The reason y’all lost is Kamala was an untalented, spineless corporate fake politician tied to an administration that was deeply unpopular and who she refused to distance herself from. The reason y’all lost is she ran a shitty neoliberal campaign at a time of populist rage and resentment. It appealed to people making $200,000 a year and no one else. The reason y’all lost is that the Democratic Party stands for nothing and has abandoned the working class and everyone knows it. The reason y’all lost is that the Democrats suck at politics. I’m as critical of the liberal professional-managerial class “left” as anyone, but watching liberals blame them when Kamala Harris did avoided the culture war issues described in this essay is maddening. She ran the platonic ideal of a campaign attempting to ignore and transcend the woke shit. But she lost bc her message on the economy wasn’t strong enough, she very clearly wanted to appeal to corporate America, and when asked if she would do anything different than Biden on The View, she said no.
It's hard to imagine a less able politician in this particular election than Harris. The "Democrats" did the most undemocratic thing imaginable and pushed her in our face and demanded fealty. Fuck that. The Dems blew this. Blew it bad in every possible way, and to point it out is to receive their same lame abuse for not getting in line with them.
I agree the left is overly censorious, but Donald Trump is much more so. It's good to learn from one's mistakes but it's not good to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
He’s worse because we’ve never talked about it. Every time we tried something came up. “Oh. You can’t talk about it cus #metoo, you can’t talk about it cus #blm, you can’t talk about it cus Trump got elected (the first time), we can’t talk about it because the pandemic…. There was always an excuse to not talk about it. It’s like an abusive relationship where your concerns just keep getting ignored because one side is always “busy” until one day you’ve had enough and you say “no. We are talking about this now. I don’t care if it’s your dad’s funeral. Right now. You keep putting it off!”
Of course Donald is worse. He's somewhere deep beneath the lowest sump of disgusting.
I'm usually up on my fallacy recognition, but I had to look that one up. I think it's a wrong application. The sooner I realize I'm screwing up, the sooner I can make a course correction.
There's no crying allowed in baseball, nor feeling sorry for one's self in politics. It's not like this needs some deep contemplation of where the Dems went wrong. If someone can't figure this one out very quickly, there's even deeper problems to overcome.
How was Trump more censorious? Did he try and create a Ministry of Truth like the left did? Did he use NGO governmental cut-outs to force social media companies to bury stories?
He's literally suing people for saying things that he didn't like. He's literally threatened to prosecute people for saying things he doesn't like. He literally wanted to remove media outlets that he didn't like from press conferences.
Maybe read the comment. The OP said that Trump is worse. And that's 100% true. Trump has spent YEARS trying to silence people who said things he didn't like.
I did read the comment. You are conflating criticism and libel lawsuits with the US government instructing social media companies to censor people it doesn't like.
The government was jawboning the companies to try and get them to remove content—not always just “people it didn’t like” btw, often it was things like egregious lies/false information about public health and vaccines, for instance—but the companies were not under legal threat. In fact, as I understand it, some of them even partnered with various government employees/agencies/etc. and worked collaboratively, because they agreed that it’s bad to spread rumors about vaccines, etc. If you think that’s the same thing as being threatened, by the president of the United States, with frivolous lawsuits that are nonetheless very expensive to defend against, then I don’t know what to tell you. (Or if I’ve got my facts wrong here, feel free to correct me.)
You didn't actually read any of the original materials from the Twitter Files, did you. Sounds like you heard it only through a very sympathetic filter. How naive is it to actually believe the "requests" from the FBI didn't have the threat of government force behind them. The internal resistance to these requests from Twitter executives, the forceful language in some of those "requests", and the eventual acquiescence and routine, immediate compliance to large-scale "requests" is telling to anyone who gave it an honest look.
Examples of "harmful misinformation": 1. Covid likely originated from the Wuhan Virology lab. 2. Ivermectin is not harmful to humans and has been prescribed literally billions of times. 3. Routine lists of thousands of regular Americans (internally acknowledged as such by said Twitter execs) to be silenced because they were questioning pro-mRNA vaccine narratives. And so on.
I did read some of the original materials, actually, but of course I didn’t read *everything* in there. Some of it was overreach on the government’s part—the word I used, “jawboning”, essentially implies as much—but look, you and I have a disagreement here. You say the “requests” (not a word I used but fine, you’re using scare-quotes, I get that) had the threat of government force behind them; I say show me the statute or mechanism the FBI or other agencies could have used in order to exercise genuine coercion. What would they actually DO to get the result they wanted? And would it even work? I take leave to doubt it.
When newspapers or other serious media outlets have been/are jawboned by the government (and it happens ALL the time, particularly on national-security issues), they might acquiesce (usually temporarily/partially) or they might not, but there have been countless cases where their final response is, essentially, “we’ll see you in court”. No such courage on Twitter’s part, and don’t tell me they didn’t have the resources to pay for the legal costs.
I don’t think the Twitter files were anything like the monumental achievement that Taibbi likes to portray them as, especially since he was just handed this stuff by Musk and we don’t know for sure how selective or not he was in deciding what to hand over; it’s not like this was intrepid shoe-leather reporting or whatever cliché phrase one might use. I found the project pretty unimpressive, frankly, and Taibbi’s recent up-sucking to the incoming administration about *how to use the Twitter files to carry out Kash Patel’s insane vengeance quest at the FBI* (!!!) absolutely firebombed whatever respect I had left for the guy. Though tbh I never had a ton in the first place; I didn’t like his Occupy stuff or his “vampire squid” stuff or any of that. I’ve always seen him as an obnoxious sensationalist who likes to have a favorite enemy he can demonize and pound away at—a populist journalist, basically, which imo is an oxymoron.
As for your examples: 1) That’s a silly thing to consider “harmful misinformation”, and no amount of government resources should have been spent trying to suppress it. You and I are on the same page on that one. 2) I don’t think the main complaint was about ivermectin’s harmfulness or otherwise—no one disputes that it’s safe for humans to consume in appropriate dosages—it was about whether it’s an effective treatment for Covid (and, crucially, one that should be used instead of the vaccine), which it is not. 3) Were these people being “silenced” for “questioning pro-mRNA vaccine narratives”, or were some of their posts being downranked or otherwise suppressed because they amounted to something more like anti-mRNA vaccine bullshit intended to stoke fears about the vaccines? In a public health crisis where it’s very important that people get vaccinated against a pandemic disease, it strikes me as prudent to try and find ways to reduce the number of people being exposed to lies that would make them much less likely to get vaccinated. I’m sure a lot of it was very heavy-handedly, and some of it was just straightforwardly a mistake; that seems probably true to me. But yeah, I don’t feel like I or any other random citizen has a right to just spray bullshit into the public discourse, have my bullshit algorithmically boosted, and sow unwarranted fear among the public—especially in extraordinary circumstances like the pandemic.
Sorry for the long reply, but yeah, I think you and I have quite a different view of the Twitter files and of this subject more broadly. And I stand by my point: Trump’s incessant frivolous lawsuits that are intended solely to silence his enemies, and his constant wild rhetoric about said enemies (which tends to gin up actual violent responses by his fans, btw) are MUCH more sinister and intimidating than the behind-the-scenes “coercion” used on Twitter over this stuff we’re talking about.
I have to agree with Brent here. He is a hypocrite who wants to silence his specific critics. That’s bad. Is he setting up an organization to check ALL claims against everything? Is the point being brought up.
He's suing a Des Moines newspaper for sharing poll results that he didn't like. That's what I'm referring to. Yes, if he sues people constantly (which he does), he'll get a few people to settle. And I hope you're smart enough to know that settling a lawsuit isn't the same thing as "losing". Do you know that?
"you guys"? You really don't get it, do you? Are you incapable of understanding that it's possible for someone to be disgusted by MAGA/Trump and not be "the left"?
Yes, They published a poll right before an election, that wasn't just wrong due to polling error, it was wrong in the fundamentals. If making shit up, and publishing it as fact with an 'expert' behind it, isn't grounds for getting sued, then I don't know what is.
Yee youre right about one thing: you definitely "don't know what is" grounds for a libel law suit. Its not libel for a news outlet to simply be wrong, they have to be repeatedly wrong with actual malice.
But if you do want to know what constitutes libel, look up Dominion Voting Systems vs Fox News.
Hahahahahhahaha. So if you hire someone to lie for you, not utilizing any of the accepted practices in polling, and their not libel for lying? Its called editorial responsibility jackass. Its why websites claim their publishers and not editors. :)
Sure, same difference but your so blinded by your partisanship that you can't even see that. This is what is killing the country. We have to have accountability by all levels of power in our country. Own it and pay up if your making it up.
You're right, which is why I'd like liberals to stand up for liberal ideals once again. Because if we do so, it'll be far more genuine than Trump pretending to care about those things when he clearly doesn't.
Excellent. If you're a typical example of lefties, that's a great sign that the Dems will continue to stew in denial rather than change course away from their most wildly unpopular positions, like men in women's sports, "hate speech", medical mutilation of kids, pretending that "the economy" matters more to voters than inflation, and pretending that illegals aren't illegal and openly wishing to grant them full citizenship.
You're guaranteeing GOP dominance for the foreseeable future 👍🏼
What reason is that?
The reason why we lost. The sooner one accepts one's mistakes and changes course, the sooner things improve.
The reason y’all lost is Kamala was an untalented, spineless corporate fake politician tied to an administration that was deeply unpopular and who she refused to distance herself from. The reason y’all lost is she ran a shitty neoliberal campaign at a time of populist rage and resentment. It appealed to people making $200,000 a year and no one else. The reason y’all lost is that the Democratic Party stands for nothing and has abandoned the working class and everyone knows it. The reason y’all lost is that the Democrats suck at politics. I’m as critical of the liberal professional-managerial class “left” as anyone, but watching liberals blame them when Kamala Harris did avoided the culture war issues described in this essay is maddening. She ran the platonic ideal of a campaign attempting to ignore and transcend the woke shit. But she lost bc her message on the economy wasn’t strong enough, she very clearly wanted to appeal to corporate America, and when asked if she would do anything different than Biden on The View, she said no.
It's hard to imagine a less able politician in this particular election than Harris. The "Democrats" did the most undemocratic thing imaginable and pushed her in our face and demanded fealty. Fuck that. The Dems blew this. Blew it bad in every possible way, and to point it out is to receive their same lame abuse for not getting in line with them.
I agree the left is overly censorious, but Donald Trump is much more so. It's good to learn from one's mistakes but it's not good to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
He’s worse because we’ve never talked about it. Every time we tried something came up. “Oh. You can’t talk about it cus #metoo, you can’t talk about it cus #blm, you can’t talk about it cus Trump got elected (the first time), we can’t talk about it because the pandemic…. There was always an excuse to not talk about it. It’s like an abusive relationship where your concerns just keep getting ignored because one side is always “busy” until one day you’ve had enough and you say “no. We are talking about this now. I don’t care if it’s your dad’s funeral. Right now. You keep putting it off!”
Of course Donald is worse. He's somewhere deep beneath the lowest sump of disgusting.
I'm usually up on my fallacy recognition, but I had to look that one up. I think it's a wrong application. The sooner I realize I'm screwing up, the sooner I can make a course correction.
There's no crying allowed in baseball, nor feeling sorry for one's self in politics. It's not like this needs some deep contemplation of where the Dems went wrong. If someone can't figure this one out very quickly, there's even deeper problems to overcome.
How was Trump more censorious? Did he try and create a Ministry of Truth like the left did? Did he use NGO governmental cut-outs to force social media companies to bury stories?
He's literally suing people for saying things that he didn't like. He's literally threatened to prosecute people for saying things he doesn't like. He literally wanted to remove media outlets that he didn't like from press conferences.
Suing for libel doesn't equal censorship.
Regardless, asserting the right is worse than the left when it comes to free speech is demonstratively wrong.
That is just Blue-Anon fan fiction
Maybe read the comment. The OP said that Trump is worse. And that's 100% true. Trump has spent YEARS trying to silence people who said things he didn't like.
I did read the comment. You are conflating criticism and libel lawsuits with the US government instructing social media companies to censor people it doesn't like.
Not even in the same universe.
The government was jawboning the companies to try and get them to remove content—not always just “people it didn’t like” btw, often it was things like egregious lies/false information about public health and vaccines, for instance—but the companies were not under legal threat. In fact, as I understand it, some of them even partnered with various government employees/agencies/etc. and worked collaboratively, because they agreed that it’s bad to spread rumors about vaccines, etc. If you think that’s the same thing as being threatened, by the president of the United States, with frivolous lawsuits that are nonetheless very expensive to defend against, then I don’t know what to tell you. (Or if I’ve got my facts wrong here, feel free to correct me.)
You didn't actually read any of the original materials from the Twitter Files, did you. Sounds like you heard it only through a very sympathetic filter. How naive is it to actually believe the "requests" from the FBI didn't have the threat of government force behind them. The internal resistance to these requests from Twitter executives, the forceful language in some of those "requests", and the eventual acquiescence and routine, immediate compliance to large-scale "requests" is telling to anyone who gave it an honest look.
Examples of "harmful misinformation": 1. Covid likely originated from the Wuhan Virology lab. 2. Ivermectin is not harmful to humans and has been prescribed literally billions of times. 3. Routine lists of thousands of regular Americans (internally acknowledged as such by said Twitter execs) to be silenced because they were questioning pro-mRNA vaccine narratives. And so on.
I did read some of the original materials, actually, but of course I didn’t read *everything* in there. Some of it was overreach on the government’s part—the word I used, “jawboning”, essentially implies as much—but look, you and I have a disagreement here. You say the “requests” (not a word I used but fine, you’re using scare-quotes, I get that) had the threat of government force behind them; I say show me the statute or mechanism the FBI or other agencies could have used in order to exercise genuine coercion. What would they actually DO to get the result they wanted? And would it even work? I take leave to doubt it.
When newspapers or other serious media outlets have been/are jawboned by the government (and it happens ALL the time, particularly on national-security issues), they might acquiesce (usually temporarily/partially) or they might not, but there have been countless cases where their final response is, essentially, “we’ll see you in court”. No such courage on Twitter’s part, and don’t tell me they didn’t have the resources to pay for the legal costs.
I don’t think the Twitter files were anything like the monumental achievement that Taibbi likes to portray them as, especially since he was just handed this stuff by Musk and we don’t know for sure how selective or not he was in deciding what to hand over; it’s not like this was intrepid shoe-leather reporting or whatever cliché phrase one might use. I found the project pretty unimpressive, frankly, and Taibbi’s recent up-sucking to the incoming administration about *how to use the Twitter files to carry out Kash Patel’s insane vengeance quest at the FBI* (!!!) absolutely firebombed whatever respect I had left for the guy. Though tbh I never had a ton in the first place; I didn’t like his Occupy stuff or his “vampire squid” stuff or any of that. I’ve always seen him as an obnoxious sensationalist who likes to have a favorite enemy he can demonize and pound away at—a populist journalist, basically, which imo is an oxymoron.
As for your examples: 1) That’s a silly thing to consider “harmful misinformation”, and no amount of government resources should have been spent trying to suppress it. You and I are on the same page on that one. 2) I don’t think the main complaint was about ivermectin’s harmfulness or otherwise—no one disputes that it’s safe for humans to consume in appropriate dosages—it was about whether it’s an effective treatment for Covid (and, crucially, one that should be used instead of the vaccine), which it is not. 3) Were these people being “silenced” for “questioning pro-mRNA vaccine narratives”, or were some of their posts being downranked or otherwise suppressed because they amounted to something more like anti-mRNA vaccine bullshit intended to stoke fears about the vaccines? In a public health crisis where it’s very important that people get vaccinated against a pandemic disease, it strikes me as prudent to try and find ways to reduce the number of people being exposed to lies that would make them much less likely to get vaccinated. I’m sure a lot of it was very heavy-handedly, and some of it was just straightforwardly a mistake; that seems probably true to me. But yeah, I don’t feel like I or any other random citizen has a right to just spray bullshit into the public discourse, have my bullshit algorithmically boosted, and sow unwarranted fear among the public—especially in extraordinary circumstances like the pandemic.
Sorry for the long reply, but yeah, I think you and I have quite a different view of the Twitter files and of this subject more broadly. And I stand by my point: Trump’s incessant frivolous lawsuits that are intended solely to silence his enemies, and his constant wild rhetoric about said enemies (which tends to gin up actual violent responses by his fans, btw) are MUCH more sinister and intimidating than the behind-the-scenes “coercion” used on Twitter over this stuff we’re talking about.
I have to agree with Brent here. He is a hypocrite who wants to silence his specific critics. That’s bad. Is he setting up an organization to check ALL claims against everything? Is the point being brought up.
So you're good with a "hypocrite who wants to silence his critics" as the President? Yeah, what could go wrong there?
What is more dangerous? a gadfly hypocrite or a noxious ideology?
I'll take "noxious ideology held by screeching liberal arts freshmen" over "hypocrite in the most powerful job in the world".
https://www.thefire.org/news/fires-defense-pollster-j-ann-selzer-against-donald-trumps-lawsuit-first-amendment-101
She didn't do libel. He doesn't even claim libel.
This is fucking bullshit.
I mean they did lose a libel lawsuit... I think its not that he doesn't like them... maybe they are actually lying and he doesn't like that?
He's suing a Des Moines newspaper for sharing poll results that he didn't like. That's what I'm referring to. Yes, if he sues people constantly (which he does), he'll get a few people to settle. And I hope you're smart enough to know that settling a lawsuit isn't the same thing as "losing". Do you know that?
maybe the left should have thought it through before widening the definition of "election interference" so broadly.
Two can play the lawfare game.
That is on you guys.
You really are ridiculous.
you guys brought this on yourselves. I have zero sympathy.
the left excels at creating enemies and then acts shocked when their targets treat them in the same way.
"you guys"? You really don't get it, do you? Are you incapable of understanding that it's possible for someone to be disgusted by MAGA/Trump and not be "the left"?
Yes, They published a poll right before an election, that wasn't just wrong due to polling error, it was wrong in the fundamentals. If making shit up, and publishing it as fact with an 'expert' behind it, isn't grounds for getting sued, then I don't know what is.
Yee youre right about one thing: you definitely "don't know what is" grounds for a libel law suit. Its not libel for a news outlet to simply be wrong, they have to be repeatedly wrong with actual malice.
But if you do want to know what constitutes libel, look up Dominion Voting Systems vs Fox News.
Hahahahahhahaha. So if you hire someone to lie for you, not utilizing any of the accepted practices in polling, and their not libel for lying? Its called editorial responsibility jackass. Its why websites claim their publishers and not editors. :)
Sure, same difference but your so blinded by your partisanship that you can't even see that. This is what is killing the country. We have to have accountability by all levels of power in our country. Own it and pay up if your making it up.
LOL at someone who supports Trump talking about "accountability".
You're right, which is why I'd like liberals to stand up for liberal ideals once again. Because if we do so, it'll be far more genuine than Trump pretending to care about those things when he clearly doesn't.
Excellent. If you're a typical example of lefties, that's a great sign that the Dems will continue to stew in denial rather than change course away from their most wildly unpopular positions, like men in women's sports, "hate speech", medical mutilation of kids, pretending that "the economy" matters more to voters than inflation, and pretending that illegals aren't illegal and openly wishing to grant them full citizenship.
You're guaranteeing GOP dominance for the foreseeable future 👍🏼
Except Dems aren't in power. The guaranteed excesses of the GOP is what precludes GOP dominance for the foreseeable future.
Yes! Keep going! The land of Denial Oblivion eagerly awaits you.
And I can see you've been a permanent resident of the land of Ignorance of History for some time now.
Why am i reading this?