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_heimdall 2 hours ago [-]
Here's a crazy thought - if you're the president of the united states, or in his cabinet, and don't like news coverage that makes POTUS look bad regardless of the accuracy, how about you find some big boy pants and do better if you don't want to "look bad."
parineum 1 hours ago [-]
Not that I agree with this move at all but, if the coverage is inaccurate, no amount of putting on your big boy pants and doing better will make you look less bad.
Nothing Obama could have done was going to make Obama look good on Fox News.
scuff3d 2 minutes ago [-]
Can you imagine the absolute mayhem at Fox News if Obama had declared himself the greatest president of all time.
Or declared a US company a supply chain risk after trying to weasel out of a contract.
Or, you know, incited a terrorist attack on the US Capitol...
_heimdall 50 minutes ago [-]
I was going of the OP article here, the quote is a concern that it makes Trump look bad, not that it is inaccurate reporting.
I do agree with you though, if reporting is wrong then that's the problem. In those cases, and there are plenty, the concern raised should be inaccuracy rather than optics though.
bediger4000 38 minutes ago [-]
How do you know the coverage is "wrong"? I mean, no news org, not NYT, not Fox, not WaPo, not even NPR can determine if Trump is lying. Sure, they occasionally note that what he says is "baseless", but never lies. So how are you going to determine wrong?
brandensilva 3 hours ago [-]
Propaganda state run networks are for dictatorships, not democracies.
spwa4 19 minutes ago [-]
That's not really accurate. I'd say in dictatorships you have one state run network ... and they grow very "confident". Most of the population doesn't believe the state network, but also doesn't have real other sources of information. Shit happens and nobody knows, like the surprise internet outages in Russia recently spreading to Moscow.
In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere.
This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...
lo_zamoyski 2 hours ago [-]
The distinction between state and corporate media is generally a meaningless one. What matters is the power to shape and misshape public opinion. The American quibbling about “private/corporate vs. public/gov’t” consistently misses the point.
thrance 26 minutes ago [-]
Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
MarkusQ 7 minutes ago [-]
> Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is.
Generally, knowing the truth is more useful than the alternative.
> There are countries with a freer press that fare better.
That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw squirrel.
> Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools
> care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
No one said that.
curt15 8 hours ago [-]
"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019
adrr 3 hours ago [-]
Same party thats says they are against new wars.
matthewdgreen 8 hours ago [-]
So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.
verdverm 8 hours ago [-]
Every accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now
helterskelter 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's something they're doing consciously, accusing the opposition of doing what they're doing. It puts opposition on the back foot, muddies the water, and provides justification for doing something you shouldn't be since "the other side already did it". This us partly why politics has become like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (more than it was before anyway).
throwaway173738 3 hours ago [-]
Which is why we need to watch the polls closely this year. They’ve repeatedly accused everyone of massive voter fraud so they will most certainly try it themselves.
helterskelter 3 hours ago [-]
Slight tangent but the thought has crossed my mind that (the potential of) retaliation by Iran could be a pretense for taking broad executive action which normally wouldn't be permitted, perhaps under the guise of securing the election. They may even do something which will be ruled illegal after the fact by courts, but it could take months after the election to reach a verdict and there's really no precedent in America for broadly declaring a federal election invalid.
To be clear I don't really expect this to happen but at this point I honestly wouldn't even be surprised.
throwaway173738 2 hours ago [-]
I think they were hoping to provoke riots with ICE but since they didn’t happen they’re using Iran. If there’s a “terrorist” strike in November followed by a suspension of elections that’s likely what’s happening.
toraway 57 minutes ago [-]
Accusation in a mirror, a strategy that is pretty much as you describe.
Wait there was active efforts to tailor free speech all over the place? Are you going to make an argument tyere has EVER been a US admin that didn't try to do this?
icehawk 2 hours ago [-]
I live in the present, and not the past, so I'm not sure what your argument is here.
gtaylor 6 hours ago [-]
This “both sides” argument is so weak.
throwaway173738 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah like if I’m in quicksand and asking to be helped out of it the appropriate response isn’t to say “the mud pit I’m sinking in is just as bad.” It’s to go get a rope.
foogazi 8 hours ago [-]
They can’t take your license away if you don’t have one
wewewedxfgdf 2 hours ago [-]
YouTube is a problem, people speaking their minds.
jacquesm 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?
A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
matthewdgreen 8 hours ago [-]
It would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.
Bender 7 hours ago [-]
That was already taken by the DHS and then dismantled in 2022.
jacquesm 8 hours ago [-]
You're probably right.
Quekid5 2 hours ago [-]
Ministry of Truth & Love.
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
I assumed it would the the Ministry of Trump. He likes putting his name on things.
skeledrew 8 hours ago [-]
Is a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?
jacquesm 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.
Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.
markdown 3 hours ago [-]
What free press? The mass media is controlled by a handful of billionaires who kowtow to the government in order to earn more billions.
thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago [-]
And let us say out loud after all the whining about cancel culture it was Republicans, as expected, who are actually going after the first amendment.
thrance 7 hours ago [-]
During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.
Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.
> All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.
Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.
h0dl0n 2 hours ago [-]
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stinkbeetle 3 hours ago [-]
Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.
lo_zamoyski 2 hours ago [-]
> There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side.
I tire of the partisan hypocrisy that so many people seem incapable of shedding. Have people already forgotten the whole cancel culture hysteria a few years back, or has that already gone down the memory hole? And that’s just one episode in a broader trajectory.
How “principled” each party is is dependent on how something aligns with their interests. Usually, parties suddenly become principled when they’re in the opposition; it’s easy to put on a big show of being principled when you’ve already assumed the role of the underdog. You don’t have the power to prove it. However, when the opposition does take power, those principles generally fly right out the window. In other words, principles aren’t things to live by, but cudgels to be used to try to cripple your opponent in the court of public opinion.
Neither party is principled. They’re two factions of the same uniparty, both composed of delegates representing the interests of their respective oligarchs. The average citizen does not figure into their squabbles except as canon fodder or minion. When we embrace party loyalty, we willfully become instruments of these oligarchs.
In other words: each party likes to babble about “free speech” when it suits them, whatever they mean by the term.
My preference is to focus on individual actions and policies and give credit where credit is due, and criticism where criticism is called for. (And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech, rightly understood.)
paulryanrogers 2 hours ago [-]
Was the left's cancel movement really hysterical? Or are you referring to the right's reaction to it
I don't recall Obama or Biden administrations opening threatening private outlets.
thrance 1 hours ago [-]
I tire of this pathetic bothsideism. "Cancel culture" never made it to law, and had zero implications for the people that were supposedly targeted. Case in point: Trump is still president despite being a child rapist that tried to overthrow the American democracy. The Right is uniquely bad for free speech and free press in this country (and the economy, and corruption, and the environment, and peace...). Stop pretending otherwise.
Do you remember Biden or his ministers openly calling journalists names for their "stupid questions" at every press conference? Because that's what the Trump admin does daily. They revoked entry to the white house to some publications they disagree with, they facilitated mergers to put more media in the hands of their allies, they have the FCC threaten "unpatriotic" reporting with sanctions... Need I continue?
> And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech
Fucking where?? I am yet to meet a single Republican who condemned anything Trump ever did.
johnsmith1840 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jacquesm 8 hours ago [-]
> I mean it's not like any administration was any different?
If you really believe that then I don't think we're going to have much to discuss.
This is not one of those 'both sides' discussions. This is a current affairs discussion.
johnsmith1840 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jacquesm 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, (1) dogwhistle for 'racism is ok' (2) my bodily autonomy beats you staying alive (3) see (1).
Note that I'm not an American, but I know a grifter and an asshole when I see one and trump is both, without a doubt. If you believe the two parties in the USA are equal in this sense then you are willfully blind at this point.
The number of people that are comfortable with outright racism and xenophobia on HN is scary, the number of people that are unable to see the hand behind the curtain during a time when we were very vulnerable and who seem to take their personal comfort above the health of others is scary as well. But I guess that what you get when you tell a good chunk of the world that they are movie stars authors and celebrities.
COVID was interesting: as pandemics go this was a mild one, and yet, we fucked it up and here you are using it as a plank in your argument that the government has too much power. Sorry, but if that was your takeaway then you really were not paying attention and you probably have no clue about biology.
If you have the time and the spare cash go buy the book Spillover, read it and then check the date when it was written. Also realize that it is about the next pandemic, not the previous one. It probably won't do your sleep any good but at least you'll be a bit better informed.
was on the money. Now follow the money and see where it leads.
Also, and final note on this: from the perspective of many other countries the USA has a one party system, with one party as a milder version of the other, but that doesn't mean that that not-so-mild version does not have some material differences, and that some of those differences may well lead to destabilizing the country on a scale not seen since the last few hundred years.
Rodeoclash 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you for taking the time to write this out. I've long since given up having any debate with people on these subjects so it's heartening to see some still flying the flag.
johnsmith1840 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
johnsmith1840 5 hours ago [-]
Should clarify "racist speech or thought is legal" clearly you can't do actions against a race of people legally
jacquesm 5 hours ago [-]
> So yeah you're on a US platform americans don't think like europeans.
I know lots of Americans, both online and in person, I see very little difference between 'how Americans think' and 'how Europeans think'. What I did see is that you automatically assumed I was on the other side of you politicall, and that isn't the case, we are at least an ocean (and in many ways a world) apart and I figured you deserved a heads up so that at least you can calibrate your arguments. Besides that, I've lived on the other side of the US border for quite a long time and probably have more friends in the USA than I do in Europe.
> 1. Racism is Legal in US, disagree if you want but that's a core stance baked VERY deep into our system.
I don't care about racism (or, racist speech) being legal in the United States in the sense that I think it should not be legal anywhere, but I'm more upset at the fact that there are a number of outright racists active on HN who for some reason are not shut down. This bothers me at a very fundamental level because it's the Nazi bar problem: if you visit a bar and there are Nazi's there then you are visiting a Nazi bar. It risks guilt by association and I'm here under my real name.
HN has a serious problem that it refuses to acknowledge and this goes way beyond what is legal and what is not, it boils down to 'is this the kind of community that we want to create'. I think the best way to address that is - as you are finding out - to speak up against this as much as possible, though I have to admit it is getting more than a little tiring.
> 2. My point was literal free speech attacks justified or not happen.
That's true, but there are times when your right to 'free speech' can be temporarily trumped (I hate that word, but we're stuck with it) by the right of others to want to stay alive. This is perfectly fine and only the most ardent free speech absolutists will hold that there should be no limits at all (usually, they are also the first to apply for legal protection when those free speech rights are used against them, especially if they're wealthy and/or powerful). If you think free speech is so holy check out who are clamoring the loudest for it in the present and then study - as someone else in this thread already mentioned - Popper and see what he has to say about this. Everything in moderation, even absolutism is a good starting point.
> The intent to stop racism/xenophobia is moral but the mechanisms are bad.
No, the mechanisms are just the tools to not stop it but to stop its spread and as such the experts are the Germans. They have experienced first hand what it is like to have no holds on how far you are willing to let the freedom of speech go before you are on a path that will harm you for generations to come. It's possible that every geographic region has to learn this lesson on its own time, the problem is that we as humanity can not afford that luxury.
Racism, xenophobia, nazism: all of these are very bad things and if we all recognize that and realize that mental viruses spread through the same vectors as all of our other information that it is a good thing to combat them in the arena where they dominate and fester. Turning a blind eye and saying 'it is only speech' is the same as saying about Anthrax 'it's only a couple of molecules'. You can't outlaw molecules, but we definitely have ruled out the use and possession of Anthrax.
> If EU swings far right and the same tools to attack racism are flipped to attack liberal beliefs the EXACT argument you hold will be used against you.
No, they won't be. I believe there is a time to talk and that there is a time to act and that would be a time to stop talking.
> They will say: "lgbt is morally wrong and therefore any pro lgbt statements on social media are now an arrestable offense" without true free speech baked in that's possible.
I will be right there on the barriers, you can take that to the bank. I'm not the kind of person that just sits around and yaps, stuff gets done. And let's not pretend that the freedom of speech is how the LGBT community got their recognition in the first place, they were squelched everywhere possible and there are more than one States in the Union now where their rights are trampled left, right and center.
johnsmith1840 4 hours ago [-]
I don't like reddit style arguments but ok.
You are quite literally saying you are anti free speech while simultaneously complaining about trump infringing it.
You are directly calling for a small US platform to censor free speech when you are not even here?
You would protest I'm sure but if a far right controlled EU came to be the point is you'd be the minority and would be treated exactly like EU treats your far right groups now.
You're arguing from a moral highground when I literally don't care. I am not much morally different than you I agree with almost all liberal beliefs.
I am saying I hope you and others like you never have the ability to perform the actions you call for in america. I view calls for censorship and stopping the spread of ideas as far more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
I will say in EU you may be largely right. If far right get in power they will crush liberal beliefs exactly as liberal crushed far right beliefs and all your fears will occur.
There would be your evil twin advocating all platforms to ban pro lgbt statements and getting laws in place to make it happen.
Instead we should make laws to prevent you or your evil twin doing anything to the free flow of ideas.
AKA: the first Amendment
This whole conversation makes me love america lol
jacquesm 3 hours ago [-]
> You are quite literally saying you are anti free speech while simultaneously complaining about trump infringing it.
I did not 'quite literally' say anything like that.
> You are directly calling for a small US platform to censor free speech when you are not even here?
Sorry, but this is not a small US platform but a large global one and that pesky thing called 'free speech' that you're so hot about at least should give me the right to speak my mind about the limits to free speech because it is clear that HN is weaponized, and I don't want it to be.
> You would protest I'm sure but if a far right controlled EU came to be the point is you'd be the minority and would be treated exactly like EU treats your far right groups now.
The reason the EU treats those far right groups like that is to avoid a certain replay. I'm all for avoiding that.
> You're arguing from a moral highground when I literally don't care.
You're free to stop arguing, but as long as you argue you show you do care.
> I am not much morally different than you I agree with almost all liberal beliefs.
So, it's worth arguing about those little details that may make the difference between 'society survives' and 'society goes boom'.
> I am saying I hope you and others like you never have the ability to perform the actions you call for in america.
I don't have any power in America, other than the power of speech from the other side of the ocean, on a forum where I spent infinitely more time than you by now. And yes, I do care.
> I view calls for censorship and stopping the spread of ideas as far more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
Yes, there are many more like you. And that's fine. But there are also some that have read the occasional war diary (or two) and that realize that free speech can be weaponized just as easily as censorship and that both of these are wrong. It's just that as soon as you become dogmatic you lose objectivity, and the Germans have found out the hard way that some trees are best taken out before they grow roots. Whether they will be able to keep doing that forever remains to be seen but it should be a tell that the likes of Musk are aligned with the EU far right. And Musk is a lot more meddlesome in EU politics than I'll ever be in the states.
> I will say in EU you may be largely right. If far right get in power they will crush liberal beliefs exactly as liberal crushed far right beliefs and all your fears will occur.
And what makes you think the USA is immune? Doesn't the most recent decade show you that you are as much if not more in danger than Europe?
> There would be your evil twin advocating all platforms to ban pro lgbt statements and getting laws in place to make it happen.
I don't know why you keep bringing LGBT into this but this goes far beyond that.
> Instead we should make laws to prevent you or your evil twin doing anything to the free flow of ideas.
No worries, Bezos, Musk, Murdoch, Trump and a whole bunch of others that are way out of your control are doing just that, you don't need me for that. You'll have the illusion of the free flow of ideas but it will be nicely choreographed.
> AKA: the first Amendment
> This whole conversation makes me love america lol
...
peyton 5 hours ago [-]
Not to be rude but we don’t know where Europeans stand politically and genuinely do not care. Collectively you don’t speak your minds and do not defend those who dare to do so. Which is the point. We all come from people who had reasons not to be where they were previously. We’ve seen the guillotines and the bread lines and the famines and we don’t want that here.
jacquesm 5 hours ago [-]
No, you are rude, and you're wrong besides. Imagine: being ignorant and being proud of that ignorance at the same time.
Also, when you think 'we' you should spell 'I'.
thrance 35 minutes ago [-]
This isn't rude, this is fucking insulting, and you know it.
> Collectively you don’t speak your minds and do not defend those who dare to do so.
Unlike Americans? Your democracy is in peril, not ours. Your press is under attack. Your free speech is threatened. Stop revelling in your ignorance and go do something about it.
Or don't. Maybe the world's ready to move on from American hegemony.
tastyface 6 hours ago [-]
"If you think trump is big bad then you need to realize the trumpers have thought the SAME about your party for like a decade now."
Yes, and they were wrong, or far more plausibly, blatantly lying about it. The Trump administration's assaults on press freedom are, factually speaking, orders of magnitude worse than anything Biden was purported to do. They claimed Biden did what they *wanted* to do all along.
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
Fucking Christ.
I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.
I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.
Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.
pstuart 8 hours ago [-]
The irony of this would be quite amusing if it wasn't so dangerous. Where are all the "free speech absolutists" now?
dlivingston 2 hours ago [-]
Right here, to name one. Needless to say I feel very bleak and despondent as I watch the America I thought I knew transform into something dark. I do not anticipate the next decade+ of life in America to be free and prosperous.
RiverCrochet 3 hours ago [-]
Broadcast TV (and cable TV too) has been whithering on the vine for a long time. What a network couldn't broadcast on TV could simply be put on YouTube or other social network. TV could become state-owned media at this point and I don't think anyone would really care as long as the Internet is the way it is.
nickthegreek 3 hours ago [-]
I largely agree, but I think we have another 5-8 years before TV’s candle light is really extinguished. I hope they fight this nonsense to the bitter end.
refulgentis 8 hours ago [-]
HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.
I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.
The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.
My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.
So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.
Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”
jacquesm 7 hours ago [-]
Well, we have a bunch of really problematic accounts on HN and I suspect that rather than to go into 'endless curious conversation' with those characters people just give up at some point. It's interesting in a way because one of PGs most famous post is the one about 'no broken windows'.
pstuart 7 hours ago [-]
I'm all for having conversations with those having other viewpoints, but it doesn't seem to be possible when they don't argue in good faith (or even grounded in reality).
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.
In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.
I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.
This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
jacquesm 7 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and it is interesting how all those countries that have seen this up close have reasonable upper limits and courts that will try to find a balance without falling over one way or the other. Obviously you won't be able to please everybody all the time but we're - as you so eloquently put it - no longer in a speculative domain but in one where you can see the consequences play out in realtime.
It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.
Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.
My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.
toraway 30 minutes ago [-]
Every time I see news about Brendan Carr's latest threat leveraging FCC licenses to enforce approved administration speech I search for the corresponding HN post and half the time it's a graveyard.
Wasn't that long ago an article about Mark Zuckerberg claiming someone in the Biden admin made some vague request about state-sponsored disinformation brought every so-called 1A defender out of the woodwork, but apparently the actual regulator of news orgs publicly threatening their business is shrug worthy by comparison.
I've been on HN since 2010 (different account) and honestly used to take the libertarian/right-leaning types at their word about being free speech advocates and not simply partisans using it as a rhetorical weapon.
But, lesson learned...
jacquesm 27 minutes ago [-]
I applaud your optimism.
refulgentis 5 hours ago [-]
On coarser sites (Elon’s, now) I’d say “1st amendment sez muh tweets MUST be published!!!”, never quite figured out a less coarse way to say it, but you just showed me.
jfengel 3 hours ago [-]
They've switched to "A Democrat told me to shut up once so free speech is over."
YCpedohaven 41 minutes ago [-]
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JeremyNT 4 hours ago [-]
It really does feel like the tech right has disappeared over the last year, at least as a more grass roots thing outside of the actual billionaires themselves.
The early crypto and tax victories were presumably the impetus for many, and that's already been realized. There's not much incentive to stick around and be a bad faith advocate for incompetence and graft when you've already got yours.
KittenInABox 2 hours ago [-]
In my impression the billionaire worship is just another form of fundamental respect and enforcement of hierarchy that has been part of conservative politics forever. We are back to transparently the "right" leaning being wanting to keep the absolute monarchy.
salawat 2 hours ago [-]
>HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.
Likely because once you've seen your opponent mask off there is no longer a point trying to maintain a facade of politeness. You are in full adversarial waters. Either those people weren't actually for it and were talking a game until they got into power, or there's no longer a point in talking about it until we can get the current numb nuts out of the picture. One shouldn't tip their hand in an enemy controlled medium on their current plans for activism. That's how you go from unrestrained, to controlled opposition. Savvy? Here on HN, you damn well know you're in the SV types territory, and you know to whom'st they've aligned by their actions. Only conversations left to be had is needling those remaining until either they out themselves as part of the opposition, or as part of the sympathetic group. Turns out there's a lot of HN'ers more than happy with how things are going.
Game theory/low trust environs are a bitch like that.
exceptione 8 hours ago [-]
You can be intelligent and believe the narratives.
You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.
Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.
Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
YCpedohaven 43 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
10 minutes ago [-]
gjsman-1000 8 hours ago [-]
Airwaves are not protected by the 1st amendment, due to the limited amount of bandwidth that physically exists. As such, the FCC has extraordinary powers, including enforcing watersheds, forcing children’s content hours (“E/I”), censoring the F-bomb, and enforcing a 7-second delay on live content to prevent another Timberlake Super Bowl.
The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.
notyourwork 3 hours ago [-]
Why do airwaves matter? I get cable over the internet. Technology constraints shouldn’t me what allows laws to undermine democracy.
SpicyLemonZest 59 minutes ago [-]
The licenses in question here are only relevant to the airwaves. An FCC license isn't required to send you news over cable or the Internet.
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.
soneil 2 hours ago [-]
I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?
SpicyLemonZest 1 hours ago [-]
It's important not to concede the premise that First Amendment protections are subordinate to the public interest at all. Carr argues in his statement, after all, that the FCC has to take action because the public is losing faith and confidence in the media altogether. But even if the FCC can produce a detailed, convincing explanation of how American democracy will suffer if they're not allowed to block certain viewpoints from the airwaves, they still can't do it.
stale2002 3 hours ago [-]
Hey if you want to get rid of the FCC entirely so neither party can use it against anyone, I'll all for that!
throwaway173738 3 hours ago [-]
I’m excited about cell phones, pacemakers, and wifi no longer working.
rpcope1 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly the world might be a better place if the vast majority of spectrum were just ISM bands anyways.
oooyay 2 hours ago [-]
I find it amusing that your last comment is preaching to someone about what politics is and isn't.
Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.
That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.
jauntywundrkind 8 hours ago [-]
It's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good.
Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.
suzzer99 8 hours ago [-]
> For a party that has crowed so much about 1A!
Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.
650REDHAIR 7 hours ago [-]
If it wasn’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all.
BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.
decimalenough 8 hours ago [-]
No, this is deeply disturbing.
The person "whining" is the head of the regulatory body that gets to decide what can be broadcast, a supposedly non-partisan role, and yet he's just straight up threatened to cancel the licenses of everybody who's not vocally supportive of what you term the current regime.
theahura 8 hours ago [-]
thanks, I should've used xcancel. @dang I would love if we could update to using this link instead
Jtsummers 8 hours ago [-]
xcancel is like archive links, they prefer links to the original with bypasses/alternatives in comments.
g-mork 8 hours ago [-]
I've read so much trump spam recently that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehe
Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments
bananatype 3 hours ago [-]
Feels eerily similar to Rodrigo Duterte's threats to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN (and in that case, he really made good on the threat and shut down its transmitters).
Nothing Obama could have done was going to make Obama look good on Fox News.
Or declared a US company a supply chain risk after trying to weasel out of a contract.
Or, you know, incited a terrorist attack on the US Capitol...
I do agree with you though, if reporting is wrong then that's the problem. In those cases, and there are plenty, the concern raised should be inaccuracy rather than optics though.
In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere.
This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...
Generally, knowing the truth is more useful than the alternative.
> There are countries with a freer press that fare better.
That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw squirrel.
> Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools > care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
No one said that.
To be clear I don't really expect this to happen but at this point I honestly wouldn't even be surprised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press
Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.
Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.
> All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pentagon-chie...
I tire of the partisan hypocrisy that so many people seem incapable of shedding. Have people already forgotten the whole cancel culture hysteria a few years back, or has that already gone down the memory hole? And that’s just one episode in a broader trajectory.
How “principled” each party is is dependent on how something aligns with their interests. Usually, parties suddenly become principled when they’re in the opposition; it’s easy to put on a big show of being principled when you’ve already assumed the role of the underdog. You don’t have the power to prove it. However, when the opposition does take power, those principles generally fly right out the window. In other words, principles aren’t things to live by, but cudgels to be used to try to cripple your opponent in the court of public opinion.
Neither party is principled. They’re two factions of the same uniparty, both composed of delegates representing the interests of their respective oligarchs. The average citizen does not figure into their squabbles except as canon fodder or minion. When we embrace party loyalty, we willfully become instruments of these oligarchs.
In other words: each party likes to babble about “free speech” when it suits them, whatever they mean by the term.
My preference is to focus on individual actions and policies and give credit where credit is due, and criticism where criticism is called for. (And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech, rightly understood.)
I don't recall Obama or Biden administrations opening threatening private outlets.
Do you remember Biden or his ministers openly calling journalists names for their "stupid questions" at every press conference? Because that's what the Trump admin does daily. They revoked entry to the white house to some publications they disagree with, they facilitated mergers to put more media in the hands of their allies, they have the FCC threaten "unpatriotic" reporting with sanctions... Need I continue?
> And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech
Fucking where?? I am yet to meet a single Republican who condemned anything Trump ever did.
If you really believe that then I don't think we're going to have much to discuss.
This is not one of those 'both sides' discussions. This is a current affairs discussion.
Note that I'm not an American, but I know a grifter and an asshole when I see one and trump is both, without a doubt. If you believe the two parties in the USA are equal in this sense then you are willfully blind at this point.
The number of people that are comfortable with outright racism and xenophobia on HN is scary, the number of people that are unable to see the hand behind the curtain during a time when we were very vulnerable and who seem to take their personal comfort above the health of others is scary as well. But I guess that what you get when you tell a good chunk of the world that they are movie stars authors and celebrities.
COVID was interesting: as pandemics go this was a mild one, and yet, we fucked it up and here you are using it as a plank in your argument that the government has too much power. Sorry, but if that was your takeaway then you really were not paying attention and you probably have no clue about biology.
If you have the time and the spare cash go buy the book Spillover, read it and then check the date when it was written. Also realize that it is about the next pandemic, not the previous one. It probably won't do your sleep any good but at least you'll be a bit better informed.
Clearly you're not stupid, this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46983287
was on the money. Now follow the money and see where it leads.
Also, and final note on this: from the perspective of many other countries the USA has a one party system, with one party as a milder version of the other, but that doesn't mean that that not-so-mild version does not have some material differences, and that some of those differences may well lead to destabilizing the country on a scale not seen since the last few hundred years.
I know lots of Americans, both online and in person, I see very little difference between 'how Americans think' and 'how Europeans think'. What I did see is that you automatically assumed I was on the other side of you politicall, and that isn't the case, we are at least an ocean (and in many ways a world) apart and I figured you deserved a heads up so that at least you can calibrate your arguments. Besides that, I've lived on the other side of the US border for quite a long time and probably have more friends in the USA than I do in Europe.
> 1. Racism is Legal in US, disagree if you want but that's a core stance baked VERY deep into our system.
I don't care about racism (or, racist speech) being legal in the United States in the sense that I think it should not be legal anywhere, but I'm more upset at the fact that there are a number of outright racists active on HN who for some reason are not shut down. This bothers me at a very fundamental level because it's the Nazi bar problem: if you visit a bar and there are Nazi's there then you are visiting a Nazi bar. It risks guilt by association and I'm here under my real name.
HN has a serious problem that it refuses to acknowledge and this goes way beyond what is legal and what is not, it boils down to 'is this the kind of community that we want to create'. I think the best way to address that is - as you are finding out - to speak up against this as much as possible, though I have to admit it is getting more than a little tiring.
> 2. My point was literal free speech attacks justified or not happen.
That's true, but there are times when your right to 'free speech' can be temporarily trumped (I hate that word, but we're stuck with it) by the right of others to want to stay alive. This is perfectly fine and only the most ardent free speech absolutists will hold that there should be no limits at all (usually, they are also the first to apply for legal protection when those free speech rights are used against them, especially if they're wealthy and/or powerful). If you think free speech is so holy check out who are clamoring the loudest for it in the present and then study - as someone else in this thread already mentioned - Popper and see what he has to say about this. Everything in moderation, even absolutism is a good starting point.
> The intent to stop racism/xenophobia is moral but the mechanisms are bad.
No, the mechanisms are just the tools to not stop it but to stop its spread and as such the experts are the Germans. They have experienced first hand what it is like to have no holds on how far you are willing to let the freedom of speech go before you are on a path that will harm you for generations to come. It's possible that every geographic region has to learn this lesson on its own time, the problem is that we as humanity can not afford that luxury.
Racism, xenophobia, nazism: all of these are very bad things and if we all recognize that and realize that mental viruses spread through the same vectors as all of our other information that it is a good thing to combat them in the arena where they dominate and fester. Turning a blind eye and saying 'it is only speech' is the same as saying about Anthrax 'it's only a couple of molecules'. You can't outlaw molecules, but we definitely have ruled out the use and possession of Anthrax.
> If EU swings far right and the same tools to attack racism are flipped to attack liberal beliefs the EXACT argument you hold will be used against you.
No, they won't be. I believe there is a time to talk and that there is a time to act and that would be a time to stop talking.
> They will say: "lgbt is morally wrong and therefore any pro lgbt statements on social media are now an arrestable offense" without true free speech baked in that's possible.
I will be right there on the barriers, you can take that to the bank. I'm not the kind of person that just sits around and yaps, stuff gets done. And let's not pretend that the freedom of speech is how the LGBT community got their recognition in the first place, they were squelched everywhere possible and there are more than one States in the Union now where their rights are trampled left, right and center.
You are quite literally saying you are anti free speech while simultaneously complaining about trump infringing it.
You are directly calling for a small US platform to censor free speech when you are not even here?
You would protest I'm sure but if a far right controlled EU came to be the point is you'd be the minority and would be treated exactly like EU treats your far right groups now.
You're arguing from a moral highground when I literally don't care. I am not much morally different than you I agree with almost all liberal beliefs.
I am saying I hope you and others like you never have the ability to perform the actions you call for in america. I view calls for censorship and stopping the spread of ideas as far more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
I will say in EU you may be largely right. If far right get in power they will crush liberal beliefs exactly as liberal crushed far right beliefs and all your fears will occur.
There would be your evil twin advocating all platforms to ban pro lgbt statements and getting laws in place to make it happen.
Instead we should make laws to prevent you or your evil twin doing anything to the free flow of ideas.
AKA: the first Amendment
This whole conversation makes me love america lol
I did not 'quite literally' say anything like that.
> You are directly calling for a small US platform to censor free speech when you are not even here?
Sorry, but this is not a small US platform but a large global one and that pesky thing called 'free speech' that you're so hot about at least should give me the right to speak my mind about the limits to free speech because it is clear that HN is weaponized, and I don't want it to be.
> You would protest I'm sure but if a far right controlled EU came to be the point is you'd be the minority and would be treated exactly like EU treats your far right groups now.
The reason the EU treats those far right groups like that is to avoid a certain replay. I'm all for avoiding that.
> You're arguing from a moral highground when I literally don't care.
You're free to stop arguing, but as long as you argue you show you do care.
> I am not much morally different than you I agree with almost all liberal beliefs.
So, it's worth arguing about those little details that may make the difference between 'society survives' and 'society goes boom'.
> I am saying I hope you and others like you never have the ability to perform the actions you call for in america.
I don't have any power in America, other than the power of speech from the other side of the ocean, on a forum where I spent infinitely more time than you by now. And yes, I do care.
> I view calls for censorship and stopping the spread of ideas as far more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
Yes, there are many more like you. And that's fine. But there are also some that have read the occasional war diary (or two) and that realize that free speech can be weaponized just as easily as censorship and that both of these are wrong. It's just that as soon as you become dogmatic you lose objectivity, and the Germans have found out the hard way that some trees are best taken out before they grow roots. Whether they will be able to keep doing that forever remains to be seen but it should be a tell that the likes of Musk are aligned with the EU far right. And Musk is a lot more meddlesome in EU politics than I'll ever be in the states.
> I will say in EU you may be largely right. If far right get in power they will crush liberal beliefs exactly as liberal crushed far right beliefs and all your fears will occur.
And what makes you think the USA is immune? Doesn't the most recent decade show you that you are as much if not more in danger than Europe?
> There would be your evil twin advocating all platforms to ban pro lgbt statements and getting laws in place to make it happen.
I don't know why you keep bringing LGBT into this but this goes far beyond that.
> Instead we should make laws to prevent you or your evil twin doing anything to the free flow of ideas.
No worries, Bezos, Musk, Murdoch, Trump and a whole bunch of others that are way out of your control are doing just that, you don't need me for that. You'll have the illusion of the free flow of ideas but it will be nicely choreographed.
> AKA: the first Amendment
> This whole conversation makes me love america lol
...
Also, when you think 'we' you should spell 'I'.
> Collectively you don’t speak your minds and do not defend those who dare to do so.
Unlike Americans? Your democracy is in peril, not ours. Your press is under attack. Your free speech is threatened. Stop revelling in your ignorance and go do something about it.
Or don't. Maybe the world's ready to move on from American hegemony.
Yes, and they were wrong, or far more plausibly, blatantly lying about it. The Trump administration's assaults on press freedom are, factually speaking, orders of magnitude worse than anything Biden was purported to do. They claimed Biden did what they *wanted* to do all along.
I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.
I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...
"The Nazi assault on the press, publishing, and scholarship was more than censorship. It was an attempt to monopolize reality." https://brewminate.com/words-under-siege-hitlers-assault-on-...
I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.
The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.
My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.
So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.
Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.
In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.
I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.
This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.
Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.
My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.
Wasn't that long ago an article about Mark Zuckerberg claiming someone in the Biden admin made some vague request about state-sponsored disinformation brought every so-called 1A defender out of the woodwork, but apparently the actual regulator of news orgs publicly threatening their business is shrug worthy by comparison.
I've been on HN since 2010 (different account) and honestly used to take the libertarian/right-leaning types at their word about being free speech advocates and not simply partisans using it as a rhetorical weapon.
But, lesson learned...
The early crypto and tax victories were presumably the impetus for many, and that's already been realized. There's not much incentive to stick around and be a bad faith advocate for incompetence and graft when you've already got yours.
Likely because once you've seen your opponent mask off there is no longer a point trying to maintain a facade of politeness. You are in full adversarial waters. Either those people weren't actually for it and were talking a game until they got into power, or there's no longer a point in talking about it until we can get the current numb nuts out of the picture. One shouldn't tip their hand in an enemy controlled medium on their current plans for activism. That's how you go from unrestrained, to controlled opposition. Savvy? Here on HN, you damn well know you're in the SV types territory, and you know to whom'st they've aligned by their actions. Only conversations left to be had is needling those remaining until either they out themselves as part of the opposition, or as part of the sympathetic group. Turns out there's a lot of HN'ers more than happy with how things are going.
Game theory/low trust environs are a bitch like that.
You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.
Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.
Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.
Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.
That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.
Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.
Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.
We’ve seen it every 4-8 years for decades.
https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...
BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.
Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments