So Twitter has gone and done it: they’ve banned Donald Trump from his favorite online hangout, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Naturally, Trump’s fans on the far right are acting as if Twitter has fired the first shot in an literal civil war.
Some suggested that Twitter’s attempt to shut down incitement of yet another attempted coup … is the real coup
Some saw it as a victory for … China?
James Woods was less upset by the Trump ban than he was about his apparent loss of Twitter followers.
Others thought that a private company’s ban of the literal head of state was somehow evidence of totalitarianism.
I’m not sure what this guy is up to but he seems awfully familiar.
Best of luck finding your way around Twitter, John Barron!
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My mother is not conservative (she proudly calls herself a moderate) and hates Trump, but since she needs to invalidate any feelings that I express, she has found a favorite response whenever I express upset with the utter awfulness of conservatives:
“These people are online because no one wants to listen to them in the real world. They don’t have any influence.”
She has continued to push this throughout the years of the Trump administration, as the very people she dismisses as no one listening to and not having any influence have steadily destroyed the country.
But heaven forfend that she agree that any of my feelings are valid. Then I might start thinking I mattered.
O/T, but it looks like Parler is going down. Tomorrow Amazon is kicking them off of the Amazon Web Services servers, and unless they can find a new host this is the end. Even if they do find a new host they’ll probably have to modify the system substantially. This is on the heels of how Google banned them from the Play Store yesterday and Apple removed them from the App Store today.
Just watched the video of that cop caught in the door and the handful up against the doors being told to basically get lost before they get mobbed and attacked.
Incidentally, those cops chose discretion over valor, but the cop behind the doors figured a gunshot might, well, in this case, kill that one woman. (Not to say it was right, but based on the later video showing oodles of cops there trying to give her first aid and blocking the doors, it apparently stopped the advance.)
Wonder if da fuzz might take a different view of alt right protesters in the future…
tim gueguen: sure Trump and friends can get media outlets again. The issue is disrupting a terrorist network for the next two weeks so they can’t as easily organize while their man is POTUS.
Discord. Odds are many of these guys will be moving to Discord servers to plan out (some of) their next moves. And since it’s very easy to set up private servers that won’t be found on a search there, it makes that platform ideal for this kind of mischief. Downside is that a would-be rabble rouser has to know someone already on one of those servers to send them an invite to join in.
@.45
That may be the case. I know that the alt right is definitely re-evaluating their view of the police. After all the Back the Blue/Blue Lives Matter stuff, now that the police have been against them in their attack on the capitol (and their attack on the Oregon state house a few weeks ago), the alt right seems to no longer like cops or even become convinced that cops are in league with Antifa.
Every time this week the right-wingers complain about private companies doing that corporate and capitalist thing, all I can think is: Boo fucking hoo.
Conservatives (surprise surprise) have got it so wrong. This mass banning on the part of social media/tech companies is not “wokeness” going out of control. It has nothing to do with leftism. Since the beginning of the internet, right wingers have been allowed, nearly unchecked to harass marginalized people, threaten violence, engage in hate speech. Nobody cared. But this time, the internet radicalized right wingers went after the wealthy and powerful. They were going to execute the Vice President, Speaker of the House, Senate leaders. That is why they finally took the threat of online fascism seriously.
Abusing the left, many of whom are marginalized, or if not, ally with those who are, doesn’t disrupt the social order. Committing an act of violence at the capitol, does. Not that I’m dismissing how serious what transpired was. It’s a huge escalation and anyone who thought that voting Trump out was enough on its own to get rid of our extremism problem was just proven dead ass wrong.
That said, it is pretty funny that this little social media purge has gotten conservatives to hate corporate power.
@Naglfar
I have seen some clips circling around of members of the Proud Boy’s even going so far as to say that because the cops, with the most mild of kid-gloves, calmly and nicely asked them to dispurse and go home: that the same cops that harshly and unjustly and extreamly cracked down on BLM, Antifa and Progressive Allies and advocates: are somehow “Communists” and “backing BLM/Antifa”.
Them and their ilk are litterally trying to deny reality and self radicalizing for the same of their self aggrandizing, self serving, self chauvinist narrative.
And, perhaps worse yet: they can’t seem to understand that everyone else—especially the people whom they’ve decided are evil—isn’t the same way.
Ugh; I sympathize.
@Surplus to Requirements, just in case if there’s a misunderstanding, I’m solely laughing about these chucklefucks getting banned AND whining like this is some sort of horrible crime and totally out of blue, not what led into it.
Leftists, sex workers, LGBT+ people, BLM, etc have been banned from these platforms for less, and those buttholios dared to call us snowflakes, after they had been flaming up an armed insurrection and some light treason.
If they want to complain about free speech, they’d better take it to places where the voices of the marginalized are deliberately suppressed, e.g. religious minorities and those who are irreligious, women, ethnic minorities, queer people, leftists and more. Fascists are not oppressed – on the contrary, their ideology has outlived WWII and arguably expanded beyond Europe and thrived online as well as offline (to note bans on sex workers and similar in various websites).
Slightly off topic, but I also recommend people watch this video about how companies became sympathetic to Nazis because of the promised (and sometimes actually fulfilled) profit margins and suppression of workers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c01NN9zvTe0
@Xennial Dot Warner
Exactly. And consequently they interpret everything else through the lens of their own projection and misinterpret it and/or tell us much more about themselves than they intended.
I want a Democrat to troll Trump by proposing a bill to void all copyrights and trademarks owned by Donald Trump and all his donors, and call is something like the “No Censorship of the President’s Speech Act.” After all, censorship is always bad in all cases, so it must be legal for me to post the full text of The Art of the Deal to my blog without paying Trump royalties or facing legal consequences. Legally preventing anyone from posting the full text of a particular book is censorship, which Trump now claims to be against (unlike when he wanted to “open up the libel laws,” or when he pressured Canada to increase the duration of copyright in Canada).
Or, if you’re willing to troll other Republicans, introduce a Free Speech Bill abolishing all copyrights owned by John Hawley’s donors, since Hawley takes bribes from the MPA and RIAA.
Speaking of social media, have you guys checked Biden’s latest tweet? Republicans are still making excuses and flat out lying about the terrorist attack on the Capitol, and even accusing the Left of infiltrating the protest.
And yet, Biden and the “back to brunch” liberals are already talking about “moving forward” and “rebuilding together”; which are a bunch of dog-whistles we are all acquainted with meaning that there will be no accountability whatsoever for Trump, his administration and his sycophants in the Republican party.
Liberal complacency is straight up going to cause the Republicans to win in 2022 and 2024 with even more radical options, and even an overt Nazi at top of the presidential ticket.
I’m disgusted (but not surprised) that the GOP Congresscritters are spending so much time anguishing over Trump’s social media access. Five people died. I won’t weep over all of them, but five human beings died. I never voted for Pence, but he was the target of Trumpsters who wanted to kill him. I have disagreements with Pelosi at times, but that mob was willing to livestream her murder.
Trump can’t tweet? Parler’s getting kicked off AWS? Cry me a river.
This was surprisingly moving.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-10/schwarzenegger-tells-trump-he-is-terminated-bams-reports
Just watched that.
Yes, it was.
Arnie for Prez! (A pity the attempt to modify the residency rules to allow naturalized citizens to run for President never went anywhere; he might not have been THAT bad at the job.)
Speaking of which…did anyone take Arnold up on his offer to pay the bills of any polling place that the Republicans tried to close during the last election? I never heard one way or the other about that, and was wondering.
I only heard about that today – on the Fark thread about the video – and apparently yes, he did. Paid out himself AND fundraised.
@ Redsilkphoenix
Apparently so. List of recipients here:
https://pollingaccessgrants.org
Seems Georgia got the most funding; so I bet that’s pissed certain people off.
“Arnie for Prez!”
*Demolition Man intensifies*
@Redsilkphoenix
Absolutely not. As elequent as Arnold is, he is still a Republican.
@Tovius
I agree. Arnold may be a cut more ethical than most of his Republican peers, but he is still a member of that party and shares many of their tenets.
Re: naturalized citizens running for president, I would support that (though not specifically for Schwarzenegger), but it would be very unlikely to change as it would require amending the constitution, which is a high bar to clear.
Arnold is overall more a neoliberal than a conservative. For him, killing poors with his policies isn’t important, while for Trump it’s one of the goal. Suck an equal amount when it happen to you.
He did keep his old ethic, unlike a lot of republican. That’s a point in his favor, but it’s not enough given what its ethic lead to.