Great and relevant comment from nicbou in the other thread:[0]
Someone brought an interesting perspective in another thread and I can't shake it off.
The other side keeps deplatforming them. Their legal cases are rejected. The mainstream media refuses to take them seriously. We're not even listening to them, because it's science and they're *ists if they disagree. We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right.
We are slowly squeezing a significant segment of the population out of public debate, and they are powerless to stop it. Is it surprising that they are furious about it, and explode in unpredictable ways? Wouldn't you do the same?
They aren't being squeezed out of the debate. They simply leave those platforms and move to alternative platforms instead. I'm personally a conservative myself and have left twitter for parler and gab instead. Many are doing the same. There are also a lot of other communities as well.
Wouldn't the audience self-selecting based on political alignment limit the discourse to a few predictable takes for any given issue? Did many leftists and centrists go to parler?
(The same limitations will likely occur at the original platforms as populations leave)
I opened a parler account to see what it’s like. Everything suggested to me was right wing pseudo news sites and pundits along with republican lawmakers. Aside from a small amount of gaming content I couldn’t find anything vaguely interesting.
The problem is when you can’t agree on the facts it’s hard to even discuss things.
“Alternative truths” which have been disseminated widely and used to storm a capital (where there were deaths). It could have been way worse. Being involved in online organization of something like that probably isn’t great for your brand.
Politics has a problem on both sides were business gets more ear than people.
In politics what the heck is true? For me nothing (bunch of drama junk pumped out from both sides and the media) so i just listen directly to what the politicians say/do/treat others and their track record on issues i care about.
Yeah you are right. Instead they burn down businesses and riot in the streets and go attack far right rallies. It seems both far left and far right are embolden these days. No science on either side. No one wants to listen to the other side. Not a good situation.
It's fairly unsurprising that the extreme parts of the spectrum aren't listening to each other, given how far removed they are from each other ideologically.
What's way more worrying to me is that they aren't listening to the people that try to understand their perspectives, but keep them grounded in reality. It seems to have become an 'either you are with us, or against us'-situation for a huge number of people, sadly.
I don't need to listen to the Qanon conspiracy theories, racist rants, gun worship, law enforcement deification, homophobia, transphobia and other dehumanizing speech of the far right.
The grassroots WalkAway group was removed from Facebook today. It was not about Q and had only encouraged rallies and protests, and did not condone breaking into government buildings. It was a repository of hundreds of thousands of video and text testimonials from ex-Democrats explaining why they felt alienated, often by seeing events/individuals they felt were covered unfairly by the media or by cancel culture in their private life, and their lived experiences of why they left the party. Is that not useful information?
I don't know anything about the WalkAway group, but from your description and nothing else it seems like it shouldn't have been taken down and that it could have been very useful.
But I don't see how Facebook taking down the group is the fault of the Left at large (or in the US). I don't know many serious Leftists who are fond of Facebook, not to mention feel the company represents them.
My comment did not intend to attribute the corporate act to Leftism, intent was to show the parent commenter that it is flawed to assume all banned speech is the result of impartial enforcement of basic rules against malicious toxicity. Because there is a slippery slope in action every day - moderators are human and algorithms are based on badly conflated example data and that leads to bans like this one.
A victim of the algorithm perhaps? Or too many links on the social graph to the more problematic elements.
I don't mean to rationalize its removal. It sounds like a project that should exist, one that serves as a mirror for introspection.
This isn't something new or that "the left" only does. In much the same way we see lgbtq groups closed because the algorithm or human moderator believes queerness == explicit sexual content rather than "a bunch of other humans"
I dispute your contention that it's a grassroots thing, that's one of the most astroturfed political campaigns I've ever seen. It's a formula: minor right-wing celebrity announces they're going to city X to 'clean it up' or highlight some deficiency, makes a bunch of posts about it on social media announcing their itinerary, inevitably attracting some opposition from annoyed locals. Then they livestream the local opposition and say 'look how unreasonable these people are, #walkaway.'
I am not, because they work together. Search their names and you'll find plenty of examples of them pairing up to do this schtick. I've seen it in person.
None at all. When the democrats are in office you kick out far right. When the republicans are in you kick out far left. This way you avoid getting regulated. It’s a free country and your company it’s all good. It opens up opportunities for other companies to come in and take the business. Oh wait... are you a monopoly?
No food for "the enemy". No air travel. No payment processing for their businesses or political causes they support. You can earn your social credit points back by kowtowing to Xi the Great - wait wrong country.
Caught me before edit. Yeah, there's plenty of bad on the right; but its extraordinary that some on the left don't see our own massive freedom of speech and behaviour issues, as in the comment I replied to.
Liberals, aka centrists, own most of the major media platforms. Actual leftists (especially radicals) tend to get silenced as much as far-right individuals do. Only "moderate" opinions are marketable on the mainstream media.
> We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right.
Election officials and reputable news sources have repeatedly stated why there is no reason to believe the election was stolen. There is no assumption about who is right, only repeated proof.
Without a platform to spread disinformation, there would have been just a few dozen people who believed otherwise, and the raid on the Capitol would not have happened.
This reminds me of a question I think about from time to time, starting with some of the epic threads I used to witness on the USENET political groups:
Are people online actually open to talking?
I get they write messages, and a lot of messages. But it strikes me no one ever actually changes their mind. They just yell at each other till they move on to another hill to yell from.
It's all so tiring, it's like when I used to watch some friends do prep for school debates. They're just practicing arguing, the topic itself is secondary to the argument.
I'm probably too cynical, but I also know every time I try to have a real discussion online, it ends badly.
I suppose the tricky part is telling the difference between people who don’t change their mind because they’re correct and people who don’t change their mind because they’re not open to doing so.
If people online weren't open to having their views changed then Q and PizzaGate and the other ridiculous easily-disproven conspiracies wouldn't exist. People are willing to set aside facts, common sense and their own beliefs in favor of these hive-mind ideas.
The problem comes once they have changed - getting them to change back, or to change again seems almost impossible.
No I feel the same way. When online discussion turns into debate, nothing is achieved. People use canned, cliched arguments and it's just a back and forth trying to have the last word until someone gives up.
Also it’s too dangerous to let social media users generate centrist liberal opinions themselves, so we should write those opinions for them and let them select from a dropdown list.
At a minimum, I'd wager that those that stormed Capitol Hill, wouldn't have done if the election had the opposite result.
I'd further wager that any protest in the counterfactual would have been a much smaller scale, and much less violent. 2016 being an example of Democrat supporters accepting an election result they didn't like - with officials taking a legal approach into their plaint with the election campaign (i.e., Russian interference) based on trying to build a case on evidence... not making indefensible claims about a conspiring deep state.
When 2016 election was won by Trump, it was at most a minority viewpoint that the election was rigged - in fact I've never heard of it said. Trump lost the 2020 election, and it was presupposed that the election will be rigged, leading to violent protests in complaint of the election result.
The real problem is that there's an epistemic crisis whereby people have lost trust in long-lived and functioning institutions, and that has been fuelled by conspiracy theorists, some of which have been given credence by the sitting president (e.g., Alex Jones).
The word "rigged" may not be technically correct for what people were saying about the 2016 election but there were people in Congress who opposed certifying and/or counting the electoral votes because of ... mostly Russian interference.
I agree with that, but there's a big difference in scale between political manoeuvrers in Congress and a hostile rabble invading Capitol House - and the millions of aggrieved voters that support them.
Minority according to who? I feel like practically every US news source was flooded for years with wacked out conspiracy theories alleging that Putin controlled everything and had "hacked the election". It was all garbage.
Who is “we”? I would have been on the fence between Bush and Biden and I feel nothing in common with domestic terrorists who would invade the Capitol and attempt to destroy our democracy.
The mainstream media refuses to take seriously issues raised by libertarians/paleoconservatives like getting rid of qualified immunity. I don’t see Cato Institute people trying to stage a coup.
The mainstream media compared Bernie’s victories to Hitler’s conquest of Germany and said on live TV that they worried if he won there’d be executions in Central Park. Bernie Sanders didn’t incite a riot and then call the rioters “good, special people.”
This is such a bizarre false equivalence, like claiming I should weigh equally the opinion of my doctor and a patient at an insane asylum.
I believe that's spot on and not only for "the other side".
By now, there seem to be a lot of fragments that used to be part of "the left" but were alienated or pushed out over disagreements about gender issues.
The discussion if feminism should a) create equal chances or b) also correct past wrongs by inverse discrimination has been around for a long time. But only recently has it become so divisive.
That does, of course, seem to imply that there is no scenario in which one can in fact be right about something and know it and that other people can be wrong. Would you use this same phrasing about, say, flat earthers?
If conservative legal cases are being rejected in the current judicial environment, how can we be sympathetic? Trump and the GOP have broken records in nominating federal judges.
And science is not an American institution... if one distrust the science of every major nation then what’s left? If one distrusts all reporting outlets and international signals for COVID or climate change, then what’s left?
The web may be full of misinformation, but in some ways it’s also a golden age for education.
Isn't this the same segment of the population that says things like 'fuck your feelings' on the regular? Their legal cases were rejected because they were deficient or substance free. They were provided with copious explanations of why. They were invited to allege fraud or broad substantial claims, and asked straight out by judges what their actual complaints were, and they backed away from the hyperbolic claims they were making to the public. Mainstream media refusing to take them seriously? Maybe that's because they have proved serially unreliable and/or outright dishonest, despite being given enormous leeway. Maybe year after year of calling media in general 'the enemies of the people' and expressing approval for the murder of journalists eroded their popularity, you know?
Trump supporters are not hapless victims by any standard of the imagination. The plain fact is that they (and in particular their leader) have lost legitimacy and credibility and are refusing to accept the fact. And I have to say that to a large extent this loss has something to do with many of them (and in particular their leader) being assholes for the last 5 years.
I mean, do you think scientists need to give flat earthers more latitude?
I think you are too much concerned with "they brought it on themselves" and too little with "the substantial segment of the population is squeezed from a debate". The latter is a bad news even if you are 100% right with the former.
I fail to see why I should be concerned with people who have evinced an utter lack of concern for me. I've participated in many discussions and debates with such folk over the years, but my patience has limits.
> I fail to see why I should be concerned with people who have evinced an utter lack of concern for me.
Because you are on the same boat with them. If they overturn the boat, you'll fall into the water.
I do not say that it is easy to be concerned, it is hard, because it leaves mind in the state of uncertainty: there are no known ways to tackle the problem. There are different ways to deal with it, but all simple ways (like throw them all over the board) are not acceptable and probably wouldn't work (some tried and it didn't turn well). These simple ways could bring mind into the state of peace: everything is decided, no uncertainty, they are the bad guys, we are the good ones, but what is more important to you: the peace of mind or a thinking process constantly seeking for ways to tackle a problem?
People mostly choose peace of mind, because they have other problems to worry about. I do not blame them, anxiety is a thing that makes life worse. But as for me, people might be better if they learned how to live with uncertainty without having to worry about the part of uncertainty that is out of their control.
As a thought experiment, imagine Trump won by a small margin.
Do you think we would have heard no unfounded accusations of fraud? No challenges in court? No protests and riots? After the year we've had?
And if, on January 6, as Congress was meeting to confirm the Electoral College vote for Trump, a riotous mob had stormed the Capitol and disrupted proceedings for a few hours, would it have been reported the same way? Would left-wing activist social media accounts be getting deplatformed?
It didn't happen. Might not have. But if it did, would you be calling it a coup? Would you be so disturbed about the attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power?
I'm not defending what happened. I'm asking, if it were reversed, how would you feel. Be honest.
I don't think conservatives are kicked off of anywhere. I don't think anybody who's making sincere debate arguments is kicked out of anywhere.
What's happening is that people who copy-paste/reshare conspiracy theories without even bothering to read the wikipedia/snopes article first are being rightly downvoted.
I think of Trump's fan base seems more like a religious minority than a political group. And like any religious group debate really isn't the answer to fantastical beliefs.
The insurrection we saw in DC was planned, in the open, on Parler. That is hardly legal speech and no company is obligated to host it if they don’t want to.
Until you can provide me with some actual proof Apple or Google were pressured by anything but the written law to remove this crap from their stores, say, a threatening phone call from a certain ranking Congressperson or judge or member of the executive branch, I’ll call this hysterics.
Oh please. US-wide riots have been planned in the open on Facebook. In the US in 2020 hundreds(thousands) more people were killed than in 2019. In Chicago only 50% year-on-year rise, almost 300 in just one city. Looking from the other side of the pond I'm happy to not be there.
Yeah, seconded. Those aren't even riots. They are deliberate political acts explicitly stated to have the goal of wiping out the police and local government authority - how is it possible an actual "autonomous zone" was created in a major US city? And how was that not insurrection? It sure looked like it from abroad, yet local leaders rolled over and even encouraged it.
Today I read the mayor of Portland was attacked whilst he was dining. The "mostly peaceful protesters" have burned his apartment building, attempted to take over police stations and court houses, and decapitated models of the mayor. He supports them anyway - it's so crazy it's impossible to believe, really. What is going on in the USA?
If FB/Twitter had cracked down on the BLM organisers putting together nightly attacks on the police, at least nobody could say they were being inconsistent now. Instead they put banners up on random developer docs sites saying they support BLM. Blatant double standards.
> Until you can provide me with some actual proof Apple or Google were pressured by anything but the written law to remove this crap from their stores, say, a threatening phone call from a certain ranking Congressperson or judge or member of the executive branch
I'm a conservative and recall the planning of the rally. No specifics were given other than "you need to be there because it will be crazy". Everyone hyped it up from there.
It's interesting that your demand for proof requires a politician to have "pressured"/"threatened" Apple or Google, whereas to believe in Trump's culpability for what the insurrectionists did you will settle for him merely insinuating violence.
Wait, direct threats of violence and child porn are legal speech now?
Because that's what you'll find on Parler.
Edit: for the sake of accuracy, Parler is unquestionably rife with threats of violence that they refuse to remove. Go visit /R/parlerwatch and despair.
They do, however, remove CP from the site if it's reported by users, but as of 2020-12-02 they admit they lack any automated systems for detecting and removing it at scale.
Why is it that whenever someone posts a variation of "platforms shouldn't ban users for simply saying naughty words / having naughty opinions"; the first thing that comes to proponents minds is CP?
So you're just going to ignore the point, then, huh?
Well, in case it wasn't clear, I'll try more words and hope this helps:
Parler has knowingly allowed content to exist on their site that violates both the Google ToS and the law.
This content isn't "naughty". It is very much illegal, and includes direct threats and incitement to violence among many other things. This includes, for example, calls to murder politicians, the police, etc.
Parler has further affirmatively stated they will not remove that material despite having the ability to do so. In this way Parler distinguishes itself from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and so forth.
That is, of course, their choice. However, a failure to moderate this kind of material violates Google's ToS.
It is therefore also Google's and Apple's choice to enforce their ToS and remove the Parler app from their store.
In no way does this represent censorship (neither Google nor Apple are in any way obligated to distribute third party software), nor does the offending content represent legal speech.
Because sad to say CP exists and is almost universally agreed to be enormously harmful, but free speech absolutists don't want to engage with reasonable questions of where of where and how limits on speech should be set. I'm in very of verybroad free speech permissions, but I'm also in favor of banning and prosecuting CP.
Indeed, but such things are covered by other laws. Just curious as to why peoples mind doesn't go to removing copyrighted content, instructions for how to manufacture weaponry, animal-related issues etc. but seemingly always equate "posting naughty opinions" to "posting CP".
'Other laws' is just a duck to avoid discussing the question, because those laws do limit absolute free speech. People's minds don't go to those other things first because they are all more debatable than CP and not necessarily limit cases. No equation is taking place outside of your own mind.
Was on parler yesterday morning. Saw VIVID cp. so did husbands friend later in the day. I clicked a hashtag for a march. He was scrolling the discover page.
The discover page shows pre-approved "verified" users (examples include Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiomo, Dinesh D'Souza, Megyn Kelley, Devin Nunes, RSS feeds like Zero Hedge and Epoch Times, and actual politicians).
If your husband's friend really did see illegal material just scrolling the discover page, there will be mainstream media confirmation of an arrest soon.
> Wernick elaborated after this story published, confirming that Parler has no system for detecting child pornography before it is viewed and potentially reported by users.
However I absolutely admit your point: rather than affirmative statement of the presence of CP on the site, the issue is they've not built systems for finding and removing it.
So I use Parler occasionally, and one of the first things I noticed when I signed up is that they banned ALL pornography. They eventually loosened up their restrictions but I haven't run into any of it -- people generally sign up to talk about politics.
They have a manual human moderation pool for removing illegal content. But they are very slow, it took over 12 hours for them to remove a spambot.
I keep wading into these threads defending Parler because they are nothing like 4chan, 8kun, or Gab. They do have moderation, they do remove illegal content, they just suck at it.
I am willing to bet that hackernews also does not have an automated system for detecting child porn. And I am certain it didn't when it was still a very new platform.
What's your point? By equivalence, you should be calling for hackernews to be shut down, right? By equivalence, you shouldn't be posting here.
The less worrying option 4 is that the right just has to use browsers and desktop computers and not apps.
But I worry that you are right. Visa and MasterCard have already been non politically neutral.
And where will the left stop? Even if we talk about actual nazis, should they have internet connections? Electricity? The right to property? It’s not like the left seem to be satisfied with anything they achieve, they always want more.
And first it’s actual nazis, then it’s qanon, then it’s lockdown sceptics, then it’s??
> It’s not like the left seem to be satisfied with anything they achieve, they always want more.
If you're going to group millions of people together and judge them by their extremes, you might want to try applying the same logic to "the right" and see if you are happy with the slippery slope you construct.
I'm part of the left and I just want to live in peace. I'm not a fan of riots from either side. But when the right riots, in this case it's because of alleged election fraud (that was thrown out by every judge) and led to multiple people dead. When the left riots it's because of police brutality.
I don't want to play Trump's advocate, but I don't think his speech even went as far as saying "it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken"[0]. Moreover, I don't think that Trump is the only person whose legal speech has been been suppressed on popular social media platforms.
First of all, Pearl Harbor wasn’t a coup. It was an act of war. Both involve violence, yes, but trying to draw a line between them is just nonsense.
As far as not being “hyperbolic”: an armed mob overran the capital in an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power, and got very close to getting their hands onto the chain of succession. Men with guns and flex cuffs wandered the building with maps and checking unmarked offices for members of congress. Five lay dead, and multiple pipe bombs had to be defused. The federal government remained paralyzed for hours, as someone in the chain of command refused authorization to send in the guard, and the Pentagon refused to pick up the phone. They built a gallows outside, and looked sure as hell like they were going to lynch Mike Pence.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic here, the issue is your lack of perspective and not me being worked up.
Yeah, “coup” is still a reach. No power was seized. Not even close. This isn’t 1973 Chile. You’re giving these unorganized white nationalist nobodies way more credit than they deserve. If it were a coordinated effort by Trump or the GOP instead of LARPers living out their conspiratorial fantasies, then sure.
You don't think this was a coordinated effort? President Trump (and several of his allies) has been stoking this flame for _weeks_ explicitly and to the day. He gave a speech the morning of the attack, explicitly pointing them to the Capitol.
He seems to have also, behind the scenes, disuaded the usual defense mechanisms that would have prevented this from being even as effictive as it was. I'd expect much more information will be coming out about that as this is investigated further. I'm not seeing how you're saying this wasn't coordinated though.
If Trump wanted to stay in power why didn't he order the military to sieze the Congress and declare martial law? He thought a loosely organized band of civilian protestors were going to actually keep him in office?
Because that very likely wouldn't have worked, and it'd more obviously and quickly have consequences for him when it failed.
He thought he could at least intimidate his political enemies, and convince his allies and those on the fence to _at least_ make a bigger mess of the transfer of power.
Fundamentally, because he’s not very good at this. He’s lazy and impatient, if it can’t be done with a few tweets at 4AM, he can’t do it.
For his entire presidency, Trump has really been good at chaos and bad at planning. He regularly failed to do things that were either within his powers or easily doable because he just didn’t follow the process right (DACA, muslim ban), or because he couldn’t work with others (wall, relief checks), or because he just didn’t have the patience to follow through (TikTok sale). When things require organization skill, he falls apart. His two biggest moves have been shit posting on twitter, and shit posting while undermining his own ongoing negotiations. He is incapable of actually doing the work, any work.
Actually doing a coup via the military requires skill and planning. There are a lot of people in the chain who can say no, or drag their feet to delay illegal orders. A smarter autocrat would’ve laid the groundwork to purge the ranks of non-faithful, done his best to bribe rank and file members, or worked to create a plausible story that required military presence in the capital. Instead he vetoed their pay bill because he was angry at Twitter, after he pardoned war criminals and called them all suckers. He is simply not a strategic thinker at all.
Whipping up his rabid fans so that they plan something on his behalf in whatever fetid swamps they’ve been banished to online? Now that he can do, because it only requires some tweets that he thinks of in the moment.
That he was able to get so far with such amateurish work is a sign that the republic is very, very sick. Hopefully we can fix our underlying issues before a smarter autocrat has a go at it, because if that happens we’re probably doomed.
It didn't work. But they all thought it would. Unless this is the most method-acting troll I've ever seen, those who barged into the chambers with zip-tie restraints and tasers truly believed they were there to facilitate the overthrow of the legislature and keep their leader in power.
If I jump the fence on Pennsylvania Ave and run across the White House lawn with delusions of grandeur about taking over the government—and promptly get shot—it isn't a failed coup.
The Capitol breach is not comparable to a junta raiding a presidential palace. It was more like the lone nutjob, except there were a few more nutjobs. And a bunch of LARPers and miscellaneous morons tagging along to riot because the protestors outnumbered the cops.
When I see a term like "coup" being bandied about inconsistent with its conventional usage, it looks to me like a rhetorical play rather than an honest analysis of what happened. "Sedition" carries all of the same gravity and probably is more accurate.
> If I jump the fence on Pennsylvania Ave and run across the White House lawn with delusions of grandeur about taking over the government—and promptly get shot—it isn't a failed coup.
Quantity matters. A single fence jumper is different than a thousand. One person is a nutball, a thousand is a mob.
Proximity also matters. We now know that the mob came dangerously close to members of Congress. In at least two instances they came within feet of members, or within seconds of passing through barricades that were not yet erected.
This is like your hypothetical fence jumper making it into the Lincoln Bedroom with a few hundred of his closest friends. Given that they literally beat at least two cops to death and erected gallows, there is no doubt that they intended the worst for Congress.
> The Capitol breach is not comparable to a junta raiding a presidential palace. It was more like the lone nutjob, except there were a few more nutjobs. And a bunch of LARPers and miscellaneous morons tagging along to riot because the protestors outnumbered the cops.
You are building up an incorrectly narrow vision on what a coup actually looks like, then using that to declare this to be a non-coup. You are absolutely correct that this looks nothing like a Junta raiding the presidential palace, but that is far from the only form that historical coups have taken. More than once countries have been toppled by a mob seizing the legislature while the military stands around without an idea of what to do. Arguably that is exactly what happened during the August 10th insurrection in Paris, which toppled a constitutional monarchy and led to the Terror.
> You are building up an incorrectly narrow vision on what a coup actually looks like, then using that to declare this to be a non-coup.
That's fair enough. Living in the present, we usually have a blind spot about how present events relate to others in history. It's likely that some peasant revolts throughout history were just as stupid and chaotic as this one.
However, the events on Wednesday were particularly complicated. There were many factions and ideologies present. There were MAGAs, QAnons, "Federalists", neo-Nazis, COVID-deniers, Blue Lives Matter supporters, Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Moms for Trump. There was but one shared allegiance—Trump.
There were five separate raids into the building, each as unorganized and chaotic as the next. Not a single rioter inside the Capitol was seen brandishing a firearm (I did see a few outside the Capitol though, via live streams). Many of the rioters were destroying things, but even more were marching through the hallways and rotunda "saying their peace" (from interviews I saw later, many thought they were still legitimately protesting). While there were a few dozen paramilitary types among the mob—or to stop the "coup", as they see it—their intentions were closer to fantasy fulfillment than a coup. One of the "zip tie guys" was there with his mom.
There was a lack of organization, little actual violence, no realistic attempt to seize anything, let alone a realistic chance to seize power in the first place. Throwing "attempted" in front of "coup" does not change the fruitlessness of the proceedings. In hindsight, I don't think even the worst case scenario would have changed much.
Regardless of the criteria we use to determine this case, I argue that it's not clear cut, and the use of "coup" and "terrorism"—as many outlets have—to describe the whole affair, especially before the dust has settled, seems like an overreach. And it's exactly the kind of thing that Trump supporters are constantly accusing the "mainstream media" of perpetuating. That's why it's an uprising, revolt, insurrection, seditious riot. All of these terms are accurate enough for now.
I take your point. This didn't rise to the level of the coups we've seen in other countries, typically carried out by the military.
But it's also something more than "plain" sedition. Not only was it a group of nutjobs with little chance of success, but they were organized and/or encouraged by the outgoing President himself, and were aided by the anemic security that was also coordinated by the President (via recent appointments to the Pentagon, decision to discourage or deny National Guard assistance, etc.)
That tie to Trump, along with the intentionally weak security, adds another dimension to this.
EDIT: I read your link after the reply above. Thanks, it captures the nuance pretty well.
They were there to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power of the government.
They came with weapons, human restraints (flex cuffs), and were calling out politicians they disagree with and explicitly looking for them.
The intention of several seems to have been to _at least_ take hostages if not worse. What would you call the threatening, kidnapping and possible murder of your political rivals for the express purpose of keeping your side in power? If that's not a coup I don't know what is. That they failed doesn't mean they didn't try.
I think part of it isn't really in bad faith, it is just some sort of magical thinking, along the lines of: "a coup is something that happens over _there_, those places we see only on the news".
That it wasn't going to succeed, doesn't mean it's not an attempted coup. It's a self-coup because they were told to go there by Trump, after Mike Pence told Trump he couldn't do what Trump asked him to do, which was to just declare Trump the winner. i.e. ignore the state ascertained Electoral votes.
This is an autocratic movement. The legislature is an impediment to that. Maybe they envision a principate to give it the veneer of authenticity that an outright autocracy would not. That worked for the Roman Empire for ~250 years, people bought that it was still a Republic when it's plain to history it was ruled by an emperor during this time.
Of course had it succeeded, no matter how it had, Trump would have accepted it happily. He doesn't care about the Constitution or even the veneer of legitimacy. He just wants to win. Doesn't matter how.
Wasn't BLM throwing molotovs and trying to overtake a federal court a few months ago, for like a week straight? I didn't see a single media outlet call that a coup. Weird.
Because that wouldn't be a coup. The word means something pretty specific. Seizing control of the government. Not a courthouse, not a police station, or any other individual agency.
The entire government.
In this case, that was the goal. Keep the losing presidential candidate in power.
So what may be confusing is the term. The full term is coup d'état
It specifically refers to the overthrow of a government. Trashing a single courthouse comes nowhere close to that.
The goal is power. Taking power from your political enemy and securing it for yourself.
The word coup by itself has a broader definition, but is usually used as a compliment. Such as "Heather just closed a $30mm deal with Acme Corp. Her entire sales team scored a coup with that sales pitch"
But when used in the context of gun-toting insurrectionists? "Coup" is shorthand for the full phrase. Coup d'état.
No, OP was very clear about what the word “coup” meant from the beginning. You don’t get to decry “moving the goal posts” when everyone demands that you put the goalposts back after you moved them.
They didn’t call it an attempted coup, because it wasn’t. The definition of coup is not “attack on the government”; it’s an attempt to take over the government by force. There is no plausible path to take over the government by seizing a courthouse. Even if they’d successfully held it, they would have no real power over any territory outside the building. Disruptive, yes, but not a power grab.
Arguably some of the stuff happening with the autonomous zone wasn’t a coup attempt, it was an attempt at secession. A stupid and doomed attempt, I’ll agree, but a different thing altogether.
There is a plausible path from taking over Congress while they’re certifying the electoral college and declaring the next president and power. I’ll admit that it’s not a likely outcome, but it’s plausible. It wouldn’t be the first time a government has been toppled by a mob taking over the legislature, ask France. If they’d succeeded they would have re-installed Trump contrary to the will of the voters, the rule of law, and the constitution. Hence, coup attempt.
A mob storming the seat of government power is. I’m actually not sure how this could be presented more clearly. Should politicians have been killed for you to consider it a coup?
Just like this comment is a failed attempt at writing a novel. Ascribing intent to the actions of a third-party is silly, especially when it comes to controversial topics or when referring to the actions of a small fraction (it's estimated that 500K people were there to peacefully hold up signs).
There is no real need to ascribe intent to that group, because they are very excited to tell you what they intende (much to the glee of prosecutors I’m sure). Half the time getting them to shut up about it is the real challenge. If you’re not aware that they were there to intimidate and/or force congress to reinstall trump for another (illegal) term, that’s on you.
Yes, a lot of them wanted to go protest. But it’s a clear straw man to say “not everyone there was in on the coup attempt”. Sure, a bunch of idiots wanted to stand around and hold up dumb signs because they got conned into the Q nonsense, but a lot of them also wanted to push their way in and lynch Mike Pence in order to get what they wanted. They even built gallows, which is not something you do if you’re just there to protest.
Again, this was all planned out in the open. The told each other to bring zip ties and maps of the capital building. They talked about blowing the building up with a Ryder van like the Turner Diaries (someone did plant pipe bombs), and discussed how they were going to kill congress members to get their way. They even printed “MAGA Civil War” shirts.
And even though they behaved like an unruly mob, they did manage to overrun the capital and came within feet of grabbing members of congress; the lady who was shot had breached the final barrier to where members of congress were holed up. What was clearly missing here was not intent or will, but coordination. And that sure is scary.
(As an aside, plenty of historical coups have been accomplished by coordinating a mob just enough to take over the legislature by force. Ask the French).
And that’s before we get into the really awkward questions, like “why did the pentagon repeatedly deny Larry Hogan authorization to send in the guard after the building had been overrun?” Why was the initial protest organized by republican AGs? Why wasn’t the capital police prepared for a protest that had been announced by the president himself? Perhaps some of that was more opportunistic, trump doesn’t really seem like the planning type to me, but it sure is awkward if your basic premise is that this was just a protest gone awry.
They brought zip ties with them, presumably to hold lawmakers hostage. Their stated purpose was to keep Donald Trump in office. That would be a coup. It may not have been the brightest plan though, I’ll grant you that.
My theory is that the companies are getting some tough calls from Nancy Pelosi- along the lines of you stop supporting violence right now or we will deal with you unfavorably later.
A conspiracy involving Nancy Pelosi isn't needed to explain what is happening here. Based on what I saw in my household-name tech workplace this week, big tech companies likely all have internal employee activism campaigns happening to pressure leadership to act (which I think is a good thing).
This week has really shown me what people mean when they say workers in tech have power. ~300 cosigners of the employee petition at Twitter helped remove Trump's ability to spread propaganda to nearly 90M followers. That's amazing and something I frankly thought would never happen. Without that internal pressure, Trump would still have his bully pulpit and zero Republicans would be coming forward to talk openly about a post-Trump future for the party like we saw Murkowski do today.
Am I the only one thinking we are in this situation because of this approach even in FB and Twitter? What I mean is that FB and Twitter use algorithm that actually fuel this situation by letting me see not all the information but only what an algorithm thinks I would like. This basically means I can only see stuff in my yard instead of allowing for free debate.
Removing Parler from the platforms looks like the same approach to me. Not really useful in the long run.
That was sunk by the mods off the first couple of pages, despite its upvoting velocity.
PS you don't need to downvote this, just wait for the mod action. But for veracity, search for it on the first 3 pages. It's not there. And then compare its time of posting and score with entries that are there
Trump supporters are unattractive demographics for advertisers because they're overwhelmingly old and rural, advertisers want to win over Gen Z and Millenials who are going to pay for decades, and not to mention the US is not the only, or even the primary market for most of these companies and being associated with Trump is particularly abysmal everywhere else.
If you want to market to cosmopolitan, affluent, educated and diverse urban consumers, which everyone does, associating yourself with Trump isn't exactly a winning strategy
I'm a disheartened leftist today, and I don't think it's appropriate to remove these apps and the accounts of these groups.
Platforms get pressure to remove individuals all the time. We've been trying for YEARS to get net neutrality written into law for ISPs, and I don't think it's too much of a leap to make for speech on Twitter.
The individual posters they suppress come and go - today it's the Trump family, tomorrow, who could it be? Last summer, it was BLM.
The problem is that tech platforms have no financial incentive to not amplify inciting speech. They economically benefit from people staying enraged and in their bubbles. This is platforms shirking responsibility, and perpetuating the system that allowed Trumpism to thrive. Deplatforming Trump will not stamp out white supremacy, and it won't improve the frustration of material conditions that are felt by working class people both left and right. If Twitter wanted to really make a difference in the world, they would stop selling user data and stop selling ads that earn them profit.
There are also many other alternatives to Urbit that achieve the same general objective while not being actively user(/developer) hostile at every possibility.
I highly doubt that PRs that would change all the "different for the sake of being different" nomenclature of Hoon to align with the one that everyone is already used to from every other programming language would be welcome.
Someone brought an interesting perspective in another thread and I can't shake it off. The other side keeps deplatforming them. Their legal cases are rejected. The mainstream media refuses to take them seriously. We're not even listening to them, because it's science and they're *ists if they disagree. We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right.
We are slowly squeezing a significant segment of the population out of public debate, and they are powerless to stop it. Is it surprising that they are furious about it, and explode in unpredictable ways? Wouldn't you do the same?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691709