This was a shockingly dumb move. Whether or not you think these actions were politically motivated or made in good faith, it just poured liquid oxygen on the "reform section 230" fire you're seeing from both sides of the aisle - one using the censorship reason, the other using the disinformation reason.
There's no way you don't block a newspaper, and the press secretary, and prevent anyone from even private messaging the link to each other, and blocking people who share screenshots, and not invite serious scrutiny or action.
The legislative blowback is going to suck. Section 230 is an ordinary law, not a constitutional right or based on one, and that means it's exposed to all the usual political fighting.
I agree they blundered here. They don't want to be hijacked by another "leaks" story days before the election but now the suppression of this has become the entire story, and its convinced a lot of people the story is true and dangerous to Biden. Even if the email is true I don't see how its dangerous and if the only media carrying the story are the NY Post and Fox it doesn't hurt Biden.
That's an angle I hadn't even considered, but I'm surprised Twitter didn't. SV social media companies, of all the organizations in the world, should understand the implications of a Streisanding.
If they had just left it alone, maybe attached the standard "this might be false" disclaimer, it would likely have passed as yet another partisan thing, but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.
>>but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.
I don't know. I think the people that are going to believe these kinds of stories at face value would have found this story on their own regardless. It is not like the NY Post is some obscure paper. It may make this story stronger with those that are already inclined to believe this stuff.
I think by this time people have already made their decision on whom they are going to vote and they will use any story that agrees with their decision as proof that they are right.
What about the story should I not be taking at face value? I just read the email, seems pretty clearcut that the Burisma bigshot asked Hunter to "use your influence" to fight off the "general prosecutor". Ultimately Biden did get the prosecutor general fired by withholding foreign aid, and bragged about it on camera.
IIRC Trump was impeached for supposedly threatening to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine unless they investigated this incident.
Well first off, is the email real? Even if it is real, do we know if Hunter Biden actually used "his influence"? What indications are there that Hunter Biden's supposed actions were critical to Shokin's firing anyway?
Several governments and other organizations were concerned because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma properly, having laid the investigation he inherited from his predecessor dormant. The demand to fire him wasn't something that Joe Biden came up with himself out of the blue, and at the end of the day it was most likely to Burisma's detriment.
It's not an impeachable offense to threaten to withhold foreign aid for valid reasons that further the interests of the United States. It was (and should be) an impeachable offense to illegally withhold aid that was already meant to have been delivered, and to do so for personal gain.
Well let’s keep in mind Biden has denied any such interaction with Burisma, has denied any wrongdoing in his son’s appointment, has denied any implication of graft. Despite information that at least warrants some hard questioning. Now this comes out and Biden’s team has not denied its legitimacy. And this from a candidate who’s last bid for President tanked because of his own admitted lying and plagiarizing. Judge it how you like but I don’t think you can extend Biden a benefit of the doubt — quite the opposite should be the default position, probably for any politician.
So is this where he steps down and Harris steps up? Let’s be honest, upcoming elections are going to be 100% about Trump. It doesn’t matter who his opponent is. Attacking Biden is pointless, and Twitters reaction was self destructive blunder that will cost them no matter who wins in November
Not even the Biden campaign disputes the emails being real.
They just said they checked his calendar and could find no such meeting, then later backpedaled and said they couldn't discount the possibly that it happened and just wasn't on the official schedule.
The part where a sloppily fabricated email was put onto a bogus laptop (probably by foreign intelligence agents), and then “coincidentally” made its way right back to Rudy Giuliani (who was at the time neck deep in the effort to extort a foreign leader into announcing a fake investigation into the same non-scandal, for which the President has already been impeached). Giuliani passed the emails via Steve Bannon (Trump’s former campaign manager and “Chief Strategist”, since indicted for mail fraud and money laundering) to a hack “journalist” (former Hannity producer) at the NY Post who did zero fact checking, because no credible journalist or news organization would ever touch such a flimsy story. Someone in the chain made a PDF of these fake emails a year ago but then sat on it, before releasing it in the last 3 weeks before an election, without releasing enough forensic evidence for any third party to do even the most basic check.
The computer repair guy’s story is just comically implausible. https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
You want a real corruption scandal? How about the $10 million bribe paid to the Trump campaign by a state-owned Egyptian bank right before the 2016 election (and immediately after candidate Trump met privately with President Sisi). Which the DOJ never finished investigating because Trump-appointed officials instructed them not to. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donat...
You do realise the Biden campaign has made a statement not denying the legitimacy of the email?
He also hasn't denied hunting deer out of season at Bear's Bend State Park, Coyote Corners, Maine. Your point?
To make a statement, and not deny it, is different not making statements about random facts.
None of the things you're describing have any effect on the plausibility of the story because they're all exactly what you would expect to happen either way. If a Trump supporter became aware of this sort of thing, he would bring it to someone like Giuliani, who would bring it to someone like Bannon and so on. Then they would sit on it until now because that's standard procedure in politics, because damaging information has more impact when released just before the election.
It tells you that the story is being maneuvered for political advantage, because obviously. It tells you nothing at all about whether or not it's true.
To anyone credulous enough to believe any part of this story, I have a bridge to sell you. You should probably stop watching Fox or reading Facebook and the NY Post for your “news”. These same characters have been selling various similar stories for the last 4+ years, and every one has turned out to be complete bullshit when given the tiniest bit of scrutiny.
What this story demonstrates more than anything is that Giuliani and Trump are getting pathetically desperate, because it is looking likely they will lose and both are facing significant criminal liability once they aren’t shielded by the Barr DOJ’s position that a GOP president enjoys absolute impunity and by the pardon power (which has already been corruptly used to let other Trump henchmen off the hook for crimes committed in his name).
The safest bet is it changes nobody's opinion. If you're left leaning, you've drowned out Trump's repeatedly false statements --or become numb to them-- no October surprise will have an effect on you. If you're right leaning, this furthers your perspective that Clinton and Deep State are up to no good. Nobody comes across content like this without an existing world view to inspect it, and the lines have been drawn a long time ago.
Right, but this is what makes the situation so dangerous in the U.S. If no one’s mind is changed over events like these, then we’re at a point where there are essentially two citizenries which both see the other side as toxic. We’re slouching towards civil war. Most people don’t want war, but do see the other side as harmful, so we have to try hard to avoid it.
Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong, maybe a civil war increases shareholder value for Facebook? Because the way they went about this is another escalation. Nothing drives engagement like military engagements, right?
I had assumed it was just that people were consuming two entirely different media streams. But I’ve had conversations recently where college educated people won’t even concede basic factual points left out of a media narrative. Like, things that can be established just by looking at some publicly available document, which I have given them. They keep just circling back to the narrative. It’s scary.
It is a "bad faith" problem. Bad faith arguments are made on all sides of the political spectrum, but anecdotally, it feels like one side is a little more fact challenged and relies on them fairly heavily. And the amount of arguments being made in bad faith means it is often more productive to just ignore or dismiss the other sides arguments outright.
Here is a good example. Right wing media likes to point at the homelessness problem in CA and claim that that is proof that Democrats are bad at governing. The homeless issue is a fact, supported by data. And CA being a Democratic state is also a fact supported by data. But pointing to both those facts and claiming it as proof that Democrats==bad is a bad faith argument. Blue states have higher GDP, higher levels of education attainment, and lower poverty rates than red states. And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars. I could make a similarly bad faith argument, and point out that West Virginia has the highest number of opioid overdoses per capita, therefore Republicans==bad. But I don't need to do that because the statistics that most reasonable people would agree to use as an arbiter of state level success are already in agreement with my position.
As you can see from the length of the above paragraph. These bad faith arguments require a decent amount of effort and/or knowledge to effectively counter. So as we move into this post-fact world, can you really blame people for just sticking to the 'narratives'?
> homelessness is a weird metric to use
Homeless is not a weird metric to use. It's absolutely a failure of government in the worst possible way. Democrats deserve all the criticism in the world for tolerating that situation.
Still, you're correct that there is bad faith: the bad faith is that Republicans care about homelessness, which they generally do not either.
Democrats deserve criticism for the failures of Democratic-controlled governments, and Republicans deserve criticism for the failures of Republican-controlled governments. In my opinion, they're both bad. Are they "equally bad"? Maybe not, but I won't accept that homelessness is a weird metric. There's a lot of bad faith is ignoring one's own faults.
> anecdotally, it feels like one side is a little more fact challenged and relies on them fairly heavily.
This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Stephen Colbert's perception of reality has a known liberal bias.
> And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars.
But the overheated housing market is the criticism, and is completely valid. California is correctly criticized for letting housing costs get so bad that people who are making twice the US median income are nonetheless sleeping in their cars.
And California may be the worst, but it is actually a problem which is more severe in blue states than red states on average. Housing costs more in NYC than Austin, and more in Chicago than Charlotte, despite having a lower median income.
So sticking to the "narratives" doesn't get you there. It causes you to ignore the problems in your own back yard. You have to look at the facts, even when they're inconvenient, and admit it when it's your team making a mistake.
> This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Everyone is wrong about some facts. Surely I'm wrong about some facts, as I'm not omniscient.
However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts. Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.
> Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.
When half the country disagrees with the other half as to who that is, I'm not sure "clearly" is the right word to use.
And if you don't entertain the possibility that it could be you, it will be you.
> When half the country disagrees with the other half
Nearly 48% of the electorate did not vote for either major party candidate. The two parties are both very much minorities. There aren't simply two sides to every story.
There's actually significant ideological diversity within each of the two major parties, though there are certainly attempts by powerful people on both sides to stamp out any dissent.
There is a distinct anti-correlation between the people who think CNN is full of liars and the people who think Fox is full of liars. The truth is that they both are, but that is the real minority opinion.
And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
> And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
That's not a thing I said.
I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil. The enthusiastic party voters are a subdivision of the minorities. Indeed many votes are more defined by what they're against than what they're for.
> That's not a thing I said.
Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.
> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.
But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.
My point is that from the perspective of someone outside of both tribes, there's no reason why one has to accept the conclusion that each of those tribes is equally enlightened or ignorant. I realize of course that they disagree with each other on a number of issues, but... so what? I'm not evaluating them as a member.
To a member of one of the tribes, that tribe's beliefs are obviously the correct ones. To an outside observer, you have to evaluate the individual beliefs.
Is the best policy to combat climate change a carbon tax which is refunded to the population, or a WPA-style "Green New Deal"? According to most economists it's the former, according to AOC it's the latter.
School choice programs have a strong record of giving low income families with children in failing public schools a better alternative, but public school teachers unions are a large Democratic voting block and major campaign donors, so they have a perverse incentive to oppose such programs even when they're succeeding, e.g. by shutting down the popular one in D.C.
Immigration has a multifaceted economic effect. High skill immigration tends to bring domestic economic benefits, because the immigrants spend much of the money in the domestic economy and pay more in taxes than they consume in services. Low skill immigration tends to have the opposite effect, and to suppress wages for unskilled labor or increase unskilled domestic unemployment. If you combine the two the total effect is positive, because the former effect is larger. But the Democratic party has a stronger incentive to promote the latter, because unskilled immigrants from socialist-leaning countries are more likely to vote for Democrats, so they regularly conflate the two and adopt policies that promote the latter, even if it harms the domestic population.
You can undoubtedly find some Republican to argue that all immigration is bad and some Democrat to argue that a carbon tax would be a good answer to climate change, but there remains much wrongness on both sides. The filter bubbles show people who live on one side or the other the reasons why some subset of the other side is wrong and not the reasons why some subset of their side is wrong. It creates an impression that isn't true.
Even the premise is basically nonsense. If one Republican says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change is a hoax, does that mean Republicans are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because it is real? We know which one will be on CNN. If one Democrat says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change will cause human extinction in twelve years without a Green New Deal, does that mean Democrats are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because humans won't go extinct if we don't immediately raise taxes to 75% and spend the money on government windmills? You know which one will be on Fox.
I'm not even talking about policy. I'm talking about basic factual matters.
Start with something simple: the in-person attendance and TV viewership of the President's inauguration. This is completely irrelevant to policy and has no long-term implications whatsoever. Yet somehow it became a major "partisan" controversy, when it was never controversial in the past for Presidents of any party. Of course crowd size estimation isn't a perfect science, but this particular controversy had nothing to do with science. And if you're going to tell me the problem there was "both sides", I'll have to disagree.
This is just one example of extreme reality denial. What makes it notable is again that the dispute was of no particular importance in the grand scheme, and yet reality was still vehemently denied.
I mean, this kind of shit comes right out of George Orwell, where the test of party loyalty is how you can make yourself believe things that are obviously false.
What was the attendance at Lincoln's inauguration? FDR's? Who knows. Who cares! The only person who truly cared was Donald J. Trump himself. But Republicans have been primed to take anything critical of what he says as a partisan attack by the "liberal media". Every fact, no matter how trivial, is now a political controversy.
You're supplying an instance of Republicans denying reality, but nobody was claiming that they never did that.
The issue is that they both do it. For example, the left made quite a kerfuffle about "Trump" separating families at the border, but the truth is the separation policy was preexisting and what changed was only how many detentions there were when he started to detain everyone crossing the border illegally. They also like to play word games, like saying "no existing policy of separating all families crossing the border illegally" which is intentionally misleading when what changed wasn't the separation of those in detention but rather the detention of everyone crossing the border illegally.
Which isn't even to say that family separation was a good policy, but the persistent implication that it was a policy established under Trump is ridiculous and politically-motivated.
> The issue is that they both do it.
No, that's not the issue. That's never been the issue. As I said much earlier:
"Everyone is wrong about some facts." "However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts."
There's neither time nor space here to numerically compare mistruths of the 2 major parties. I would just like to see acknowledgment of the general principle that 2 groups of people can be ignorant in some ways while having very different levels of ignorance. For example, compare high school children and elementary school children. Generally speaking, high schoolers have a lot more knowledge than grade schoolers, and yet high schoolers still have quite a bit of ignorance. The 2 groups are not at all equal. This is a very common situation, and "both sides are wrong about things" is not a useful description of that situation.
It’s less dramatic than you might think. For example, both Republicans (82%) and Democrats (91%) trust scientists: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mis... (Even that question is politically loaded. “Science” is a spectrum, and as the reproducibility crisis shows, they’re often wrong. Conservatives by definition are more likely to be skeptical of people who say they have new insights into age-old problems, while liberals are by definition always looking for new approaches and don’t mind much when they don’t pan out. So this 10 point gap isn’t either bad or good, necessarily.)
Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.
Left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias takes this on in the context of climate change in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri...
He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.
> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...
> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.
There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)
Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow. I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.
I think it's telling that conservatives seem to have shifted from sowing doubt regarding the very existence of climate change to now "there's no point, it's already too late!". The primary goal of status-quo remains.
> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science
Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?
The IPCC report received plenty of criticism. The report summary left out some of the more alarming findings [1] (which were conveniently not addressed in your reason article) and there was valid criticism about the consensus model that was used[2].
In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.
I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/world-... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-climate-repor...
The large uncertainties in climate modeling have only been getting smaller, as we've made progress on estimating cloud feedback lately. Fundamentally, there is a lot of guesswork (aka parameterizations) but these are all tuned with as much data as we can get. Projections made in 1980 and 1990 have been pretty accurate so far, and show the warming world we live in now, so it should count for something.
But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.
Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.
I think people need to come to terms with the fact that the USA isn’t immutable and no government lasts forever. A divorce is coming and it’s better for everyone if it’s peaceful when it happens.
> I think people need to come to terms with the fact that the USA isn’t immutable and no government lasts forever.
I agree with this. The Constitution is outdated in the extreme. We're long overdue for something new.
> A divorce is coming and it’s better for everyone if it’s peaceful when it happens.
A divorce? I don't think that's going to work. Who gets custody of Wisconsin?
How about the Republic of Wisconsin? The divorce doesn’t need to end with only two parties.
>>A divorce? I don't think that's going to work. Who gets custody of Wisconsin?
Some warlord from Michigan?
Is Civil war possible at all in US’s military system today?
From an external position, I'd say theoretically yes. It is enough when a political rift goes through society and also the military. This rift could lead to failure of command coehesion, split of the military and ultimately infighting.
Which could, if you ask me, be a risk in case trump wins but it is rather clear that the election was fradulent (not saying it will be, but let's assume for the arguments sake it was). In which case the military would have to decide which "president" to follow, or to follow congress, or the senate, or someone else. Which could tear the military appart, let alone to speak of the national guard.
As a former Army officer, I completely agree with the CJCS recent statement that the military will play no role in the election process.
Anything short of a clear landslide for one of the two candidates is going to result in a seriously tense/chaotic situation. Best to hunker down and hope the civilians sort their shit out before giving an order you know is going to result in a lot of resentment and formerly good, dependable people being locked up for insubordination (best case), or entire organizations dissolving in an orgy of mutiny, violence, and/or desertion (worst case).
As far as a split goes, it wouldn't be "clean." Unlike in the 19th century, individual units aren't constituted from people drawn from the same geographic area. There's a centralized bureaucracy managing personnel, so most units really are a cultural melting pot made up of people from all over the country. So I don't see the military splitting, I see it falling apart.
I was affraid that people with actual US military experience would share that sentiment. Also the international impact that would have. just thinking about a situation in which the US military would have any real role in who the next President will be gives me the chills. And it kind of would force every country with a US military presence to basically pick a side. Scary thought.
I just hope that the outcome will be chrystal clear, hopefully democrat. And that if it is not unit cohesion is strong enough to prevent the US forces from falling apart.
There might be something like a civil war, but it won't look anything at all like the last one. Don't look for two armies marching on fields against each other. Do look for dozens of shadowy groups practicing guerilla warfare against each other and the state, with actions gradually escalating in intensity.
You can make a pretty decent argument that this is already happening.
Can't wait for the 2AM knock on my door, and finding an armed group on my front porch demanding to know how I voted in the last election (I'm surprised people are still putting campaign signs on their lawns or stickers on their cars).
Oh yeah. More likely they'd come based on you going to an event they don't like, or having a hobby they don't like. And they probably won't be interested in any claims that you weren't there or didn't do that or aren't who they're looking for.
Actual police mostly have better procedures for this sort of thing, but still sometimes get the wrong guy or go to the wrong address. Somehow I doubt such groups will do better than them.
I agree on those firmly in either camp. But there is a big chunk of voters who aren't firmly in either camp. That's why you have Bush Jr. winning some years, Obama others and then Trump.
In the grand scheme of things, the Pandora's box Twitter and Facebook might have opened today seems minute next to the Pandora’s box the Bush administration opened after the 9-11 attacks, the homeland security and all.
I think after the election we will have completely forgotten about this conduct while we still have to live with the spying on innocent people, non-sense travel restriction, and human-rights violating immigration system for years to come.
Making a scene of this decision just seems like stirring a storm inside a teacup, all the while we are experiencing a hurricane from the patriot act.
How does the immigration system violate human rights?
not GP, but most immigration systems violate human rights all the time by treating people as if they were people without these rights - or not people at all. Most of the time the legal leeway is based upon them not being citizens (yet). What is the path to immigration in your country?
It begins with a legal dilemma: E.g. asylum is a human right, but how to determine who is eligible? In a timely manner that is. Especially if you have thousands of applicants and (almost) no documents. How do you house people in the meantime? What rights do they have?
"asylum is a human right" "determine who is eligible"
Well, if it's a human right, then everyone. But it's not, which is why you have this twisted logic.
There is no right to freely cross borders.
Asylum is a human right, that doesn't mean everyone can successfully claim it!
It means everyone has a right to put in a claim to asylum and have it assessed properly by the authorities.
> There is no right to freely cross borders.
In some circumstances, yes there is.
If there's a war in country A, and non-combatants flee to neighbouring country B out of genuine necessity for safety, yes that border crossing is widely regarded as a human right.
It derives from the basic right to life.
Doesn't mean country B will respect it.
Most countries do, although there is a difference between immigrant and refugee. Immigrant can be you Saudi Prince with billions in the bank. Somehow they never have problems of not being let in anywhere.
Immigrant have no right to just live in another country, refugees fleeing war have that right as long as the danger remains.
Of course there's a right to freely cross borders. Borders are just imaginary lines on a map.
Just as any bird has the "right" to go wherever it wants and any other animal hat the right to go wherever it wants, I have the natural right to go wherever I want.
I'm a free human. As I'm born on this planet, it's my right to go wherever I want to go on this planet.
That governments want to take away that right of mine, that liberty, is just one example of how governments are using the tyranny of power to force people to their will.
That governments are just the thugs with the best weapons is just Realpolitik. This still doesn't invalidate my right to freely cross borders. I never signed away these rights.
Though I might be stupid to try to exercise it.
Borders are just as real as the governments and societies that give you those rights. If you don't recognize them then you don't have rights either.
Remember your rights are my responsibility. They don't work in a vacuum nor can you make up your own rules.
But your "right to go wherever I want to on this planet" must already have limits, right? Do you lock the doors on your house/car?
I'm not going to tell you where I live. But... no, I don't actually.
Then I can guess a few places you don't live. :)
Then there is no twisted logic.
Asylum is a human right https://ijrcenter.org/refugee-law/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Article 14
Some people believe that open borders to all countries are a human right.
I wonder what they use to justify this belief. I dont think it has a specific historical precedent
Isn't every human right without historical precedent at first, until it becomes established?
Doesn't that always happen step by step, with "early adopters" arguing on grounds of morality and other arguments, until eventually enough people start to believe something has a high moral value and should be raised to the level of a human right, enshrined in law?
Those who would argue for open borders as a human right are like "early adopters" of that idea.
There would be consequences for that. For example you would need a universal world wide social safety net.
We would all fit easily on Iceland, but most would die of dehydration or starve in a short amount of time.
I could be an early adopter of "cheese for everyone", but I would need to get a lot of cheese first to make that happen.
World wide safety net: Open borders isn't the same thing as everyone having the same safety net in whichever destination they travel to. Though related, they are distinct issues that can exist independently.
That said a world wide safety net would be a good thing to advocate for on moral grounds, no?
The EU has open borders for all EU citizens, and for the most part it's faring ok. There has not been a Europe-wide social safety net crisis as a result of this freedom, and crucially for this argument: there isn't an EU wide social safety net. It has freedom of movement without a universal safety net.
The USA's states are effectively countries. All USA citizens have open borders to travel between states in the USA. For the most part, it's faring ok and there has not been a USA-wide social safety net crisis caused by this freedom either.
Iceland and cheese for everyone: That sounds like what's called the slippery slope fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
But I believe most participating countries in the EU have pretty strong social safety nets. And the US' social safety net system is at the federal level. How would a world safety net be financed?
US states are not countries.
That was set with our Constitution, and thoroughly tested in the 1860s. The idea has never really been seriously tested again since.
It’s a quite different setup from the EU.
I’m not a historian but I would have thought that open borders were the norm not that long ago. I would guess that immigration restrictions wouldn’t have started to be commonplace until at least industrialization.
But regardless if that is right or not, siblings have pointed out that open borders are in fact common-place in many parts of the world today, e.g. EU and USA’s internal borders are open. And (as sibling has also pointed out) historic precedent or existing examples are not necessary to justify any belief. Abolishing slavery did not need a historic precedent, neither did gay rights, and theoretically neither does open borders.
Many of the immigration restrictions in america started around the time the first welfare programs were introduced. Before that, it was a bit of a free for all. I don't know if the same pattern holds anywhere else, but I'm suspicious that might not be a coincidence.
We can't discuss human rights in absolute worldwide terms while looking at immigration systems, because there's no universally agreed set of human rights to discuss, as far as I know.
But we can discuss violations of what it is widely regarded should be universal human rights.
Here's a list of some that I consider should be universal human rights, which are often violated by immigration systems:
- The right of young children to be with their parents
- The right of spouses to be together and start a family
- The right to get married
- The right to legal due process, including appeals and representation
- The right to work for essentials for survival such as food, shelter and medicine
- The right to enter private transactions for things like shelter
- The right to access the prevailing currency system (basic banking in the modern world)
- The right to leave an abusive job, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to leave an abusive relationship, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to stay in the country where you were born, raised and have never known anywhere else
- The right to vote in the country where you were born and raised
- The right to protection and safety when talking to the police about a crime where you are a victim or witness
> because there's no universally agreed set of human rights to discuss
This statement might be technically true in legal terms (I am not a lawyer so I don’t know), but there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], ratified by all 193 members of the United Nations. That is a good place to start. Additionally the UN has more in depth declarations (e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child[2]; which my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them).
1: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
2: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx
---
PS. I truly encourage everyone to read the Declaration of Human Rights[1] in their native language. It is such a beautiful read and gives you a sense of shared humanity. It is not that long, and has over 500 translations. In my native language the translation is really clear and easy to follow.
I agree with you, I think it's beautiful too. I'm a strong advocate for universal human rights - and for improving on the set of rights that we agree on.
> my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them
A fine example answer to "How does the immigration system violate human rights?"
Perhaps they did understand, or perhaps they do but the decision was made by someone who didn't.
If Twitter et al really want to be public resources they need transparency in their decision making and possibly independent oversight. If they want to just be regular businesses they need to take responsibility for the bullshit they propogate.
Straddling these two lanes hasn't been working for society and it seems like regulation or breakups are close to inevitable.
Clearly their partisan activism got the best of them. No longer can they merely label trump's tweets as misinfo, they have to start full-on censoring. They were probably trying to find a way to call this hate speech or racism to justify it.
I worked at a large media company and we held internal meetings essentially telling people how to vote. The media we promoted was aligned with this: all extreme left wing. It’s just as bad as trump. We’ve all lost.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Classic Barbara Streisand effect
Maybe because I suggested Facebook and Twitter are concerned with the news hurting Biden. A better way to phrase would be - "is the story consequential to the election". I think it was not until they took this action, and it is a very strange hill to die on.
I'm curious why didn't they just choose to shadow block it or de-prioritize it on the newsfeed? It would achieve the same thing w/o discretely taking a side.
Eh, I don't think it's going to have the impact you think it will.
The major criticism for S230 is that social media companies are rampant with fake news, and not doing enough to combat misinformation. If anything, it gives FB and Twitter a defense against an accusation of spreading political misinformation.
Was the NY Post article actually filled with disinformation?
If the roles were reversed and a similar story came out about Trump and his son, would Twitter and Facebook have taken it down as part of a misinformation campaign?
> Was the NY Post article actually filled with disinformation?
Yes.
Parroting Russian disinformation during an election campaign because your owners don't like the politics of said disinformation target should be removed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
There needs to be more censorship on FB and YouTube which are in addition to Fox News doing WAY more damage to the United States than any foreign terrorists could ever dream.
Amusing you're citing the NYT.
Their coverage in the lead up to the Iraq Invasion did more damage to this country, Her military, and the rest of the world than some mean tweets or made up BS about Russia. Should we ban the NYT, too?
No, there does not need to be more censorship. You should realize by now the Russian boogeyman narrative has no power anymore. Not everything that favors Trump is a Russian initiative. Far from it.
Right there in the first article:
> There was no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails that the Post obtained, but its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at the 2020 election.
So the only proof that it comes from Russia is basically "that's the kind of thing the Russians would do." Aren't you spreading disinformation yourself by claiming that it is Russian disinformation?
Particularly, claiming Russian collusion the last time did not turn out to be true, but the Media jumped on this narrative. Let's not do it again.
This has been repeatedly debunked. Crowdstrike, who was hired for the security audit, states very explicitly that their IR team had proof that COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR had breached the network.[0]
> To reference, CrowdStrike’s account of their DNC investigation, published on June 14, 2016, “CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR…. At DNC, COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015, while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016.”
0: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
OP is talking about collusion and the years of investigations and other nonsense.
You're talking about an ineffective hack that's used for scaremongering, that was caught and had little to no effect on the out come of the election.
There were extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Even the (bipartisan) Senate report on this states that much. There is nothing nonsense about it.
No, the intelligence agencies already have said this is a Russian disinfo campaign and the Post should be mocked and shunned for knowingly propagating it.
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/131658513181811507...
What was the "disinformation" exactly?
YouTube has spent the summer censoring doctors because their views didn't match the WHO. The WHO has changed its own views so much that it's now contradicted itself many times, showing how terribly naive Google's policies are on this. Google never used to be naive, but clearly, times have changed.
"disinformation" seems to be information that advances an unpopular narrative now. The latest newspeak for the feeble of mind.
Unfortunately this is 100% true.
The real problem is that YouTube inexplicably chose to base its public health "ground truth" on WHO guidelines, when as a US company their appropriate source would have been the CDC. The two were often in conflict, particularly with regard to civilian usage of masks.
The WHO spent a lot of time being wrong -- or, at best, confusing -- and a lot of people got sick unnecessarily as a result.
> Parroting Russian disinformation during an election campaign because your owners don't like the politics of said disinformation target
^ This is the actual disinformation.
Your bias is clear for all to see.
No. If there is damage done to United States, then it happens with the hands of people who suggest that undermining US tradition ( and constitution ) is the way to go. The will of the people to accept an invisible tyrant, who will allow only acceptable thoughts and punish wrongthink is terrifying and those clamor for it do more damage than any foreign terrorist could dream of.
Twitter, FB et al made a mistake ( calculated or otherwise ) and it is now hard to argue in good faith that tech companies are neutral arbiters.
To address your specific claim, if you showed me, say, RT post prior to yesterday that said what NY post posted, you would have a point. Instead, you have claims from Biden campaign staff and thanks to FB, Twitter, you now have a perceived bias in tech community that diminishes credibility of all those publications.
The fact that you seem to suggest that more like bias is needed, is, and I put it mildly, counter productive.
The story is already in full swing streisand effect mode.
edit: corrected some prepositions
Yes, they were. The PDFs with the emails were created long after the laptop was allegedly dropped off and abandoned, and the tech store owner claims they only copied the hard drive. This is on top of obvious formatting errors and the removal of the email headers.
None of the information was verified (even the easily verifiable bits) and the source, who was doxxed by the NYPost, is a Seth Rich conspiracist: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
In some hypothetical "whatabout the other party", the only way to test it is if it were to happen.
If the roles were reversed, the story would be on the lead story of every major left-leaning media outlet (which is all of them except Fox) in the nation for days: CNN, Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, USA Today, Reuters, AP; all of them would carry it non-stop and beat it to death, covering every possible aspect and angle. Which is what they do any time there has been a hint of a story against Trump in the past four years.
Since the roles are not reversed, they're working together to bury it and trying to pretend it doesn't exist, because they're con-artists and fake journalists completely in bed with the Democrats and very willing to conspire to throw an election and commit election interference.
The barely existent election interference by the Russians is trivial compared to what big tech is doing out in the open (hell, they're practically bragging about it at this point it's so brazen).
Several executives at big tech need to be put in prison for election interference. Start with Dorsey.
Since the roles are not reversed, they're working together to bury it and trying to pretend it doesn't exist, because they're con-artists
Yeah, I remember when the editor-in-chief at WaPo settled a Federal suit for $20M to avoid facing charges for his role in running a fraudulent university. Good times. Then there was the NYT board member whose namesake cancer charity foundation was shut down by the state attorney general's office because it turned out to be a front for his own business and political interests. What a con artist, huh. Not to forget the time the chairman of the Democratic National Committee stiffed his contractors for $70 million on a casino project that later went bankrupt. There oughta be a law.
Ad hominem. Trump may be awful, but that has no bearing on the argument you're responding to.
I especially like how I'm guilty of an ad-hominem fallacy, while the person calling their opponents "con artists" while citing no evidence whatsoever wasn't.
Re-examine your own biases, then post.
Name-calling isn't ad hom.
Poster didn't say "they are con artists", they said "they are doing this and this, because they are con artists".
Your response was tu quoque mixed with ad hom: "oh yeah? Well the other guy is a bad person!"
There is such a thing as moral authority, you know. Look around you. Does it look like you're sitting in a philosophy classroom?
(If it does, take the opportunity to freshen up on your Kierkegaard.)
I'm simply pointing out your argument was cognitive dissonance and completely ineffective.
I'm sure you could engage with it directly and without fallacy, you're obviously bright, but your replies were very low-brow ad hominem and tu quoque.
PS I don't invest "moral authority" in almost any leading politician today, though I certainly rank Biden higher than Trump in the "personal morality" stakes.
People are amazingly biased, perhaps dishonest, when it comes to this. Of course the same media that propagated the Russia hoax(among others) would behave totally different if the roles were reversed. The fact that they all have acted in unison, and along with social media's draconian measures, only suggests that there's actual merit to the story.
The only thing that terrifies me more than Trump is the number of my tech industry colleagues who seem to think we can and should abuse our power to shape public discourse.
Underrated comment.
You already do, don't you? Social Media created an algorithm based add industry that was and is easily highjacked for bad-faith propaganda purposes. A system that at its core is designed to exploit human psychology in ways and scales we never saw before. You cannot create such things, keep them under your control and just ignore the consequences.
Highly underrated comment.
It's easy to be a free speech advocate when it benefits your own views. It's not easy when it doesn't.
Being a free speech advocate when it benefits your own views is an oxymoron. Defending free speech by definition means defending people's right to say things you disagree with. If you only defend people's right to agree with you then you're not a free speech advocate.
No. The point being made is that if your speech is being suppressed for whatever reason, you will care about free speech.
If you're not being suppressed, you won't even realise you have it, and will happily advocate for censorship.
That's a very cynical take. You don't need to have your own speech rights threatened to care about free speech, and many, many people are capable of defending free speech even if their own views aren't being "suppresed".
My political opinions are reasonably mainstream, but I'll happily defend the free speech rights of groups I disagree with (e.g. pro-lifers.)
I think that's precisely what they're saying: a lot of people talk about "free speech" because free speech benefits them. When you're in a dominant position, free speech doesn't threaten you. Or at least, you think it doesn't.
Few free speech advocates think you should be free to call for violence. That's free speech that does threaten them. Speech that calls for discrimination against groups they don't belong to, however, is perfectly fine -- they know that they're too important to be threatened by it.
So practically all self-described free speech advocates do put limits on free speech, and there aren't any True Scotsmen.
If you don't support someone saying something you find disgusting / horrifying / etc, you don't actually support free speech.
'Free speech for my side, but suppress the other side' is not free speech. This is what Facebook / Twitter is engaging in.
You didn't see ANY suppression from them when Trump's tax returns were leaked like they're attempting to do with Hunter's emails.
The only way Facebook has to not "use its power to shape public discourse" is to turn itself off. Having the platform up shapes the discourse. Algorithmic timelines shape the discourse. Adverts, whether political or not, shape the discourse.
Neutrality is only an option if you limit yourself to making cuckoo clocks.
> Neutrality is only an option if you limit yourself to making cuckoo clocks.
Heretic! True clocks look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Hexadeci...
That was a specific reference to a famous speech of Orson Welles in The Third Man:
> You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
_Pinky and the Brain_ edition:
> In Italy under the Borgias, they had thirty years of murder, bloodshed and warfare. And they produced indigestible noodles, boring operas and the FIAT. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The Swiss bank account, the best cheese in the world and Heidi!
:)
Companies which spend millions on counsel every year are not going to blunder. They either have anterior motives (boost the story through censorship) or they had no choice.
I don’t know what to think anymore because I don’t understand how this censorship will have any effect other than causing the story to spread like fire.
> other than causing the story to spread like fire.
Does it really? I haven't seen anything on Reddit or the likes. Seems to me that the censorship has been rather successful so far.
I am not even from the US and here almost everyone knows by now.
In your bubble. But in the bubble targeted by this story the censorship is going to accelerate everything.
I'm sure they've learned their lesson, and next time it won't be a ban, but a difficult-to-prove reduction in visibility.
This is what Facebook already does. It turns out after a few years of this, it actually becomes pretty easy to recognize.
For instance, many left news organizations that were critical of NATO have seen their posts substantially deprioritized on FB.
Sounds interesting - I'd love a source on it.
I would not characterize this story as speech but as carefully designed viral marketing content. If one is in the business of attracting people speaking with each other and selling that access to companies and political parties then dealing with viral content intended to undermine your sales is a continuous struggle. This one was deemed over the line and a case of potentially Russian disinformation laundering.
When looking at the legalities keep in mind that these companies have been explicitly warned by the F.B.I. of such possibilities and have spent time combing through their own databases and have identified such events.
> I would not characterize this story as speech but as carefully designed viral marketing content.
God. I’m on the Left, but can you all not see the blatant paternalism behind stances like this? It’s a pretty explicit: “we know best, don’t worry your pretty little head about this misleading content, we will take care of it”
Given the scope of it, I have to assume some outside pressure was applied. WH speaker is banned off Twitter ffs
>There's no way you don't block a newspaper
This explains why individual billionaires bought all the newspapers.
> and prevent anyone from even private messaging the link to each other
I can't find this stated anywhere except HN posts. What is the original source for this?
Various tweets from affected people, including screenshots, were all over last night. This isn't new, though. When Twitter blocks a URL, it applies even to DMs.
I mean.. I just tried and it stopped me.
Didn't Twitter and Google already stated they want regulation? They are one of the few companies that actually can facilitate any form of large scale content scanning. Such mechanisms take years to develop if you even get the critical data needed.
Saying you want regulation is a classic of DC lobbying. Exxon wants “regulation” too. What it means in practice is that they want to be part of the conversation in choosing what regulations get passed, so actual serious regulations don’t make their way through.
Hm, would make sense. Can't loose anything and they would always have an advantage to competitors.
Companies only want regulation when it boxes out competitors.
> it just poured liquid oxygen on the "reform section 230" fire you're seeing from both sides of the aisle - one using the censorship reason, the other using the disinformation reason
The GOP is prioritizing § 230 reform. Given their likely fall from power and prioritization of the SCOTUS confirmation, as well as Democrat control of the House and its focus on stimulus bills, the short-term threat is minute.
From an amoral government relations perspective, heavier moderation makes sense. A Biden spoof going viral during the election would attract the attention of incoming Democrat legislators. That creates a medium-term threat where there isn't one.
That said, I'm surprised they chose to block the content over de-prioritise it algorithmically and flag it with a warning.
It seems like the GOP might lose, but it’s hardly “likely”. It’s probably a good idea to consider what might happen if they don’t.
I'm curious why you seem so confident in a widespread democratic victory when the republicans did so well in 2016?
EDIT: for those unaware, not only did the republican party take control of the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2016. They also made big gains in state elections. In fact, the republican party had a 'trifecta' (house, senate, and executive) in 25/50 states. It was a very significant shift in power: https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2016
Many polls are showing a Biden win is above 80% probability, the House is solidly Dem, and a possible sweep in the Senate. Make of that what you will.
Its a fair point that polls missed in 2016. 2020 has kicked the hornet’s nest (rather, the last four years), voter turnout appears to be higher than previous years, and I’d bet an expensive bottle of bourbon current polls align close to what results will be (with modeling lessons learned from 2016).
Tangentially, quite a few Trump voters have simply aged out over the last four years (roughly 1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die each year). Broadly speaking, much older voters skew conservative compared to younger cohorts (per Pew Research), hence the confidence in a shift towards the left across branches in government representation during this election cycle. GOP support is quite literally dying out.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/907433511/trumps-base-is-shri...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/the-generati...
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-chance-taking-senate-fore...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/12/biden-tops-270-poli...
But isn’t American society becoming older, due to Boomers low birth rate?
Doesn’t that mean older generations have more influence?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille... (Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X outvoted older generations in 2018 midterms)
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials... (Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation)
Young voters outnumber older voters, but this is mutually exclusive from an aging populace and a declining birth rate. You can chalk it up to population momentum and previously higher levels of immigration. It does mean Millennials will hold on to their electorate influence longer though.
Except Millenials are becoming more conservative as they age, and Republicans have way more kids than Democrats: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/republicans-more-kids-democra...
Rural conservatives who have kids will eventually have those kids leave for good paying jobs in urban areas, or those kids will likely not have a great life expectancy from lack of opportunity in their small community (dying small communities are well documented: https://www.google.com/search?q=dying+small+towns) and deaths of despair (alcoholism, meth, opioids: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinekee/maps-despai...). As long as prospects for women continue to increase (education and earning potential), and the data shows well off educated women prefer a partner on equal footing, conservative birth rates will eventually converge with that of other ideologies (this can be inferred from the total fertility rate trend for religious vs non religious women of childbearing age).
While your point about ideology drift over time has some merit, I don’t believe it to be significant enough to materially consider.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889?jou... (https://doi.org/10.1086/706889 if you want to grab the full paper from SciHub)
“Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.”
> Rural conservatives who have kids will eventually have those kids leave for good paying jobs in urban areas, or those kids will likely not have a great life expectancy from lack of opportunity in their small community (dying small communities are well documented)
If only a worldwide event would take place where the entire business world deemed it acceptable to change policies so employees can work remotely, then realize they can save boatloads of money by not paying inner city office rents and reduce employee salary expenses by vastly increasing their applicant pool, coinciding with significant increases in inner-city violence sparked by rioting protestors demanding to get rid of the police or else they'll burn the entire city down......oh wait
"Conservative" has become such an overloaded term that it's useless. IMO Biden is the most conservative candidate in this race.
>Many polls are showing a Biden win is above 80% probability, the House is solidly Dem, and a possible sweep in the Senate. Make of that what you will.
I'd point out that it's not the polls that are predicting such things. Rather it's people who are interpreting those polls.
Polls are just a snapshot of opinion in time. They are useful and can provide information about public opinion, but they certainly aren't predictive in the way you're stating.
Making predictions like "Biden is 80% likely to win" is a guess. Possibly based on polling data, but are not a poll.
A poll reporting[0] that the respondents of that poll prefer one candidate over another is not a prediction, rather it's data.
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...
The polls are way off because they oversample democrats, which can be seen when you start looking at results by counties.
Some rural counties that are know to be republican strong holds by a huge margin are favouring Biden by ridiculous amounts. Its not going to happen. Its obviously an error, and the accumulation of these errors are the final polls. (Source https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YqKDpqkYBOKV)
Its true that the democrats are winning the early mail in voting. But since republicans don't trust mail in voting, as Trump told them to vote in person. They will come out on election night, by a large margin.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/18/924182086/early-voting-analys...
“Early voting turnout continues to shatter records, as sky-high voter enthusiasm meets the realities of the United States' creaky machinery of democracy amid a pandemic. That means long lines in some places and administrative errors with some mail ballots, but a system that is working overall, according to experts.
More than 26 million people had voted as of Saturday, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. That's more than six times the number of votes cast by the same point in 2016.”
You could just as easily counter and ask why anyone would expect a Republican victory when Democrats did so well in the 2018 midterms.
Previous result are only predictive to a point.
They did well in the House, but lost seats in the Senate. Midterm elections are an imperfect signal, like you're suggesting, but it's not true that the democrats won a landslide or something in 2018.
The Senate map for a given year can tilt towards one party or another; 2018 was a structurally bad year for the Senate Dems.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-horrible-2018...
Right, this is a good data point in favor of the argument that it's unwise to extrapolate too much from midterm races for the general.
No. It is a good datapoint that one should consider the seats in play when making claims about the senate. The map this time is much less unfavorable for the Democrats.
The party that is "behind" always does well in the mid terms, this is a very well documentes phenomenon. In fact, I think the Dems did much worse in 2018 than expected
That’s not true. The 538 model was very close to the actual outcome in 2018.
By 'expected' I don't mean the models where wrong, I mean the country is on fire and the Democratic party could/should have run away with the election. Instead they lost seats in the senate and did not gain back all the ground they lost in the state governments.
For comparison, the Republicans did very well in the 2014 mid term, convincingly taking over both houses of congress.
The democratic party had every advantage for a convincing win in 2018 and they instead had a very poor showing. The party is not good at elections and I don't see a reason why we expect this election to be different.
"Democrats won the House with the largest midterms margin of all time" [1]
Dems did well in 2018, the issue was that the 1/3 of senators that happened to be up that year were in very bad states for dems geographically.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-democrats-won-h...
The senate stayed red because there were basically zero unsafe red seats open and lots of unsafe blue seats open. If, by coincidence, zero republicans were up for reelection in the senate it would be impossible for the dems to gain seats even in the biggest wave possible. Any analysis which ignores this issue is just foolish.
The Dems had a trifecta in 2008. Very significant shifts in power during presidential elections are not uncommon.
fivethirtyeight gave the democrats a 63% chance of getting a federal trifecta a week ago : https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-forecast-thinks-dem...
> why you seem so confident in a widespread democratic victory
I’m not. The above analysis only depends on a lack of confidence in a GOP trifecta. That’s the only case where pissing them off could result in unilateral action and thus consequences for these moves.
GOP is talking big about Section 230 reform, but it is absurd on its face.
Prior to Section 230, if you censor ANY content (say, child pornography) then you are "moderating" the discussion and are liable for ALL content. If Twitter deletes a death threat tweet, why didn't they delete the defamatory tweet against Hunter Biden or whomever? Biden could sue. So Section 230 allows websites to delete the kiddie porn without becoming a "publisher" of everything that gets posted. Biden can sue the poster but not Twitter.
Reforming (weakening) 230 would force Facebook, Twitter, etc. to choose between allowing all content, and blocking anything that could be the basis for a lawsuit. Of course Facebook and Twitter are not going to become an 8chan free-for-all, so they would be forced to crack down harder, censoring much more aggressively.
Also far-right sites (e.g. InfoWars) very much do not want increased liability here.
So "230 reform" is a useful rallying cry for conservatives who feel censored (rightly or wrongly) by social media giants, but the idea is so obviously bad that I can't imagine they'll go beyond minor tweaks.
This is has the right idea. Both politicians and tech companies are in on it. Politicians get to silence people and control the narrative. Tech companies turn into publishing houses and now have a moat (moderation and legal costs, political connections).
This is the first comment I've seen in this discussion that accurately summarizes what section 230 does, and what its removal would mean.
<meta> It's rather sad that it has been downvoted, and those doing the downvoting should think a bit about their motivations. </meta>
> and blocking anything that could be the basis for a lawsuit.
Almost. That is the situation it would create for small venues like Hacker News-- extreme liability issues and heavy handed moves to mitigate them (if not just a shutdown as would probably be the case for many non-for-profit venues).
But Facebook, Google? These multibillion dollar companies have very little to fear from a lawsuit by the likes of me or you.
They could just staff up their legal team and work anyone who sues them into bankruptcy-- they already do. It isn't like litigation against parties for content they post in the US is easy to begin with even when you're not going after a 900 lb guerilla.
It would be bad news for them but ultimately just a cost of doing business. It might even ultimately be the best for their businesses as the ability to endure lawsuits would be one hell of a moat.
I have figured it out why this move was done despite being stupidly obvious. It is done to provide cover for the next thing Section 230 repealed. Section 230 provides immunity for website publishers from third party content. By repealing section 230, big social media tech gets an even larger monopoly but that's not the reason why this happened. There are lot of people on these social media platforms who are behind the scenes worker type of people. They know how things work and run their mouth freely. Somebody predicted Kamala Harris as VP 1 and 1/2 years out. The politicians can't risk losing control.
Freedom of speech should be a civil right and I hope that’s the result of this. No entity should be allowed to censor speech.
So hacker news shouldn't be allowed to remove spam comments?
hacker news shouldn’t be allowed to censor legitimate information or dissenting political opinions, which is what is covered by the 1st amendment. It doesn’t mean you can literally say whatever you want, e.g. flood sites with spam.
Who gets to be the arbiter of "legitimate"?
Judges do when a lawsuit happens under a civil rights violation case.
Judges, who are government employees, would get to determine what speech is legitimate and what is not? No thanks, I’ll take the current system.
That’s literally how all civil rights are enforced.
Judges can only enforce laws passed by Congress. “Congress shall make no law” seems like a much better plan to me.
Judges do not enforce laws, they apply laws to specific situations, otherwise known as interpreting the law.
“Congress shall make no law” is the text of the first amendment, which is in regard to limiting free expression, not expanding it.
Wouldn’t Congress have to make a law for judges to step in here, though? I’m not sure what you are suggesting, exactly.
No. Congress makes a law that declares the right to free speech to be a civil right. Judges would naturally step in when there is a contested violation of that right, as they currently do in all civil rights disputes .
So HN needs a judge to remove spam?
No. HN would be able to remove spam freely. A judge is only involved if the spammer wants to waste money on a lawsuit where they are likely to lose
What is being amended? Use terms that people understand, please. This is an international forum.
Hacker news operates in the US and if the 1st amendment were made a civil right, it would have to obey that law.
So you can say whatever you want at your job without any repercussion from your employer? Yikes.
If you’re being sincere that’s a false characterization of the freedom of speech. It is not the ability to say whatever you want but it is the ability to share legitimate information or dissenting opinions, the former being the topic of OP. Employers should not be able to deny people their rights.
Employers fire people all the time for comments on social media and they are well within their right to do so. Any suggestion otherwise is a violation of the company's freedom of speech.
Did you read about how this thread is about making freedom of speech a civil right where its protections extend to private entities?
Of course, that's the topic - perhaps you should read my post, and realize the contradiction your idea creates that I clearly pointed out for you.
It’s not a contradiction unless you think employers should be able to violate the civil rights of their employees.
Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
Employers have just the same rights. Take the case of an owner with one employee.
If I own my own business and I'm the only employee, let's say a plumbing business. For years I did my own work, own accounting, own taxes, etc. I decide to add an apprentice who I hire in full time. This apprentice starts evangelizing his political views while on jobs. This turns off customers and doesn't agree with my political views. I don't want my employee to do this. It is not my point of view and it's affecting business. Now in your world, I can't fire this person, or tell him to stop. But by not being allowed to fire this person, and allowing his speech to continue via my company, the government is forcing me and my property to endorse his speech. Why stop there? Why can't I put a Trump sign in my neighbors yard?
Now we're in a contradiction. Who's right to speech matters more in a private setting? Typically the owner of said private setting. By and large, this is true. Does this lead to sticky situations where people are profiled racially? Yes. But I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
Do you think it making it legal for an employee to bark racist words towards their minority colleagues all day at work is a good idea? Because under your free speech rule, that would be OK. Oh look, another contradiction. In any case, we have laws for these scenarios that are largely constitutional because the constitution largely ignores these private settings, thus it is up to us to legislate, hence we have laws on discrimination.
There is no contradiction except in the black and white strawman that you’re projecting. As all debates around civil rights, there is a reasonable middle ground that maximizes everyone’s freedom while minimizing the amount of restriction.
In “my world” where free speech is protected as a civil right, you would be allowed to fire an employee who is using his position to evangelize instead of doing his job. In my world the employee is simply protected from being fired for having a dissenting view when sharing their view in a forum where that would be otherwise appropriate. Or people cannot be censored on social networks for sharing inconvenient truths to any political side.
We already have laws that restrict discrimination in the workplace, setting it up so that protecting free speech in the work place necessarily contradicts that is either intentionally dishonest or an unintentional demonstration of lack of imagination.
The reality is that it’s possible and moral to legislate the protection of free speech civil rights without harmfully violating the employers’ rights. You just don’t believe in free speech civil rights.
> Employers should not be able to deny people their rights
Freedom of speech means the government will not target you for expressing your opinion. It does not mean that your employer has to tolerate it. If I write an op-ed about how my employer makes a shoddy product, they are well within their legal rights to conduct their business how they see fit and terminate their business relationship with me. You seem to confuse freedom of speech with freedom from consequence of speech.
Yes this is why my OP is about making freedom of speech a civil right and extending its protections to private entities. Similar to how anti-discrimination protections are currently extended to private entities.
> making freedom of speech a civil right
Free speech is already a civil right. You are not talking about free speech. So employees would not be allowed to quit working for an employer because that employer used their free speech to support a position they were morally opposed to? Anti-discrimination laws almost exclusively protect who you are i.e. race, gender, nationality, religion, physical ability. Free speech is about the viewpoints you choose to express and the actions you choose to take. You have the freedom to speak and act how you choose, but I also have the freedom hear you and choose how I interact with you or choose not to at all. You can’t legislate that person A is free to speak but person B is not free to react to that speech, as you are restricting the basic freedom of person B. Of course, when B uses their speech and A is not free to react, you are now restricting everyone’s freedom and everyone loses their freedom. As opposed to not legislating the speech or the reactions to that speech and individuals have the freedom to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
Free speech is factually not a civil right in the US currently. Do you know what the definition of a civil right is?
I agree with you in principle, however in practice this has been hijacked to spread misinformation with potentially deadly results. This is a very nuanced issue IMO and the answers are not trivial.
The answer is trivial if you believe in the protection of civil rights.
I believe in the protection of civil rights, but I also believe in the devastating effects of misinformation. We need to find a way to protect against the latter while affecting very little the former, but we're just not there yet.
What devastating effects of misinformation are you referring to? I see no devastating effects of misinformation at all. Your negative worldview is not a reason to allow the civil rights of others to be violated.
Is there any potential benefit for fb in having Section 230 reformed?
the new media moves are building up for a possible civil war
I dont understand the shock.Just 4 years a staffer suspended Donald Trumps account and was considered a hero. So it is not at all surprising that twitter does this sort of policing.
I agree. It was extremely dumb and obvious. TOO OBVIOUS. What are the politicians and social media tech companies trying to get out of section 230?
Have it removed so no other company can get to their scale? We have to always have a way to defer liability to the user who posted the content.
If a website is always responsible for whatever the users post you won't have much of a free internet anymore. However I think the issue with FB and Twitter is that they haven't had any repercussions for breaking the law in the first place.
If you violate rules, you will be banned. They were found to be violating rules, but were treated leniently compared to lower profile users who distribute illegal materials.
This is not new. You will be censored or banned on Hacker News for not following rules. You will not see the distribution of the NY Post's material on this site.
I applaud them for enforcing rules, but not for being lenient with these actors. Free Speech has limits especially in someone elses' house, you should all know this.
Furthermore Reform Section 230 is political crap going nowhere. Any invokation of that here is political nonsense.
There won't be legislative blow back, the GOP is days away from being wholesale evicted from controlling anything at all in DC.
As a legislative move, this is changing their bet to the horse that's about to win. The social media companies are clearly more afraid longterm of what happens if they let this kind of stunt spread than they are afraid of the lame duck.
What makes you think that the Dems wouldn't like to make social media companies liable for misinfo?
That's what I'm trying to say, here. Either way you slice it, 230 is in the crosshairs, it's just a matter of who's holding the gun and for what purpose.
I also wouldn't bet a cent of my own money on the GOP being "wholesale evicted". I heard very similar, equally confident talk in 2016.
Democrats haven’t been raising 230 regulation though, that’s been republicans disgruntled that their ads had been fact-checked (by partisan conservatives, it turns out). The proposed regulations coming out of the house have been more about competition and anti-monopoly.
It’s hard to see this as anything more than an attempt to change their bet on a losing horse in this race, as the commenter you replied to pointed out.
And I’m not sure if we’re remembering the same 2016 election. We’re both talking about the same election, that resulted in the largest win for an American political party in history, right? 2016 was absolutely horrendous for conservatives and their saving grace was the senate cycle was particularly bad for democrats. If there’s a similar performance this election there’s a good chance that they take both branches.
> Democrats haven’t been raising 230 regulation though
They may not be raising specifically 230 concerns. But democrats are absolutely bringing up anti-trust concerns regarding major tech company.
Arguably, anti-trust breakup of major tech companies would be much more destructive to those tech companies, than merely removing some tech companies ability to moderate content.
> They may not be raising specifically 230 concerns. But democrats are absolutely bringing up anti-trust concerns regarding major tech company.
My comment that you replied to says that democrats in the house have been bringing up anti-trust concerns. Anti-trust and 230 regulation are two separate things done for different reasons. They are not equivalent actions nor do are they being pursued out of the same concerns. Trying to conflate them is wrong.
> Trying to conflate
I think that from a higher level principle, they can be conflated.
The way that they can be conflated is that many of these tech companies, just don't have many friends left.
Even if the exact reason as for why they don't have many friends left may be different, the end result is still the same.
The left and the right may be going after them from different angles, but that is still pretty bad, because nobody is there to defend them.
People who may have stuck their neck out to defend them in the past, just aren't going to do so anymore.
Is it really your opinion that the richest and most powerful industry in the world has no ability to defend itself? And that we need to fight back and encourage monopoly and stifle competition?
And sorry, they are still not conflatable - you’re still trying to create a false equivalence. They are not the same thing, the desire here to misrepresent facts to fit into a narrative is intellectually dishonest.
> has no ability to defend itself?
Well, in the legislative bodies, they have much less ability to defend itself, than in the past, due to both parties having significant, albeit different, problems with these companies.
> trying to create a false equivalence.
They are equivalent in the specific aspect of them having less allies in congress, and that this makes them more vulnerable than in the past.
IE, less people in our legislative bodies will be willing to stick their neck out to defend them.
> to fit into a narrative
It is absolutely accurate to say that these companies have less allies in congress, than in the past, and that being hit, from both sides, on these 2 issues, hurts these companies.
I can promise you that the major tech companies have no shortage of people in Washington preaching the benefits their companies provide. I wouldn’t say they have less allies than I would say that people don’t use the same rose-tinted glasses when it comes to these companies and their effects on the markets they participate in. It’d be perverse to have a congress that allows what it sees as monopolistic behavior just because their friends are the ones profiting from it.
> I would say that people don’t use the same rose-tinted glasses
You can use different words to describe having less allies, or allies that are less likely to support them, if you want.
But my point still stands. They either have less allies, or those allies are less likely to look at these tech companies through "rose-tinted glasses"
Glad you agree that their former "allies" are no longer looking at these companies so favorable, using " rose-tinted glasses".
The only people who expected democrats to defend monopolies because they were ‘friends’ has either a very cynical or naive view of the influence of business on the Democratic Party, and very little historical perspective.
Arguments that would essentially allow monopolistic behavior has pretty much always been firmly inside republican laissez-faire circles, and those allies are still very much there. Railing against tech elites may play great for tv, but let’s be honest - Peter Thiel, strong advocate of monopoly, still spoke at the Republican national convention. There’s a good reason they overruled fact-checkers when conservatives violated their prescribed rules, they know where their bread is buttered.
https://www.engadget.com/facebook-overruled-fact-checkers-to...
>Democrats haven’t been raising 230 regulation though, that’s been republicans disgruntled that their ads had been fact-checked
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/29/21274812/joe-biden-donald... : "Joe Biden doesn’t like Trump’s Twitter order, but still wants to revoke Section 230"
I think you are referring to the 2018 election, when the Democratic Party regained majority in the House and there were not many Republican held Senate seats being elected.
Democrats’ victory will be built on purple House seats, COVID blowback, and suburban women and seniors getting cold on Trump. That’s not going to last forever. The “demographic destiny” thing is looking increasingly dubious as Trump continues to outperform expectations among Latinos, even after, well, four years of Trump and COVID and everything. Meanwhile, there is no bench of strong moderates behind Biden. Republicans will be back in office sooner than folks think.
Nonwhite Democrats are culturally far more conservative than white progressives on every issue except for racial issues. This will come to bite Democrats in a big way probably, as I’m almost sure the republicans will sooner or later nominate a nonwhite candidate (Nikki Haley??) and Democrats won’t get the ‘demographic’ vote they were hoping for.
White progressives have become more liberal on race issues recently as well: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white...
> In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.
Trump has plumbed the bottom of the non-white vote. The protests rankled many Latinos. In recent YouGov polling, a narrow majority of Latinos rated “the breakdown of law and order” as a “bigger problem” then “systemic racism.”
Meanwhile, Millenial Black voters are twice as likely to have favorable or somewhat favorable views of Trump than older Black voters: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/ucla-study...
> The data collected from April 2-May 13 by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, an initiative that conducted weekly surveys of thousands of potential voters for nearly a year, found that 29% of percent of black voters ages 30-44 and 21% ages 18-29 have a "very favorable" or "somewhat favorable" view of President Trump. This compares to just 14% of black voters 45-64 and 9% of those 65 and older.
It’s not going to be Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. But Democrats shouldn’t be popping champagne corks assuming that the opposing party will never be in power again.
The republicans have gone too far right for this to work and have left many moderate republicans in no-mans land.
Nikki Haley is not as popular as republicans think she is - she's largely irrelevant right now.
There's research suggesting it's not this simple, and that Black voting is highly coordinated and communitarian. Already, we have strong indicators that most voting is about personal identification and not about fitting candidates to a personal ideological profile (Achen and Bartels). Combine that with White And Laird's observations about the dynamics of Black voting (heavily identified with the Democratic party, and with an awareness of the influence in the party their bloc voting gets them), and I don't think you can just run a Black Republican and peel off that cohort of Democratic voters.
What's more likely to happen is that the progressive dream of celebrity politicians in places like NYC will run aground of what the party is actually game for, because, as you observe, huge portions of the Democratic coalition are far more conservative than the Take Factory gives them credit for.