This is a problem we've dealt with since Boris, our first troll. He was banned not for his opinions, which he assumed were laws discovered by Newton or Bohr or somebody, but for A - Picking fights and B - Vandalism; he was in the habit of trying to deface the site, with enormous pictures or 500 letters in a row with no spaces or hyphens. Except for him, the rest mostly bothered other mods more than they did me, mostly for fighting. I draw the line at brainlessness - racial epithets, pernography, spam, that sort of thing.
[thewriterinblack] When people complain about censorship by FaceBook, Demonetizing or outright deleting content by YouTube, or ranking shenanigans by Google, the people who benefit from these things (by having their opponents silenced or at least throttled) always say it’s not "really" censorship and not a First Amendment Violation because they’re not government. "They’re private companies," it is said. "They can do what they want." My attitude: I built the site, from the ground up. I can manage it as I please. I can shut it down anytime I want.
Except, I guess, refuse to bake a cake. I'm on the baker's side.
I’m going to ramble a bit on several topics here, but they do come together at the end. If you cross my (perhaps subjective) fine line between disagreeing with me and being a dipshit, don't trip over the ban button on the way out.
Some years back Cleveland defense attorney Bob Ingersoll had a column, "The Law is a Ass" printed first in a magazine for comic book fans then repeated elsewhere. In this column he discussed the ways law is used, and misused—the ways they rarely got it right, and the ways they usually got it wrong—in comic books and other media. Among the things he discussed were exclusionary rules and exceptions thereto. One of those rules is if the police perform a search without meeting the legal requirements for probable cause and warrants and what not then the evidence could be excluded from trial. The electric company can't not sell you electricity because you call the lineman names. They can if you try to sabotage his cherry picker. Fedex can't not delivery your Nazi memorabilia to you, but they can if you throw rocks at their truck.
Now, some people might think that this exclusionary rule would apply to someone like Batman making an illegal search so that any evidence thus found must be excluded because of coming from an illegal search. And the answer is...maybe. Yesterday we had the story of a Georgetown law profession whose Zoom conversation lamenting the performance of her black students was recorded (by whom? legally?). She was fired after a howling mob of Georgetown (black) students showed up with a figurative rope...
You see, a private citizen could turn up evidence of a crime, even turn it up illegally, and the evidence is entirely admissible. ... unless otherwise prohibited by law, as in Maryland and Taxachussetts...
It’s admissible because the reason for exclusionary rules is to provide an incentive against police misconduct. By not allowing the police to benefit from police misconduct it is meant to ensure the police don’t violate suspect (that whole"presumption of innocence" thing) rights. When a private citizen does it, however, there’s no police misconduct and, so, no real justification for excluding the evidence (although the citizen can be charged with crimes related to collecting that evidence—breaking and entering, theft, that sort of thing).
And so, evidence collected by Batman is perfectly admissible. Or is it? You see, depending on the era of Batman stories you’re talking about, Batman could have the unofficial, or even downright official (there is at least one rather risible reference in the late-silver to early bronze-age Batman being "officially deputized" by "every law enforcement office in the world". Totally ridiculous, of course, even by comic book standards) status with the Gotham City Police. They permit him to function. They even work in cooperation with him. Other times they treat him as just another criminal...just one that’s harder to catch than even Two-Face and the JokerBut it’s these periods where the police work with Batman that I want to talk about here, where the police turn a blind eye to his illegal activities. These are the cases where the police turn a blind eye to, or at most give no more than lip service of, his illegal activities. These are the cases where the police talk to him about crimes, give him information, or actually call. him. in. to help deal with criminals. A Batman that has that relationship with law enforcement is acting as an agent of government. It doesn’t matter that he’s not a sworn officer. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t draw a government paycheck. He is acting as an officer of the law through his actions and, most especially, through the way law enforcement by their actions approves his.
The courts might still allow illegally obtained evidence provided by Batman to be accepted (and, indeed, in the comics generally did) but the courts would be (and were) wrong to do so. It wouldn’t be the first time the courts made wrong decisions.
Now, let’s look at another topic (trust me, these will tie together). "Section 230". Section 230 is a law that protects public platforms from being held liable for user content. A public platform doesn’t exercise control over content and, therefore, is not liable for it. When you speak to someone on your phone, the carrier, whether ATT or Verizon or someone else, is not legally responsible for anything you say. You can make the most vile statement, even legally actionable statements, and the carrier is protected because they have no control over what you say.
Fair enough, but what happens when a "platform" starts controlling content—limiting some voices, promoting others, endorsing one, disputing another? At that point the rationale for Section 230 protection breaks down. Instead of being a platform, they are now acting as a publisher. They are picking and choosing what content will be allowed. And this means that they are now responsible for everything that they do allow on what they aretrying to call a platform. After all, since they are removing things, if they don’t remove that, then it must be because they approve of it. And so, if, among the billions of posts on a social media site that controls content there is one that includes something actionable, then the people running the social media site are also legally liable for that content. Or they would be if the rationale behind Section 230 were consistently applied.
For a large site with millions, or even billions, of users, it would be far, far better for the folk running it to throw up their hands and say "Oh, no. We’re not even going to try to control content. If you don’t like it, scroll past." After all, how could any automatic algorithm, or any reasonably sized group of moderators, ensure that no posts contained something actionable that would leave them liable. They would be best advised to stay safely behind Section 230 provisions.
That is if the rationale behind Section 230 were consistently applied.
Side note: There can be laws that require even a platform to remove certain types of content as soon as they become aware of it. But note that such laws then are the action of government and, at least in the United States, are a First Amendment issue.
Next topic: Anti-Trust laws. In the US there are laws that are intended to "protect" American consumers from the problems of monopolies. We can discuss the value—good or bad—of such laws and whether their good outweighs their harm and maybe I’ll do that in another post. Not going to get into that here. Suffice to say that such laws do exist. Furthermore, then are often applied "proactively". I.e. they sanction businesses long before they become an actual monopoly. One argument that has been used for sanctioning a company is that it "controls" (which is an odd way of saying "successfully sells to") a "significant" percentage of the market). A company simply "controlling" some rather modest proportions of theirmarket has been enough to trigger anti-trust action. (Note: Thomas Sowell goes into this a bit in his book Basic Economics.)
Facebook "Controls" 69% of the social media market.
About 70% of all searches on Desktop computers use Google. About 90% of all mobile device searches.
And yet, neither has seriously been challenged on an anti-trust basis.
And so we have these online versions of Batman, "private" but being given tacit sanction by government bureaucrats. They are shielded from laws that we peons have to abide by. And thus, they are not entirely "private" businesses, regardless of what their corporate structures might say. Their actions to silence or throttle certain views while promoting others, then, are First Amendment issues.
And if the courts say otherwise, just like with the courts of Gotham City allowing illegally obtained evidence provided by Batman, then so much the worse for the courts.
#2
/\ Yes, it was eventually broken up, divided into smaller companies. Standard Oil's owner was permitted to retain small, partial ownerships in the newly established firms. Those firms grew and prospered, making Standard Oil's founder even wealthier.
#6
Fine. Tie this in with the discussions of firearms bans. The gun grabbers operate on the principle that "because a nut got ahold of a gun, anyone who gets ahold of a gun may well be a nut." They want to punish the innocent for the actions of criminals. They want to put firearms manufacturers out of business because a lawfully made and sold product was intentionally misused.
By that logic, all the social networks should be shut down and every person who has ever participated in any forum where icky speech has occurred should have their fingers cut off and tongues ripped out. But that would be absurd and unjust, of course.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/13/2021 7:13 Comments ||
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#7
One reason the GIVERnment encourages large centralized companies is to more easily manipulate them for social justice. Recent examples include manipulating and controlling social media companies to censor citizens that would clearly be against the law if the GIVERnment did it directly. Federal bank regulators do the same with big banks in lending with payday lenders, gun & ammo manufacturers....
#8
The beloved (by many, but not all) internet blogster who banned me some time back for "being a jerk" (calling some Elon Musk fans cultists) says his blog is "like his living room" and he can decide who gets in there. I don't know how he runs his house, but getting in my living room is not something you can do via the internet. However that may be, it seems blogs and social media straddle that goopy grey area where "private business" meets "public accommodation." Note that the requirement for the baker to bake the ghey cake was rooted in the court's determination that the bakery is a "public accommodation," that is to say, anyone can walk in off the street. What that amounts to is, if I require people to register to interact in my site, am I now a private club as opposed to a "public accommodation?" Or is it just whatever the court decides, devil may care?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/13/2021 9:10 Comments ||
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#9
Big Tech and the legacy media companies suppressed news and facts that undoubtedly would have sunk Biden well before last November.
They threw an election for their candidate.
If we still want to be a Republic, we must eliminate any risk of this crime of the century happening again. Enforce 230 and also break them up.
#11
Big Tech buys politicians all over the place. They have unprecedented power. And if they don't like you, they ban you. Good luck getting your message out when you can't use the world's defacto platforms for communication like Facebook and Twitter.
Anyone here hear of the SuperStraight movement? No? Yeah, that's because it got censored real fast. Now it's gone, and a powerful weapon against the trans crazies is gone and probably won't resurface. It's been banished to web forums with 2000 users instead of 200 million.
#12
I'm "just straight enough" to be a danger to mass media's "anything goes" version of society. There's no meeting in the middle on that and I'm not moving in their desired direction.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/13/2021 12:16 Comments ||
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#13
The fundamental issue is size. R'burg doesn't shape elections; If you've reached the level of more than 20-30% of internet traffic to your site, you're not just a tech company or a blogger anymore. You're now an information gatekeeper-- a political player with the ability to shape election outcomes in a democracy.
R'burg or whatever blog you like -- Substack or Slate, Townhall or Jacobin, doesn't matter which way the little site leans-- these don't shape elections.
But Google, FB and Twitter absolutely positively swung the last election to their candidate by suppressing the extraordinarily vast amount of evidence, testimony, and witnesses who established that Biden is a lying POS and compromisedby the CCP. Most voters had no idea that Biden's family has been selling access to Biden for Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian illicit money.
If CNN, NPR, NYT WaPo etc suppress this, that's a problem, but these companies have a small market share. They compete with the NY Post and Tucker Carlson in a fragmented market.
But GOOG FB and Twitter have no serious rivals in their respective markets. Their political power is immense, and not tolerable in a democracy. They need to be broken up.
#14
The channels of communication should not be subject to some "percentage" litmus test. You should be free to speak your mind at any level. Witness "celebrities" using their megaphones.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/13/2021 13:20 Comments ||
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#15
"Should not be" -- sure. But aren't. When it comes to the flow of information, market dominance brings political power.
Posted by: Jeremiah Prince of the Esquimeaux5557 ||
03/13/2021 14:29 Comments ||
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#16
Speech and the right to self defense both transcend market power. Corrupt politicians and oligarchs may move to deny that, but the truth remains whole.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/13/2021 14:35 Comments ||
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#17
It has become increasingly obvious and annoying over the past twenty years or so that the left actually believes in "capitalism" for themselves but no "capitalism" for anyone else.
[Just The News] The former lead investigator at the State Department who oversaw the Task Force into the origin of the COVID-19 virus told Fox News that he believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese military was doing on a bioweapon.
"The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health," said David Asher, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. "It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I'm just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program."
Asher previously led the team that uncovered Pakistan's nuclear program, headed up by AQ Khan. He told Fox that he believes the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in a massive cover-up during the past 14 months.
[Washington Examiner] President Biden’s White House deputy budget director pick has sparked controversy after claiming that access to abortion is a matter of "racial justice."
"The President has spoken in favor of Congress ending the Hyde Amendment as part of his commitment to providing comprehensive health care for all women," Shalanda Young said in a written portion of her confirmation process obtained by the New York Post on Thursday.
"Further, eliminating the Hyde Amendment is a matter of economic and racial justice because it most significantly impacts Medicaid recipients, who are low-income and more likely to be women of color," Young added.
Young had been asked a question about the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding to abortion except in specific cases such as rape and incest.
Some Republicans have expressed concern over Young’s views on abortion, including Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who voted "no" on her nomination this week.
Anti-abortion groups have criticized Young’s opposition to the Hyde Amendment as well.
"Shalanda Young’s radical support for abortion on demand ignores the devastating toll of abortion on black communities: an abortion rate four times higher than that of their white counterparts," Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said. "This isn’t justice — it is a profound injustice. The fact is, the Hyde Amendment saves 60,000 lives every year."
Young’s nomination was advanced through two Senate committees, but the latest comments could jeopardize her confirmation with more centrist Democrats and Republicans who initially supported her.
#3
Planned Parenthood carrying out Margret Sanger's racial holocaust in the black community as funded by the Commies now running the former party of Andrew Jackson.
[THEASPENBEAT] Now, fifty-eight years later, Black Lives Matter and the politically correct wokerati scorn and condemn the land King dreamed of. We’re told that if we judge people by their character, we’re racist.
Character, we’re told, is a dog whistle for white supremacy ...the pernicious doctrine that laws were intended to be obeyed, that society works better when people don't pour shreiking from their places of worship every Friday for a weekend of rioting over insults real or imagined; and that cannibalism, beastiality, incest, murder, theft, rape, and similar activities are bad. A Dead White European (which invalidates his opinion) philosopher once opined that societies thrive when a person's word can be relied upon, and that a society which puts individual happiness first will invariably fail. Strangely enough, other successful societies, such as China, Japan, Korea, and those kinds of places could also be lumped with white supremacist societies, since they push the same values... . Hard work, rule-following, merit, law-abiding, test scores, marriage, family, honesty, generosity, loyalty, decency and objective measurements of productivity are simply white tools to subordinate minorities.
The left argues that people who value these traits do better in the game of life — and they do — and that those people tend not to be the left’s favored flavors of skin colors. Therefore, these traits are bad and must be de-legitimized.
The de-legitimizing process begins with branding. Traits for success are branded "white privilege." Forget that it is not just whites who value these traits. The phrase "white privilege" has a nice ring to it.
Then they attack the traits themselves. A key trait under attack is the notion of merit. In colleges, the left bans objective measures of academic achievement. In college admissions, for example, the SAT gets canceled because too few of the right kind of minorities do well on it.
Colleges that continue to use the SAT have different cutoffs for different races. At Harvard, the average SAT scores of accepted blacks is 300 points lower than average scores of accepted whites and 450 points lower than accepted Asians. Even high schools are phasing out testing, or specifically discriminating against whites and Asians.
Most thought this foolishness would be limited to academia, because it doesn’t work in the real world. A business that refuses to reward employees for merit tends to see less merit. A business that sees less merit in its employees sees less profits.
But now the madness has metastasized. Everywhere, "merit" is increasingly seen as a codeword for "white."
But if merit is canceled, what replaces it in deciding how to allocate society’s rewards? Race, that’s what.
Along with students, workers are now judged explicitly on the color of their skin. Blacks are greatly favored, Native Americans and Hispanics are favored some, whites are disfavored a little and Asians are disfavored a lot.
The proponents of this racial discrimination insist, ironically and hypocritically, that everyone engage in it and tout it — and all from colleges to corporations do — while simultaneously denying that it actually happens and canceling anyone who objects to it or even points it out. This canceling is done by labeling them "racist."
Posted by: Fred ||
03/13/2021 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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#1
The more important question, IMO, what will it take to cancel white guilt?
[UNZ] The Dr. Seuss book-burning gave a guest on Tucker Carlson’s eponymous show the giggles: "It’s total distraction from the real issues," claimed one Chadwick Moore. So wrong.
Come to think of it, our much-loved TV host’s defense of the purged Dr. Seuss books fell short of freedom’s standards: "Dr. Seuss was not a racist" was the gist of it.
But before deconstructing Tucker’s defeatist and defensive argument—here is the latest in the saga of Dr. Seuss and the wussification of the West, for lack of a better word.
The New York Times reports that, "Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery."
None other than Dr. Seuss Enterprises, "the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator," "had decided last year to end publication and licensing of" the following titles:
#1
Yes. Isn't it obvious? Shakespeare's an apologist for colonialism, oppression, and a Christian apologist.
Next heads on the chopping block:
- Beethoven: toxic male.
- Lincoln: white supremacist.
- Bach, Milton, Rembrandt, Velazquez: militant Christians all; oppressors of women and non-whites.
- Tchaikovsky: binary, and a pre-revolutionary Russian therefore a de facto white supremacist.
#3
^ and they ignore the growth and wealth of former Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore et al) that adopted western science, medicine, institutions, etc.
#4
....At the risk of sounding overwrought, I can see the rise of a new Dark Age - the great classics of civilization being banished by the Woke, and beimng preserved in small enclaves here and there...
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/13/2021 12:08 Comments ||
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#5
Re Dark Ages: Those who still value our great writers, artists and philosophers will be like the Irish 7th century monks, hiding out in islands in the Atlantic off the far western edge of Europe, scribbling away by candlelight, preserving the glorious texts from the barbarian hordes who've destroyed our great civilization and its institutions
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Just The News] The former lead investigator at the State Department who oversaw the Task Force into the origin of the COVID-19 virus told Fox News that he believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese military was doing on a bioweapon.
...the pernicious doctrine that laws were intended to be obeyed, that society works better when people don't pour shreiking from their places of worship every Friday for a weekend of rioting over insults real or imagined; and that cannibalism, beastiality, incest, murder, theft, rape, and similar activities are bad. A Dead White European (which invalidates his opinion) philosopher once opined that societies thrive when a person's word can be relied upon, and that a society which puts 
