, and academic experts. Those principles affirm that "state actors must not exploit or manipulate companies' content moderation systems to censor dissenters, political opponents, social movements, or any person."
One way to provide a check on government contacts that cross the line would be to oblige government actors proactively to disclose any contacts with social media companies where they seek to influence moderation decisions. The Santa Clara Principles provide that "governments and other state actors should themselves report their involvement in content moderation decisions, including data on demands or requests for content to be actioned or an account suspended, broken down by the legal basis for the request."
It's the Principle, Stupid
One thing is clear about Missouri v. Biden: The decision cannot be understood by viewing it through a polarized lens. Bullying tactics by government officials violate the First Amendment regardless of who controls the levers of power. Accordingly, it is not a huge victory for the right as some have imagined, or a loss for the left, as others fear.
Assuming it is upheld on appeal, as it should be, it will limit the ability of future administrations to engage in behind-the-scenes censorship. And that is true whether the administration is led by Biden, Trump, or someone else.
As to the A.G.s who brought the case, they might want to be careful what they wish for. First Amendment rules that constrain the White House also, obviously, limit the ability of politically ambitious state law enforcement officers to issue threats designed to bring recalcitrant businesses into line.
Target, are you listening?
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Sqrlsy said free speech is just as dangerous as wildly shooting a gun, and Jeff said we must have restrictive laws in place until people fall in line with the way he wants them to live.
So this decision might not be well received by a few people here.
"Don't look at me!" said the it favors "free speech for me, but not for thee", and that Section 230 (the 1A of the internet) MUST be torn down so that "Don't look at me!" can pussy-grab the libs! Last butt not least, in a power-grabbing frame of so-called "mind", in "Don't look at me!"'s greatest pussy-grabbing ever-lasting lusts, "Don't look at me!" believes that after S-230 is torn down, the libs will NEVER use the lack of S-230 (and the disrespect to the 1A inherent therein, in this tear-down), to pussy-grab the brainless right-wing power-lusters right back!
The constitution guarantees free speech to ensure that evidence that refutes a narrative isn’t criminalized leaving the only legal communication uncontested advocacy for it.
just hope that the court can agree on what the word 'evidence' means...
you can bet 3/9 of the court will have a problem with it.. esp if it goes against desires for progressive outcomes
Various dictionaries define evidence as either simply supporting a belief or actually providing proof of truth.
Assuming courts are interested in the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we’ll need to codify in law exactly what reliably constitutes proof of truth, reality. Because it isn’t belief.
Nothing but correctly applied logic and science reliably discerns truth.
That’s how we do more than just hope.
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The Comstock is strong in this one.
https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1680440047529779202?t=YwMMpPtcc5hvGPD9e2vZNQ&s=19
After cancelling elections indefinitely, Zelensky has now literally cancelled Christmas.
"UKRAINE ORDERS ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS CANCELED, WILL OBSERVE CHRISTMAS ON DEC. 25TH INSTEAD OF JAN. 7TH *
Democracy on the move"
Thank God we're supporting Democracy in this bastion of freedom!
Just don't thank Him on January 7th.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/11/ukraine-democracy-wartime-elections-russia-zelensky/
Wartime Elections in Ukraine Are Impossible
Voting in the middle of the Russian invasion is legally and practically unworkable.
Your fucking asshole DARLINGS, the Russians, would target the voting stations with missiles, for starters!
At least you’re consistent.
At least you’re consistently empty-headed.
I read that as 'incontinent'.
Sqrlsy’s mouth is incontinent.
Progressivism is the fentanyl of the masses.
Nice!
The Washington Post is the DNC's newsletter, and they have editorials by a few token conservatives like George Will so the commentariat can have their Two Minutes Hate.
Trumpians don’t consider Will to be a conservative since he coined the phrase “crybaby in chief” to describe the previous president.
Neocon TDS sufferer won't stand for criticism of neocon TDS journalist.
Sarc really doesn't understand what he wrote, but that's okay because he was only trying troll anyway.
Will said he would vote for Biden (D). Brandon does have a neocon foreign policy but that’s about it regarding “conservative.”
I'm not going to defend who he said he would vote for. I chose not to vote for Turd Sandwich or Giant Douche because they were both terrible. My point is that he is indeed a conservative, and that the Republican party left him, not that he left the Republican party. You should try reading what he writes from the point of view of a conservative, not an emotional Trump defender who has an emotional reaction to all things Democrat.
Had Biden been the R candidate, do you think Will would have stayed and that would have represented conservatism?
I don’t know nor care. Why don’t you read one of his books, or listen on audio. You might learn something.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Conservative-Sensibility-Audiobook/1549195239
I did once following him when he had a culinary podcast and I learned how to make Cuban sammiches.
Will’s vote for Biden (D) was to support the Washington establishment that has been so lucrative for him, not conservatism.
Whatever. The fact that the only thing you know or need to know about him is who he voted for, and you can glean everything else about the man from that, is more of a statement about you than him. Have fun making fun of me with your troll buddies. Over’n’out.
You just don’t get it, do you? It’s the Establishment (Dems plus GOPe) versus the rest of us.
This is the worst appeal to authority ever. You can't explain any if wills takes except he was anti trump. Lol.
Other than Biden (D) going full neocon in his foreign policy, I don’t see a lot else that qualifies as “conservative.” Will, an ardent supporter of conservatism, voting for the mostly non-conservative Biden calls for evaluation. Will is an establishment guy whereas Trump largely was not. An explanation is that Will supported more of the same when casting his vote for Biden over all other candidates (or not voting at all).
I’m old enough to remember when sarc admitted he was a neocon and supported our involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Many of the statists here support the US govt funding and supplying the corrupt and genocidal Bandera regime in Kiev. Ken really was the outlier in that he wasn’t much of a statist, except with that. My guess was that he either worked for the MIC or had significant financial interest in it.
The Ken exit was odd. I figured he had family in Ukraine or something.
Ken also supported the action in Lybia. I'm pretty sure he's a commercial real estate developer.
I've actually met him on many occasions, and found him relatively pleasant as long as the conversation did not include politics or baseball.
Fun fact: A parent of one of his son's classmates took him for a ton of money in a pyramid scam.
George Will suffers from TDS. It is a severe dislike of crude, vulgar, and blunt people, a kind of cleanliness cult. This is the same kind of thinking that caused all women to be labeled 'unclean' and for people to shun the Untouchables. He could not get past this to see the useful policies and actions Trump had taken. He lost objectivity.
He literally voted for a Democrat. He left the republican party dumdum.
The Neocons grabbed their toys and stomped off the playground because their preferred candidate, Jeb Fucking Bush, lost to a reality tv star. If the Republican Party left the neocons, I say good on them.
George F. Will? F George Will
In 2020 Will, like several of the Reason staff, signaled to his readers that he would vote for Biden.
Like I said, Trumpians hate Will because he had the gall to stick to conservative principles instead of abandoning them like Trump and his followers.
Which principles? Can you be specific?
The pro war one?
https://www.greensburgdailynews.com/opinion/columns/americans-have-a-stake-in-ukraine/article_4564d1ee-7ece-11ec-a987-c79a7b2b2a4b.html
Or the vote for Biden principle?
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/508391-conservative-columnist-george-will-says-hes-voting-for-biden/
Are you saying a vote for Biden is adhering to conservative principles?
I think you've just given yourself away, Mr. Totally-Not-A-Democrat.
Well thats what the Lincoln Party says so yes, that is what sarc believes.
Considering that George Will was also against Ronaldus Magnus, his opinion on conservativism has been trash for longer than Trump has been active in the public square.
George Will is the original Jennifer Rubin.
Reagan, like Trump, was a Democrat before he became a Republican. And it shows. With both.
Results matter, and both are legendarily better at results than Will ever will be.
Considering Will was never president, I have no clue as to what the point of that statement is.
Will has utterly failed to move the dial or bring in people to his way of thinking. Both Trump and Reagan did so.
You mean presidents have more influence than people who write opinion pieces in newspapers? Wow. So profound.
He's been there as long as Reagan. And it isn't as though he's some great unknown. And IDC about the pulpit factor, either he has the ability to effectively convince people or he doesn't, and he doesn't.
LEAVE GEORGE WILL ALONE!
And that can’t possibly be the peoples’ problem rather than Wills’.
Lol. Look at the position these retarded faggots drunky and Episiarch/Bo Cara Esq. have gotten themselves into. Imagine defending George fucking Will by suggesting he's just too good for those rubes whom he can't convince of his ideas.
Mind you, up until 7 years ago, these retarded cunts would have been castigating George Will as a literal Nazi racist Republican.
Odd flex.
Odd comment.
It’s just his opinion.
Poor sarc doesn’t understand.
I’ve a feeling pour Sarc never will.
I mean, Neocons are a type of conservative, so you’re technically correct.
George and Tucker Carlson both went to Trinity College.
But while Tuck couldn’t make the grade as a PBS court jester, and ended up as an embarrassment to Fox, George went on to become a Reagan speechwriter with an Oxford PhD, and the only Libertarian presence at the Washington Post.
He is no Libertartian presence.
I like the "spirit" of the findings in this court case, but the "letter of the law" being laid down is utterly muddled. Read from the heading "What To Do About It" on down, above, in the article.
As long as idiots don't prevail, in taking down S-230, half of the battle is already won. Lack of S-230 would give Government Almighty a HUGE "stick" with which to whack us for "wrong" speech, via the courts. Making them be "civil" rather than "criminal" suits is a thin disguise. Punishment is punishment! So do NOT give Government Almighty their "big stick" back!
The other not-often-mentioned aspect here is the "carrot", by which Government Almighty rewards those (media actors) who do their bidding. It needs addressed!
MUDDLEDNESS PART II
WHO shall be prohibited from making suggestions, about what? Precisely, legally, in both cases? Taking just the WHO… Government employees? Contractors? Their wives, husbands, children, nephews, cats, dogs? If I am the POTUS, or a Senator, and I want to get a “suggestion” put in to you (Twitter-Twatter or FacePooo or etc.), you can BET that I WILL find a way to get that “suggestion” over to you, and make it somehow clear WHO it came from (but NOT in a legally provable fashion).
Then if we are going to outlaw such communications, how will we ENFORCE such laws? More spy cameras and ever more-more-MORE mandatory collection and reporting of ALL of our communications? … Pretty SUCKY idea when we think of HOW are we gonna actually make this WORK!!
HOW ABOUT THE CARROTS?
A VERY simple version of REAL progress here would be to outlaw tax money spent as “carrots” to “persuade” media to do or not do certain things! FBI spent millions rewarding Twitter, say some, others say not true… I wasn’t there to see it or not see it… If it IS true, or NOT true, it should be outlawed!
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/20/no-the-fbi-is-not-paying-twitter-to-censor/ says 1 source…
https://nypost.com/2022/12/19/fbi-reimbursed-twitter-for-doing-its-dirty-work-on-users/
Well SHIT! Now, WHO to believe!?!? In any case, outlaw tax money spent for this!
The FBI didn't have to pay Twitter to censor. They had agents hired on at Twitter (and other social media outlets) to censor and get paid by Twitter.
The FBI still paid them. Millions of dollars.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11558251/FBI-paid-Twitter-3M-devoting-staff-processing-requests.html
NO qualified immunity for these wannabe tyrants. NO prosecutorial immunity for these wannabe tyrants and the taxpayers do NOT pay their legal fees or damages.
Then we start on the local yokels; school districts, city governments, state governments and bleed these wannabe tyrants dry.
"Well SHIT! Now, WHO to believe!?!?"
Probably the one who isn't lawyering the definition of the word "paid" and making inferences without evidence on what the money might have been given for.
But shouldn't this just be considered a win for the First Amendment and not a partisan matter?
One would think; however, as you wrote previously,
The Washington Post labeled the decision a "win for the political right" while The New York Times called it "a victory for Republicans." The headline for the Post story placed quotation marks around the word censorship.
Journalists, who should be applauding the decision, have pretty much criticized it as "partisan" and favoring Republicans. Why?
The why can be answered in what has been observed over the past 7 or 8 years. Our mainstream media wants to control the narrative, and they have lost control of it to a slew of independent journalists, bloggers, and others who do not and will not necessarily follow the narrative the MSM wants to push. Given the political proclivities of the MSM, they tend to follow the left and far left (Democrats), going so far as to provide cover for the worst of their lot while criticizing even the smallest and most trivial (and even imagined - I'll get to that later) thing that anyone on the right and center does.
Given these proclivities, the MSM on the whole (maybe 90%) has aligned with the Democratic Party. Anything the Dems do is fine by them as long as it gets the Dems in power and keeps the Dems in power. Even flat out lies like the Steele Dossier and Russiagate are fine by them as long as their party is in power. The ends justify the means for the MSM. One need look no further than MSNBC (commonly mocked as MSDNC) and their hosts like Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid, and their hiring direct from the White House of Jen Psaki. But, MSNBC isn't the only one doing this, just one of the most vocal. You have CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC also participating in this. Even Fox follows along, moreso now after letting Tucker Carlson go. And that's just the TV outlets. You have a bunch of newspapers, magazines, and others doing this as well (WaPo and NYT being two of the worst here).
People have noticed, and it's one reason why all of these venue from TV to radio to newspapers to magazines have lost viewership and subscribers. It gets tiring to see the same mouthpieces day in and day out shilling for the Democratic Party, which, according to these outlets, can seemingly do no wrong. Even Reason here is caught up in it. An article criticizing Biden manages to mention Trump more often than not.
But, the bottom line here is that these outlets and the Democratic Party want message control. If they cannot control what is on social media from Twitter to Facebook to YouTube, etc., they believe they will lose control of their power through either elected means (Congress, state legislatures, President) and unelected means (deep state bureaucracy). They're already pissed enough that they've lost the Supreme Court. They're so pissed that they go out of their way to write hit pieces on the conservative justices while ignoring the same (or worse) infractions on the progressive (I refuse to call them liberal) justices. And why the administration and the MSM are so irritated over this decision comes down to control. They want to control the message, the messaging, and ultimately, you and me.
Traditional, progressive media are seeing customers flee. This decision to effectively eliminate a form of cronyism that was benefitting the progressive media causes them anger.
Is THIS why Parler had such HUGE layoffs, then?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/parler-reportedly-axed-most-of-its-staff-after-ending-deal-to-sell-to-kanye-west/
Parler owner laid off 75% of staff and has only 20 employees left, report says
And is this ALSO why Parler censors liberals? https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/29/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like/
Oh, OK, I get it now! We all need to move on over to Parler!
Remember when Parler had their servers yanked by Amazon, and Apple and Google removed their app based on what turned out to be a phony accusation that J6 was planned on Parler, and Parler was a hotbed of MAGA (which it looks like you still believe)?
I'm sure that didn't play a part in their layoffs.
Look at the date headline built right into the Parler-falling-into-ruin link... January 2023 is WAAAY after the Trumpanzees went apeshit at the capitol! Which is also, in turn, well after the app was TEMPORARILY yanked by other players!
Just trying to be clear about what you're saying here...
Having your company shut down without recompense, your data wiped and customers chased away based on what turned out to be phony accusations, doesn't play a part in your bankruptcy three years later?
If there had been overwhelming customer desire to say conservative shit all day every day, without any "libs" allowed, Parler would STILL have been a HUGE success! WHERE were the government guns keeping customers away from Parler? Answer: There were none!
PART of the reason why Parler floundered so badly, is that they misunderstand human psychology. Conservatives NEED "libs" to yell at, despite them saying that they do NOT need the libs!
A conversation a while back, started by BrandyBuck, illustrates this VERY well:
My only criticism of social media algorithms is that it leads to bubbles. But that’s me, everyone else LIKES the bubbles. The complaints aren’t about bubbles, but that other bubbles exist. People don’t like that there isn’t a person in charge they can write to demanding their views be given priority. Conservatives are mad that progressives aren’t seeing their posts, and progressives are mad that conservatives aren’t being fed their lies.
Or you have conservatives angry that some progressive posts are making it through their bubble, but the algorithm sees that these folk like arguing back against the progressives. Or you have progressives angry that some conservative posts are making it through their bubble, but the algorithm sees that these folk like arguing back against the conservatives. But they are getting what they want. Stop responding to posts you don’t like. Stop forwarding their crap along. All that does is tell the algorithm that you like that stuff.
Revealed preferences. Angry people want stuff to be angry about, and the algorithm will accommodate them. They want to be validated that progressives are destroying the country, so they get fed validation. Ditto for those certain that conservatives are promoted fake news, they get fed the fake news that validates them.
The problem isn’t that there are algorithms designed to deliver personalized content, the problem is that people just haven’t learned to live with impartially personalized content. They spent their lives with curated content from people in news departments, or political leaders telling them how to think, or some other human being with a bias curating biased content just for them.
Note that I am NOT claiming that the algorithm is perfect. Not at all. I am merely claiming that it’s doing what it was ostensibly designed to do: deliver personalized content based on the user’s demonstrated preferences. I would tune it differently, but the idea that it was designed to be “progressive” or “conservative” is utter bullshit. The algorithm is agnostic.
SQRLSY One EXCELLENT mini-essay there Brandybuck!!! People want contradictory things (incompatible with one another).
I for one, want to be the Catholic Pope, AND a famous porn star!
Bob Seger, He wants to live like a sailor at sea…
He wants his home and security
He wants to live like a sailor at sea
Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall?
You realize you just can’t have it all…
1. Dillinger
substitute prostitute for p0rn star and you can probably pull it off.
SQRLSY One:
Whoa, why did I not think of that?!?! I’ll give it a try… Thanks! Excellent, VERY deductive, seductive, suggestive suggestion! Good for my digestion!
(I am a ho of the mo of the bro, and can rap my head around shit all around the hood, ass I should!)
"without any “libs” allowed, Parler would STILL have been a HUGE success!"
I think your confusion here stems from your belief that Parler was some sort of MAGA hangout.
It wasn't and it never was.
When the DNC media shock troops were looking for villains after J6, someone smeared Parler. But It turned out Parler wasn't a MAGA hangout and most of the protesters had actually organized on Facebook, but the damage from the overreaction was already done.
And even three years later gullible idiots like you think that it was right wing.
Then why did Parler fence out the "libs"? Or did that not happen on Your Perfect Planet?
It didn't, and you wouldn't know what Parler even was if it weren't for the 3 year old article you picked up from HuffPo, sarcasmic. It's weird you're so histrionic about Parler banning users for violating its terms of service when you're such a staunch defender of Section 230 who believes that social media companies should be allowed to ban anyone they want, including when they do so at the behest of government agents. Why is this case so much different, drunky? The world may never know...
Techdirt, not HuffPo... https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/29/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like/
Cunt-SOREva-Turds "refute" all facts that come from sources that are NOT "of their Tribe", if they don't like the facts. It is as close to "facts and logic" that many of them will go. STOP being a cunt-sore pussy-shit, and be BRAVE, and get acquainted with facts and logic, please! You'll thank me later!
Enemy-tribe social media: They are practicing CENSORSHIT on poor, poor, pitiful MEEEE!!!
My-Tribe social media: They are merely enforcing their contracts, when they ban wrong-think! BAN the wrong-think; full speed ahead!
Remember when I said that "When the DNC media shock troops were looking for villains after J6, someone smeared Parler", Sqrlsy?
That someone was Mike Masnick who wrote yours and several other erroneous articles. Parler didn't ban users for being liberal. Masnick was lying, something you'll learn Masnick does often if you research it.
In fact, in Masnick's article, the guy who claims to be banned for being liberal admits he was trolling.
You do know that you can check the backlinks on an article right, sarcasmic? And that we already know you're an obsessive HuffPo reader from the dozens of their articles that are part of your copypasta repertoire? What am I saying, of course you don't, you had to have the Glibertarians explain to you how to use HTML to make bold and italic text.
I have him greyed but possibly just more cheerleading.
Telegram has three-quarters of a billion active accounts and seems to be growing. Biden (D) has denied access to some political-news channels there though mirror sites often pop up. One can also access via VPN.
Chumpy-Chump NEVER engages in mere cheerleading and sneerleading for the One True Tribe!
So sayth the spastic squirrel of the establishment.
Ask him about section 230 and Stormy Daniels.
Stormy Daniels has gathered more nuts than even I have ever managed to do! Ass the notches on her bedpost approach infinity, though, she STILL obsesses about "the One True Nut that got away"
from her, which, of course, is Der Dear TrumpfenFuhrer!
I am still left wondering...
So is this, then, finally, the eagerly awaited “Drag Queen Stormy Daniels Hour” that I’ve heard SOOO much about?
I do have to hang my head in shame these days, and ‘fess up to being old, over the hill, and out of touch!
Butt… Now what IS this deal about “Drag Queen Stormy Daniels Hour” who-haaa thingee anyway?!?!? Is or was she the Queen of Dragging men (against their will and utmost efforts at self-control) into her lady-parts bear-trap “Snatch, I gotcha” device? What can one DO to resist her contriving and cuntriving mind control?
Does GREAT world-ass-class POETRY fend off her mind cuntrol? Doesn’t hurt to try, right?
All Hail Der TrumpfenFuhrer, Full of Grace
Savior of the human race!
Never mind, us all, He’ll disgrace!
Conservatards, above all, MUST save face!
In glory, a glaze of Vaseline,
Behold Stormy Daniels, our Queen!
What a scene, what a scene!
The Donald? NEVER so obscene!
Now don’t you DARE throw a fit,
It won’t matter, not even a bit,
We mustn’t ever, EVER quit,
We be saved, by The Trumptatorshit!
Q: What’s the difference between a rooster and a Stormy Daniels?
A: The rooster says “Cock-a-doodle-doooo”!, while the Stormy Daniels says “Any cock’ll do!”
You just had to do that, didn’t you, Chumby? LOL!
Remember the spamflag, ITL.
Humpty Dumpty Trumpty section 230 STORMY DANIELS ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!
Trumpty Dumpty, He’s quite off-the-wall,
Trumpty Dumpty won’t stay in His toilet stall
He just goes ahead and takes His shits,
Totally regardless of whereever He sits
Whenever He simply, no way, can sleep,
He Twits us His thoughts, they’re all SOOO deep!
He simply must, He MUST, Twit us His bird,
No matter the words, however absurd!
He sits and snorts His coke with a spoon,
Then He brazenly shoots us His moon!
They say He’ll be impeached by June,
Man, oh man, June cannot come too soon!
So He sits and jiggles His balls,
Then He Twitters upon the walls
“Some come here to sit and think,
Some come here to shit and stink
But I come here to scratch my balls,
And read the writings on the walls
Here I sit, My cheeks a-flexin’
Giving birth to another Texan!
Here I sit, upon the pooper,
Giving birth to another state trooper!
He who writes these lines of wit,
Wraps His Trump in little balls,
He who reads these lines of wit,
Eats those loser’s balls of shit!”
Nobody read that, sarcasmic.
Nobody read that, Tulpa-Satan.
Remember the spamflag, ITL.
Oh, I did. 🙂
Some more wannabe tyrants who need to be plucked and possibly deported to their beloved homelands
"One thing is clear about Missouri v. Biden: The decision cannot be understood by viewing it through a polarized lens. "
---
Then the author proceeds to looking at the decision through a political lens.
The above post needs to be ignored because it is political. I needn't explain how, why, or in what way the above post is political... It is enough that I (MEEE, THE WISE AND MIGHTY ONE!) have accused it of being political!
Pretty sure CindyF didn't preface that comment by saying that it cannot be understood by viewing it through a polarized lens and then contradict herself 3 seconds later, sarcasmic, but other than that, you've got a great analogy going, keep running with that.
Hey by the way, we haven't heard much about your fake wife with her fake cancer diagnosis ever since she was NEARLY KILLED by reckless nurses and physicians who wouldn't get the COVID vaccine 2 years ago. Why is that? Did she fake die from fake COVID or did you write her out of the show after Democratic Underground switched their 24/7 hysteria from COVID to Ukraine?
Hi Tulpa!
“Dear Abby” is a personal friend of mine. She gets some VERY strange letters! For my amusement, she forwards some of them to me from time to time. Here is a relevant one:
Dear Abby, Dear Abby,
My life is a mess,
Even Bill Clinton won’t stain my dress,
I whinny seductively for the horses,
They tell me my picnic is short a few courses,
My real name is Mary Stack,
NO ONE wants my hairy crack!
On disability, I live all alone,
Spend desperate nights by the phone,
I found a man named Richard (Dick) Decker,
But he won’t give me his hairy pecker!
Dick Decker’s pecker is reserved for farm beasts,
I am beastly, yes! But my crack’s full of yeasts!
So Dear Abby, that’s just a poetic summary… You can read about the Love of my Life, Richard Decker, here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/11/farmers-kept-refusing-let-him-have-sex-with-their-animals-so-he-sought-revenge-authorities-say/ and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sex-animals-bestiality-farm-cows-horses-richard-decker-new-jersey-a9152136.html
Farmers kept refusing to let him have sex with their animals. So he sought revenge, authorities say.
Decker the hairy pecker told me a summary of his story as below:
Decker: “Can I have sex with your horse?”
Farmer: “Lemme go ask the horse.”
Pause…
Farmer: “My horse says ‘neigh’!”
And THAT was straight from the horse’s mouth! I’m not horsin’ around, here, no mare!
So Richard Decker the hairy pecker told me that, apparently never even realizing just HOW DEEPLY it hurt me, that he was all interested in farm beasts, while totally ignoring MEEE!!
So I thought maybe I could at least liven up my lonely-heart social life, by refining my common interests that I share with Richard Decker… I, too, like to have sex with horses!
But Dear Abby, the horses ALL keep on saying “neigh” to my whinnying sexual advances!
Some tell me that my whinnying is too whiny… Abby, I don’t know how to fix it!
Dear Abby, please don’t tell me “get therapy”… I can’t afford it on my disability check!
Now, along with my crack full of yeasts… I am developing anorexia! Some are calling me a “quarter pounder with cheese”, but they are NOT interested at ALL, in eating me!!! They will NOT snack on my crack!
What will I DO, Dear Abby?!?!?
-Desperately Seeking Horses, Men, or ANYTHING, in Fort Worth,
Yours Truly,
R Mac / Mary Stack / Tulpa / Mary’s Period / “.” / Satan
Nobody read that sarcasmic. How's your fake wife though? Did the dreaded 'vid get her yet?
He really didn't. He noted many times when the partisan-inspired critiques were wrong, and his critiques all center around the principles of the ruling itself, and not about which team wins or loses.
He really didn’t.
Of course he did. Below, among other places, he frames opposition to censorship in political terms instead of as opposition to government conduct.
Lyin' Jeffey strikes again.
Start with the fact that the lead plaintiffs in the case are the attorneys general (A.G.s) of Louisiana and Missouri, who, along with four individuals, claim that the Biden White House (and other federal agencies) engaged in a pressure campaign to get social media companies to take down conservative posts. This has been a cause célèbre on the right since Donald Trump occupied the White House, based on the claim that "woke" liberal owners and workers at Big Tech companies primarily take down conservative-leaning content.
I'm going to disagree with "your guess is as good as mine"; my guess is better than yours. Because my guess is that this just means the government is still allowed to publicly post stuff on Facebook and Twitter. I'm not sure what else you think it could mean, honestly.
Yes. The government used to do press conferences and press releases where they were free to sell whatever lunatic idea had crawled up their ass. "Journalists" and everybody else was free to question the government narrative and posit an alternate truth. Government no longer bothers to win the hearts and minds of the great unwashed. Propaganda is distributed by an army of unnamed sources to a press that eagerly regurgitates it without question. Government actors communicate with social media outlets and pay them to censor dissident voices. The house republicans and multiple whistleblowers have exposed hard evidence of decades of corruption on the part of a sitting president and the media, including Reason, refuse to even report it. The White House won't even bother to deny that the cocaine found there is Hunter Biden's. Because they don't have to.
Reason could do itself a favor and stop relying on Tech Dirt and more specifically Masnick who isn't libertarian in any regard. This article is overly influenced by him when the writer could have simply read the decision and examples from it themselves.
What could have been a good article is a mess of defending government in many ways.
The simple libertarian answer is government shouldn't spend on dime on trying to censor speech. But that's not what this article is.
"...who isn’t libertarian in any regard."
The JesseBahnFuhrer (and ONLY The JesseBahnFuhrer) is The One True Libertarian! Set your compass by The Emanations of The JesseBahnFuhrer!!!
It’s funny because you’re literally the only person besides Episiarch/Bo Cara Esq. whose entire fucking shtick is gatekeeping your Marxist interpretation of libertarianism, drunky.
The simple libertarian answer is government shouldn’t spend on dime on trying to censor speech.
But this doesn't really address the issue of concern here. When is a government action 'censorship' and when is it not? How broadly should the term be defined? THAT is the crux of the issue.
When it hurts My Precious Tribe and-or My Precious Baby Feelings, it is CENSORSHIT!
That's enough for the True Tribalists!
The irony being that you spend 2/3 of your pathetic drunken life bitching and whinging about your hurt feelings and defending the government for censoring information you don't want to see because it hurts your feelings, sarcasmic.
And the answer to that is very simple, you lardass fat piece of shit bootlicking Nazi pedophile faggot: A government action is 'censorship' when it prohibits or limits the lawful speech of any person, by any means or method. So for example, you obese fat fucking sack of shit, when a policeman comes and cracks somebody upside the head with a baton for passing out flyers on a street corner, that would be censorship. Or when an FBI agent with a direct hotline to a Twitter or Facebook employee sends that Twitter or Facebook employee a list of posts he wants them to delete from their servers, that would be censorship. Or when an NSA agent suggests to a newspaper editor that he might find himself under investigation for Espionage Act violations if he publishes a story unfavorable to the intelligence community, that would be censorship. See how easy it was to answer that question when you're not an equivocating bootlicking Nazi piece of shit fascist, fat boy?
Clever new name, Tulpa. What inspired this one?
And if defining government censorship were only so simple.
Here are a couple of more challenging cases for you to consider.
1. A nonprofit organization makes recommendations to a social media company on best practices to stop or limit disinformation online. The company decides to implement many of those recommendations, which results in some users being banned. It turns out that the nonprofit organization is partially funded by a government grant. Is this an example of government censorship?
Would it be relevant to know if the topic of the government grant was directly related to the subject matter of disinformation online? Would it be relevant to know if the recommendations from the nonprofit organization to the social media company involved naming specific users or not?
2. A university hosts a conference on the topic of strategies for stopping disinformation online. At this conference a government employee - say, a department head at DHS - gives a presentation on some possible strategies. A social media company executive at that conference likes the strategies and decides to implement some of them, resulting in some users being banned. Is this an example of government censorship?
Would it be relevant to know the details of the government employee's presentation or not? Would it be relevant to know if the university was public or private?
Unfortunately, there is a lot of gray in the world, and the answers we seek cannot always be reduced to simplistic formulations.
You and Episiarch/Bo Cara Esq. should really stop taking your cues from the only person here possibly more stupid than you are. I'm still not Tulpa and have been running this same shtick since before you arrived here, even on your original cytotoxic handle. It's hilariously embarrassing that you still can't identify me after all these years, and that you think these names have any special significance, or even that I make them up myself.
Also those questions are not even the slightest bit complicated by any standard. It's just sad that you're so unimaginative you can't even come up with an actual edge case. 1. is impermissible government censorship, compounded by the fact that the government has no constitutional authority for the grantmaking in the first place. 2. is not impermissible government censorship since no relationship exists between the government agent and the corporate scumfuck social media cretin, and no proprietary information was exchanged between them. Your half assed details don't change either scenario. There *is* a lot of gray in the world. Fortunately, government censorship isn't one of them. It's impermissible. Always. Everywhere. Full. Fucking. Stop. That's why we have the first amendment here in the United States. I know they don't have those protections in Canada where you live, so it's terribly difficult for you to wrap your fat fucking head around.
Reason could do itself a favor and stop relying on Tech Dirt and more specifically Masnick who isn’t libertarian in any regard.
And this comment illustrates part of the problem that we all find ourselves in. This comment prioritizes tribal loyalty over the search for truth. Jesse is right, Masnick is not a doctrinaire libertarian. That doesn't mean he can't be correct.
I would prefer an article that seeks out all sorts of sources of information from all sides. Jesse only wants articles that have tribe-approved sources.
JesseAz judges people. Not ideas. That's why all his criticisms are against people, not ideas. Frankly I don't think he's bright enough to consider ideas, which is why he attacks people.
Which idea from the article would you like me to counter? What ideas have you provided this morning?
I already stated my criticisms of some of the article in other posts. Why do you ignore that?
Confession by projection as always. Tell us more stories about how nothing in your life has ever been your fault and everything bad that ever happened to you was because of the dirty Mormon Idaho cop who's fucking your vindictive "cunt" ex-wife now, drunky.
I should kind of feel bad for calling JesseAz dumb. He can't help it. It's like picking on a cripple in a wheelchair or someone who still uses AOL.
What did I say that was dumb? And I know you don't have me on mute as you're repeating my insult about you two from yesterday.
I said that all wrong. It's like picking on a cripple for being in a wheelchair or a retard for using AOL. Apologies.
Or going to glibs to ask how to do basic html while claiming to be a programmer?
Lmfao. Coming from the drunken fucking retard who thinks Jon Stewart and Lindsay Lohan are fresh, contemporary pop culture references and still tries to start pits with other decrepit boomers at a Ministry concert, this is just precious. It's too bad you didn't spend more time on AOL back in the day, drunky, you might have learned how to use HTML for simple text modifications like bold and italics instead of having to embarrass yourself begging the Glibertarians to teach you how to do it after bragging up your graduate-level computer science education.
You say this today. You said this yesterday:
https://reason.com/2023/07/15/rip-anchor-steam-the-san-francisco-brew-that-saved-craft-beer-in-america/?comments=true#comment-10155566
By "all sorts of sources of information from all sides" the lardass fat piece of shit cytotoxic means he wants to read Jacobin, Mother Jones, Democratic Underground AND neutral sources, like MSNBC, CNN and The Atlantic. You know, both kinds, country AND western.
I would prefer an article that seeks out all sorts of sources of information from all sides.
The branding propaganda continues from the poster whose entire judgment system is driven by tribalism.
Reason could do itself a favor and stop relying on Tech Dirt and more specifically Masnick who isn’t libertarian in any regard.
Nor specifically very tech-y either. He's not some engineer, nor some academic, nor some other Zuckerberg-style code-crunching startup maven and is, otherwise, a fairly minimal social influencer. Ben Huh, Eric Nakagawa, Ninja, and Mr. Beast all rose (and some fell) far further than Masnick, were more broadly influential, *and* more directly involved in the technical details of their work.
This is the part that really gets me about him. Alex Jones is/was both more influential and tech-y than Masnick is. The continued cross-referencing seems like a rather obvious loser-deal between two shills to push each others' users' eyeballs back and forth between their two sites.
Mike Masnick is terrible.
If only this had been the case prior to the 2020 election, we might still have had a good POTUS.
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Special agent Jerkins will continue to monitor OnlyFans.
Jeff will continue to monitor Dance Moms.
Is that a show about strippers?
"I support single mothers, one dollar at a time."
Small children in hooters like outfits.
Imagine a Hooters waitress snuck into the trunk of your car. You later got in the car and drove around. When you stopped at each light and sign, she would hop out, Hooter around, then get back in the truck. Would you be responsible for this?
Terrific article. Reason needs more articles like these.
The problem though is that this article needed to be published on July 5, the day after the ruling. At this point, the two tribes have already formed their opinions, being exposed to countless articles on the matter in their various media bubbles giving their tribal take on the matter - and, because we currently live in a postmodernist hell, what the media bubble says becomes reality for the tribalists - and this one article nearly two weeks after the ruling is unlikely to change anyone's minds at this point.
cytotoxic knows all about partisan political media bubbles because he read about it in Salon.
And then there's the Hunter Biden laptop story. This has been a Holy Grail among conservatives looking for social media conspiracies, and Doughty found the FBI's "failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling."
Wait, what? Rather than complaining that the administration was pressuring social media companies to take information down, the problem, apparently, was that the FBI didn't advise social media companies not to moderate this story.
Given that the government had previously told those companies that it was Russian disinformation, then yes, they did, in fact, have an obligation to correct that. This is not complicated.
They even had conferences utilizing an example of DNC hacked material being pushed on social media by Russia. Meanwhile the FBI KNEW the laptop was real.
And covered it up explicitly to help biden
Given that the government had previously told those companies that it was Russian disinformation
No, the government didn't. There was the letter signed by the 50 intel guys, but that wasn't an official government letter.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the FBI contacted Facebook and Twitter immediately before the laptop story broke and said to be aware of a major Russian disinformation op occurring in the next few days. The FBI knew that the Post was breaking the story, and Zuckerberg said this FBI warning was exactly why he censored it.
The 50 lying sleazebags were a whole other bit of fuckery.
The literally wargamed hacked materials with social media companies with one of the scenarios similar to the laptop issue. This was gamed after the FBI knew the laptop was an issue.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smith
That was an interesting article, Jesse.
Well, you’re not telling the whole truth here.
I’m assuming this is the Zuckerberg story that you are referring to:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
So the FBI did not tell Facebook “the Hunter laptop is Russian disinformation”.
Also interestingly:
Dude.... Why in the world would you keep carrying this water? Everyone here was alive for that event. Everyone saw it in real time.
Running around pretending that the important point is that "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is" is just ludicrous.
The FBI was spying on the author of the article. They knew for a flat fact that it was completely real months before it was published.
Not only did they warn everyone off of covering, not only did they flat out lie when they said it was Russian disinformation, they illegally spied on an American journalist while doing it..... And everyone complied with their illegal requests.
But sure.. "they only censored it a lot, not completely ". Hell, the even censored DMs.
Pick a different propaganda hill to die on. This one is dumb. You are the sheep in the back row bleating your approval as the pigs in front exclaim "Four legs good, two legs BETTER!"
Jeff choose all the propaganda hills to die on.
The FBI was spying on the author of the article.
The FBI was spying on the authors of the Hunter Biden laptop article for the NY Post? Which one? Do you have a link for this? This is news to me.
They knew for a flat fact that it was completely real months before it was published.
My understanding of the timeline, is that the FBI picked up the laptop sometime in either late 2019 or early 2020, at at some point in 2020 they did determine that it was authentic, yes.
But, the information that was published in the NY Post, came from a copy of the hard drive that the computer store owner made. Not from the physical hard drive within the laptop itself. That is my understanding anyway. Because how could the NY Post publish an article on the contents of the actual, physical laptop in the fall of 2020 if the laptop was in the possession of the FBI at that very moment?
So yes the FBI could authenticate the laptop that was in their possession. But they didn't have the ability to authenticate whatever copies had been made, which could have been subsequently altered.
Not only did they warn everyone off of covering,
Who? The government? The FBI said that they believed a Russian disinformation campaign was imminent. They should not have said that?
not only did they flat out lie when they said it was Russian disinformation
The government never said "the Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign".
And look I don't think the government covered itself in glory here, but I don't think they are the major villains here. I simply would like to have a fact-based discussion on the matter, not filled with conspiracies and hyperbole.
Ignorance is not a virtue, Lying Jeffy.
But it's his best trait!
Nobody asked them to do that, only to not fucking lie about it, which they did. They refused to acknowledge the existence of the laptop in their custody or any of its contents. They didn't even do a weasely "we can't confirm or deny" on it, they flat out fucking lied about its existence you stupid fat fucking lardass obese sack of whale shit. And of course, had they been inclined to do so, it would have been trivially easy to verify the integrity of the copied data compared to the original. But they couldn't do that, because they were still in the process of lying about their possession of the original.
Since that was a lie, and a strategically timed and planted lie in order to preempt the release of the laptop story, no, fatass, they shouldn't have said that. Any more than they should have lied about yellowcake in Niger when they got us into your beloved Iraq war. The intelligence community should get out of the business of telling lies for political purposes you fat stupid piece of shit.
Only that it "fit the pattern of a Russian disinformation campaign" Which is to say, they fucking lied. It did not fit the pattern of a Russian disinformation campaign, it fit the pattern of a breaking news story that would have hurt their chosen candidate in the election. They knew the laptop existed, they knew what data it contained, they knew that the information published in the Post story did not contradict the data that they had from the laptop (since you're going to try to say the data was altered, which has never been suggested by anyone, even at the FBI), and they lied anyway and said that the story fit a pattern of Russian disinformation. It didn't.
That would be easier to do if you weren't a lying fat fucking lardass piece of shit denying known and verified facts, fat fuck.
I think your entire story is conspiracy-laden twaddle. Get back to me when you have some more concrete facts.
Yeah you fat lying fucking bitch, I know all you've got is LALALALALALALALALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. That's what happens when you're a lying fat fucking piece of shit carrying water for other lying pieces of shit.
“Well, you’re not telling the whole truth here.”
Actually it’s important to note that you’re trying to twist and lawyer the truth here.
Three major companies credit the FBI warning for their decision to censor the laptop.
-Zuckerberg clearly states that the FBI’s warning was the reason Facebook banned the laptop story.
-The Twitter Files emails clearly show the warning was the reason why Twitter executives banned the laptop story.
-Sundar Pichai says the FBI’s warning was the reason Google deranked the laptop story.
The FBI had the Laptop and knew it was real in 2019. They knew months in advance that the Post was releasing the story and when. They had received no intel that Russia was actually planning any disinformation, but they still lied to the tech companies that they had, immediately before the Post was to release the story.
They knew they were lying about a Russian Op. and they knew exactly what effect their warning would have.
Stop lying about it.
I note the complete lack of citations for your claims.
Ignorance is not a virtue, Lying Jeffy.
Nice try you sea lioning fat piece of shit, but the Twitter files are so easy to find that even a brain damaged 83 IQ morbidly obese troglodyte retard like you can pretty easily source them. The Zuckerberg interview has already been linked.
*I* linked the Zuckerberg story, in case you weren't paying attention.
They knew months in advance that the Post was releasing the story and when.
Really? What is the citation for that?
Stop lying about it.
OK, King Canute.
Yup. Jeffy’s lies are as natural as the tide.
LOL you explicitly admitted below that you lied.
I am way more honest than you around here.
Only that it "fit a pattern of Russian disinformation just like we saw in 2016" even though they had already verified its veracity at that time. Glad you cleared that up, fatass, for a minute there I almost thought the FBI was exerting influence on social media companies based on false information or something.
It was *Facebook* which made the determination that the Hunter Biden laptop "fit the pattern", not the FBI. Read the quote above more carefully.
No, you fatass lying piece of shit, here's the fucking quote from your own goddamn link, retard:
The FBI told Facebook to be on the lookout for an "information dump" "similar to" Russian disinformation in the 2016 election. Facebook used the "fits the pattern" language, but the FBI told them the same fucking thing. See, an information dump that's "similar to Russian disinformation from the 2016 election" has the exact same meaning as an information dump that "fits the patter of Russian disinformation from the 2016 election." Which, by the way, was also a fucking lie. There was no Russian disinformation dump leading up to the 2016 election. There were a handful of shitty meme pages on Facebook and ads on Facebook and Twitter. Stop trying to draw distinctions without a difference to cover for your lying you fat fucking piece of shit. It's not going to work. The words are right fucking there.
The FBI clearly did think there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. Look at how the Trump-Russia investigation evolved.
Chemleft Lying Shitweasel already knew that. And then lied about it. Again. Because that's what he does, and why attempting any repartee with him is pointless.
Then again, I never did like the actual "Whack-a-Mole" game either, so this may account for our differing tastes here.
I demonstrated, from a direct quote from Zuckerberg, that the government did not tell him that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.
So you are the liar here.
That is beside the point.
The government had absolutely no business doing that.
The government had no business doing what? Warning social media companies that they thought a Russian disinformation campaign was on the horizon?
Except they had zero intel or agents warning them about a Russian disinformation campaign, but they did know that the post was releasing the laptop story.
Well, so there is this memo.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-declass-16MAR21.pdf
I don't know if this information was known to the FBI or not, but it does give some basis to suggest that perhaps Russia was interfering in the 2020 election.
Now, maybe the information was not that reliable, maybe the threat was exaggerated and the warnings were overhyped. That is all certainly plausible. But it doesn't seem likely that the warning itself was completely phony.
That's an intelligence summary with all sourcing redacted from January 7th, 2021 you fatass lying sack of shit. It also doesn't suggest that there was any imminent Russian disinformation campaign relating to an information dump about Biden's crack addicted son. Here's what it says, you lying lardass piece of shit:
And here again, for emphasis, you fat lying piece of shit: They knew that nothing in the Post story was incorrect, because they had access to the original computer and all of its original data. The comparison of the revealed details and messages would have been trivial. Not only that but the recipients of Hunter Biden's emails that were discovered on the laptop independently verified that they were legitimate.
They knew that nothing in the Post story was incorrect, because they had access to the original computer and all of its original data.
You're probably right.
So, why didn't the FBI say anything about it in October 2020?
We can consider two hypotheses:
1. They were intentionally trying to cover for Biden's campaign.
2. They were fearful of repeating the mistakes of 2016 by making a public spectacle of themselves so late into the campaign.
Unless I have some concrete evidence to the contrary, I'm going to go with an Occam's Razor analysis and go with hypothesis #2.
Correct.
It was not their business than if the disinformation was from China, or Israel, or the Covenant, Arm, and Sword of the Lord!
"That is beside the point."
Jeff's lying.
Deliberate inference is exactly the same as using the words. Particularly when the FBI knew the laptop story was going to break and received absolutely no intel to justify their sudden phony Russia warning.
All social media companies all immediately assumed that the laptop story was Russian disinformation exactly as the FBI intended.
Jeff is disgusting.
How do you know the warning was phony?
Because all of the declassified evidence demonstrates unambiguously that there was no intelligence to support the FBI's assertion of an ongoing Russian disinformation campaign involving Biden's crack addicted son, and we now know from that same declassified evidence that they were in possession of that laptop, which they lied about, and could independently verify that the facts published in the Post story comported with the data from the laptop that they possessed.
But to my knowledge, the FBI never asserted explicitly that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation propaganda campaign.
If I told you that there was something very dangerous in the trunk of that car over there but didn’t specify that it was a bear, I have done nothing to dissuade you from opening that trunk.
No, you actually didn't you stupid fat fuck. You're desperately trying to let the FBI off the hook for deliberately lying about a Russian disinformation op that never existed, that we now know they know never existed, by pretending that because their language in a hypothetical, the blame rests on Facebook for properly understanding the implication. Because you're a bootlicking censorious Nazi piece of shit.
Actually, if the FBI is to blame, it is for being so paranoid about potential Russian propaganda and getting worked up about a threat that was marginal at best, at least based on what happened in 2016. They should not be let off the hook for that.
Great, so you support firing the actors involved for incompetence just as I support firing them for deliberate malfeasance and lying, right? Oh what's that? You're a bootlicking fat piece of shit Nazi who's just running cover for the FBI and won't support any manner of accountability for what they did? Well I'll be...
Zuckerberg says differently, you weaselly simp
GFY
This is pathetic even by your standards
I'm just quoting directly what he said.
You do understand that whole interview was damage control for facebook?
I lack the ability to peer into Zuckerberg's soul and understand his true motivations.
All I can do is quote his words.
Yet you divine the intent of every "right wing" poster here?
Do you think I treat conservatives disrespectfully?
The words “no shit, Sherlock” come to mind.
Well, do you have a suggestion on how I can do a better job?
And then lying about it. What he said is that the FBI told Facebook:
That's from your own quoted link you fatass lying piece of shit. There was no intelligence to suggest that, and not only that, the FBI knew full well that the contents of the "some kind of dump that's similar to that" was in fact all true and factual, because they had the laptop in question in their possession and had already examined all of its data.
The FBI thought there was going to be some "Russian propaganda" event taking place. That's right. Considering 2016 and how they reacted to that, I don't have any reason to believe that, at least in *their minds*, they thought that it was a legitimate concern.
I posted a link to a memo that says that there was intelligence to suggest that there was a "concern" of Russian propaganda. I have no idea how valid that intelligence was or how strong that concern should have been. My hunch is that the FBI, if they were aware of that memo, probably exaggerated and overstated the Russian threat, again based on their reaction to 2016.
the FBI knew full well that the contents of the “some kind of dump that’s similar to that” was in fact all true and factual, because they had the laptop in question in their possession and had already examined all of its data.
Right, so you are explicitly stating what I suggested elsewhere, that you think that the FBI deliberately concocted a fake Russian propaganda story to try to trick social media to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story on behalf of Biden. Is that it?
I think that's a little bit bonkers, and gives the FBI far too much credit for the level of deception that they are capable of.
You posted a link to an intelligence summary released 2 months after the election with all of its sources redacted you fat lying cunt. In the subsequent 3 years we have learned more information. The FBI lied.
Of course, the same FBI that illegally spied on prominent civil rights leaders and kept dossiers on Washington D.C. homosexuals to blackmail them for half a century would certainly never do anything as nefarious as plant a fake intelligence warning to sympathetic social media companies which were already censoring posts and user accounts based on FBI input. Just ludicrous. It's not like they're pure evil sociopaths whose only goal is wanton evil for the sake of evil's sake, like Trump.
I love that you always give the government/authorities the benefit of the doubt.
Never change jeff.
Don't worry, he won't, unless it's to gain another 100 pounds and get so fucking fat he can't leave his mom's basement without a crane and a support team.
No; it is that I am knee-jerk allergic to conspiratorial-type thinking.
Again I don't think that the FBI or the government did all the right things here.
But the narrative that *appears* to be put forth here by the commenters, is that the FBI had Biden's laptop in early 2020, knew it was legit, knew that eventually it was going to leak and become public knowledge, and so they concocted a fake Russian disinformation story to try to trick social media companies to censor a story that would be presumably damaging to Biden under the guise of "stopping the Russians".
And if that really is the working narrative around here, then I'm sorry it sounds too much like a fictional novel than a real plausible possibility. I don't buy it.
I think a much more reasonable story, is that the FBI really were concerned about Russian disinformation, and probably *too much so*, since they tended to exaggerate its influence in the 2016 election and they didn't want to be seen as dropping the ball this time around. So they were hypervigilant about the potential Russian threat to the point of paranoia. Yes they had Hunter Biden's original laptop, but they probably knew that the store owner had made copies, and they had no idea if those copies had been altered in any way between the time when the FBI recovered the laptop up until when the story broke. FURTHERMORE, I would imagine that they would be very hesitant to repeat the mistakes of 2016 and give public attention to themselves by making public statements about what was or was not on Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020, so close to election day.
But I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but it will take more than conspiratorial, government-is-always-wrong, connect-the-dots type thinking. It will take something more concrete than that.
Lol. That 4 years you spent on the Russian collusion conspiracy theory really didn't do you credibility on this any favors, but then you still bother lying about your original cytotoxic handle, so what else would anyone expect.
That’s not the narrative. That’s the set of discernible and verified facts that have come out over a 3 year period of time. You would rather swap that out for a narrative of a beneficent and always well-intentioned FBI because you’re a bootlicking Nazi.
Yes. The author here is clearly a victim of misinformation which is why this long winded rant isn't worth the read.
"...This has been a cause célèbre on the right since Donald Trump occupied the White House, based on the claim that "woke" liberal owners and workers at Big Tech companies primarily take down conservative-leaning content..."
Seems this man hasn't heard of the "Twitter Files".
Why would he look at evidence? He had Masnick at Tech Dirt to tell him what to think.
And, speaking of the postmodernist hell that we currently occupy. What is the way out? What is the path towards a place where all teams have a shared sense of reality?
Ultimately, if there is not going to be government censorship to force one version of 'reality' upon everyone - and there shouldn't be, of course - then there has to be an individual incentive on the part of each media consumer to seek out information and facts about objective reality, not about the 'reality' that they think exists. And like with many things, it inevitably comes back to the schools. There needs to be a much greater emphasis on media literacy and critical thinking in the schools, even in elementary school, so that individuals have a better sense of which stories are authentic and which stories smell like bullshit.
For example, when I read a story that is written to depict one side as monstrously evil, then I know that the author is really just distorting the truth to frame it in a Manichean way. The real world is not a black/white dichotomy of "good vs. evil", the real world is full of shades of gray. This type of bullshit detection needs to be more commonplace.
If more people valued the search for truth and objective reality, over the presentation of simplistic narratives and reinforcement of tribal loyalty, then maybe we can find a way out of this postmodernist hell that we find ourselves in.
Agreed. Public schools are run by government employees, so they have an axe to grind right there. But my trust in them to do this, and do it well, is low, for that, and for other reasons. Teacher's unions by and large swing "Team D", is other evidence. There must be other, better ingredients. Oh, and, the kiddos? What percent of their time do they spend at home getting indoctrinated by their parents, and getting crowd-influenced by their peers (even more importantly, actually, than parents, say the developmental psychologists), v/s a TINY smidge of time being instructed by teachers?
IMHO, the BETTER (but VERY difficult) fix is to shrink government! Smaller government means less to fight about, and therefor, less "need" for tribalistic fighting.
sarcasmic supports a government just small enough to strong arm multinational corporations with trillion dollar market caps into doing what they're told.
In ye old eras (like the founding), there was never a free or fair press.
The notion of objective press is a mythological construct of boomers.
I agree that there has never been a truly objective press. So the responsibility lies upon all of us to go beyond tribal-friendly press outlets and seek other sources of information, because we are motivated for a search for truth rather than confirmation bias.
No, it doesn't, because there is no responsibility for people to hold "right" opinions.
Get it through your thick skull that humans will never defeat their own nature.
What do you think is "human nature"?
Racism, tribalism, envy, greed, selfishness, to name a few.
Too true!
There is also an innate "fairness" urge, which can be tamed for good purposes. See monkey fairness grape cucumber (search string) = https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/how-we-learn-fairness "How We Learn Fairness"
Learn it? Hell, it is genetically programmed in us! "Sociobiology", hello?!?!
Well anyway, we also have "free will". We can struggle against our stupid programming if we want to.
Less well-known is "do-gooder derogation", also sociobiologically programmed IMHO. See http://www.churchofsqrls.com/Do_Gooders_Bad/#_Toc75869262
Nobody ever clicks on your deranged blog posts anymore than they read your walls of copypasta, sarcasmic.
It involves portly fanboys without a lot of victories on their CV banging away on the keyboard, rooting for big brother to stop others from making them look so bad.
Sociobiology-driven "do-gooder derogation" and tribalism involves self-righteous, smug authoritarians lecturing others about being as righteous as they are, all the while, shitting all over ideas about "individual freedom". All if for the Hive-Tribe, Comrades!
You resent the hell out of the fact that many other people are flat-out, better, more honest people than you are, right? More “live and let live”, and WAAAY less authoritarian?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-love-and-war/201706/why-some-people-resent-do-gooders
From the conclusion to the above…
These findings suggest that we don’t need to downplay personal triumphs to avoid negative social consequences, as long as we make it clear that we don’t look down on others as a result.
SQRLSY back here now… So, I do NOT want you to feel BAD about YOU being an authoritarian asshole, and me NOT being one! PLEASE feel GOOD about you being an evil, lying asshole! You do NOT need to push me (or other REAL lovers of personal liberty) down, so that you can feel better about being an asshole! EVERYONE ADORES you for being that asshole that you are, because, well, because you are YOU! FEEL that self-esteem, now!
http://www.churchofsqrls.com/Do_Gooders_Bad/#_Toc75869262
There is also a lot of goodness and kindness and empathy and caring in human nature.
We've evolved from being beasts living in squalor according to the laws of the jungle to where we are at today. Sure there are some ancient traits that are very likely hardwired into us associated with tribalism. But I am sure we can make further progress.
"There is also a lot of goodness and kindness and empathy and caring in human nature."
This, too, is true. Thank nature or thank God, but do NOT thank Government Almighty for this! But too often, "No good deed goes unpunished". For a recent example of this, see https://nypost.com/2023/07/16/canadian-man-mark-skage-fired-for-saving-moose-calf-from-black-bear/
Canadian man fired from job after saving baby moose from bear: ‘I couldn’t just leave her’
The evil-doers often justify their evils by saying, "But the law is the law is THE LAW, man!!!"
That's why we need a beneficent government to make us all behave correctly until we have become deserving of our freedom, right you fatass Nazi piece of shit?
I'm willing to bet I'm a lot more pro-freedom than you. For starters, I don't advocate mass execution of political enemies.
You supported actual concentration camps during COVID and support curtailing people's rights until their behavior conforms to your preference, you Nazi piece of shit. Also I don't advocate mass execution of anyone. Lie about yourself, or lie about others, but don't do both in the same post you lardass fat piece of shit.
Oh you've changed your position then on mass murder. That's good to hear.
I'm a boomer and I agree, although the myth was alive and well when I appeared on the planet. In retrospect I think U.S. history is a lot more Machiavellian than most would believe. RFK Jr. says the CIA was involved in his uncle's assassination. He's in a much better position to know than I am so I'll take him at his word until I'm convinced otherwise. Something that will never happen at this point. I've personally watched the media create a false narrative that became the conventional wisdom that I knew for a fact was a lie. Don't believe anything except your own lying eyes.
“What is the way out?”
My hope is the majority, who are not Team Red or Blue, become disgusted with the poor quality of the candidates those teams come up with, the lack of competent governance and any effort to find solutions to the big problems affecting us, and the constant bickering and negativity. And demand something better.
Beside education, America’s winner-take-all election laws turn states that are actually purple into red or blue prizes. It is hard to change American politics without changing that dynamic.
I would agree with that. Electoral reform should be one of the Libertarian Party's top priorities in 2024.
You live in Canada with a parliamentary system, and your government has less political diversity than this one does, cytotoxic.
I really wouldn't know about political diversity in the Canadian parliamentary system. Maybe you should ask an actual Canadian.
Lol, hilariously enough, you comment on Canadian politics constantly when you're trying to tweak Mother's Lament, so even in the context of this sockpuppet that doesn't make any sense. You do realize that Playa Manhattan spotted you out as cytotoxic literally the same day you debuted this handle, and that everybody else did as well, right? Like, you don't actually believe that anyone who was here back then actually falls for it do you? Because that's even sadder, if true.
I don't have a clear recollection of what you describe. Do you have a link?
“….where all teams have a shared sense….”
“…. hell that we find ourselves in.”
Jesus Christ, what a radical individualist. Are you in “hell” Jeff? Sucks to be you.
For example, when I read a story that is written to depict one side as monstrously evil, then I know that the author is really just distorting the truth to frame it in a Manichean way.
And yet the real Jeffey acts in exactly this way demonizing those on the right and protecting those on the left. He posts these so he can pretend he is not part of the problem, but his entire posting history proves otherwise.
The way out is when the system collapses.
I would prefer a 'solution' that did not involve systemic failure.
Yes, we know you prefer total subjugation of anyone who disagrees with you until such time as they have earned their liberty to do as you wish by their compliance with your wishes, you fat Nazi piece of shit.
"Total subjugation" is a little harsh.
As with all things, I have a priority list. So do you.
For instance, I imagine you would prefer executing liberals before opening the borders. Would that be your preferred ordering of things?
Lol, imagine being so incredibly stupid you can't even construct a strawman without its very own false dilemma. Even if I were a psychopathic Nazi like you who wants to kill my political enemies and crush them into subjugation, it wouldn't follow that I would be willing to open the borders after doing so.
The western (US) empire is in the age of decadence. For all empires, decline then collapse follows.
You could start by not constantly lying and we could go from there, you fatass lying piece of shit. It's hard for everyone to have a shared sense of reality when there's a fat lying faggot piece of shit lying about the reality that's right before everyone's eyes.
You could start by not constantly lying
That is a little rich coming from the guy who literally lies about me in every post that he writes about me, calling me cytotoxic and accusing me of living in Canada.
See that's not a lie though, because you returned with this handle mere days after retiring your cytotoxic handle using all of the exact same linguistic and rhetorical tics, linking to the same articles from the same websites, and using the same talking points from the same ActBlue PDF. You aren't very clever, cytotoxic. I've explained that to you many times. The only person here possibly more stupid than you is sarcasmic. Your bullshit doesn't fool anyone, and your sockpuppeting is poorer than shreek's. If you don't like getting called out for sockpuppeting, try not sockpuppeting. Kind of goes hand in hand with: try not constantly lying.
I'm not sockpuppeting.
“based on the claim that “woke” liberal owners and workers at Big Tech companies primarily take down conservative-leaning content.”
Oh wow!
“described as “anti-Christian designs,” such as one that included the phrase Satan Respects Pronouns.”
Imagine that.
“But the opinion veers off from there and credulously accepts plaintiffs’ claims that almost all of the contacts with government officials (and some civilians) were coercive, and it uncritically accepts assertions that “only conservative viewpoints were allegedly suppressed.”
Because look at all the proggy establishment viewpoints that were suppressed too, right?
“Accordingly, it is not a huge victory for the right as some have imagined, or a loss for the left, as others fear.”
Whew! Thank goodness for that! Because the last thing in the world Reason Magazine wants is a huge victory for the right and a loss for the left.
It isnt even the liberal vs conservative issue at hand but the state vs citizen issues such as the large takedown of factual covid misinformation. While there was a clear bias against conservative material the anti statist takedown was far more pervasive. The overlap is of course huge as democrats are largely pro federal state. Something jeff seems to be defending above.
The article was one long sneer. Looks like Robert Corn-Revere doesn't realize he's writing to plebs and not the WaPo readership here.
Yes. Two individuals who co authored the Barrington Proclamation were plaintiffs in this case. I don't see any reason to believe that scientists disagreeing with lockdowns to defend against a virus is "conservative". It's a learned opinion that may or may not be correct but it's not political. And if their detractors were predominantly "liberal" the larger incentive for thugs like Fauci was to cover their asses and big pharma to make billions on Operation Warp Speed, something that Reason is pretty jazzed up about. For some reason. Overall a silly article that ignores facts in the public domain.
Exactly.
The reason conservatives were bitching about woke wasn't "looking for conspiracy theories" it's that they happened to get the bulk of it. But the real problem is the basic fact of it all, as it affects everyone. EVERYONE.
This dude with his "woke" in quotes is totally gaslighting. It happened. A lot. Mostly to conservatives, but to anyone who didn't toe the party line. It's not gaslighting, it was widespread government disinformation and silencing of voices, even the voices of learned scientists and doctors who just didn't happen to agree with the shite the propaganda the CDC and Fauchi were spewing out.
An amazing story.
NYC awards people who failed teaching licensing exam 1.8B due to exam being racist.
Some individuals who never worked as teachers will get more than $1 million each, and could even get pensions which will inflate the cost well beyond $1.8 billion, the New York Post reported. The Post interviewed 64-year-old Herman Grim, who will be paid $2,055,383 after failing the test “a lot.” He could not provide any examples of how the questions were racist.
Up to 2M for never teaching. Even more amusing... minorities continued to fail the "non racist" licensing exams.
But the idea that those statistics prove that the test was racist, rather than properly reflecting knowledge levels, is undercut by the results of the teaching exams used since. Most states use an exam called Praxis to credential their teachers. According to a 2011 study co-written by the National Education Association teaching union, Praxis’ results were similar to the New York City test. “The largest differences exist for African-American test takers, with passing rates that are lower than White test takers by 35% or more,” the NEA study found.
.
by 2017, 12 states including New York had moved to a more subjective test called edTPA. That was designed to address claims that the other tests didn’t actually identify who would be good in the classroom, and allowed people to submit videos of themselves teaching. “But in New York State, black prospective teachers failed the edTPA at nearly twice the rate of whites and Hispanics,” the book found.
Now one must be thinking the new testing is also racist and covers material not needed for teaching. But...
Teaching exams are notoriously easy, essentially measuring whether the teacher could pass the class she is teaching. Praxis’ creators said that “All of the content and skills in the three Praxis 1 tests … cover skills that do not exceed a high school level.”
These are the same people Jeff calls experts and should set their own material with the state having no say.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyc-to-pay-1-8-billion-over-old-racist-teaching-exam-but-blacks-performed-poorly-on-newer-exams-too
See, once again. A story that is just littered with ridiculous claims. “Teachers who failed a test cry racism, sue the school district and cash in on giant settlement”. It just plays too much into a tribal narrative rather than seemingly grounded in reality.
So, if you dig into this story a little bit, as usual, reality is more complicated.
Here is a website on the original class-action lawsuit, which was initiated in 1996:
https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/gulino-v-board-education-city-new-york-and-new-york-state-education
It should be noted that the four original plaintiffs in this lawsuit were all working teachers at the time, and according to this source, were doing a good job and had received satisfactory evaluations. In 1996 they were asked to take this standardized test, but they failed it. So if you put their racial discrimination claims off to the side for a moment, one of their OTHER claims is that this test is not meaningfully related to their job duties – after all, if these teachers were already doing a good job before this test, how could failing this test demonstrate that they were unqualified to be teachers?
It would be like giving a bus driver a math test, and then if the bus driver failed the math test, firing the bus driver. One can argue that sure, bus drivers should know how to do math, but is this knowledge of math integral to the job of driving a bus? Probably not. That seems to be one of the complaints of the plaintiffs separate from the racial bias complaints.
They also had questions on whether these tests were ever validated for demonstrating proficiency in teaching.
Again these are just two data points, not the entire story. Maybe these teachers were not all that qualified and enjoyed an overly generous evaluation system, and the standardized test that they failed was really a true measure of their performance. Maybe the test really was an unfair assessment of their abilities even if there was no racial bias component to it. I don’t really know the full story.
What I do know is that the version Jesse presented – and by extension, the version that appears to be all over the right-leaning websites, going by my Google searching on this matter – dishonestly frames this story as ‘unworthy teachers get big cash payout from their ridiculous claims of racial bias’. They don’t go into the larger issue of whether these exams really are racially biased or not, and they certainly don’t go into this other claim of a potentially non-germane test, that is exclusive of the racial bias claims, because that is boring and doesn’t support the ‘out of control racism claims’ narrative.
We need to do better in our consumption of news and not be content to stay in our tribal bubbles when we are trying to find the facts.
cytotoxic the fatass lying piece of shit Nazi went to the plaintiff lawyer's website and got the 100% straight skinny, you see.
I even said,
"Again these are just two data points, not the entire story. "
where the "two data points" were the original article, and the source that I cited. I even explicitly said it's NOT THE ENTIRE STORY, and not the "100% straight skinny".
It's so terribly ironic and not all that amusing at all, that I'm the one who is continually called a liar, when it is all of you who continually troll me, who lie far more often.
Expecting teachers to know anything is racist.
Holy shit: "In 2017, New York State scrapped its requirement that teachers must pass a literacy test because just 46 percent of Hispanic test takers and 41 percent of black test takers passed it on the first try, compared with 64 percent of white candidates."
Did they add a “likability” component to help boost PoC/WoC scores?
Yeah, but as cytotoxic so cogently points out above, it's not like literacy is related to their abilities as a teacher. After all, they were already hired on as teachers despite being illiterate and they were doing such a great job!
California judge rules there is a state interest in teachers hiding gender transitions from parents.
https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/judge-lets-schools-hide-gender-identity-parents-docs-question-gender
House Republicans Move To Cut Funding For FBI, Protect Whistleblowers
Is that why the Klan has commited to DEI?
https://twitter.com/HarmlessYardDog/status/1680207444121907200
Profs push program that claims math is 'racist' because it requires a 'right answer'
A new program promoted by the Oregon Department of Education is designed to “dismantle” instances of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.”
Looks like White Supremacy was the impetus when the Babylonians and Egyptians began using arithmetic, algebra, and geometry for taxation and other financial calculations, for building and construction, and for astronomy. Or when Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi created algebra.
Which is why sarc prefers math without numbers.
He can still calculate (m+d)20/20 though.
His drinking is also a continuous function and not discrete.
He will never be able to grasp significant figures.
Liar. He grasps significant figures of 40s.
That isn't actually what the document says.
Here is the relevant math instruction workbook for educators.
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf
The authors of this workbook, instead, are claiming that it is an example of "White supremacy culture" (which is not the same as saying it is racist) to insist on "a greater focus on getting the 'right' answer than understanding, concepts and reasoning". This is on p. 8 of the document linked above.
So they aren't saying that students shouldn't get the right answer because it's racist. They are saying that teachers shouldn't overly emphasize getting the right answer at the expense of understanding the method for how the right answer was arrived at.
And if you take away the stupid racial language, it sounds like an eminently reasonable idea. After all, if you are a math teacher, and you are teaching, say, about logarithms, would you be content if all your students knew how to do was to use the logarithm button on the calculator? Or would you really want your students to have a deeper understanding of what a logarithm was on a conceptual level?
It is stupid and needlessly inflammatory for these authors to call it "White supremacy culture" though. An emphasis of result over process in education, however misguided, has nothing to do with race or skin color. These people are making it harder to adopt some good ideas by attaching these stupid anti-racist labels onto them.
And, once again, we see a story that frames the issue as some ridiculous caricature - 'crazy social justice warriors make ridiculous statements about math!' - turns out to be inaccurate, and the reality is more complex.
I'll also note that ML cites some right-leaning article, while I cite the primary source material.
They are saying that teachers shouldn’t overly emphasize getting the right answer at the expense of understanding the method for how the right answer was arrived at.
Then they are planning on teaching to fail.
No, it is the opposite. The idea is to teach kids to understand math beyond simply knowing how to use their calculator.
The only answers that matter in mathematics are the right answers, else way the system of math is broken.
In addition, we do not need to teach people how to learn, but instead how to think.
The only answers that matter in mathematics are the right answers, else way the system of math is broken.
It is important to get the right answer. If you want a deep understanding of math, it is also important to know WHY the answer is correct.
In addition, we do not need to teach people how to learn, but instead how to think.
We actually need both. Metacognition is a real thing.
The answer is right because the proper steps were correctly followed.
Just like the troons want to remake children in their twisted image, you want kids to be fat and stupid like you.
Oh knock it off with the insults. We're having a dialogue here.
Knowing math is more than just knowing how to use a calculator. For a lot of math problems, you can get the correct answer if you just know how to use a calculator (or know how to use Google, etc.) But it doesn't prove that you know the math concepts behind the answer.
Just having the correct numerical answer does not necessarily demonstrate proof of knowledge of the math concepts behind the answer.
And NOT HAVING THE CORRECT ANSWER AT ALL doesn't demonstrate proof of knowledge of the math concepts behind the answer either you retarded fat piece of shit.
And NOT HAVING THE CORRECT ANSWER AT ALL doesn’t demonstrate proof of knowledge of the math concepts behind the answer either
Hey you're right. Good thing no one is suggesting that students be given full credit for the wrong answer.
Giving ANY credit for the wrong answer fails on the same grounds you stupid fat piece of shit. You can't use the correct method to reach an incorrect answer in mathematics. You shouldn't get credit for "understanding the concept" if you reached the incorrect answer, because having reached the incorrect answer demonstrates that you don't understand the concept. Jesus fuck, how are you this fucking dedicated to making yourself and the people you support look so unimaginably fucking stupid?
It's impossible to know WHY the answer is correct if you don't reach the correct answer you stupid fat fucking piece of shit. Holy fucking Christ what a joke you are. I thought you couldn't get too much lower than "white people's welfare should be taken away from them and given to immigrants because immigrants work harder" or "what if a bear in your trunk jumps out and mauls people while you aren't looking" but goddamn if you aren't up to the task.
“If you want a deep understanding of math,”
That’s fine for college, but not really necessary for elementary and middle school kids.
First he sets up an inaccurate analogy, then he refers to the analogy as if it were fact.
Teaching kids how to get the right answer is not analogous to using a calculator. In fact since the kids have to follow the process to get the right answer his entire assertion these things are different and getting the right answer excludes understanding is false. But he chooses that analogy to obscure this fact and help support the left.
But in reality the left pushes alternatives to objective standards because they understand fellow leftists control these subjective evaluations. This is another angle of attack similar to colleges are moving to end SATs so they can justify relying more on personal essays (which leftists grade higher for those which indicate membership in favored races and adopting leftist politics) and personal interviews (where they can bolster favored racial groups while penalizing Asians and whites).
Activism is playing your part. Jeffy's part is to protect the left using whatever justification works in the moment no matter how absurd.
Plus, people who are innumerate are easier to keep in poverty and thus on the plantation / reservation.
Jeff isn’t smart enough to understand that if a student utilized the correct methods they would get the right answer. But jeff also argued 2+2=5 was valid for an entire summer.
Jeff wants subjective mathematics to go with his subjective beliefs.
Math is objective. Using the right methods will always get the same answer. Ie the right answer.
What is log(100)? where “log” here means base-10 logarithm.
If you truly understand logarithms, you should be able to arrive at the correct answer in your head without using a calculator.
If you do not understand logarithms, you can still arrive at the correct answer by knowing how to use the logarithm button on your calculator.
That is the difference here.
Math is objective. Using the right methods will always get the same answer. Ie the right answer.
There is the right method that arrives at the correct answer that demonstrates conceptual understanding of the subject (calculating log(100) in your head and explaining your answer), and then there is the "right method" that arrives at the correct answer that does not demonstrate at all any conceptual understanding of the subject (using the logarithm button on your calculator).
San Fran has a lot of logs in their public spaces.
Except that literally no one is suggesting teaching students to use the log button on their calculator you disingenuous lying fat fucking piece of shit. You've already had that false dilemma shoved up the 14 fucking fat rolls obscuring your shit-encrusted asshole a dozen times now, so stop pretending it hasn't been dismantled already. The pedagogy you are supporting suggests you can somehow use a correct mathematical method to arrive at the incorrect answer. That is false, you lying fat piece of shit. Teaching the correct method will always lead to the correct answer. If you want to focus on teaching the correct method, it makes no sense whatsoever to remove any requirement that the method lead to a correct answer, because the correct method CAN ONLY LEAD TO THE CORRECT ANSWER.
The pedagogy you are supporting suggests you can somehow use a correct mathematical method to arrive at the incorrect answer.
This statement is not supported by anything I cited.
It only states that in their view, understanding how to arrive at the correct answer is *more important* than arriving at the correct answer itself, not that the correct answer is unimportant entirely.
I think you know this, and just wanted yet one more opportunity to throw in more insults.
Do you have an insult generator website that you consult?
Which is a non-sequitur for the reasons I already explained, you stupid fat piece of shit. You can’t emphasize method without emphasizing the correctness of the answer, because the correct method can only produce the correct answer.
No, I just rely on the known facts that you’ve made publicly available here at Reason.com over the years. For example, when you spent 3 years histrionically claiming that everyone had an obligation to wear utterly ineffective paper masks on their faces because you are morbidly obese and therefore at an elevated risk for contracting COVID, I began referring to you as a morbidly obese fat piece of shit. I add the appellations “stupid” and “retarded” because of your demonstrated stupidity and retardation. It’s easy.
That article came out two years ago, so, about when Superchonk got his talking points.
Oh, so it is a two-year-old article. I wonder which right-wing news aggregator ML pulled it from.
That is a fairly common tactic, on a slow news day, recycle old outrage-inducing articles so as to keep the dopamine rush flowing and the clicks to keep clicking.
“I wonder which right-wing news aggregator ML pulled it from.”
The Daily Kos.
"That is a fairly common tactic, on a slow news day, recycle old outrage-inducing articles so as to keep the dopamine rush flowing and the clicks to keep clicking."
A Media Matters fifty-center would definitely know.
I'm having a hard time believing you. Which Daily Kos article did you get it from?
Lol, notice how the fatass retarded piece of shit took the bait and admitted he follows DailyKos closely enough to know which articles they pushed today.
I know how to use a browser and visit their site to know what is on their front page for today, yes. But no, I don't follow them.
I mean your damage control would probably work a little bit better if you didn't literally cop about half of your talking points and links from Kos posts, you stupid fat piece of shit.
I didn't, you stupid fuck, but I thought that might rustle your jimmies. Like telling a televangelist I saw it in the Bible.
So you lied.
And you took the bait, Inceljeff Retarded Statist.
BTW, this same philosophy was implemented everywhere in the US for reading, dumping phonetics for context based clues.
Research has since demonstrated that this was idiotic, and they are returning to phonetics, even in the most progressive states.
After years using kids as Guinea pigs. Because FYTW.
Could you explain in more detail how "context based clues" in reading is similar to teaching how to arrive at a correct answer in math?
It would be easier to explain that your inability to understand that the controversy is that the postmodernist radical left wing math pedagogy you are supporting explicitly DOES NOT teach how to arrive at the correct answer in math, because it does not require the student to produce a correct answer, is probably a result of your having been one of the 3 generations of imbeciles who is functionally illiterate owing to the reading pedagogy that supported dumping phonetics for context based clues.
There is something deeply, deeply wrong with you when you choose to spend your valuable time to come to this website and troll every single post of mine with filthy profane comments.
Profane? My apologies, lardass, I didn't realize you were a deity. I guess you do resemble some depictions of the Buddha.
There is something deeply, deeply wrong with you when you choose to spend your valuable time to come to this website and post hundreds of left wing talking points, defend pedophilia and child genital mutilation, lie about your own words in the very same thread where we can all read them, and then play the victim for it. Maybe you should take your oily sausage fingers and put them to use somewhere else if you don't like it you fat piece of shit.
At this point I think you must get some type of perverse sexual thrill from all this shitposting of yours. For the amount of time and energy you devote to this, the psychic reward must be enormous.
“…“White supremacy culture” (which is not the same as saying it is racist…”
White supremacy IS racism. Are you fucking serious?
You have to keep up with your woke speak.
White supremacy culture is the culture corresponding to the normative standard that all are expected to follow in polite society.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
Notorious White Supremacist. He was the supremacistest of them all, back in the day.
Muhammad was probably spending a lot of time indoors - in order to avoid a tan. Avoiding a tan is racist.
HUNTER BIDEN FAKE BRIBERY SCANDAL UPDATE!
(AP) James Comer(R) says he is undeterred by the arrest of the key witness and whistleblower Gal Luft for acting as an unregistered agent for China, arms trafficking, violating sanctions and making false statements, according to a 2022 federal indictment unsealed on Monday. “The search for a credible witness concerning the crimes of the Biden family will go on” said Comer.
.
Comer went on to say that statements from Alexander Solonik, Sergei Mikhailov, Vladimir Kumarin, Evsei Agron, Marat Balagula, and Ludwig Fainberg were being gathered and considered as reliable sources by the committee as the investigation continues.
^ Discount and Down Syndrome version of James Carville
Obviously, as usual, Pluggo the Pedo doesn’t leave us a link or a cite where this came from. Chickenshit probably copied it word for word from his ActBlue email.
He used to until we realized he didn't actually read his own links, and they almost never said what he claimed.
Federal Judge in Oregon Completely Ignorant About Firearms
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A new culture war *began* with the July 4 ruling.
This is an example of how to completely disqualify your opinion in the very opening.
Good lord... The decision is (theoretically) an *end* to a decade of political censorship taking place behind the scenes across a huge swath of American media of all types.
It is no more the beginning of a culture war than Hiroshima was the beginning of World War II.
The right solution is to pass a Federal law prohibiting government employees and contractors from interfering in social media moderation.
The Republican-dominated House passed such a law, but it is sitting dead in the Senate. Why?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/140
Because the Democrats in the Senate want government employees to interfere in social media. Somehow the Twitter Files and the past 8 years seems to escape you, Laursen.
Perhaps Fetterman thinks passing this bill would result in him no longer being able to view the Badger Badger video on YT.
Hey, I like that video... badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom!
Weebl's stuff was genius.
Shut up woman get on my horse!
I like how Mike has pushed this narrative a half dozen times. All it idincates is 2 things... Mike is too stupid to realize the dems control the Senate and that a law doesn't supercede the constitution. Mike is truly a state excusing moron.
Maybe Dee’s been drinking too many Mike’s Flaccid Lemonade.
"The right solution is to pass a Federal law prohibiting government employees and contractors from interfering in social media moderation."
It's called the First Amendment.
"The Republican-dominated House passed such a law, but it is sitting dead in the Senate. Why?"
A Republican bill that stops the Democrat's censorship racket sitting dead in the Democrat-controlled Senate?
How strange.
Thanks for posting that. I looked at the text, overall I think it is good, but the one issue that gives me a little bit of concern is this:
I am totally fine with (A) and (C), but (B) seems to me to go a little bit too far. It says that the government can't ask even for a disclaimer to be appended to a message. That's not censorship. That is actually the *alternative* to censorship: to fight false or misleading information not by banning it, but with more speech attempting to explain why it is false or misleading.
Technically, you are right, although I guess my expectations are low for perfect laws from Congress.
I wonder if Republicans are letting the issue die because they have more interest in playing the victims of censorship than actually solving the problem and moving on. What would they whine about?
Well I think they did their job, they passed the bill in the House, now it's up to the Senate to pass the bill, and the Senate is run by Chuckie Schumer and his pals.
Hopefully there is a Senator who will see to it that this bill gets consideration but I am not holding my breath considering the very polarized environment.
There used to be a time when the two parties could compromise and work out deals. They don’t even try anymore.
"What ever happened to the good old days when the Republicans would acquiesce to whatever Democrats wanted and the government expanded without any restraint?!?!?!"
Both sides, right?
And he does it! He doubles down asserting Republicans in the senate are killing the House bill. Act Blue goes wild folks!!!
What he lacks in honesty he more than makes up for in clinical retardation.
No, you fat Nazi lardass piece of shit, the government demanding media companies append warning labels onto speech they don't like is not "the solution to censorship." Now if one of your fascist collaborators in the corporate world wants to do so independently, without coordinating with the government, that's a different story. They would still be censorious pieces of shit, it just wouldn't be illegal censorship since the government isn't dictating it. How would you like it if the government required Hostess to slap a 3 page warning label on every box of Twinkies you shovel into your bloated, obese, fat fucking mouth every day, fatass? It's no different than the blatantly unconstitutional cigarette label warnings.
The alternative to censorship is more speech. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and all that.
I personally don't find warning labels to be unconstitutional. Depending on the type of label, one can consider them libertarian even, as a measure against fraud.
The alternative to censorship is to stop censoring, you stupid fat piece of shit. Government compelling speech is no different than government curtailing speech.
Of course you don't. For one thing you're a fascist piece of shit and for another you have little or not familiarity with the United States constitution since you are a Canadian man who lives in the greater Toronto area with his mother. But your feelings don't change the fact that the government requiring warning labels is blatantly unconstitutional. The remedy for fraud is civil court and restitution. Nor do warning labels address fraud in any way, shape or form.
The government shouldn’t be “asking” for anything.
The right solution is for the government not to use private business to engage in actions which would be unconstitutional for the government to do directly.
Then they will just contract a firm that says they are not government contracts, but employees of the company. They will always use words to work around it.
Well, how threatening can jawboning from a contractor to a contractor be?
The bigger problem is how do you stop elected officials from jawboning? They are not employees or contractors, and are supposedly representing the voice of the electorate. You can’t just take away an elected official’s free speech rights.
How many links have you been given regarding entities like CISA? It is like you try to come across as a dumb partisan hack.
I've said it before, but people like Jeff and Mike would applaud actual fascism.
cytotoxic and Episiarch/Bo Cara Esq. *do* applaud actual fascism. They're fascists.
The Washington Post and the New York Times 45 minutes before the ruling: There's no evidence Republicans and conservatives were being censored at an unnatural rate.
The problem with Missouri v. Biden is that the political noise surrounding the case is distracting attention from the important First Amendment principles at stake. And the even bigger problem is that the noise is coming from all sides—including those who brought the case, some of the reactions to it, and Doughty's opinion itself.
Here we go... we're pissed off at the people with defensive knife wounds on their hands for being mean to the home invaders?
Where in that statement is anyone “pissed off”?
Metaphor escapes your feeble intellect there, Laursen.
Whooosh!
"STOP RESISTING!"
After all, most of us should be able to agree it's a bad idea for government officials to huddle in back rooms with corporate honchos to decide which social media posts are "truthful" or "good" while insisting, Wizard of Oz–style, "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
This is such a strange comment. Of course we should be able to thus agree, but we can't because the left abandoned its support for free speech as soon as controlling low information voters through media censorship became a viable option for them. Why would the author's wishcasting be more relevant than the actual facts?
Obviously the wishcasting isn't relevant. But the author wants to find a way to blame this on the right so he needs to hide that this partisan framework exists because the left does not in fact agree with what we all should be able to agree on. In reality it is not the right's fault the left supports censorship an propaganda.
The left will stop supporting censorship of anything to the right as soon as people no longer will want to utter such messages.
There's no evidence the right was being censored on social media.
... this ruling is a victory for the right.
cytotoxic (dba chemjeff, pedophile fatass) literally said exactly that yesterday.
Being called names on the internet is terrible. But using government to gatekeep speech is a good thing.
https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1680665098765975558?t=KmnY1nl4tlFPb_yyra_TvA&s=19
ACTCON2023 STRAW POLL RESULTS ARE IN
Trump dominated with 85.7%
Vivek wins 51.2% of second choice votes, ahead of DeSantis and Tim Scott
Kari Lake wins VP vote with 30.8% followed by Byron Donald’s with 24% and Vivek with 22.7%
77.3% of respondents say they do not plan to donate to the RNC
89.7% support the GOP embracing early voting and vote chasing
95.8% oppose US involvement in Ukraine.
The @TPAction_ straw poll was conducted by @trafalgar_group
On one occasion when he didn't get the response he wanted from Facebook, Flaherty demanded to know, "Are you guys fucking serious?" And he added, "I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."
Would’ve been nice if anyone at Facebook would’ve had the balls to publish that and say, “hey, everyone, this is happening.”
Publishing his quote would not have been flaherting.
Sounds like the judge should have issued a restraining order specifically against Rob Flaherty.
By the way, some Rob Flaherty news:
White House comments his “bias toward action”:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/16/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-rob-flaherty/
And White House replaces him, as he goes off to work on Biden’s re-election campaign:
https://apnews.com/article/biden-digital-campaign-christian-tom-a5bca7d9a1c3f73914b2f5378fce31c1
So a central role in the Biden campaign after abuse of his government position. Sounds like a positive Mike!
Lol, the irony being that Episiarch/Bo Cara Esq (dba Mike "White Mikey" Laursen) was claiming as late as yesterday that this wasn't happening. Now it's happening, and Joe Biden is a hero for replacing the guy who did it 3 years later, after the thing that totally wasn't happening became public, and instead moved him to his campaign staff!
4b) It is happening and it is a good thing for Flaherty.
https://twitter.com/pepesgrandma/status/1680675157201809408?t=4GtNR_bncJxLL4c2XcbJbw&s=19
Just being at a protest gone awry, isn’t obstruction of an official proceeding. A Jan 6 defendant takes this to the Supreme Court.
Could this case upend legal proceedings against hundreds of other defendants?
Edward Lang’s attorney claims, “this is nothing less than the weaponization of the penal code to stifle dissent; it sets a terrifying precedent unworthy of this nation's history,"
[Link]
In some non-US world news:
They're baaaaack!
Iran's morality police to resume headscarf patrols
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66218318
Sounds like a bunch of faithful Muslims who happen to work for the Iranian government exercising their free speech rights, eh lardass?
Actually, they're just autistic coders with a CMS obsession.
UK joins TPP.
https://www.dw.com/en/uk-signs-biggest-trade-deal-since-brexit/a-66246933
Seems like trade could be much simpler: like Britain simply telling British people, “Go ahead and trade with whomever you want.”
That would be too simple.
India and UAE agree to conduct international trade between the two countries using their currencies as part of dedollarization. Reported by Multipolar Market.
Anorexic woman may be allowed to die legally in Canada
https://www.insider.com/anorexic-woman-assisted-dying-canada-legal-2023-7
My first reaction to that article is it doesn’t give much insight into what is going on with her.
Well, she appears to be suffering from anorexia, for a very long time.
I think she should have the legal right to kill herself, and I think she should have the legal right to enter into a contract with a willing medical professional to assist her if they both so choose.
But I wouldn't want them to exercise those rights if it can be avoided.
If she's lived in Canada her whole life, I wonder how much of her hopelessness is based on the health care that she's received there her whole life. Would she be in a better place had she not been subjected to the rationing of care that their single-payer health care requires? If she had received higher-quality and more responsive care, would that have made a difference and would she be in this state today? I would like to think so.
I think she should have the right to kill herself, but I don’t feel good about it. Any psychologist who goes along with it is creepy.
I could only find one more article on her, and it’s about the same. Probably doesn’t help someone with such a miserable life to suddenly be the focus of a national controversy.
The psychologists going along with preteens taking cross-sex hormones and having their healthy genitals and breasts removed are compassionate caregivers though.
I'd say it's well beyond creepy. Suicide is supposed to be pretty much the #1 outcome any mental health care provider is supposed to be working to avoid. They are doing the opposite of their jobs in this case.
I'm fine with people facing an immanent painful death deciding to end it. But for mental health it's just a moral and ethical nightmare.
"I think she should have the legal right to kill herself, and I think she should have the legal right to enter into a contract with a willing medical professional to assist her if they both so choose."
The government is paying for her suicide. How about that?
I don’t think most health care ought to be taxpayer funded. But in your system as I understand it, most health care IS taxpayer funded, so if this qualifies, then I guess you’re on the hook for it.
Oh wait, YOU aren't actually on the hook for it, as your full time job is to come here.
It's funny because cytotoxic is a Canadian who lives in the greater Toronto area and was proud to announce that fact until he went into hiding and retired his account after his humiliating meltdown when Hillary Clinton lost and he went into an apoplectic blubbering rage for a solid week.
It's also funny because the lardass fat piece of shit is literally a paid shill who works for Media Matters posting ActBlue talking points on this and a few other blogs.
Anorexic woman to be killed by government doctors in Canada
The want to thin their population.
Two weaks to flatten the curve.
They should prescribe liposuction and gastric bypass instead.
If the Libertarians aim to break the two party glass ceiling, they should run Will & Weld in 2024
How about no.
Few candidates have governed as well as Weld, and Will , being well versed in reality , can run rings around those who dwell on reality TV.
Congratulations you pathetic chicken little histrionic bitch, this is somehow more stupid than the climate hysteria shit you publish on your web 1.0 free blogspot blog that you try to fraudulently masquerade with by substituting 2 v's for a w, as if anyone besides you would be so stupid not to recognize it, or to miss the fact that the blog you're trying to misdirect doesn't have "blogspot" in the URL, because the guy who runs the actual WattsUpWithThat site isn't a 90 year old decrepit boomer sack of shit who doesn't know how to register a domain name or use a CMS.
You really are a piece of work.
Do you get paid by the insult?
Nope, I bring the pain onto your wretched 50-cents-a-post ActBlue scumbag lying morbidly obese fat ass all for free, you disgusting fat lying piece of shit.
The ones on Telegram admitted that some got a pay raise. We think it went up to $0.70 per post for the more equal animals. One of them was making fun of another that was getting paid at the old rate.
And THIS is the bitter fruit of the postmodernist hell that we currently live in.
https://news.yahoo.com/big-lie-dismissed-election-case-183600139.html
Jul. 16—BELLAIRE — More than a year after the state Court of Appeals ruled against an Antrim County man, stating that election audit powers rest with the Secretary of State and not with individual voters, the case continues to occupy federal and state investigators.
It's a long article but it's worth reading. It goes into the history of what happened in Antrim County, Michigan, on election night 2020. It is this tiny rural county that is as you might expect overwhelmingly red. So when the votes started to be tabulated, it looked strange that there were so many votes going to Biden. Then the workers discovered that one of the switches on the tabulators was set wrong - IIRC it was set to "ranked choice voting" when it shouldn't have been. The switch was reset, all of the affected ballots were retabulated, the results came out much more what one would expect, and everyone thought that was the end of that.
But then the Big Lie crap started getting amped up, and the residents started suspecting fraud. So they demanded a recount. There was one recount, which showed no fraud, then there was another live-streamed recount with all sorts of volunteers watching everything. And again this is a tiny county with not all that many ballots, so it was absolutely possible to watch the whole thing. Still no fraud.
But that wasn't good enough proof. So some people decide they were going to break in to one of the voting centers and steal a voting machine and "audit" it themselves. They were caught and now it looks like they might also be facing federal charges.
And it is just sad. I actually feel sorry for these guys. They are so committed to their postmodernist, socially constructed reality that they risked a great deal - their livelihoods and their liberty - utterly convinced that there was this massive voting fraud taking place in their tiny county.
We are just in a bad, bad place. We've got to change.
One thing to do is to fully renounce the whole "Trump Colluded with the Russians®™ to Steal the 2016 Election" and those behind it.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2023/05/17/assorted-ethics-observations-on-the-durham-report-part-ii-the-substance/
The Trump-Russia stuff is also part of the postmodernist hell that we live in. How many people STILL believe that Trump is a "Russian asset"? It is insane.
It just can't continue like this. Something has got to give.
We all have to start valuing again objective reality instead of soothing narratives that confirm our biases. It is hard work and no one is perfect, heavens knows I am not. But because it is hard work, not many people want to do it. They would rather hear the moron on Facebook tell them one more time that Trump is a Russian asset, or that truckloads of fake ballots threw the election to Biden.
As has already been explained to your fat retarded ass thousands of times, you can recount the same stack of counterfeit money a thousand times and come up with the same final amount. That tells you nothing about whether the bills are counterfeit. If you want to avoid having people questioning the integrity of elections and stealing voting machines in desperation when their elected officials refuse to conduct meaningful safeguards of the voting process, maybe you should consider not illegally changing voting rules and pouring half a billion dollars of donor class Zuck Bucks into a dozen contested swing state precincts whose election results turn out wildly abnormal and ahistorically lopsided to the winning candidate, and then siccing federal prosecutors on anyone who suggests that's not kosher.
Also if you want to be taken as a neutral arbiter of all things neutral, you should probably avoid using your idiotic radical left wing nomenclature. Questioning the results of a US election is not "the Big Lie." That's a term with a very specific meaning, and it refers to Hitler's propaganda strategy in 1930s Germany. If questioning the 2020 election result is "the Big Lie" then so was 2016, 2008, 2004, and 2000. If asking to see Dominion's source code is a conspiracy theory, then so was "selected, not elected" and so was "Halliburton owns Diebold." As I've explained to you numerous times now, cytotoxic, you obese gluttonous fat piece of shit, no one here besides sarcasmic is actually as stupid as you are. Your sophistry doesn't fly. Don't bring that shit.
Hey, Tulpa! How was your weekend?
Oh just fuck off already.
Die.
Are you related to Ben Lexen?
If only more people had seen Hunter Biden's dick, Trump woulda won!
What is with conservatives being so blatantly open about their fixation on genitals lately? Genitals are literally all you people talk about anymore.
You do realize that normal people find this behavior creepy?
Well, if it isn't the postmodernist moron back for more.
The only people here who are interested in Hunter's dick are you and buttplug.
Jeez guys just put Sqrlsy and the other retards on mute.
Your responses to their insanity destroy the conversation w/o doing anything to change their minds about anything or to even admit that their logic/facts/assertions are faulty.
“Your responses to their insanity destroy the conversation”
Huh, it’s almost like SQRLSY ain’t the problem.
Here's a crazy idea: when fundamental rights are involved, the default legal assumption should be against the state and for individual freedom. If it's not clear whether or not a government action violates the constitution, then they shouldn't do it.
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"and what the letter described as "anti-Christian designs," such as one that included the phrase Satan Respects Pronouns."
I would argue that that slogan is actually very much PRO-Christian/conservative.
The decision was fine but the analysis that it "veered off course" by being too credulous of attorney general claims is erroneous. I agree with the judge that not all contact between government officials and private speech platforms is a violation of the First Amendment. The decision clearly states that government officials may not lean on the operators of platforms to get them to censor things that the government is not allowed to censor; that indirectly threatening to "regulate" an entire industry would constitute leaning on them; and with the attorneys general that almost all of such contacts in the recent past constituted leaning on them whether the individual platform operators minded being leaned on or not. I think some bias against "conservative" attorneys general is being shown by the author here.
Excellent analysis overall, BUT: "Wait, what? Rather than complaining that the administration was pressuring social media companies to take information down, the problem, apparently, was that the FBI didn't advise social media companies not to moderate this story." No, if I have my facts right 1) The FBI was well aware the laptop content was genuine, 2) and that its disclosure by the shop owner was imminent, and 3) falsely advised social media platforms that an October surprise involving false information was imminent. If so, the FBI deliberately tricked these companies into suppressing as false a true story unfavorable to a political candidate they clearly supported. This is exactly what the ruling forbids.
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