In communist China citizens are forbidden from criticizing the government.
The only appropriate use of nuk- I mean, an inventory full of TNT.
From the creators of chapo.chat, we bring you a Youtube alternative.
A man can dream lol
I think it was either just recently merged, or is sitting in a pull request ready to be merged.
nice. as a protest streamer I am aching for a platform that isn't owned by a big corp and ready to ban me any time they please.
He says in the thread that the DHS visit was after a video about police brutality, presumably this one.
Remember...no matter how unimportant you think you are, if you are left of Bernie Sanders, you are being watched.
Switch to self-hosted, decentralized, and/or open source software in any way that you can. If you absolutely must use proprietary services, take every precaution you can to protect anonymity and privacy.
what should the poor saps who have already left a decade-long trail of bread crumbs do?
No more damage. You can’t take back what’s already out there, you just have to focus on not making it worse.
Switch to self-hosted, decentralized, and/or open source software in any way that you can. If you absolutely must use proprietary services, take every precaution you can to protect anonymity and privacy.
Taking the opportunity to link a thread I made in tactics on online anonymity.
If DHS comes knocking, I have yet to finish my shrine to an oil-fueled burning effigy of the Rust Belt of America made out of bubblegum in a closet, similar to Helga Petacky's Arnold shrine.
:elmofire:
If talking to a hypothetical leftist who supports hate speech laws or other first amendment restrictions, remind them of things like this. Even if your ideal state has more restrictions on speech than the contemporary United States, remember that this is the state we live under now. "Hate speech" laws written by Republicans and Democrats would likely restrict speech directed against cops, Israel, the military, etc.
Ehh. Free Speech is a meme. It was never about whether legal protections for speech were absolute or not. It was never about mitigating a slippery slope scenario caused by the persecution of arch-reactionaries for genocide denial or hate speech. It always has been about who wields power and who threatens it. No amount of free speech protections has ever been capable of protecting the journalists, muckrakers, dissidents and activists who threaten that power.
You're right insofar as no curtailment of civil liberties dictated by the bourgeoisie will ever be beneficial to the proletariat. They will always have an ulterior motive. But I will not shed a tear when reactionaries like Bill Maher are sent to the camps crying about being cancelled.
I don't really agree. While obviously it is the case that who holds power in the state is more important than the form of the law, that doesn't make the latter inconsequential. Leftists in America, despite COINTELPRO and everything else, do have appreciably more freedom of expression than in many other countries. It would be idiotic to give up any ground there just to own some annoying nazi youtubers. Remember that the Smith Act was originally directed against Fascists.
Right. I wouldn't rush to give up any ground under the current circumstances. As long as we do not wield power, we hold no power to influence any changes in a positive direction. Primarily, I just find the paradigm of "free speech" as we (US subjects) understand it to be obsolete. We understand free speech as a constitutional right. As a negative right, defined by what they state may not do. Beyond that, there are already minimal protections.
Speech requires media, and most media being privately owned ensures that we end up in a scenario that state censorship is made irrelevant by the censorship of corporate media empires. If we take the materialist view and consider these corporations and the state to already be one, the current paradigm is the perfect loophole to make the first amendment as we understand it irrelevant.
If you dig a bit deeper into this, the "free speech" framing leads to a dead end. Publishers, broadcasters, and communications platforms have (de facto) editorial control. They have the right to moderate their platforms and decide what they want and what they don't want to host. The state doesn't have the right to compel them to publish things they don't wish to be published. So you run into a scenario where I want to publish an edgy meme on Reddit, but Reddit does not wish for my edgy meme to be published. If the state were to intervene on my behalf, it would be compelled speech. I don't thing there is any way to get around this just by maximizing our interpretation of free speech.
The solution to me isn't tweaking the legal landscape, or trying to use the law to damage our enemies. If we had the force of law on our side, things would be much better off all around. The solution is to build counter-hegemonic media platforms. To decentralize the consolidated media ecosystem. To build a well grounded material foundation to project our point of view. While this works towards achieving the "diversity of opinions" free speech advocates celebrate, it has little to do with legal regimes or constitutional rights.
I don't disagree for the most part. Formal, constitutional free speech obviously only goes so far. I just think it has more than zero importance.
I think we're on the same page more or less. I'm just a contrarian edgelord.
restrict speech directed against cops, Israel, the military, etc.
I would say we should be skeptical of any new restrictions on speech, but we clearly already have the part that you're worried about right now, and this is a perfect example of it.
But we don't in a full sense. It is not illegal to say those things (with the arguable exception of some BDS laws), and you can't go to prison for it. That's very different from having a youtube video taken down.
This is more a case of private corporations controlling the large majority of online speech, which is itself an important related issue. But it's not the same as outright law.
not sure it matters terribly much whether the coercion is legal or economic
Obviously they are both forms of coercion. But why increase the total amount of repression?
You're right, it would be worse if it were actually illegal, and laws against hate speech could easily be designed to include this. That's reasonable to worry about. Or they could be designed to include only real hate speech, and not dissent generally, which would be a good outcome. Free speech isn't an absolute good, it's good when we have it and it's good when fascists (and etc) don't have it.
Basically, good laws would be good, bad laws would be bad, but right now this is all hypothetical so we can't say anything specific enough about it to mean anything. Until that changes, imo it's something to keep an eye on but not fixate on, and instead work on more concrete issues that can change the balance of class forces, which is what would create the context for any legal changes anyway.
OTOH if you're really fired up for this issue then go for it, I personally don't think it's a priority right now, but I also think some diversity in strategy is good overall.
One problem I've seen with the "alternative" social media sites is that they become rife with chuds.
I see, however, that PeerTube uses federation instead of the cringe blockchain, so perhaps we could start our ChapoTube someday.
An online community either has moderation, or it turns into /b/. If you are interested in building a community, you have to remove the people who are only interested in pissing in the pool. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to bad moderation on Reddit and assume moderation itself is the problem.
Some people view the deterioration of Reddit as a technical problem. Something that can be fixed by the right cryptographic algorithms, or by the unmitigated entropy of the Internet. They think the solution lies in building a platform, not in building a community. These people go on to form platforms like voat, saiddit, ruqqus, etcetera, and what they end up with are shitholes. Dens of the bottomfeeding scum who aren't welcome anywhere that actually has standards.
Some people view the deterioration of Reddit as a social problem. That the interests of blood drinking silicon valley vampires and the interests of building a community are contradictory. Tildes is a good example of a website founded with this philosophy. The admin / developer's take is essentially, "if your website is full of assholes, you're an asshole, and growth for the sake of growth does not serve the needs of building a community."
Federated social media also takes the view that the deterioration of social media is a social phenomenon. That community independence is key to the long term health and development of online communities, while interoperability and diplomacy are essential to overcoming the network effect. Chuds get to have their spaces, but diplomacy doesn't often work in their favor.
I feel like the platforms like Voat et al. actually achieved their purpose, namely as platforms where the type of people who typically get banned on reddit/YT/Facebook/etc. gravitate. Most of them being chuds is a feature, not a bug.
While some of these websites (like Gab or Ruqqus) were designed from the get-go to be as vile as possible, I get the impression that a good number of these founders were naive libertarians who ended up biting off more than they could chew. People who thought "Reddit used to be good when there weren't as many rules."
While the operators of Voat don't seem to care very much about the shit on their site, I see the platform largely as a victim of circumstance. Gamergate spun out of hand, Reddit had to take action, and Voat popped up at the right time and place to absorb the refugees. The culture wasn't set by any explicit actions of the operators, but by inaction dictated by a naive understanding of the world.
This might be a charitable reading of events though.
While some of these websites (like Gab or Ruqqus) were designed from the get-go to be as vile as possible, I get the impression that a good number of these founders were naive libertarians who ended up biting off more than they could chew. People who thought “Reddit used to be good when there weren’t as many rules.”
Can't remember where I read this, but there's a quote that neatly sums it up along the lines of: If you start a community in the middle of nowhere, and your only rule is 'no witch burnings', you end up with two principled libertarians and fifty million witches.
Always beware of any alternative social media that advertises as being "censorship-free."
https://youtu.be/_2khAmMTAjI here's the link just because it's two kilometers down the twitter thread
Violence, usually directed at civilians to achieve political goals might as well be CIA's mission statement.
There's a great quote from the video where Tony Benn debated John Bolton on the Iraq War, where he says as a survivor of the Blitz: "There is no difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons."
On one hand this isn’t totally surprising, I had a girlfriend who got a visit from DHS at her parent’s house, and they informed her and her family that she was on a watchlist after taking pictures near a refinery. But on the other, I’m pretty baffled by what draws the focus of the national security state. There are dozens of books and articles and videos out there about the CIA, I was just re-listening to Death is Just Around the Corner’s episodes on JFK. Why go intimidate some random YouTuber? Feels like being some poor asshole getting audited by the IRS. They just went to their database of “published criticism of the CIA online” and draw a random name.
Is the video worth a watch? My eyes glazed over when it opened with a nebula plug and I went to do something else
It also has clips of former CIA officers themselves talking about it which is really good
