Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

[LessinSF]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsin...extreme_covid/

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsin...extreme_covid/

I'm in favor of sending you there.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Note nothing Sebby says here implicates the Prez, at the very worst, assuming Sebby hasn't just been inhaling strange stuff in the fever swamps, there's a "billy carter" issue here.

Agreed Hunter is a Billy Carter, or a Roger Clinton. But why do we know those two names? Oh, right. Because they were newsworthy embarrassments. For doing a whole lot less than receiving payments from a Ukraine energy company which the FBI is now investigating.

He admits it should have nothing to do with the election,

No. What I said was that IMO it should have nothing to do with the election. I am not the average American. As I was careful to note, but you've conveniently ignored, this kind of stuff has everything to do with an election for a whole lot of people other than me, or you.

...but thinks it should nonetheless be amplified by every site trying to deliver some degree of legitimate news.

This is a mischaracterization that gets to the heart of the issue, and the trick you attempt here is basically an admission you really don't have a leg to stand on in trying to defend Twitter's preclusion.

I did not say "it should be amplified." I said it should not have been precluded. These are two very different things. You know, I suspect, that the story should not have been censored from Twitter. First, it was unquestionably indefensible, as Dorsey now admits. Second, preclusion was objectively terrible optics, and it has ultimately wound up giving the story longer staying power.

My concern is with any star chamber, be it Musk's inner circle or Dorsey's, deciding what's "misinformation." I care about the disturbing circumstances under which an objectively newsworthy story was barred from Twitter. You can't counter that, so you instead suggest that I advocate for the story's "amplification." I didn't and I wouldn't. I couldn't care less about the story. But I do care about skewering the bullshit justifications for barring it.

And if you want to play with my words, do so more cleverly. This was pretty lame.

And he's really upset twitter suppressed some stuff from Aunt Edna's voices, excuse me, the NY Post.

In all these years, you've never given up the ad hominem.

Now ask Sebby anything about the wee trumper's dealings while actually working in the white house.

Ah, yes, the finale. The accusation of bias in favor of Trump. Let's dismantle...

1. You needn't ask me, as every single thing those nitwits did while dad was in office was front page news everywhere, and all over Twitter.
2. Nobody "moderated" any story about them out of existence except on Fox News, which is not Twitter.
3. You're firing in the wrong direction. I'm not a Trumpist in hiding. I'm over in the Glenn Greenwald camp, calling bullshit.*

_______
* An actual liberal, who trusts people to read and decide things for themselves, and if duped, be duped, and if manipulating others with misinformation, be allowed to take those suckers for a ride. This as opposed to the authoritarian-lite progressives and right wing book burners who think what they don't like should be censored under the pretext of it being "dangerous" or "misinformation." If you think that, sorry, you've no business calling yourself a liberal, a conservative, or even a fan of democracy. You're a self-righteous, officious know-it-all hall monitor, just like Brent Bozell and the right wing boycott mobs of the 80s, or the woke imbeciles of the past five years comprising Twitter mobs. Mind your own fucking business and let the marketplace of ideas decide what becomes popular.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsin...extreme_covid/

I was in Beijing in 2008 for the Olympics. CCP had done massive things to it’s people. Millions had been ordered to relocate from the city to the country to empty the city a bit. Factories shut down for a year in an (unsuccessful) attempt to clean the air.

But the saddest thing was what they did to the Hutongs (sp?). These were the traditional neighborhoods. One story old wooden homes and shops. The Party did not want foreign visitors to see them. So for a while they were tearing them down and putting up high rises. But they ran out of time.

And there were still plenty left, including along the Marathon route. Some of those were outside our hotel. To hide them the Party put up walls with pretty propaganda people. Every 20 yards there’d be a small entrance to the neighborhood. We walked in and shopped there daily.

The shop owners didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Mandarin, but I know they loved to have visitors seeing their shops. They had been expecting to be part of thousands of visitors from everywhere seeing their place, buying shit. Instead their government tried to hide their existence. China doesn’t give a shit about its people. The extreme lockdowns are to spare the Party from embarrassment.

[Icky Thump]

I doubt this deal goes through. The twitter stock wasn't reacting positively enough and I thought that weird. Then TSLA lost like 25% of its value last two days and I smelled a rat. Someone knows something.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Here's the thread:

All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy, and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence ...

... of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they've said, and let far more egregious sexist/racist violations by the other side pass.

Woke friends: it's true, right? You have LOTS of examples.

All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda and they ALSO have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when...

... the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they've said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy, and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand.

Right-wingers and libertarians: it's true, right? You can remember PLENTY of examples.

Neither side is lying.

Mostly, it's really because enforcement is hard, and there are LOTS of errors.

The lab leak theory preclusion is something new. I was talking about Hunter Biden. There was no fear of imminent harm to anyone accruing from allowing a story about Hunter's sordid laptop. None. At all. It was just a salacious political story.

Moderation involves looking at each story discretely. The preclusion of the Biden story is indefensible. The preclusion of the lab leak story is defensible (I think very weakly, but still technically defensible).

You cannot defend the preclusion of the laptop story by lumping it in with the lab leak story. Very, very different things. And that thread's author, and your "umbrella" defense highlights a dishonesty in the censorship.

First, there's this defense that all or most moderation is precluding harm, a "Who will think of the children???" cudgel. This immunizes indefensible decisions like the Biden laptop preclusion by allowing the moderator to say, "We have to err on the side of safety." That's naked bullshit. The story on Biden's laptop involved zero public safety issues. It also allows the mod to say after the fact, as Dorsey has, "Oops. We goofed there."*

"Public safety" is a huge umbrella under which almost any content can be shoehorned (except things clearly outside it, like the Biden laptop). Mods can hide behind that all day long and abuse that privilege. One way to abuse it is to kowtow to the CCP by banning a lab leak story, while saying this was done to avoid having lunatics commit hate crimes against Chinese people.

I think the author of the thread was truthful and forthright about mistakes he sees in moderation. But I think he also highlights a system which, by his own admission, is riddled with ideologues (the woke) at lower levels, and is easily abused, with built in plausible deniability.

Just stop. He doesn't "admit" anything about "ideologues (the woke) at lower levels." He says they make mistakes without an ideological valence, and then partisans of different stripes get bent out of shape, imaging that they're being discriminated against. See -- you're doing it. You're doing exactly what he says happens.

See above. That's a dangerous construct.

It's not a "construct." It's the way that every single commercially successful internet platform business operates. It's a fact of life that you choose only to notice when it fits your personal bugaboos about "the woke".

When the Gen Xers retire, we're staring down the barrel of a minority of people in charge of platforms who think free speech is dangerous and something they should have the right to craft or curtail. There will be a woke CEO of a platform someday, and wrongthink will be banished.

This is your own ideological horseshit, nothing more.

If you're going to pretend to care for free speech principles, shed a tear for Disney, which just had the State of Florida retaliate against it by changing its tax treatment for disagreeing with the Republican Governor.

______________
* What was truly loathsome in the Biden laptop debacle was our own intelligence community lying about how the story was Russian fiction. Clapper and Brennan made that argument everywhere they could, and it conveniently provided cover for Dorsey's awful decision. But I can't blame Brennan or Clapper. They are openly biased political actors. Dorsey, OTOH, had no basis to listen to those two men or their surrogates, as each of the two of them has been caught lying to serve their interests in the past (Clapper having done it before Congress in regard to NSA metadata collection).

"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

"The clock says it's 5:30 and it's 5:30 -- see, that proves it's not broken."

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The son of a presidential candidate who has been tied to numerous boards of energy companies in Ukraine (a nation recently the centerpiece of an impeachment of the sitting President, for seeking to use the release of arms in exchange for dirt on said son), for which he received Croesan sums, drops off a laptop full of extremely personal information at a computer store. This son obviously has terrible judgment, and the laptop is filled with not only pictures of him doing all sorts of scandal-sheet worthy stuff, but also information regarding his business dealings with Ukraine. The validity of this information is verified by sources who worked with this son. The son and his father, the presidential candidate, do not deny the laptop's authenticity.

And yet the contents of this laptop are not newsworthy?

This is not the hill on which to die. You aren't winning that argument in any forum that has ever existed or ever will. Except maybe Twitter in 2020.

I have no problem believing that Hunter Biden is a scoundrel. I have never heard anything that suggests that his deeds and misdeeds have been a matter of public concern, but I have seen the Trump campaign essentially tell the media that they planned to smear Joe Biden, and I have heard about how Trump tried to use weapons shipments to Ukraine -- weapons shipments to Ukraine, to, you know, defend themselves against Russia! -- to extort Ukraine to manufacture dirt on the younger Biden for political purposes.

Oddly, that doesn't seem to bother you at all, or even creep into your consciousness.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I don't even know what they are talking about. Mostly I'm just messing with Ty.

I knew it, and I'm glad you're there for me.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I actually stated here and still conclude that this story should have had no bearing on voters in 2020. Hunter's a fucked up kid, and unless his dad was dumb enough to get involved with his business dealings, which I doubt, this is not relevant to a presidential election.

But I'm not everyone. A whole lot of people think this stuff is important, for their own reasons. And even if it weren't an election year, this stuff is objectively newsworthy.

ZOMG. How to parody this? Unpossible.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

It's not a "construct." It's the way that every single commercially successful internet platform business operates. It's a fact of life that you choose only to notice when it fits your personal bugaboos about "the woke".

Maybe he should listen to someone who has worked for successful internet platforms for years to get some domain expertise - would you know anyone like that?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I was in Beijing in 2008 for the Olympics. CCP had done massive things to it’s people. Millions had been ordered to relocate from the city to the country to empty the city a bit. Factories shut down for a year in an (unsuccessful) attempt to clean the air.

But the saddest thing was what they did to the Hutongs (sp?). These were the traditional neighborhoods. One story old wooden homes and shops. The Party did not want foreign visitors to see them. So for a while they were tearing them down and putting up high rises. But they ran out of time.

And there were still plenty left, including along the Marathon route. Some of those were outside our hotel. To hide them the Party put up walls with pretty propaganda people. Every 20 yards there’d be a small entrance to the neighborhood. We walked in and shopped there daily.

The shop owners didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Mandarin, but I know they loved to have visitors seeing their shops. They had been expecting to be part of thousands of visitors from everywhere seeing their place, buying shit. Instead their government tried to hide their existence. China doesn’t give a shit about its people. The extreme lockdowns are to spare the Party from embarrassment.

It's interesting that people seem to be discovering anew that authoritarianism sucks. It sucks in Russia, it sucks in China. Part of the argument of the last few years that the government has been feeding to their people is that the authoritarianism keeps them safe because COVID hit much less there than in the Democratic world. They were arguing Democracy didn't work because it couldn't handle the pandemic.

But COVID don't have any ideology.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'm over in the Glenn Greenwald camp, calling bullshit.

Oh, man, Oh man.

I am laughing so hard.

So fucking hard.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

I doubt this deal goes through. The twitter stock wasn't reacting positively enough and I thought that weird. Then TSLA lost like 25% of its value last two days and I smelled a rat. Someone knows something.

Dan Primack had some stuff on the outs that have been negotiated in the deal. Sounds like it's not going to close for months and during those months lots of shit can happen.

[Icky Thump]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Dan Primack had some stuff on the outs that have been negotiated in the deal. Sounds like it's not going to close for months and during those months lots of shit can happen.

Fun fact, Seth Godin was my literal neighbor for six months. Don't know why that made me think of that.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Oh, man, Oh man.

I am laughing so hard.

So fucking hard.

I wear that hat without apology. I'm also squarely in the camp of people like Bill Maher, and Taibbi.

I'm a reasonable, libertarian leaning person who suspects any preclusion of speech. I also think people have a right to fool others, and be fooled. The cure for liars and manipulators is poking holes in their bullshit.

I'm fine with moderation as a concept. And indeed, platforms can do anything they like. But when they do it badly, or suspiciously, or at the behest of people who ought not to control them (extremists on the right and left), they should be called out for doing so.

Is this an unreasonable position? Of course not. Now do your thing and offer an ad hominen about how Greenwald is a tool of Russian propaganda.