> ....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Disclaimer text:
> This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more
"Learn more" links to this page about "public-interest exceptions"
That's interesting. I interpreted it the exact opposite way. That looking at the words - they don't seem so bad, so the liberal-minded HN users downvoted to keep the details away.
Funny indeed. Maybe he meant shooting as in shooting footage! What a rascal. Those darn liberals can't expect the president to not be ambiguous about using lethal force every day!
When facts/information doesn't align with one's agenda, some people have a terrible habit of trying to have it hidden/banned/removed/etc.
You would think in hackernews of all places, we'd upvote the comment to see exactly what trump wrote so that we can decide for ourselves when it was "glorifying violence". Sadly, many here don't want that to happen.
I think because it just restates what's in the link being discussed, when the link is not inaccessible nor behind a paywall. There are a lot of people who think that's bad form on HN. That's my guess. People trying to force everyone to "read the articles" on HN.
You should investigate the racial history of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and also consider whether property crime deserves loss of life.
This is not an isolated incidence of property crime. This is utter destruction more akin to waging a total war against a particular district of Minneapolis. It's a form of terrorism.
Property -- in the form of business and services -- is essential to life. There is no absolute distinction between the two, despite what some pretend. These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.
> Property -- in the form of business and services -- is essential to life.
While that can be true in a literal sense at times, I don't believe shop lifting electronics from Target would have that effect. Even the destruction of local businesses, while indeed terrorizing, is not lethal.
Violent rioting would be something that might require a lethal response, but stealing, looting, robbing, plundering -- no.
> These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.
So you believe that what is right, instead of investing and rebuilding, is that these people should be killed?
> Even the destruction of local businesses, while indeed terrorizing, is not lethal.
Tell that to the poor immigrant family whose business, and thus livelihood in this country, was destroyed. This is how we get roof koreans.
Why don't these rioters go stand with guns outside the state capitol or city hall or police dept? Instead of disrespecting the memory of George Floyd. I hope his death isn't used to defend people's 'right' to steal TVs without getting caught. That would be really really really sad.
You don't have the moral high ground here. Terrorizing and instilling fear in your local community is wrong, whether it comes from the state through the police or your fellow countrymen through riots. Just as an appropriate response to the officer who killed Mr Floyd would have been violence, so is violence towards the rioters. We can't honestly say that just because the police are thugs, thus we ought to also let others be thugs. Both can be wrong.
I don't think I will be able to convince you that no one else should be shot or killed so I won't be participating in this argument anymore. I can't have an ethical argument with someone who doesn't value human life.
Right -- I think it's wrong to pick and choose who should be punished for terrorizing communities, and some only believe the police should.
This is not a question of 'valuing human life'. It's about appropriate responses to violence. It's a basic principle of justice that those who commit violence no longer deserve to have their full set of rights respected in the eyes of the law or society. This is how we justify all sorts of things, from basic fines, to jail terms, to full-scale war.
To be clear... I also think no one else should be shot and killed, which is why no one should be lotting or setting things on fire.
> Why don't these rioters go stand with guns outside the state capitol or city hall or police dept? Instead of disrespecting the memory of George Floyd.
Because, unlike the white anti-COVID-restriction protestors that did this, these protestors would be killed for trying something like that. Wake. Up.
You don't live in the same nation as african americans. You are protected in a way that you don't understand.
I am a brown man who would also be the target of police violence so I do live in quite a similar world.
And I will not be forced to come up with an answer to the ridiculous false dichotomy of having to choose between police restraint and having the right to keep my own property. The answer is both and not either or.
No, but nor should they be allowed to get away with it. They should be stopped and charged with a crime. But in the process of being stopped and arrested, their chances of being shot are not negligible, especially if they resist.
If you steal a TV, yeah honestly. There's a difference between stealing food or money to feed yourself or provide for your family and stealing luxury goods. I have lots of sympathy for the former, very little for the latter. The latter is a form of terrorism meant to intimidate businesses many of whose owners are likely members of your own community.
I don't understand the modern desire to excuse theft. Theft is a form of terrorism; it is not okay, and is really high up there on the list of serious crimes that damage society.
It doesn't unequivocally say that at all. It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
In the general case: yes, absolutely. But in the specific, to make that claim for an individual account requires a high burden of proof. Some people are just stupid or trolls, not necessarily part of an astroturfing operation.
> It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
That's definitely not it.
Walter Headley, Chief of Miami Police during the 1968 Republican National Convention. On the eve of the convention, he gave a press conference where he said this exact phrase. It wasn't an observation that crime begets more crime. It was a threat.
This. This post is a perfect example of the kind of desperate digging for dog whistles the american left is obsessed with.
IT IS NOT WORKING. To someone outside your bubble you look like a crazy person. Even if you're right, that's not a good look.
There are more than enough reasons to dislike, disagree with, hate or fear Trump, but for some reason you people are fucking incapable of finding them and instead hang onto these bizarre conspiracies.
> It doesn't unequivocally say that at all. It can reasonably be interpreted as: "once people are willing to break the law and start looting, it's not long before there are also people shooting"
This is not a reasonable interpretation of the president's words. The previous tweet said that the military is standing by. There can be no mistake: Trump is saying that he will order the US military to kill Americans.
The thing about Trump supporters that baffles me is, they have the common sense to understand when some his claims are false or hurtful, because they make up excuses for them: they're ambiguous, he was just checking if we were paying attention, etc. even when he refuses to back down and absolutely denies the excuses. But they still enjoy having their prejudices, fears and hates validated whenever Trump's tweets align with their view.
Well, looting had already started hours before he'd posted this.
That being said - the President of the United States, just stated on one of the largest social media platforms used in the U.S., that citizens of the U.S. are now to be shot. From his words, immediately. It could even be viewed as "they should've already been shot at"
If you don't understand how this is glorifying violence, I don't think you can be made to.
Have you looked up the context of that quote? Here is where that quote originated from Miami Police Chief Walter Headley. It’s very clear the implication is the use of law enforcement and police brutality.
“In declaring war on 'young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign,' Headley said, 'we don’t mind being accused of police brutality.'
'They haven’t seen anything, yet.'
Headley said Miami hasn't been troubled with racial disturbances and looting because he let the word filter down, 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts.'"
I am not in favor of looters, but note that
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf
emphasizes the necessity of graduated response.
I presume state militia units share the doctrine (Figure 2.1) that lethal response is only called for in the face of an armed threat, and that it must be the minimum response necessary.
(found by googling four words: national guard crowd control; 2nd page of results)
I'm reading the tweet more like 'I will authorize the use of deadly force by the military against the looters'. Although I could see several interpretations
But I think the real thing people aren't able to come to grips with is how Trump uses the media in such a style that gives him all plausible deniability, builds outrage AND builds support. All at once.
Really? "When the looting starts, the shooting starts"... in reference to THUGS (which we all know what he means by that euphemism). Can't tell if you're joking, but either way it's in poor taste.
Ah so now they are "people"? The people who loot should be arrested and tried. Once you start using force many innocent people will be caught in the crosshairs, this will only further escalate the situation.
> Once you start using force many innocent people will be caught in the crosshairs, this will only further escalate the situation.
I don't have a dog in your fight, but you are aware that "arresting them" is literally done by force, right? And from what I hear, whether you send in the National Guard or a militarized police force is primarily a political difference, not so much a question of escalation.
This "if I back off, I will show weakness" mentality is precisely what leads so many police officers to use excessive force despite being surrounded by bystanders pleading for mercy on behalf of their fellow citizens.
When the people have to resort to violence to get public servants to do their jobs and relieve the wounds of injustice, the only appropriate response is to give them justice.
Lastly, I remind you that the public did not initiate the use of force in this riotous controversy. A police officer did.
You will show weakness and that weakness will be exploited again. How is that debatable is beyond me.
Police are allowed to use violence, that's their reason for existing, if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way, that's what society is built around. It might not be instant or easy, but that's the difference between civil discourse and terrorism.
It's not OK for the police to terrorize people. If they do so repeatedly, their authority can be revoked. I might remind you that people tried protesting this peacefully a couple of days with the conventional things like signs and chanting and got tear-gassed for their efforts.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
It just seems like you're failing to acknowledge the logical consequences of the idea. If the looters in Minneapolis are conducting a civil war, military force against them is justified and appropriate.
A great many people in this country feel they're already having military force deployed against them and that police are little different from an occupying army, so officially militarizing he conflict would just mean different colors of uniform and cleaner rules of engagement.
As a practical matter, a resort to military force in a domestic theater signals a failure of governance. And to the extent that it is attempted, it will further erode the support of the military for the civilian command; many veterans and active-duty personnel have no faith in the commander-in-chief, and history suggests that in such cases many troops choose to remain in their barracks.
To be sure, insurrection could have dangerous and bloody consequences, but that's why people are rebelling against it. Different people are rebelling for different reasons across the political spectrum; folk on the left are angry about the deaths of people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, folk on the right are angry about the death of people like Duncan Lemp or Randy Weaver. There are big differences between different groups because of differing notions about race, property, the social order, history, and so forth, but there's a wide consensus that the status quo is oppressive both at home and abroad and that regular folk feel trampled upon.
Was it not just weeks ago that the President, in response to heavily armed demonstrations in statehouses, was tweeting out 'Liberate Michigan! Liberate Wisconsin! Liberate Virgina - your 2nd amendment rights are under attack!' Now he threatens military force when a different group of people rise up against a different perception of tyranny. There's plainly a big disagreement in this country about what constitutes liberty, where life ends and property begins, and so forth - ideological questions that can be reasoned out to some degree, but highlight quite different basic premises held by people of different birth and experience. History is in many ways the tale of such fundamental disagreements.
Notions of justification and appropriateness are ultimately appeals to a higher authority - civic, judicial, parental, political, or religious. Once the nature and legitimacy of authority itself comes into dispute, differences are resolved by other means. In this historical moment people are choosing to seize authorship of their own lives rather than dully play the roles that were written out for them. Make of that what you wish.
You know, I recall a group of old white guys looting circa 1776. They attacked a boat in Boston Harbor, spilled a bunch of tea. IIRC, that turned out pretty good for a lot of us, not so much for King George.
Would you have preferred that never happened? Sometimes violence and revolution are justified. JFK said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The DA could've made this peaceful by simply filing charges. I mean it's a pretty open/shut case here. All 4 police officers need to be thrown behind bars for life. He should be held accountable for the looting/violence because his actions of trying to cover this up and let it just 'go away', led to the escalations.
The people in 1776 didn't loot random places, they only attacked the people abusing them. Also they didn't loot, they just poured it all in the sea to ensure the company suffered losses, they didn't do it to enrich themselves. That is very different from what is happening today, if these people only attacked the police station and left the other places untouched I would have more sympathy for them.
As another modern example, the protests in Hong Kong didn't involve looting. Instead the protesters were very well behaved except against what they protested against, and thus got a lot of support. Looting and destroying random property will just ensure that people will cheer when you get smashed by the police or military.
>if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way
This is demonstrably false for the genre of police crime in question. When the people being murdered react with violence, it is unrealistic to brush that away as evil because those people aren't exclusively using the proper legal channels instead.
Looting and even property damage is different from violence, and when it happens to a business it's different from when it happens to a person.
It's not that you should like or always accept such things, but the unpleasant part of being robbed is the fear of violence, besides which the lost property itself is usually a transient annoyance. Actual violence against your person is a great deal worse.
You're allowed to defend your person with violence. I think you understand quite well that I am drawing a distinction between your person and property, and that while you can certainly resist being robbed to the extent that you feel personally threatened, your property is of distinctly secondary importance. In the case of corporate property, it's of tertiary importance for reasons I hope are obvious.
> Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
And that's bad because...? We can't succumb to lawlessness if people don't respect the law and expect no penalties. If they did the same thing at Area51 and were shot, would you say it's the fault of the guard who swore to protect their post just as the National Guard does? Is the value of civility not greater than a single life?
The reason a prosecutor makes an example of someone is so that they serve as a deterrent to others. It's not because they desire to make an example of everyone.
The problem is that you disguise widely complicit violations of societal order by comparing them to single instances of pilfering. Looting doesn't justify deadly force, but a riotous and unlawful mob certainly can.
I don't follow the logic that a crime against property should become a capital crime just because it is down by a large(unorganised) group of people. Furthermore, the constitution guarantees a fair right to a jury trial, no matter how egregious, and police or the national guard shooting to kill looters goes against that.
Should drug smugglers be shot too? They are also going against societal order.
A rebellion is different, if you have to deploy the military because people have overpowered the police then it is no longer just a normal crime scene. Normally people would just disperse when that happens, but if they tried to attack the military in the same way they attack the police then what would you expect?
The 2nd amendment was intended to keep people with a healthy fear of one another. The equation is clear - to take another's property means one must risk something even more valuable; one must risk their life. It's that inequality that preserves order and to try and rebalance the equation by cancelling out the ever-present constants and insist life is above both liberty and prosperity, then you are fundamentally altering the social construct in untenable ways.
So then why don't we just have the police shoot on sight for any suspected crime? Police get called to store theft, just shoot the suspect. Police get called to vandalism, shoot first.
I think it's interesting how he's threatening China about HK on one hand, but on the other hand being a lot more literal and aggressive towards his own people.
I think he does not know how to handle the moves being made by China to advance its territorial claims in this chaotic moment. That would explain Donald's domestic diversions.
China is pushing outward toward Hong Kong and Taiwan, in simultaneous fashion. In the former, we have the national security law. In the latter, we have new and uncamouflaged threats that China will use military force in Taiwan if it cannot control the island peacefully.
If Trump keeps our attention away from the China problem, it won't affect the stock market and we won't focus on its impacts on the world economy.
Trump is just a big bully who loses courage when he gets pushback. Look at how nice he is to the North Korea guy while constantly bashing and demonizing other leaders of democratic countries.
He seems to be fairly aggressive against other countries:
> Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
> To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE
He sounds more like a super villain from a comic than a president.
On the other hand, if he was indeed in their shoes he would have never made it and be deposed near instantly. The only place a Trump can thrive is in a democracy.
He's not moving anywhere and any Twitter controversy gets more people to tweet about that controversy... Until he forces a significant part of his followers to leave, it's not a bad situation for Twitter to be in.
Or worse, in terms of discourse. I suppose twitter is awful for something as complex as political debate, but removing an entire half of a political spectrum would only serve to further divide our country, something which the real demagogues of the world would love to capitalize on.
I would suggest that maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign and candidacy alienated many people in the center. In my mind, that seems to be the simplest explanation for the existence of Obama-Trump voters.
I think the Obama-Trump voters were a result of 8 years of partly empty promises. (He did a lot, but people hoped for much more. Yes we can / yes we scan.)
Removing Trump would not remove entire half. (Assuming there's even a half) Some would move, majority would be just fine with occasional screenshots from another source, and lots would find a different celebrity to follow.
They're not half of a political spectrum. I can get on fine with most conservatives despite disagreeing with them, but Trump's most vocal supporters are part of a cult of personality rather than a complex polity. The divisions are already there, all the appeals to reason and fellow feeling have been exhausted.
He could, but it would be a bit like Reddit/voat situation for an independent platform. Otherwise where can he go for remotely comparable publicity? IG/FB? I don't see FB working with his style of communication and it's not as easy to embed in news as Twitter. Ig would be closer.
> Until he forces a significant part of his followers to leave, it's not a bad situation for Twitter to be in.
That would force them to stop complaining, and there is a lot of value, and money to be made, in whining all the time and playing the victim constantly. So it won't happen.
So far every legal analysis of the order draft I've seen is "it's not enforcible, mentioned agencies fought not to regulate things like that, looks like it was written just to appease him". Once the regulation is realistic, (likely needing senate involvement) Twitter may be worried.
People on Twitter are mostly not voting for Trump. Trump voter demographics are roughly white male rural middle-income evangelical non-college-educated over-50, and this does not overlap much with Twitter user demographics (80% millennials).
So Trump has nothing to lose on Twitter, so he can't lose. The goal for his tweets is to make a big story, and Twitter intervening makes it an even bigger one.
While the demographics non-overlap is true, it's not an insignificant number listening to him either. But he gets something else from Twitter: famous (verified) people involvement which amplifies what he's saying, and the profile being public to the world in a trivially news-embeddable form. I believe it matters and if he got a separate blog-like site where he can post, the reach and reuse of his posts would not be even close to what it is now. (and he'd possibly be less motivated without seeing the number of likes)
It does impact the stock, and that's likely a part of the reason it took Twitter so long to take even the smallest action against his violations of their rules. The President is using the threat of allowing social media companies to be held liable for their content, as retaliation against Twitter. The stock was down 4.5% yesterday and is trading lower in the pre-market session.
To be honest I actually think this has a lot more to do with the fact that Dorsey has been an absent CEO. The only person who really has the authority to pick this fight is Dorsey and he hasn't been engaged enough in running twitter to care. This was observed through all sorts of side-effects where Twitter was basically failing to innovate for the past few years. Now the activists got involved and forced Dorsey into actually running the company he's finally in a position to pay attention and act on these things.
The service that hosts the accounts of all branches of the US military, all major weapons contractors, all three letter agencies, and many foreign militaries, governments, and world leaders guilty of all manner of war crimes, and this is where they draw the line for violence. Really interesting.
The president is the most visible face of the government. Of all the ones you mentioned, it's the only one people actually vote for. What he says and does has the most impact. So I don't find it "interesting", I find it entirely reasonable.
People in the United States do not vote for a president. They vote for an elector who in turn will vote for the president. This is an important and often left out detail in how the American political system works, in theory it could have protected us from the current dumpster fire.
My ballot has the candidate’s name on it, not some elector. If electors conspired to change the outcome, the people would rightfully consider it nothing more than a coup, regardless of the 18th-century design of the electoral college.
The Founders would fundamentally disagree, and so would I.
Our government repeats the motif of filtering down the raw passion and energy of the populace as a whole through a smaller, generally much less numerous group backed with the implicit assumption of good faith and sense.
The faithless elector was to the Founder's one of the last bulwarks against bestowing the highest office in the country to someone so repugnant, that an isolated bunch of people, accountable to no one but their own conscience, politely discussing the matter came to the conclusion it just couldn't work out. The idea that a President could get that far by mere populism and charlatanism may seem daft, but in that time, you didn't have background checks. You couldn't sniff out who someone really was, and if you knew the right people it was easy to get paraded in front of a populace that would eat up anything you fed them as long as there was enough spectacle to keep their attention. Odds are, it wouldn't be a problem. Everything would go just fine. However, the Founder's were well read on the ills of Greek and Roman poli, and the traps of demagoguery, and cults of personality. Their solution was the application of well-intentioned moral reasoning. We've all experienced the excitement of an idea that sounds great in a crowd, to later go home and say, "Now wait a minute." Same basic principle. In such an important decision, if it is really the right answer, no one will refuse,yet if it isn't, the stakes are high enough where the presence of that last chance is warranted.
The political party system completely undermined the entire intent behind the College, and many people never really try to transplant themselves out of the modern mindset, back to the time period to understand it. Nor do they realize just how important careful consideration of the person holding that post was. Think about it.
That President did not have the most capable Armed Forces in the world at his disposal. They did not have the capability to essentially make or unmake law via Administrative law and control of Alphabet soup of national regulatory agencies we have today. That President was not sitting atop the world's largest nuclear arsenal, or at the nexus of arguably one of the most well-funded intelligence and law enforcement apparatus in the world. In comparison to the Presidents of today, Abraham Lincoln was absolutely right. "No man can do any great harm in four years". Nowadays, given the level of interconnectivity between world governments, and the technological capabilities that are at our disposal, it stands to reason they might have balked at having a President in the first place. We don't know for certain. We can only guess.
I'm not certain anyone will find any of what I'm saying rhetorically convincing, but the main point I'm making is it is dangerous to dismiss the past without really understanding why what was done was done. The thinking behind the College was completely rational for the time, and arguably, even more rational and relevant today assuming your values and philosophies are more or less consistent with those of the Founders, who were so helpful as to write them down in generous volume that we may benefit from their endeavors today.
At least, I think so, and I've spent more time than I like to admit trying to understand the topic myself. Which is kind of silly, after all, to be ashamed of doing so, seeing as it is one of the single most important things to do for those who come after us.
To his wife,Joh Adams wrote:
>"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, co...
the founders kept slaves and built a system of government where slaveholders increased their political power by a amount proportional to the number of slaves they kept. fuck the founders.
>The faithless elector was to the Founder's one of the last bulwarks against bestowing the highest office in the country to someone so repugnant, that an isolated bunch of people, accountable to no one but their own conscience, politely discussing the matter came to the conclusion it just couldn't work out.
Thank you for taking the time to illustrate many points. I appreciate the informationa and further explanation.
I'm not sure that's an accurate portrayal of the history of the matter. It wasn't at all a carefully considered scheme, it was thrown together slapdash, the option that none could hate but also none loved.
You cite Federalist 68, but forget that less than a year later Hamilton was gaming the electoral college.
The founders were humans. They had flaws and disagreements. Many parts of the Constitution are borne more out of political expediency than grand ideals, and the operation of the Electoral College is not exempt from these caveats.
One, the electoral college itself is tied to the political power of many low population states, so any serious adjustment to this process is a pretty dangerous subject for some states, making any country wide changes very hard to start.
Two, the shift to direct election of the president (minus the electoral college) was not a planned change. If one day in the 19th century everyone decided to change, then scrapping the EC would've made sense. Instead it has been a slow process happening over at least a century to arrive at our modern system, hence the presence of vestigial artifacts like the electors themselves.
Three, the process of how electors are selected is delegated to the states, which is part of why it took so long. So for example Pennsylvania and Maryland went to a system by which one party won the entire state at once in 1789, while it took South Carolina until 1860 to abandon per district results. Maine never adopted the winner takes all approach, and assigns two votes by district and two by the popular vote tally.
Well said, but I'd like to restate and emphasize a point you stated:
the Constitution specifies that States (not The People or citizens or voters) shall choose their electors.
As you said, allocation of electors by states has been played with in different ways based on different election/ voting methods, but there's actually no constitutional requirement for States to hold a general election at all.
It's entirely up to the state legislatures, who have all since delagated the responsibility to a statewide vote.
From Article II:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors..."
That's it- the rest covers how many electors each state gets.
It's questionable as to what theoretical limits the modern SCOTUS might place on this power to delegate, but they've already said that voting must adhere to "one person, one vote" principles, and have hinted that the states can't delegate the power externally (from the state). But they've never explicitly "locked-in" the requirement that any state hold a general election at all.
You’re right that there’s no hard constitutional requirement that electors vote for for whoever won the popular vote in their state or district, but there is absolutely a strong cultural expectation that electors act faithfully. Also, it’s illegal in many states for electors to act faithlessly.
I think this is a bit like saying that the UK has no constitution because it’s not written down. It’s technically true, but it comes nowhere close to the actual lived experience of the people in that jurisdiction, who absolutely believe they live in a constitutional society.
The electoral college as a system for weighting the votes of people based on where they live is unjust in my opinion, but it’s well-understood as part of the rules of the system as it exists today. The mechanics of that system where the electors are humans who cast votes instead of just points that get tallied is a formality we could get rid of.
It’s not actually that important. In many states it’s illegal for the elector to vote for something other than the popular vote and in the others it’s unheard of to go a different way and it would be made pretty quickly illegal if it happened.
Yep, but given that it doesn’t happen, it’s not really relevant as some kind of IAmVerySmart comment claiming that people don’t vote for the US President. They effectively do.
States can apportion their electors however they choose, but generally their votes are cast in a "winner take all" manner.
This setup is (in a way) a consequence of the Great Compromise, and would serve to reduce the electoral influence of more populous states even if elector votes were cast proportionally with respected the state's popular vote.
It's not accurate to say that people in the US vote for electors.
This is using past violence as a threat of imminent violence while the other accounts you mentioned will generally reference violence indirectly or in the past tense. That is an important distinction.
That's a fair point. I'm not defending Trump's tweet, but it seems defining violence glorification is arbitrary. It would be funny if Twitter adds a rule that says you can be an organization whose whole purpose is to make devices that kill people as long as you don't glorify making devices that kill people.
He may be commander in chief, but even commanders in chief have to follow certain laws / moral rules.
Just observing his behavior during speeches and such, it should be obvious to anyone that Trumps mental state is... abnormal, and needs to be corrected.
As commander in chief he has many ways of communicating with the nation. Threatening violence on Americans on a private platform that explicitly forbids such actions is expressly not allowed and Twitter is well within their rights to “editorialize” it.
What is a realistic solution though? Police == violence, we might want to pretend that's not true, but it is. The threat of greater violence (a.k.a. police attacking you, throwing you into jail or even killing you) is what keeps lesser violence (individuals looting, murdering) at bay in civilized, democratic societies.
The solution is for MPD to do their fucking jobs and arrest the murderer.
This entire thing is happening because they refuse to simply arrest a man that has been caught on camera slowly murdering a man, simply because he is a cop.
Even if they arrested him and let him bond out (which is what would happen to any non-police individual in this scenario) there would have been zero destruction. Zero.
For the most part, public shame is a bigger driver of everyday behavior than threat of violence. And threatening to shoot people (and conceivably ask questions later) is very different from announcing a policy whose violation will result in arrest and prosecution. It's called due process, and it's what separates a legitimate government from, e.g. rule by organized crime.
Correct. And a lot of this violence is a direct result of institutional systemic violence. Violence breeds violence in other words. This is terrible for the economy in general, but capitalists found a way to exploit violence and fear: the weapon industry thrives on violence and fear.
Yeah, enforcing the law is the worst. If we just got rid of the police I for one would be much better off because all of your property would become mine.
Not sure if the story has fully made the rounds, but there was a whole panic during all this rioting about a kidnapping that took place. The police had just fled from the police station, and suddenly the same people who were burning down the station were desperately trying to contact the police to save a kidnapping victim.
We absolutely need to reform the police, but I really can't understand people who think we should abolish them. What is your plan to handle these situations?
> Police == violence, we might want to pretend that's not true, but it is.
I disagree, and point to a distinction that I learned from an essay of Christopher Hitchens. He described this as (paraphrasing) the distinction from the worldview of Hobbes versus the worldview of Locke.
Hobbes was of course the author of Leviathan, which viewed strong government as the barrier between an ordered society and a brutal state of nature ("the war of all against all"). Entrust a monarch with very strong authority, because the alternative is civil war at all levels of society.
Locke, writing somewhat later, advocated for separation of powers and constraints on the power of the state in general. In particular, the need for the entire state, including a possible monarch, to follow the law.
So, I would argue that the function of the police is to enforce laws, which are arrived at by a social negotiation, and that equating police with violence is mistaken. The threat of police violence is not what holds people in check. Rather, people are held in check by their recognition of the value of the system of justice and laws.
This viewpoint can explain why people have such a strong reaction to police who break that social contract.
Everyone is on board with each private platforms freedom to choose its content until it goes against their personal opinions: then, all of a sudden, the spaces of privately owned corporations are instead treated as if they belong to the public.
Net neutrality is important, because the digital infrastructure of the Internet is the "streets" of the digital world. Freedom of speech needs to be protected there, but when you're signing up for a free-of-charge social network that survives on advertising, you are literally soapboxing in a Walmart -- and it can't possibly be the civic duty of this metaphorical corporation to allow you to stay in there and disturb their business, rather than redirect you out into the street, or into your own place of business.
How about this for neutrality: When Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders end a post with "the shooting starts", they can get flagged for glorifying violence as well.
This argument lacks so much nuance, yet I see it in every thread where a communication platform dictates who can and can't be heard.
The danger in the idea of "just find another X" is that, if you are willing to believe that the action in question justifies an open platform's prerogative to censor, then it follows that every alternative platform do the same. This creates black holes, if you will, that are incredibly easy for dissenters to fall down.
I'm not saying that I support Trump's message. But, as a society, we have to be nuanced about this and figure out what constitutes a right to use on massive platforms like Twitter. Twitter isn't just some dinky website. If you are worried about Russians/Chinese/Republicans swaying elections on social media, then you'd better be worried about how Twitter itself picks and chooses what you see.
After all, exactly how many levels down will we go?
Twitter: You can pay your own hosting fees.
Namecheap: Your users can find you at your IP address.
AWS: You can run your own server hardware.
Intel: You can build your own CPU.
Electric Co.: You can generate your own electricity.
VISA: You can take payments in cash.
Hospital: You can use your own butterfly strips and an ibuprofen.
I see what you're getting at but it's not really a valid comparison.
Advocating violence (or whatever you want to call it) on Twitter directly affects their bottom line, and enjoyment of the site for other users.
More simply: A toxic environment repels advertisers, users and investors.
Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose does not affect those companies bottom line, or otherwise affect the user experience for other customers.
With that logic, how exactly is the president(or anyone in authority whether it be a governor, police chief, etc.) supposed to threaten use of force on any communication platform? It seems like mass communication is needed, which inevitably involves advertisers and investors, thus an exception should be made for situations like this where the president's message goes against the interest of Twitter.
What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use. They are all funded by advertisers, investors, etc. Should we really be entrusting billionaires in determining which messages from the government we should and shouldn't be hearing?
> Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose
My analogies might not be totally applicable(though all analogies fall apart to some extent), but that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't applicable at all. A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack from investors and segments of the public for hosting undesirable content, in which case it might be their interest to let go a customer publishing that content using their services. Of course, that is far less likely than with something like Twitter.
More accurately, the alternatives would be something like CNN or iHeartRadio, or possible alternatives to Twitter.
Right. Which is why I think Twitter has chosen the best (of nothing but bad) options in handling this. That is, carry the message (since it is newsworthy) but annotate it.
>What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use.
To a degree. But those businesses don't have positive social interaction as their core value proposition (reason to exist). People don't go to CNN.com for the purpose of being social. Thus anti-social behaviour on CNN doesn't affect their core value proposition in the same way.
>A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack
True, but groups organizing to lobby for a political/social purpose is a bit of a different beast altogether than one users actions directly affecting other users. In other words, there's no way (absent a bug/failure/poor design) that one users' usage of AWS should directly affect my usage of AWS.
All I'm saying is that social networks are very different from the other examples because they are, well, social.
I'm sure you didn't mean it, but inserting "will" misrepresents what I was trying to communicate. A more accurate word would be "should" or "obligated to". Saying that they will follow in taking adverse action is more prescriptive than what I meant. My fault, not yours.
There are sort of alternatives to Twitter, though you have to admit that Twitter's approach and audience size is quite different from, say, someone's forum using vBulletin. Nevertheless, there are mainstream alternatives such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and perhaps TV and radio, but that's not to say that they aren't likely to make a similar choice to Twitter, if it is generally agreed upon that Trump's message is bad and either shouldn't be seen or shouldn't be engaged with. Since they have similar financial incentives, it's not totally unreasonable to think that these mainstream platforms would follow suit if Trump decided to abandon Twitter and start posting solely on one of these alternatives. Whether or not you agree with Alex Jones, he was banned from all these platforms in coordination. It's absolutely possible that the dominoes would fall, and non-mainstream alternatives like Minds or Gab or Mastodon aren't necessarily viable alternatives if their audience is incredibly small.
Twitter isn't owned by the president or the federal government; Trump has many other legally established venues for his public announcements (whitehouse.gov, for instance). If he prefers to use a private company to speak to the public, he has to abide by its rules - in that regard, he is no different from any other Twitter customer.
The US is a federated country. The governors of the states have the ability to call in the National Guard to protect their state if they can not use Local/State law enforcement.
If and ONLY if that doesn't work can the State Legislature/Gov formally ask the President for help by calling on the Insurrection Act.
It's actually one of the core tenets of federalism.
> Rubber bullets can blind or kill. Tear gas hurts like hell.
So... don't go looting? It's supposed to be a deterrent. Maybe you'll think twice about burning down your local target and autozone if there is a risk of being blinded. You'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't reach for your molotov cocktail and baseball bat to go join in the "fun".
Bullets don’t have names on them and tear gas doesn’t discriminate between peaceful protestors and looters. The use of force should be a final response, not an initial one. It can and does hurt innocent people, inciting even more violence.
Peaceful protesters should not be anywhere near commercial zones being looted and burned. Why would a peaceful protestor choose to protest at Target and not the local Sheriff/Police headquarters?
Don't kill innocent black people then? The looting is a consequence. It's not as if looting happens everyday for no reason. People are angry and do certain things to express their anger. It's not fair for one side to protest peacefully when the other side resorts to violence for non-threats.
Don't kill innocent people of any color. Punish police who do. Everyone can agree on that.
"Looting is a consequence" is a poor excuse, looting/arson is not the correct way to express anger, you harm people who have nothing do with the problem or solution. Stop excusing their behavior.
The person who smashed the windows of the Autozone, starting its destruction, was decidedly not a protestor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evjkVfJ7HY . There is some speculation regarding his identity, but even without a full investigation, his actions and attire out him as not part of the crowd.
Rubber bullets are a emergency tool if normal anti riot told don't work and the police is atacked work thinks like molotophcocktails. They easily cause major permanent damage like blindness and like work gun it's easy to get the wrong person by accident of groups are involved.
Shooting people is not even remotely a correct response to looting. It's why someone might be court marshalled, or dishonorably discharged.
The funny thing is...I remember back when we held the US President to a higher standard than say, the worst soldier in the National Guard. Just because he is making a public statement does not remove the ability of the platform to fact check or accompany it with the idea that it's wrong. News broadcasters can freely air Trump speeches and pair them with fact checks.
If trump would like to not be editorialized, he should post this statement on the White Houses's site. The fact of the matter is that he uses twitter for the audience, the claps, the viral followers. Twitter is not a public place, he is using their service for their service and to reach their users. They have every right to make statements on this and enforce their rules.
> he should post this statement on the White Houses's site
All "microblog" type posts made by a president should be posted directly through the White House's own web site, and not be communications through a commercial service.
This is the same word games that edge lords use to avoid social consequences; there’s no “I was just kidding” excuse when the president of the United States of America discusses the use of lethal force on American citizens.
It would be fine if it's: if they loot arrest them and if they treat to prevent this by using weapons like guns then you can shoot them if there is no other way.
You can not take someones life to defend your property in Minnesota. There are not "Stand Your Ground" laws afaik. A use of lethal force must be intended to protect someone's life.
“Stand your ground” isn’t about defending property with lethal force. Stand your ground is about whether or not you have a duty to attempt to flee (if possible) before applying lethal force. Castle doctrine is a similar rule, but more narrowly scoped to your own home. Without stand-your-ground, you have to demonstrate that you tried to, or were incapable of retreating before applying lethal force.
That being said, there are very few states of the union where applying lethal force to protect property is legal. Texas is the only one I know of. In Texas you could shoot someone to protect property even if you feel that your life and limb are not at risk, but that’s not the norm in other states.
All states allow some level of force to stop a fleeing felon, the well named “Fleeing Felon” rule, but Tennessee vs. Garner limited this to non-lethal force. So you could tackle a fleeing robber legally, but shooting one would be illegal outside of Texas.
Now Minnesota only has castle doctrine and stand your ground from your own vehicle. If one reasonably feels that life and limb are at risk in Minnesota you can apply lethal force, but if you’re outside of your home and car you have a duty to attempt to retreat first. In my opinion this makes shooting at looters to protect your business a dicey proposition legally, as arguably you should have just fled.
As always, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
That's very interesting information, thank you for taking time to research this and explain it in a friendly and informative way. I am from Texas, so I admit most of my knowledge comes from my own state's laws. If I'm not mistaken we are in agreement that the looters lives should not be at risk in this situation and that Minnesota law will likely not protect an equivalent of what the Korean population did in LA during their riots, when they took to protecting their shops by getting on their roofs with rifles.
That’s an implausibly charitable interpretation, especially given that Trump has repeatedly expressed positive sentiments towards police violence, and advocated for the death penalty for citizens accused of crimes. He paid $85k to take out a full page ad calling for the Central Park five to be executed.
This is also the same guy who promised to pay the legal fees of anyone who attacked protesters at his rally, and suggested that we should shoot migrants crossing the border. It strains credulity to believe that this time Trump was just asking people to not loot.
American citizens should be shot in the same circumstances any other citizens should be shot, like when all other reasonable countermeasures fail and they are posing a credible treat to other people's lives.
There are better options than killing people. Even shooting legs is better than shooting to kill.
I will never advocate violence on your own citizens because that creates a never ending cycle of violence and vendettas. It’s as stupid and fruitless as populist politics
> Even shooting legs is better than shooting to kill.
No it isn't. Legs are hard to hit compared to center-mass, and the only reason you should be shooting at somebody is if you need to because they are an imminent threat; therefore you should be aiming for a part of the body that you have a higher probability of hitting and that, having been hit, has a higher probability of effectively stopping the threat.
There are two different questions here, which are only tangentially related.
First, are there circumstances in which a citizen could apply lethal force to protect life and limb? Obviously yes; shooting someone trying to light your house on fire is certainly something that is both plausible and plausibly legal.
Second, is it appropriate for the political leader of a nation to imply that people committing a crime will be shot for it on the street? Not "we will deploy the national guard to provide safety and security to the citizens" but "looters will be shot". I think the answer here is obviously no, that is not appropriate.
I'm not going to defend that part of the statement, it was obviously wrong to anyone with more than 2 brain cells if interpreted literally. However the situation has rapidly declined to a state where I personally think the use of non-lethal force is justified, and lethal in the case of an imminent threat (ie. armed and threatening or literally firebomb in hand). A number of dwellings and business have been set on fire, in addition to the police precinct. These are individuals (and some large corporations) that are unrelated, and those taking advantage of the chaos and creating more should be punished appropriately. Obviously appropriate measures do not involve shooting people.
I will also add that this is also a case of tensions boiling over. While that doesn’t justify the arson, meaningful reform to defuse long standing tensions would be a wise move.
I'd also argue the recent pandemic and subsequent crash of the economy has an underplayed role in the riots. When many haven't left their homes (much) in months and have been laid off, it's no surprise they'd be looking for an excuse to get out and focus their energy. People are desperate and stressed and it makes for some abnormal dynamics.
An alternative interpretation is that he was simply observing that violence begets violence, rather than encouraging it. My take is that he was deliberately ambiguous in order to taunt his opponents whilst also giving himself plausible deniability.
I think he probably meant exactly what everyone thinks, but you can shoot things other than bullets. Rubber bullets and gas canisters are also “shot.” He could have even been referring to the rioters shooting. I’m sure it would have been worded better if it wasn’t on Twitter, but that’s definitely on him.
The point is if you’re going to censor the president (or anyone, IMO) you should give them the full benefit of the doubt first.
> He is the commander in chief. He has the capability to threaten violence.
Actually no, he doesn't have the capability to threaten institutionalised violence against US CITIZENS which might have or maybe want commit a crime which is not capital and don't even lead to to much jail time.
If he would have the right to do so he would be an authoritarian leader and the US no longer a democracy.
Even if the national guard is dispatched they can just arrest people, not shoot them down (except if that people try to shoot down the national guard, which they don't).
If I'm not mistaken, being commander in chief doesn't mean that you're above the law. No US law that I'm aware of allows you to threaten mass execution of US citizens.
Target is minor, they blew up a police station. That’s terrorism level attack. Police should have had control of the situation, they allowed it to happen
I kind of see it backwards from that. Police are an understandable target, given the situation. The police killed someone. But Target didn't do anything.
Depends on the Twitter regulations, war is generally not illegal. Summary capital punishment usually is unlawful; though there are exceptions. So I was trying to account for that.
Well, in political science and sociology, one of the most common definitions of the state is that it possesses a monopoly on legitimate/lawful violence.
Violence conducted via the military or police, according to regulation, is lawful.
But violence conducted by citizens, or by members of the government or military that is not according to law/regulation, is not lawful.
I'm not saying Twitter's drawing the line exactly right, but it's somewhere in the right vicinity.
Minnesota does not have stand your ground laws. Instead, they have duty to retreat laws (basically, you can use deadly force to protect your life, not property).
"Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts"
I think Trump's saying that if things get out of control, law enforcement will start shooting. If I understand your post correctly, this would be lawful...
Well, it is not legal to shoot someone for stealing in Minnesota so I'm not sure how this would be lawful violence. He would need to have said something like "when the looting starts, we will attempt to arrest anyone that we see, if they then threaten the officers' lives instead of stopping or running away, then the shooting starts".
It is NOT legal for the Minnesota police to shoot a citizen that they believe is committing a crime unless their life or another person's life is under direct threat.
Well, yes - you're of course right. And Trump should have said something different, like you suggested. I'm not defending the tweet in any way. I was suggesting that the tweet was in alignment with the idea that the state has a monopoly on violence. But I think I read crazygringo's comment too fast and didn't really digest the emphasis on lawful/legal/regulated violence. In other-words, I derp'd.
Presidents are also commanders in chief; a civilian that has ultimate control of state’s violence monopoly. Still the distinction between lawful/unlawful applies.
Twitter didn't draw the line at promoting violence (which is a line I can agree with), they drew the line at a prediction of mail-in voting resulting in fraud.
It's interesting Twitter finally started taking a stand in Trump's last year as president, I wonder if it's because they hope he'll get ousted and they won't have to deal with the backlash from him for too long. Or it's just a marketing ploy, perhaps customer count was falling.
I'm not trying to valorize Jack, but why is it so hard to believe they just finally feel some level of responsibility? While you should always keep an eye out for more banal motivations, at some point one can only tolerate so much.
I agree that Jack is well-intentioned, but I think he's making a huge mistake by choosing a half measure. Twitter's current policy allows Trump to claim he's being silenced while simultaneously allowing him to get his message out to his Twitter followers. It's the worst of both worlds.
Twitter should either let him tweet whatever he wants or ban him.
I think what you're seeing is Twitter building a track record that will allow them to effectively ban him. Take a look at Reddit, they've been following the exact same track for /r/the_donald. They're not interested in trying to make sure Trump stays on twitter, they're just interested in creating the trail of evidence that when they do kick him off they can talk about how incredibly tolerant they were.
He attacks people on Twitter and pretends he can literally do what he wants without consequences — whether from the government and rule of law or in this case, a private company.
You’re getting downvoted for a fair call out. There’s a deeper rot in this country where a select group believes freedom and fairness is something they can own and define, screw reality or objective fact. Anything else is biased and a conspiracy paid for by Soros, Obama, Hillary, Muslims, Hispanics, and the “swamp”.
Selectively fact checking things that are arguably opinions rather than factual claims in the first place, using flimsy evidence, whilst leaving actual factual misinformation to spread is definitely picking sides.
There has to be a line somewhere, otherwise the implication is that nobody can be held correct by fact checking. Snopes and Politifact do a pretty good job, IMO. I think this just touches on the fact that the GOP and Trumpists in general are more likely to engage in distorting the truth or outright fabricating lies.
or perhaps you use it against the most egregious offences by users with a high number of followers. not much point fact checking my tweets because at worst I could misinform 6 people, perhaps if it was retweeted a lot it would then be fact checked. Trump's verbal/typed diarrhea gets everywhere.
Not fact checking is only picking a side once you have decided to fact check. Before all of this twitter could claim to be a medium of communication. There isn't implicit trust that something is true because it is written on paper, posted on a billboard, or appears on TV. By choosing to mark tweets as true or false, they are no longer just a medium of communication. We can now imply that if twitter does not mark a tweet as false, they are endorsing that tweet as true.
Sounds like maybe you should take the hint. It's not "taking sides" to point out that you're glorifying violence if you as the president are threatening to deploy military force against protestors.
Shooting rubber bullets at rioters and looters is standard practice pretty much everywhere in democracies, and in non-democracies they tend to go straight to lethal ammo.
You're right, I mixed the two. In any case I think my point still stands; in most European countries both would be addressed with police batons and in case of violence rubber bullets and tear gas. From his tweet I don't think he was thinking about rubber bullets.
No it wouldn't. Most cases of looting in Europe are just forgotten about because it's done by minorities in countries like France or UK and it's a controversial topic to talk about so police and governments would rather just pretend it doesn't happen.
I've done my own share of protesting (living in Eastern Europe forces you to do that sometimes) and we never resorted to looting. If we had done so I would have expected the powers that be to take some counter-measures that would have involved more than strong verbal reprimands, yes.
If by 'we' you're referring to the entirety of Eastern Europe, Russia has a well known history of employing agent provocateurs in order to affect protests or other movements. This isn't isolated to just Eastern Europe either, considering Italy has a history of this as well.
Needless to say there's also been some reporting and concerns of provocateurs among the protesters here as well using it as an excuse to inflame riots or start looting.
I live in Romania, not Russia, and you're correct, the powers that we protested against also employed agent provocateurs. They were easy to spot though (youngish, like 17-18, looked like they belonged to some football ultra movements) and the other protesters took almost immediate action against them (isolating them, mostly).
You may find this thread interesting, as it concerns the allegation that the property destruction taking place yesterday (edit: Wednesday - I just remembered it's already Friday) was initiated by a police officer. https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1266196890649088000
The looting in Minneapolis is a) rather ancillary to the larger protests against the police, b) an American tradition going back to colonial times, and c) a mix of opportunism and antipathy to US hypercapitalism. A few small stores have been damaged but the destruction has mainly been targeted against corporate retail outlets.
Different places have different forms of political outcry. Protest by destruction of commercial property was a well-known component of American colonial resistance to Britain. (Consider the Boston Tea Party, for example.)
Personally I have never been part of a riotous protest, but in an academic sense I believe that destruction of commercial property does more to force a change in police activity than destruction of police cars and other public property (things that ultimately belong to the people themselves).
You can bet that there are more powerful people in the business community there, than on the police force.
I don't believe this is actively in the mind of most rioters, but I think it is part of the reason that rioting has a major impact on American politics.
His feed has been getting worse recently, and the publicity of his misbehavior has been escalating. Maybe he's acting out more because it's an election year. Bit of a chicken/egg issue that I wouldn't want to get stuck defending either side.
But the fact of the matter is that the Citizens United ruling grants private corporations the right to free speech. He can continue to use Twitter, but they've literally got the right to campaign against him, editorialize, shadowban, or straight up ban him. He could choose to follow the site's rules, or run off to Gab. But he's doing it for attention and his tantrums and Twitter's non-enforcement actions are getting him a lot of that.
Citizens united foes not grant private corporations anything. Their freedom to say what they like was determined to already have existed. Citizens united just stops lower courts from enforcing any law that violates this freedom.
Would you feel the same if Twitter were purchased by Rupert Murdoch and Twitter hid tweets that Fox considered not true?
Remember that it's only a matter of time until ownership changes or another larger platform gains traction, perhaps even one owned by a foreign government with significantly different ideas of what is "true", IE TikTok.
There's nothing preventing Trump for saying 'I made a hasty remark in a moment of anger, and will maintain a more thoughtful and respectful tone in the future.' It's inarguable that Twitter has been very, very accommodating of him and tried the hands-off approach for a long time while explaining their reasons for doing so to their other users.
Oh, but it is. It is when the prominent troll is also POTUS.
You and Twitter may want it to not be politics... But unfortunately both doing nothing and doing something are political moves by Twitter HQ, I'm afraid.
Twitter was 'kind of' dying before Trump. Now its a pretty nice place with people to follow (Some sort of network effect?). But its too far from being open, requires phone number, lacks 'RSS' and etc.
I wish he moved to Mastodon. Decentralized, open source. It only needs users
Imagine all the devs and supporters of Mastodon trying hard to come up with a pretext why it is okay to block him from the network via technical changes.
It's pretty established that individual Mastodon nodes are able to impose the rules they want and network with whichever Mastodon nodes they want. And many popular Mastodon nodes have stricter rules than Twitter, so it would hardly be surprising if they shunned someone who broke rules on Twitter.
110% I wouldn't federate with any node that allows that sort of posting (from Trump or anyone else). I run a a mastodon node precisely because I don't want to deal with the racism, homophobia, and transphobia so common on twitter.
The over-reaction here is just completely fucking stupid.
The statement that juxtaposed "looting/shooting" is akin to juxtaposing a combination not unlike "drunk driving/car wrecks" or "where smoke/there's fire" and the like.
But yeah, okay, just fly into apoplexy because you find the man tasteless and rude.
'Trump's phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" is an unattributed quote of Walter Headley, Miami's police chief in 1967. It was a threat to citizens who were upset that police had terrorized a black teenager by holding him over a bridge.' (https://twitter.com/mattsheffield/status/1266246092393336838)
The OP means that Trump didn't use quotation marks or mention that it was a quotation. (I myself didn't realize it was a quotation.) There is no attribution or quotation marks in the tweet.
I found the attribution of the quote very informative and am very surprised it is currently downvoted. My own summary of the tweets is also downvoted, not sure what I could/should add to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347395
I tried to neutrally summarize the tweets, in case people wanted to know what they said without clicking.
This seems like a dubious foundation for Twitter to start with. If Trump controls the National Guard there is a definite public interest in knowing when he is likely to deploy the National Guard. It'd be headline news after the fact; it should be telegraphed beforehand.
Trump might be bluffing, but Twitter can't possibly know.
I find it clever that Twitter is not deleting the tweets, but simply adding their opinions about it.
I don't know if you can call "censure" when your messages are still visible to the public, but the "editor-that-is-not-really-an-editor-but-sort-of" simply adds a banner saying "yeah, sure, right."
I can't wait for Trump to protest the flagging, and Twitter to respond that "flagging tweets while letting them visible" is just expressing their free speech. Surely Trump supporters are all in favor of free speech in a free country, right ?
yes we support free speech but if they are editiorializing then section 230 no longer applies to them. we should prosecute them for all the child exploitation and other crimes such as defamation on their platform
If Twitter sucess to fight for the truth without exposing bias they will be the most remarkable heroes of the 2001 century and could begin a whole change of behavior of websites regarding fake news and hate speech
For anyone who doesn't want to click, Twitter quarantined (you can click "view" to see it, however engagement is disabled) a Presidential tweet in which he calls on a mayor to "get a city under control", threatened to send in the national guard, said the military is behind the governor, and said that if there is difficulty they will assume control. His specific reference to violence occurred at the end the tweet, which he ended saying "Any difficulty, and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!"
Send all of the middle east into meltdown, as militants foment biblical anarchy, engage in AK-47 raids, snipe tanks with RPG attacks and indirect fire, and oh right, the beheadings, but woah, woah, woah.
Trumpy say pee pee and poo poo, and that's a no no.
Twitter's problem is that Trump wants to pick a fight, and there's no good way to avoid it.
Trump's base is not on Twitter. Fact checking tweets provides more grist for the outrage mill, and the media which his base consumes amplifies the conflict and not the substance. So the tweets will get worse and worse.
It's impossible to give Twitter good advice, it's a horrible position to be in.
They should honestly just cross the rubicon and suspend his account. Playing both sides like they have will only prolong the conflict. Trump and the outrage mill alike will still find things to interpret as fighting until Twitter just pulls the switch.
Trump chose Twitter as his platform; they never chose him. His tweets have been central to his political presence and his ability to immediately alter the country's (and world's) discourse about current events. It would be humiliating for him to lose that platform, because he embraced it voluntarily.
"We start from a position of assuming that people do not intend to violate our Rules. Unless a violation is so egregious that we must immediately suspend an account, we first try to educate people about our Rules and give them a chance to correct their behavior. We show the violator the offending Tweet(s), explain which Rule was broken, and require them to remove the content before they can Tweet again. If someone repeatedly violates our Rules then our enforcement actions become stronger. This includes requiring violators to remove the Tweet(s) and taking additional actions like verifying account ownership and/or temporarily limiting their ability to Tweet for a set period of time. If someone continues to violate Rules beyond that point then their account may be permanently suspended."
Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
They've suspended the accounts of prominent people many times before.[1]
Maybe. But there's probably a business model out there this is simply a Twitter clone that waits for the Trump account to move there, and bang, instant success.
There is and they (Gab) get an okay number of likes on every one of his posts promoting it. [0] Also Facebook is now well positioned to be his next platform if he moves off twitter.
Trump isn't moving to Facebook, regardless of Zuck's attempt to pandering to his childish outbursts. Twitter is precisely suited to Trump's micro-tantrum thoughts, where Facebook is orthogonal. I would argue that the brevity of Twitter, and the adversarial nature of it, made Trump and the imbecile-right (e.g. not conservative -- it's a bunch of flag wavers who have close to zero political lean of knowledge...they just want to hate).
P.S. I know this comment is auto-dead, and that's okay.
Out of all the social networks, isn't Facebook the one that has the most Trump supporters? Twitter is notorious for being full of the woke left. Most people only find out about Trump's tweets because they get reported somewhere. Facebook is nowadays the preserve of older moms and pops.
Gab has been the theoretical right-wing Twitter for years. It wallows in mediocrity.
Trump and his cult are on twitter to try to bask in the legitimacy. If they're on their own, the raw charade of how childish and imbecilic their noise is becomes too obvious.
It's also a bit hilarious given that Gab, created because of crybabies like Trump and Scott Adams, has hilariously restrictive policies, just as The_Donald is one of the most snowflake-moderated subs on Reddit. The right really can't stand each other.
The headline is misleading. The "statement" is a Twitter thread, and it doesn't say anything about banning or not banning everybody. The body of the article concedes that it only "heavily implies" they'll never ban him. And that was three years ago. Some stuff has happened since then.
Because suspending Spike Lee would have required someone at Twitter to make that decision, and they're not going to do that. But will leap at the chance for Trump. It's been a clear double standard for years.
Only accounts with a large reach get fact checked. Unfortunately, leftist lunatics don't have the same reach as him, so they aren't ever going to get fact checked. (Just banned for violating the TOS.)
Edit: Don't understand the sentiment. Are there any radical left accounts with as much reach as the POTUS, that engage in similar behaviour that I am not aware of? If they exist, they should be trivial to link to. Looking at the top Twitter accounts, they consist of Barack Obama, YouTube, Modi, Bill Gates and a bunch of celebrities. Are any of those folks radical left? Will Lady Gaga or Katy Perry be opening the 2021 Superbowl halftime with "Internationale?"
I think you're being downvoting because your first sentence appears to be calling all leftists lunatics when (correct me if I'm wrong) you're actually saying "there are no leftists who are quite as loony and prominent as Trump so there is no easy comparison".
> I think you're being downvoting because your first sentence appears to be calling all leftists lunatics when (correct me if I'm wrong) you're actually saying "there are no leftists who are quite as loony and prominent as Trump so there is no easy comparison".
I think so. The GP's use of the term "leftist lunatics" reads as a right-wing shibboleth to me.
Outside the US, I hear "looney left" and related terms used all the time by political moderates to describe any leftist groups outside the political mainstream, with a similar connotation to "alt-right", though it's a meaner phrase. It's derogatory towards them, but not towards the left in general.
Inside the US, "looney left", "communists", and "traitors" are all used by the political center-right and right-wards to describe any leftist group. Any reference to the left is intended to be derogatory.
Yes, double standard to protect Trump. Who has for years twitted violent stuff, racist stuff, and Twitter had let it slide. I don't get this weird victim mentality of Trump folks. Trump has been treated with kid gloves by Twitter. Meanwhile, the largest broadcast network is literally Trump's state media.
If they were going to "leap at the chance" to suspend Trump, then why haven't they already? He's been treading in the grey area of their ToS for years.
Conflicting interests between how much they disagree with him politically and how much money they directly make off of his traffic (and less directly via traffic from everyone complaining about the controversy).
Twitter's business model is totally reliant on controversy. They want to treat/control, but not cure/extinguish.
Which is a separate reason that twitter's ethically conflicted in making almost any judgment calls on what's "allowable" speech.
Additionally, the nature of mud-slinging politics requires that ones opponents "follow" his online presence in able to attack. So if Trump leaves Twitter, not only do his followers go to whatever new platform he does, but so must his adversaries.
The article you linked to was over 8 years ago at this point - it was years closer to the founding of Twitter than it is to the present day. I don't think that can be considered relevant to their current enforcement regime.
Better leveraging Twitter's reporting feature is probably the most neutral way to solve this.
When a tweet is deemed response-worthy, they should post the report numbers. Value in numbers shields them in many ways and could legitimize their actions as a neutral party. Then, if they miss something, they can simply say there weren't enough reports. This will then empower the feature in the future.
I suggest this as active Reddit moderator with a community of 40,000+ subscribers who regularly has to enforce rules and uses auto-mod to help manage reports and shares that with the community.
-----------------------
You can report tweets for:
(1) Being not interested in it (you just get redirected to a mute or block button)
(2)It's suspicious or spam
---> The account is fake
---> Includes a link to a potentially harmful or phishing site
---> Hashtags are unrelated
---> Uses the reply function to spam
---> Something else
(3) It's abusive or harmful
---> It's disrespectful
---> Includes private information
---> Includes targeted harassment
---> It directs hate against a protected category (eg race, religions, gender, orientation, disability)
---> Threatening violence
---> They're encouraging self-harm or suicide
(4) It's misleading about politics or civic events
---> It has false information about how to vote
---> It intends to suppress or intimidate someone from voting
---> It misrepresents it's affiliation or impersonates an official
(5) It expresses intentions of self-harm or suicide.
-----------------------
It's pretty good but I would suggest the very simple following updates:
- Updating the main issue (It's abusive or harmful) to (It's abusive or encourages violence or destruction of property)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's misleading about politics or civic events) with (A political official is supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's suspicious, spam, or false) with (It's supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding chevron icons (>) as a visual cue that each main reporting issue has many sub-issues
This doesn’t work for political tweets. Look at replies to even Trumps benign tweets and you will see 50% of the population would hate other guy no matter what they tweet. Every single tweet of Joe Biden and Trump will get flagged no matter what they were tweeting.
> Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter has exempted Trump's accounts from all automated moderation. However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
> However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point), and how that scenario affects their bottom line.
They probably don’t want US institutions to dissolve into full-blown autocracy... But on the other hand, if that were to happen, then it would be better for the stock price if they hadn’t burned all bridges with the new leader for life.
You can bet that Zuckerberg is making the same calculus - except that he seems to have chosen a side. Facebook is no longer pretending to care about preventing autocracy. They are betting on the GOP coup succeeding, and are building bridges accordingly.
Note: no amount of downvoting by the alt-right fringe lurking here will make the facts go away. Downvote away since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs. You are an embarrassment to the technology community. You are the spineless, petty, cowardly foundation upon which all autocracies are built.
When Trump leaves office he will be open to an enormous amount of investigation, litigation and prosecution. I don't know how probable it is that he tries to stay in office, but I don't think it is zero. Twitter planning around that possibility seems be less likely.
> Since assuming office in January 2017, Trump has made at least 27 references to staying in office beyond the constitutional limit of two terms. He often follows up with a remark indicating he is “joking,” “kidding,” or saying it to drive the “fake” news media “crazy.” Even if Trump thinks that he’s only “joking,” the comments fit a broader pattern that raises the prospect that Trump may not leave office quietly in the event he’s on the losing end of a very close election.
OTOH people who hated Bush Jr. thought there was a good chance, and some evidence, that he'd find a way to stay in office past his term. Same with Obama.
I don't think you appreciate the magnitude of what is happening in the US at the moment.
The federal government is being stripped for parts, as we speak. Entire agencies have been gutted. Industrial conglomerates can literally regulate their own industries - for a price. Foreign leaders can influence foreign policy - for a price. Federally endicted criminals can get out of jail as if nothing had happened - for a price.
The level of grift and corruption is unlike anything the US has ever known. If Trump remains in power - which he is absolutely planning to do at all cost - it will only get worse. The end game for him is to create a new dynasty of oligarchs - at the same level of the Saudi royal family or Putin. Compared to that, the book deals and talk shows are nothing - crumbs. He wants to join the club. And that requires staying in power so that he can 1) continue stealing billions from the US public, and 2) continue corrupting the federal government to stay out of jail.
they are already cashing in. look at jr's book deal. look at ivanka's trademarks in china. look at funneling money into their properties. there's myriad graft in that family.
> My personal estimate is zero. He can't really cash in until he leaves office.
This seems true for a normal president, but Trump has never been shy about self enrichment even while in office, so it's not clear what incentive there is for him to leave.
I'm not certain that is true. Wouldn't the most effective way to profit from the presidency be to cultivate your persona as a twitter troll, and tip someone off when you are about to make a market moving tweet so they can place a leveraged bet?
I don't think insider trading law would apply, but in any case we seem to have established that he's above the law and can't be impeached. He, or friends beholden to him, could be trillionaires by the time they leave office.
It would certainly explain why he continually makes inflammatory statements about China and everything else, without seeming to consistently pursue anything.
Matt Levine regularly says that US insider trading law is a mishmash of precedent and that it does not require an "equal playing field" but rather that's a misconception. He's also more than once mentioned that you can trade on your own intentions legally, and that illegal trading is generally based on misusing information that belongs to someone else. Finally, I essentially got the idea of people front-running the tweets from one of his columns, so I know it's occurred to him, but he wasn't quite so blunt about it.
The SEC is irrelevant if there's no specific law against it, never mind that there's no evidence anyone can prosecute for anything even if it was a crime.
As far as making money for someone else, doing a "friend" a favor is not the same thing as charity, nor is laundering money through a proxy. If you hypothetically give away a trillion dollars without receiving anything in return formally that doesn't mean you haven't bought something. Ownership is only the convention that other people think you own something, backed up by some sort of written records somewhere.
Yes, but recall we are talking about my expectation that he will prefer cashing in to trying to be President for life (which in my estimation would be thwarted by every other part of government anyway). He may well be doing such things now, but he can't really cash in on favors owed until he leaves office.
And yet Obama jailed journalists and worked towards instituting Socialist ideas - which include a ruling class.
Meanwhile, Trumps only "autocrat" proof is words? He talks snit... What has he done to become a King? Nothing he's done so far isn't powers used by previous Presidents - including Obama.
What actual has Trump taken to expand Presidential powers? And what steps has Trump taken to become a King?
Because until actual actions are taken... words are just Trump talking shit. Which he's allowed to do...
He's neutered the justice department[0] and he's packing the federal judiciary with ideologues to the exclusion of sober-minded jurists. He's firing inspectors general tasked with oversight of the executive.[1]
What do you mean by socialism? What socialist ideas did Obama institute? What is the "ruling class" within socialism?
Regarding Trump: what do you make of him removing the inspector general who had opened an investigation against Pompeo? What do you make of him pushing out Jeff Sessions because Sessions recused himself from the Muller investigation?
Put another way: what would count as stepping toward autocracy, other than an explicit suspension of Congress or the like? Barring outright coups, these things happen incrementally. See Hungary, Brazil, etc.
I don't see anything about jailing them - and I remember reading a story awhile back about but can't find it. So if I'm wrong on that point, I stand corrected.
With that said - Obama definitely attacked journalists from DC. Spying on them, following them, etc.
> Trump removing various people
Those people work at the Presidents discretion. All previous Presidents have fired staff at various stages for various reasons.
Trump is a businessman who is known for firing people... You may have seen his Reality TV Show. His catch line? YOURE FIRED!
> The final vote was ten in favor and ten opposed, so Adams, exercising for the first time his Constitutional authority to break a tie, settled the matter in favor of the president’s exclusive removal power.
> The president’s authority to dismiss an appointee is now settled law, but with the text unclear, it had to be settled by the First Federal Congress.
> autocracy
Trump doesn't have the "unlimited powers" of a King or a Dictator though... you can claim it but he's got the same power as those before.
You could argue about "incremental" movements... but Trump hasn't moved the needle any further that I know of. Previous Presidents? Definitely... but Trump has been using everything previous Presidents have used - from Obama on back.
The opinions of your friends on subjects they don't understand are irrelevant. What is relevant is the opinion of actual experts on the topic of autocracy. There is strong consensus among those experts that the Trump administration is, in fact, implementing a transition to autocracy. Specifically a kleptocratic autocracy following the Russian model.
You are free to ignore the scientific consensus about the rise of autocracy in the US. Just like you are free to ignore the scientific consensus about global heating. But the facts remain the facts.
They become pundits making mid 6-figures on TV and go on the lecture circuit making 5-figures per speech. Not a bad life for someone who doesn't need to be right.. ever.
There are as many sources as there are experts on the topic... If you had bothered to even google "autocracy expert trump" you would have dozens of sources already.
1. Sarah Kendzior. PhD on the topic of autocracy (specifically Uzbekistan). Investigative journalist on the topic of corruption in the Trump administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Kendzior
I heard those things too. This is the first time I've considered it even slightly plausible. I'd give it a 20% chance that he calls on his most fanatical base to march armed on DC if he loses the election.
Go check into the Qanon cult and similar circles. There are conservatively probably a few hundred thousand people in this country that would take up arms against the (literal) baby eating pedophile illuminati. All he has to do is say "the storm is upon us" and provide instructions. "Where we go one we go all."
Can any constitutional scholars comment on what happens then? What if he as commander in chief orders the military to stand down? Would they obey him or protect the constitution? What about the national guard? Local police? What would any of these agencies do if removing Trump required opening fire on tens of thousands of Americans?
Reagan, Clinton, and Obama were much more broadly popular than Trump, but the thought of them attempting this and having any chance of success is laughable. I don't even think Bush II could have pulled it off right after 9/11 at the peak of his popularity and with his powerful religious right base.
Trump on the other hand has a fan base unlike any I've ever seen. If you don't believe me research Qanon. There's a shockingly large group of people who worship him as something almost akin to a prophet. I'm sure there's some percentage who would die for him. It's a bit disturbing.
I agree that it's unlikely, but it is plausible.
Personally I think he will leave office, but what he has accomplished is to pave the way for an actual future dictator.
If the COVID recession plus unlimited QE results in further divergence between the real economy and the financial economy I could definitely see real fascism or totalitarian socialism winning some day. As I've been saying for a while, which one we get probably depends on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue. I don't think people will care about left or right as long as there are pitchforks being handed out.
I think it's impossible to predict whether he makes such a call, it's the realm of psychology. What's the trigger? Let's say he loses the election. Does his decompensation happen so fast and so hard that he turns into Jell-O? Or does he rage tweet (or go on Facebook or TV or all of the above) that the election is rigged, illegal, invalid, and must be challenged with violence, before it's too late?
shrug
At that moment it is less about law than it is about character of other leaders. Does the Vice President, who is still the VP following his own election loss, contradict the POTUS' election fraud claims and call for violence? Necessarily on the table is 25th amendment and/or impeachment. A call for violent revolution to achieve the dissolution of constitutional order is unquestionably a violation of oath of office for any elected official.
People are conditioned to think that an impeachment would take a week or more. If Congresscritters actually get scared? They can follow strict rules of order and still get it done very quickly. Hours. The real impediments to speed are physical presence in the chamber. Not opposition. They will not wait for TV cameras, spectator chairs or tickets to get printed. If they really believe the POTUS is trying to incite an overthrow of the government, which is what autocracy means, they know full well they are inside the blast radius of imploding power.
POTUS is a legal term, and no law gives them power to prevent senators from entering either capitol chamber. Each house has their own rules who can enter. They each keep their own Sergeant at Arms.
IF a POTUS can use force to stop them, it is extra-constitutional, and at that point this person is not POTUS but something else.
During his 'The president has total power' gaffe he at one point said something along "I am president, the president isn't a person, but the office. I have the office now. Then the next guy will have the office..." You know, the kind of thing a dictator would say. Sometimes I feel like defending him due to people's over reactions when I wouldn't otherwise.
Vladimir Putin talks about his office in a similar way. Yet he's managed to hold it for 20 years even though the Russian constitution was supposed to limit him to two four-year terms.
At least since Augustus, dictators have been diligent in paying lip service to law and established tradition while trampling over both.
> Sometimes I feel like defending him due to people's over reactions when I wouldn't otherwise.
You feel the urge to defend someone whose actions are indefensible. Why is that? If I had to guess, I would say it's because you feel the urge to always be the contrarian. Whatever you feel the majority opinion is, there is an urge to go against it. This is probably because your feeling of self-worth is attached to the notion of being a contrarian. Going against the majority opinion makes you feel special, and in a way, it makes you feel superior. In my experience, it is a symptom of deeper issues - insecurity, fear of the unknown. The risk, if you don't address this issue, is that you will find yourself defending more and more extreme positions, and even seeking out more extreme positions to defend. This will cause social isolation, as people with more maintstream opinions such as "dangerous criminals should not be elected president" start avoiding you, and are replaced by other "contrarians".
That’s awfully ungenerous to your fellow HNer. Maybe it would be better to wait for his response to your question (“Why is that?”) rather than answering it yourself.
If I had to guess you're the kind of person who always thinks you're the smartest guy around. You know absolutely nothing about this person, just went on this rant against a strawman to feel intelligent.
Yes, that’s always a possibility. I try to check myself for this kind of behavior, and I don’t think that your description is accurate, but of course you never know for certain.
The context for this is also that although Democrats wanted Obama to use executive orders to advance their agenda, Obama understood that future presidents would use his use of executive orders as precedent for their own--regardless of to what party they belong.
I did too, but the funny thing about "this time is different", is that sometimes it is true. Consider the fact that Trump is the only president that said he would not respect the results of an election if he lost. Also consider the dramatic backsliding in democracy we've seen in other countries throughout the world in the last decade. Vladimir Putin never explicitly called himself Emperor for Life, but for all practical purposes, he is just that.
At the end of the day there is no such thing as "the law". They are just words written on paper.
I'd love to live in this world, but it is not one I think anyone can afford to live in. This man is a true narcissist who has very little respect for the office, the institutions he's responsible for, or more than half the country. All sorts of things that were very far from reality are no longer.
But I would love to be able to agree with you. That would be a better world. But the world we live in is where the President says "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a racist dog whistle to the 1960s, who "jokes" about staying past any term limits, where enablers in Congress and in the media allow him to toe the line of criminal behavior with no accountability as long as it benefits them. That's reality. I wish it were different, but I cannot take your position and reconcile it with what's in front of us today.
Trump barely has support now, nothing close to the widespread popularity he’d need to refuse to leave office. There’s about a 0% chance the Supreme Court goes along with it, and without an election the Presidency automatically transfers.
He’d also have to be astoundingly popular among the Secret Service for them to betray their oaths. His military support would tank, and him, his family, and administration would be in constant fear for their lives. IMO, he’s just not that insane, stupid, or popular enough to even try.
Well enough to pass some policy, but not enough to seize power through popularity. He’d undoubtedly lose significant (I’d wager most) Republican voters, and all semblance of a mandate.
The idea drives a lot of clicks and ad views though, so I’m sure we’ll see many more speculative articles before the election.
I wonder if anyone in history has managed to seize authoritarian power with only 40% support. I vaguely remember an example in the 1930s in central europe somewhere.
I appreciate your point but do you see an actual path for him to do so here? It’s a different form of government, in a different era, with a much more informed populace aware of those consequences.
Maduro did it in Venezuela recently, that’s actually a more apt comparison as he packed their Supreme Court to do so.
- Informed populace. Really? It seems to me that propaganda and disinformation are rampant. The rise of radio broadcasts parallels the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Hitler understood the power of this new form of media, and used it to build a superior propaganda apparatus. The same thing is happening now with the combo of cable news and social media.
- Supreme court is now 5-4. The last two nominations do meet the bar of independence and due process. Neither do dozens of federal judge appointments that the Senate is railroading in unprecedented numbers.
- The entire GOP is compromised. Those who are not aligned with Trump have resigned. Remember Paul Ryan? Everyone who is left is fully aware of the new marching orders: absolute loyalty to Trump and his family. Breaking the law is ok - you will be protected. And if the law gets in the way, change it.
- The DoJ is compromised. For example, Federal charges were dropped against Michael Flynn, a federally indicted accomplice of Trump. That has never happened before.
- The election system is compromised. See the revelations by whistleblower Reality Winner. Note that no action has been taken - except exceptionally harsh prison sentence against Winner in retaliation for leaking the fact that the elect infrastructure is under attack.
- The FBI is compromised. Trump and his family have been under surveillance since the 1980s as known associates of the Russian mafia. It’s the only plausible explanation to the FBI leaving him, a known criminal, entirely alone, while choosing to sabotage Clinton with Comey’s eleventh hour announcement.
- ICE is now effectively a para-military operation loyal to Trump personally.
- The Treasury has been compromised by Russian agents since 2015. With Trump appointees now in charge, things have only gotten worse.
- Multiple state legislatures are compromising beyond repair. For example Missouri is deeply corrupt, and effectively controlled by the GOP in perpetuity regardless of popular vote. There is a vicious circle of electoral impunity leading to more dismantling of anti-corruption regulation, which allows more shady practices to tip the electoral scales even further. In Georgia, the secretary of state used his authority to “disappear” thousands of ballots and get himself fraudulently elected as Governor.
- Let’s not even get into the countless state and city police agencies that are infiltrated by white supremacists.
Would you be interested in a bet on this? I’m fascinated by people who have strong convictions on things that I think the mainstream populace would put an incredibly low weight on, like, how’d you get here?
I’d love to hear what constitutes your majority of news sources. And also where you live broadly. I almost can’t imagine someone outside of SF who ready HuffPost daily to believe this.
I’d give you 20:1 odds and happily take the bet. I’m very curious how seriously convinced you are about this, as it’s about as far outside what even my extreme leftists friends believe. Not to try and be macho or anything, but I’m very curious how strongly you believe this, or if you are mostly acting as a bellweather, trying to sound an alarm very early on a trend you think others miss.
My concern is that we may see the same dynamics as the reconstruction era. White liberals may lack the stomach for the kind of serious reform that would preserve democracy in the face of a white supremacist bloc gradually eroding voting rights and the rule of law. I wouldn't expect a Hitler-style dictatorship but we could see one-party rule.
Primarily the Constitution and the Presidential Succession Act. While there are some ambiguities that need to be resolved there is definitely no scenario in which the sitting President continues.
I think you're basically making an "it can't happen here" argument, and I wholly disagree. I worry this kind of thinking effectively guarantees it will happen here eventually, because it relies on dynamics that govern legitimacy remaining the same as they have been in the past. The way it would happen is specifically if the dynamics of loyalty and who has legitimate authority change, and we've seen over the last four years that that's 100% happening. The only question is how deep the distrust of institution goes and how far the people in key positions will go to defend a President they are loyal to. If you can convince enough people to distrust the process of picking the President, you can create enough chaos to break apart the forces that would normally counter that kind of thing.
Look at any nation that underwent major coups; factions form, and it tears the organizations you've listed apart at the seams. Because a conflict of legitimacy exposes those seams, and those seams are absolutely present today. A Secret Service agent, an army colonel, armed militia, border patrol agents—if they can be made to believe the results of the election are illegitimate, they may consider the best way to fulfill their oaths to be stopping the "illegitimate" president from taking office. They will think of themselves as the ones stopping the coup.
I'd love to believe that all of those dynamics you're describing are the same as they were 20 years ago. I'd also make your argument then. But they aren't anymore. It can happen here.
I won’t claim it could never happen here, societies change and we could certainly drift to a place it could. The Dem candidates that advocated packing the Supreme Court scared me for this reason, that’s part of how Maduro seized complete power.
Trump now though? Nobody fears him, the majority disrespect him, government bureaucracy openly defies him. He doesn’t even have the House, nor enough Republican support to pass laws to enable a power grab, nor a Supreme Court loyal to him before the constitution.
They didn’t pack the Supreme Court, it’s still the same number. They did appoint a bunch of textualists and originalists, not just die hard conservatives. That makes it harder to drive progressive change through the judiciary, but the legislative branch was always the better option.
Actual court packing is a terrible idea, last attempted by FDR, at great political cost. Hearing candidates actively propose plans for doing so boggled my mind.
It's not about what Trump does. It's about what everyone else does. He's very good at getting attention with stunts that have no practical or legal effect. This includes signing executive orders, which sounds like doing something but it's not necessarily so.
So you need to look at scenarios where other people do stuff, and why it happens. Are there orders he can give and will people follow them? If not directly due to an order, how does it happen?
In order for trump to make a military coup and disband elections, he need more than the title of office. Even for something like sending in the military in order to push demonstrators, you need the direct support of the military. Is there any evidence that he as that kind of support?
Without such support, all the can do is push peoples buttons. He can ask the national guard to go to the location, which the national guard will likely accept in order to look helpful and useful. He might be able to impose a curfew, through the courts will fight him there. He might even be able to impose rules against large gatherings, which again the courts would fight him over. But I don't see how officers and generals would accept an order to start shooting civilians. Even if we disregard the moral question, just the liability risk from "just following orders" makes me question how much control a president have over the military to do acts which the law and common understanding of the law says are illegal. Intentionally killing your own civilians is a pretty major step for any nations military.
Sending in the national guard is naturally still a terrible idea as someone is likely to get shot accidentally. There was a good reason why the 9/11 military posted at airports wielded guns with empty magazines. Trump has likely the ability to cause accidentally shooting when the looting starts by placing the wrong people at the wrong location with the wrong training and wrong gear. He has a much harder time to accidentally cause a military coup and disband elections.
I agree that this system is more fragile than most people think; somehow almost preferring automatic government than the tediousness that functioning democracy requires. And sometimes people get a rude reminder of this.
I do not agree that the scenario you're talking about is probable (which is indicated by plausible). Perhaps you mean possible? Sure, but in that case it's also possible money instantly has no meaning, there is no Congress, there are no states, there are no judges or generals, there are no prison sentences, there are no laws at all whatsoever. Nothing matters, everything is possible.
That is a sense of unpredictability a society does not trend toward no matter how ill it is.
But try to understand that completely ending all constitutional order is not how revolutions tend to progress. Even in the U.S. civil war, there were two (federal) constitutions in place for two sets of states. There was order, even in that chaos.
I agree Trump has autocratic tendencies. But he is a weak minded fool. He will not make for a strong autocrat, he even contradicts himself and dithers too much for this. He is Side Show Bob. He's a distraction. To succeed he would need a very high percentage of authority, trust, and compliance - and there's just no way he's going to get that.
I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed one, we'll need a Congress.
That has never happened. I can tell you many examples from history, things that are way more likely than any of this. Including from American history. Some of those things are violent, even in fact violent for just one person, that are way more likely than autocracy.
Trump's best chance is for the election to proceed.
So, while you can't for sure predict what's going to happen next, just try to have some imagination for rare events that have happened rather than events that have never happened. Trump is a chickenshit asshole but that's like, the least remarkable or interesting thing going on here, because he's been a chickenshit asshole his whole life - not news! And that doesn't really highly qualify (or disqualify) him as an autocrat. He's not going to be one because he's just too incompetent and steps on his own dick every chance he gets. Just try to calm down, let him have enough rope to hang himself, and he will.
During the Colfax Massacre during Andrew Johnson's presidency, there were two factions that claimed they had won the gubernatorial election for Louisiana. They both tried to set up governments. White Democrats murdered freed black men and Republicans in the streets. The President at the time was sympathetic to the south's cause and only reluctantly sent in the army to take charge of the situation.
This is already part of American history. You're describing some amazing world where people follow the rules even during chaotic situations, and I guarantee that will not happen if there's a contested Presidential election with Donald Trump on the losing side. It will be a lot more like the racist South trying to claw back its power, because his most ardent followers are exactly the same kinds of people. He doesn't need to be good at being an autocrat, he just needs to encourage enough people to support him no matter what, and eventually he'll encourage someone who IS good at it. So you're right that he is not the risk, alone, but he's not alone. He's surrounded by enablers, criminals, and domestic terrorists who have a vested interest in his success.
> I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed on, we'll need a Congress.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but how would there be "no election" to that degree? Rather than a single, centrally-coordinated federal election, doesn't the US have 50 state-coordinated elections (emphasis on the plural)? So to truly cancel the elections in November, you'd have to have buy in from all 50 state governments. In a slightly more realistic (yet still unrealistic) scenario you'd still have a POTUS, but one elected by electors from the states that held elections, and there'd still be a House of Representatives, but only with members from states that didn't participate in the cancellation.
I suppose the situation would be similar to what must have happened during the Civil War.
You are correct. It's federally mandated as to the date, but it's up to the states to administer the elections. And if POTUS were to "cancel" it - well it would get a good deal messier than I've suggested, and really wanted to avoid.
Let's say a few states agree to the cancellation? For POTUS and VPOTUS, they need 270 Electoral College votes to win. If states drop out, it's decently likely no one gets to 270. That means the House chooses the president, the Senate chooses the VP. In the House, each state gets one vote. I repeat, one. In the Senate each senator gets a vote. This has happened before and it can take a while. It could possibly take weeks. Also, the Congress that decides this is the new one, not the old one. So some election needs to happen because House terms, every single seat, expires on January 3. Do they have quorum? Did enough states elect House members to have a sitting Congress? shrug
Most states are likely to still be red states in the 2020 Congress, so if the decision goes to the House, Trump will probably get another term. Again, each state just gets one vote.
> If states drop out, it's decently likely no one gets to 270. That means the House chooses the president, the Senate chooses the VP. In the House, each state gets one vote. I repeat, one.... Also, the Congress that decides this is the new one, not the old one. So some election needs to happen because House terms, every single seat, expires on January 3.
But I'd imagine that the states that dropped out of the election would actually get zero votes, and and those would be the states most closely aligned with the president.
> Most states are likely to still be red states in the 2020 Congress, so if the decision goes to the House, Trump will probably get another term. Again, each state just gets one vote.
But like I noted above, the red states would be the ones that would be more likely to follow Trump's lead an drop out of an election. I only count 24 red-tinted states on Wikipedia's map, so a few drop outs would actually hurt the Republicans.
But if it got to the red states picking that, would they be obligated to pick an official presidential candidate? I'd hope the Republicans would at least pick a president that isn't as deranged as Trump. On the other hand, Trump's derangement isn't a completely bad thing, because it leads him to pursue his objectives incompetently.
>But I'd imagine that the states that dropped out of the election would actually get zero votes, and and those would be the states most closely aligned with the president.
Right. So you can't assume that outcome. You have to figure out some edge case that would cause toss up states to either drop out, or have their Electors challenged. I think it's less likely a state cancels elections, than having their Electors challenged, even though neither has happened.
>But if it got to the red states picking that, would they be obligated to pick an official presidential candidate?
Yes 11th amendment. House must choose from the top three receiving EC votes.
I agree with you. But what Trump is doing is, he's paving the way for a real autocrat, by breaking down the norms and systems that keep an autocrat from being able to function.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. That's not cool. Emotions are inflamed right now, and that makes it more important, not less, to follow these rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I would never let a machine automate any decision regarding Trump's account, considering that any action would be scrutinized by the entire world and could have massive repercussions...
So definitely not "a counter incremented somewhere". This is a political decision.
I would imagine that accounts of "important" people are handled personally rather than by automated algorithm. As Jack Dorsey points out in this[0] Joe Rogan podcast, the reported tweets by public or algorithm are manually checked at some point.
Approx. 4000 employees of Twitter all around the world. Every day 100k (edit: 100M) tweets are sent. The reports of tweets that violate the platform policy are (reported by public) enter a queue. These are then inspected by personnel hired by Twitter (number varies proportionally to the scale reports in the queue).
The personnel then go through a series of steps to take an action such as making you verify again, delete those tweets, suspending the account, or in the last resort ban the user permanently.
It was just* MySQL for a lot longer than you might imagine. They were switching over to Manhattan (in-house DB, similar to FB's Cassandra) when I left, dunno the current state of affairs.
* highly customized and sharded, required team of senior MySQL DBAs to maintain, but still just MySQL.
Useful to know that this specific selective application of editorial bias by Twitter, was after Trump's executive order [1] on preventing online censorship of free speech.
>"...
Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.
.."
When a car manufacture represents their 18-wheeler fleet as a 'passenger cars' -- we understand that this is a lie and demand corrective action.
When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
I would be ok if their manufactured opinions are displayed to paid subscribers only, who want to care what Jack Dorsey thinks about President Trump, obamagate or Brexit.
Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?
I'm not even from the US and I know what "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" means and what outcome it envisions.
> When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
What are these opinions? Can you speak them out loud? Which opinions are being hidden? Can you write down the message of these opinions in plain words?
Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?
You cannot not have bias when you are talking politics. For Tweeter’s case, one would need to look at statistics for how many tweets from each sides are getting flagged. If one side is getting all the flake then it means that side is evil and other side is holy. In politics, this is not possible over long term if democracy is in full effect.
The outcome was clear the moment a president mentioned the use of the national guard in dealing with demonstrations.
Using the military to quell civil unrest means people getting shot. Last time in 1992 on the order of George HW Bush, the resulted was 50 dead and 2000 injured.
Unless a person is talking about using the military to assist with natural disasters, the person is envisioning the violence of "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".
WRT "... Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?.."
I think much of the media (bbc, reuters, vox, cnbc, msnbc, abc, cnn, buzzfeed, huffingtonpost, twitter's leadership) basically are the propaganda arm of the anti-Trump Coup.
The use a multi-level approach to execute and to protect it:
- to keep legitimacy of their disinformation efforts, keep 10-15% of the reporting as 'neutral', and then flood the 90% of the time with anti-president message.
This tactic allows for what I call: Plausible Deniability.
When you confront these propagandists about the majority of their disinformation compaign, they point to the '10%' and then claim plausible deniability ('eg we do not do everything wrong)
- Use War propaganda tactics [2]. With emphasis on 4 (We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!) and 5 (The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention)
- instigate unrest (and there are a number of tactics to do this, as we are seeing being unrolled)
When you use the above decomposition, it is, at least for me, easy to see what is going on and why.
With regards to:
>".. Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?.."
Sure.
So let me re-iterate the context
Trump's tweet:
>"...
....These THUGS are dishonering the memory of George
Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz
and told him that the Military is with him all the way.
Any Difficult and we will assume control, but when looting starts, the
the shooting starts.
Thank you.
..."
The twitter suggests that the above is glorifying violence.
I think that an opinion, it is a wrong opinion.
And leads to more violence.
I would interpret Trump's message as:
- Laws will be enforced. Help to local police is on the way
(in the form of National Guard that Tim Woltz mobilized [1]).
- Physical harm to Innocent people and their property will lead to shootings.
I would interpret Twitter's handling of this as:
we do not want law enforcement to enforce laws. Loot all you want, it is your right under the circumstances.
Oh just great. The american left should stop pushing people away by acting like spoiled babies.
The idea that twitter's actions are going to lead to anything good is terribly misguided. The idea that acting out your collective trump derangement syndrome is helping is even more misguided.
Part of the reason people hate FB and don't use it, is that their leadership is afraid to make risky decisions for the benefit of their users and the quality of their platform.
100K people dead and this guys priorities are Twitter and coming up with ways to throw more fuel on a dumpster fire of race relations and police brutality. Bravo.
1,592 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadtweet text:
> ....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Disclaimer text:
> This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more
"Learn more" links to this page about "public-interest exceptions"
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere...
edit: here's the official thread from @TwitterComms about it: https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1266267446979129345
Funny how personal bias can twist perceptions.
Because this is HN. Expect some guidelines-lawyer to cite some section that was technically breached by that informative reply.
That's the problem.
When facts/information doesn't align with one's agenda, some people have a terrible habit of trying to have it hidden/banned/removed/etc.
You would think in hackernews of all places, we'd upvote the comment to see exactly what trump wrote so that we can decide for ourselves when it was "glorifying violence". Sadly, many here don't want that to happen.
https://nitter.net/realDonaldTrump/status-/12662311007807447...
https://nitter.net/realDonaldTrump/status/126623110078074470...
This is not an isolated incidence of property crime. This is utter destruction more akin to waging a total war against a particular district of Minneapolis. It's a form of terrorism.
Property -- in the form of business and services -- is essential to life. There is no absolute distinction between the two, despite what some pretend. These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.
While that can be true in a literal sense at times, I don't believe shop lifting electronics from Target would have that effect. Even the destruction of local businesses, while indeed terrorizing, is not lethal.
Violent rioting would be something that might require a lethal response, but stealing, looting, robbing, plundering -- no.
> These people are breaking property in their own community and then expect investors or the very government they're protesting to step back in and rebuild.
So you believe that what is right, instead of investing and rebuilding, is that these people should be killed?
Tell that to the poor immigrant family whose business, and thus livelihood in this country, was destroyed. This is how we get roof koreans.
Why don't these rioters go stand with guns outside the state capitol or city hall or police dept? Instead of disrespecting the memory of George Floyd. I hope his death isn't used to defend people's 'right' to steal TVs without getting caught. That would be really really really sad.
You don't have the moral high ground here. Terrorizing and instilling fear in your local community is wrong, whether it comes from the state through the police or your fellow countrymen through riots. Just as an appropriate response to the officer who killed Mr Floyd would have been violence, so is violence towards the rioters. We can't honestly say that just because the police are thugs, thus we ought to also let others be thugs. Both can be wrong.
You have already stated that you believe that individuals should be shot for theft here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23354190
This is simply a difference of opinion.
Right -- I think it's wrong to pick and choose who should be punished for terrorizing communities, and some only believe the police should.
This is not a question of 'valuing human life'. It's about appropriate responses to violence. It's a basic principle of justice that those who commit violence no longer deserve to have their full set of rights respected in the eyes of the law or society. This is how we justify all sorts of things, from basic fines, to jail terms, to full-scale war.
To be clear... I also think no one else should be shot and killed, which is why no one should be lotting or setting things on fire.
Because, unlike the white anti-COVID-restriction protestors that did this, these protestors would be killed for trying something like that. Wake. Up.
You don't live in the same nation as african americans. You are protected in a way that you don't understand.
And I will not be forced to come up with an answer to the ridiculous false dichotomy of having to choose between police restraint and having the right to keep my own property. The answer is both and not either or.
Grow up.
I don't understand the modern desire to excuse theft. Theft is a form of terrorism; it is not okay, and is really high up there on the list of serious crimes that damage society.
What part of this isn't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Surely, you're trolling. HN isn't the place for that.
That's definitely not it.
Walter Headley, Chief of Miami Police during the 1968 Republican National Convention. On the eve of the convention, he gave a press conference where he said this exact phrase. It wasn't an observation that crime begets more crime. It was a threat.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/08/07...
IT IS NOT WORKING. To someone outside your bubble you look like a crazy person. Even if you're right, that's not a good look. There are more than enough reasons to dislike, disagree with, hate or fear Trump, but for some reason you people are fucking incapable of finding them and instead hang onto these bizarre conspiracies.
This is not a reasonable interpretation of the president's words. The previous tweet said that the military is standing by. There can be no mistake: Trump is saying that he will order the US military to kill Americans.
There have already been many shootings across the country in the past few hours.
That's not an ambiguous sentence.
The thing about Trump supporters that baffles me is, they have the common sense to understand when some his claims are false or hurtful, because they make up excuses for them: they're ambiguous, he was just checking if we were paying attention, etc. even when he refuses to back down and absolutely denies the excuses. But they still enjoy having their prejudices, fears and hates validated whenever Trump's tweets align with their view.
That being said - the President of the United States, just stated on one of the largest social media platforms used in the U.S., that citizens of the U.S. are now to be shot. From his words, immediately. It could even be viewed as "they should've already been shot at"
If you don't understand how this is glorifying violence, I don't think you can be made to.
Please stop trying to troll.
“In declaring war on 'young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign,' Headley said, 'we don’t mind being accused of police brutality.'
'They haven’t seen anything, yet.'
Headley said Miami hasn't been troubled with racial disturbances and looting because he let the word filter down, 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts.'"
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DS19671228.2.19&e=--...
I am not in favor of looters, but note that https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf emphasizes the necessity of graduated response. I presume state militia units share the doctrine (Figure 2.1) that lethal response is only called for in the face of an armed threat, and that it must be the minimum response necessary.
(found by googling four words: national guard crowd control; 2nd page of results)
But I think the real thing people aren't able to come to grips with is how Trump uses the media in such a style that gives him all plausible deniability, builds outrage AND builds support. All at once.
Very much looking forward to seeing how this plays out this evening.
If I could recommend a title edit though, "Donald Trump" --> "POTUS"
Pretty interesting how people even here try to invert the situation for political reasons.
Please tell me how I am inverting the situation? Or should I use your translation book to make sense of his tweets?
I don't have a dog in your fight, but you are aware that "arresting them" is literally done by force, right? And from what I hear, whether you send in the National Guard or a militarized police force is primarily a political difference, not so much a question of escalation.
When the people have to resort to violence to get public servants to do their jobs and relieve the wounds of injustice, the only appropriate response is to give them justice.
Lastly, I remind you that the public did not initiate the use of force in this riotous controversy. A police officer did.
Police are allowed to use violence, that's their reason for existing, if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way, that's what society is built around. It might not be instant or easy, but that's the difference between civil discourse and terrorism.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
As a practical matter, a resort to military force in a domestic theater signals a failure of governance. And to the extent that it is attempted, it will further erode the support of the military for the civilian command; many veterans and active-duty personnel have no faith in the commander-in-chief, and history suggests that in such cases many troops choose to remain in their barracks.
To be sure, insurrection could have dangerous and bloody consequences, but that's why people are rebelling against it. Different people are rebelling for different reasons across the political spectrum; folk on the left are angry about the deaths of people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, folk on the right are angry about the death of people like Duncan Lemp or Randy Weaver. There are big differences between different groups because of differing notions about race, property, the social order, history, and so forth, but there's a wide consensus that the status quo is oppressive both at home and abroad and that regular folk feel trampled upon.
Was it not just weeks ago that the President, in response to heavily armed demonstrations in statehouses, was tweeting out 'Liberate Michigan! Liberate Wisconsin! Liberate Virgina - your 2nd amendment rights are under attack!' Now he threatens military force when a different group of people rise up against a different perception of tyranny. There's plainly a big disagreement in this country about what constitutes liberty, where life ends and property begins, and so forth - ideological questions that can be reasoned out to some degree, but highlight quite different basic premises held by people of different birth and experience. History is in many ways the tale of such fundamental disagreements.
Notions of justification and appropriateness are ultimately appeals to a higher authority - civic, judicial, parental, political, or religious. Once the nature and legitimacy of authority itself comes into dispute, differences are resolved by other means. In this historical moment people are choosing to seize authorship of their own lives rather than dully play the roles that were written out for them. Make of that what you wish.
Would you have preferred that never happened? Sometimes violence and revolution are justified. JFK said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The DA could've made this peaceful by simply filing charges. I mean it's a pretty open/shut case here. All 4 police officers need to be thrown behind bars for life. He should be held accountable for the looting/violence because his actions of trying to cover this up and let it just 'go away', led to the escalations.
As another modern example, the protests in Hong Kong didn't involve looting. Instead the protesters were very well behaved except against what they protested against, and thus got a lot of support. Looting and destroying random property will just ensure that people will cheer when you get smashed by the police or military.
This is demonstrably false for the genre of police crime in question. When the people being murdered react with violence, it is unrealistic to brush that away as evil because those people aren't exclusively using the proper legal channels instead.
It's not that you should like or always accept such things, but the unpleasant part of being robbed is the fear of violence, besides which the lost property itself is usually a transient annoyance. Actual violence against your person is a great deal worse.
Interesting
He didn't literally say that. The National Guard would be acting in a role very similar to the police when there is rioting.
Is looting a capital crime?
The problem is that you disguise widely complicit violations of societal order by comparing them to single instances of pilfering. Looting doesn't justify deadly force, but a riotous and unlawful mob certainly can.
Should drug smugglers be shot too? They are also going against societal order.
Doing the same on a much larger scale is not going to improve any situation whatsoever. It will be the exact opposite of a deterrent to others.
China is pushing outward toward Hong Kong and Taiwan, in simultaneous fashion. In the former, we have the national security law. In the latter, we have new and uncamouflaged threats that China will use military force in Taiwan if it cannot control the island peacefully.
If Trump keeps our attention away from the China problem, it won't affect the stock market and we won't focus on its impacts on the world economy.
> Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
> To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE
He sounds more like a super villain from a comic than a president.
That would be even better for Twitter.
If they're going to block his tweets, why wouldn't Trump go elsewhere? It'll be interesting to see what he does do next.
That would force them to stop complaining, and there is a lot of value, and money to be made, in whining all the time and playing the victim constantly. So it won't happen.
People on Twitter are mostly not voting for Trump. Trump voter demographics are roughly white male rural middle-income evangelical non-college-educated over-50, and this does not overlap much with Twitter user demographics (80% millennials).
So Trump has nothing to lose on Twitter, so he can't lose. The goal for his tweets is to make a big story, and Twitter intervening makes it an even bigger one.
Our government repeats the motif of filtering down the raw passion and energy of the populace as a whole through a smaller, generally much less numerous group backed with the implicit assumption of good faith and sense.
The faithless elector was to the Founder's one of the last bulwarks against bestowing the highest office in the country to someone so repugnant, that an isolated bunch of people, accountable to no one but their own conscience, politely discussing the matter came to the conclusion it just couldn't work out. The idea that a President could get that far by mere populism and charlatanism may seem daft, but in that time, you didn't have background checks. You couldn't sniff out who someone really was, and if you knew the right people it was easy to get paraded in front of a populace that would eat up anything you fed them as long as there was enough spectacle to keep their attention. Odds are, it wouldn't be a problem. Everything would go just fine. However, the Founder's were well read on the ills of Greek and Roman poli, and the traps of demagoguery, and cults of personality. Their solution was the application of well-intentioned moral reasoning. We've all experienced the excitement of an idea that sounds great in a crowd, to later go home and say, "Now wait a minute." Same basic principle. In such an important decision, if it is really the right answer, no one will refuse,yet if it isn't, the stakes are high enough where the presence of that last chance is warranted.
The political party system completely undermined the entire intent behind the College, and many people never really try to transplant themselves out of the modern mindset, back to the time period to understand it. Nor do they realize just how important careful consideration of the person holding that post was. Think about it.
That President did not have the most capable Armed Forces in the world at his disposal. They did not have the capability to essentially make or unmake law via Administrative law and control of Alphabet soup of national regulatory agencies we have today. That President was not sitting atop the world's largest nuclear arsenal, or at the nexus of arguably one of the most well-funded intelligence and law enforcement apparatus in the world. In comparison to the Presidents of today, Abraham Lincoln was absolutely right. "No man can do any great harm in four years". Nowadays, given the level of interconnectivity between world governments, and the technological capabilities that are at our disposal, it stands to reason they might have balked at having a President in the first place. We don't know for certain. We can only guess.
I'm not certain anyone will find any of what I'm saying rhetorically convincing, but the main point I'm making is it is dangerous to dismiss the past without really understanding why what was done was done. The thinking behind the College was completely rational for the time, and arguably, even more rational and relevant today assuming your values and philosophies are more or less consistent with those of the Founders, who were so helpful as to write them down in generous volume that we may benefit from their endeavors today.
At least, I think so, and I've spent more time than I like to admit trying to understand the topic myself. Which is kind of silly, after all, to be ashamed of doing so, seeing as it is one of the single most important things to do for those who come after us.
To his wife,Joh Adams wrote:
>"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, co...
Thank you for taking the time to illustrate many points. I appreciate the informationa and further explanation.
You cite Federalist 68, but forget that less than a year later Hamilton was gaming the electoral college.
The founders were humans. They had flaws and disagreements. Many parts of the Constitution are borne more out of political expediency than grand ideals, and the operation of the Electoral College is not exempt from these caveats.
At this point, Americans vote for the president, arguing to the contrary is just pedantry.
One, the electoral college itself is tied to the political power of many low population states, so any serious adjustment to this process is a pretty dangerous subject for some states, making any country wide changes very hard to start.
Two, the shift to direct election of the president (minus the electoral college) was not a planned change. If one day in the 19th century everyone decided to change, then scrapping the EC would've made sense. Instead it has been a slow process happening over at least a century to arrive at our modern system, hence the presence of vestigial artifacts like the electors themselves.
Three, the process of how electors are selected is delegated to the states, which is part of why it took so long. So for example Pennsylvania and Maryland went to a system by which one party won the entire state at once in 1789, while it took South Carolina until 1860 to abandon per district results. Maine never adopted the winner takes all approach, and assigns two votes by district and two by the popular vote tally.
the Constitution specifies that States (not The People or citizens or voters) shall choose their electors.
As you said, allocation of electors by states has been played with in different ways based on different election/ voting methods, but there's actually no constitutional requirement for States to hold a general election at all.
It's entirely up to the state legislatures, who have all since delagated the responsibility to a statewide vote.
From Article II:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors..."
That's it- the rest covers how many electors each state gets.
It's questionable as to what theoretical limits the modern SCOTUS might place on this power to delegate, but they've already said that voting must adhere to "one person, one vote" principles, and have hinted that the states can't delegate the power externally (from the state). But they've never explicitly "locked-in" the requirement that any state hold a general election at all.
I think this is a bit like saying that the UK has no constitution because it’s not written down. It’s technically true, but it comes nowhere close to the actual lived experience of the people in that jurisdiction, who absolutely believe they live in a constitutional society.
This setup is (in a way) a consequence of the Great Compromise, and would serve to reduce the electoral influence of more populous states even if elector votes were cast proportionally with respected the state's popular vote.
It's not accurate to say that people in the US vote for electors.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/05/argument-analysis-in-a-cl...
Hint: there are non-Americans too.
Downvotes? HN really thinks there are only Americans on this planet? Of dear.
He is instructing police to shoot protestors as long as there is looting.
This tweet, while in bad taste IMO, was a threat to those who are planning to continue looting and burning buildings in Minneapolis.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen the videos, but there are full scale riots. Rioters completely looted a Target and burned it nearly to the ground.
Is “shooting” the answer to that? Probably not. And hopefully the National Guard is not going to do that.
But at the end of the day, this is the commander in chief making a public statement, and Twitter is editorializing it. Make of that what you will.
This entire thing is happening because they refuse to simply arrest a man that has been caught on camera slowly murdering a man, simply because he is a cop.
Even if they arrested him and let him bond out (which is what would happen to any non-police individual in this scenario) there would have been zero destruction. Zero.
We absolutely need to reform the police, but I really can't understand people who think we should abolish them. What is your plan to handle these situations?
I disagree, and point to a distinction that I learned from an essay of Christopher Hitchens. He described this as (paraphrasing) the distinction from the worldview of Hobbes versus the worldview of Locke.
Hobbes was of course the author of Leviathan, which viewed strong government as the barrier between an ordered society and a brutal state of nature ("the war of all against all"). Entrust a monarch with very strong authority, because the alternative is civil war at all levels of society.
Locke, writing somewhat later, advocated for separation of powers and constraints on the power of the state in general. In particular, the need for the entire state, including a possible monarch, to follow the law.
So, I would argue that the function of the police is to enforce laws, which are arrived at by a social negotiation, and that equating police with violence is mistaken. The threat of police violence is not what holds people in check. Rather, people are held in check by their recognition of the value of the system of justice and laws.
This viewpoint can explain why people have such a strong reaction to police who break that social contract.
Net neutrality is important, because the digital infrastructure of the Internet is the "streets" of the digital world. Freedom of speech needs to be protected there, but when you're signing up for a free-of-charge social network that survives on advertising, you are literally soapboxing in a Walmart -- and it can't possibly be the civic duty of this metaphorical corporation to allow you to stay in there and disturb their business, rather than redirect you out into the street, or into your own place of business.
The danger in the idea of "just find another X" is that, if you are willing to believe that the action in question justifies an open platform's prerogative to censor, then it follows that every alternative platform do the same. This creates black holes, if you will, that are incredibly easy for dissenters to fall down.
I'm not saying that I support Trump's message. But, as a society, we have to be nuanced about this and figure out what constitutes a right to use on massive platforms like Twitter. Twitter isn't just some dinky website. If you are worried about Russians/Chinese/Republicans swaying elections on social media, then you'd better be worried about how Twitter itself picks and chooses what you see.
After all, exactly how many levels down will we go?
Twitter: You can pay your own hosting fees.
Namecheap: Your users can find you at your IP address.
AWS: You can run your own server hardware.
Intel: You can build your own CPU.
Electric Co.: You can generate your own electricity.
VISA: You can take payments in cash.
Hospital: You can use your own butterfly strips and an ibuprofen.
United States: You can find your own country.
Advocating violence (or whatever you want to call it) on Twitter directly affects their bottom line, and enjoyment of the site for other users.
More simply: A toxic environment repels advertisers, users and investors.
Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose does not affect those companies bottom line, or otherwise affect the user experience for other customers.
With that logic, how exactly is the president(or anyone in authority whether it be a governor, police chief, etc.) supposed to threaten use of force on any communication platform? It seems like mass communication is needed, which inevitably involves advertisers and investors, thus an exception should be made for situations like this where the president's message goes against the interest of Twitter.
What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use. They are all funded by advertisers, investors, etc. Should we really be entrusting billionaires in determining which messages from the government we should and shouldn't be hearing?
> Using Namepcheap/AWS/Intel/Whatever for the same purpose
My analogies might not be totally applicable(though all analogies fall apart to some extent), but that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't applicable at all. A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack from investors and segments of the public for hosting undesirable content, in which case it might be their interest to let go a customer publishing that content using their services. Of course, that is far less likely than with something like Twitter.
More accurately, the alternatives would be something like CNN or iHeartRadio, or possible alternatives to Twitter.
>What you are saying about Twitter could be applied to TV networks, radio stations, and just about any other medium or platform that people use.
To a degree. But those businesses don't have positive social interaction as their core value proposition (reason to exist). People don't go to CNN.com for the purpose of being social. Thus anti-social behaviour on CNN doesn't affect their core value proposition in the same way.
>A web host like AWS, for instance, could conceivably receive enough flack
True, but groups organizing to lobby for a political/social purpose is a bit of a different beast altogether than one users actions directly affecting other users. In other words, there's no way (absent a bug/failure/poor design) that one users' usage of AWS should directly affect my usage of AWS.
All I'm saying is that social networks are very different from the other examples because they are, well, social.
No, it does not. Particularly not in the case of Twitter. And the proof of this is self-evident in the alternatives to Twitter that exist today.
There are sort of alternatives to Twitter, though you have to admit that Twitter's approach and audience size is quite different from, say, someone's forum using vBulletin. Nevertheless, there are mainstream alternatives such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and perhaps TV and radio, but that's not to say that they aren't likely to make a similar choice to Twitter, if it is generally agreed upon that Trump's message is bad and either shouldn't be seen or shouldn't be engaged with. Since they have similar financial incentives, it's not totally unreasonable to think that these mainstream platforms would follow suit if Trump decided to abandon Twitter and start posting solely on one of these alternatives. Whether or not you agree with Alex Jones, he was banned from all these platforms in coordination. It's absolutely possible that the dominoes would fall, and non-mainstream alternatives like Minds or Gab or Mastodon aren't necessarily viable alternatives if their audience is incredibly small.
The US is a federated country. The governors of the states have the ability to call in the National Guard to protect their state if they can not use Local/State law enforcement.
If and ONLY if that doesn't work can the State Legislature/Gov formally ask the President for help by calling on the Insurrection Act.
It's actually one of the core tenets of federalism.
Not to Americans nor on American soil he doesn't. Because of the 4th amendment and the Posse Commitus act.
> the National Guard is not going to do that.
Who is controlled by the Minnesota governor. Trump has no legal authority to threaten protestors with the Minnesota national guard.
The correct action is reform.
So... don't go looting? It's supposed to be a deterrent. Maybe you'll think twice about burning down your local target and autozone if there is a risk of being blinded. You'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't reach for your molotov cocktail and baseball bat to go join in the "fun".
>So... don't go looting? [...] You'll be perfectly fine as long as you don't reach for your molotov cocktail and baseball bat to go join in the "fun"
This is not a video game we're talking about.
There'd be little point in provocateurs burning commercial zones if there weren't peaceful protestors there.
"Looting is a consequence" is a poor excuse, looting/arson is not the correct way to express anger, you harm people who have nothing do with the problem or solution. Stop excusing their behavior.
/s
The funny thing is...I remember back when we held the US President to a higher standard than say, the worst soldier in the National Guard. Just because he is making a public statement does not remove the ability of the platform to fact check or accompany it with the idea that it's wrong. News broadcasters can freely air Trump speeches and pair them with fact checks. If trump would like to not be editorialized, he should post this statement on the White Houses's site. The fact of the matter is that he uses twitter for the audience, the claps, the viral followers. Twitter is not a public place, he is using their service for their service and to reach their users. They have every right to make statements on this and enforce their rules.
All "microblog" type posts made by a president should be posted directly through the White House's own web site, and not be communications through a commercial service.
If they loot shot then, that's what he is saying.
It would be fine if it's: if they loot arrest them and if they treat to prevent this by using weapons like guns then you can shoot them if there is no other way.
Because I read what you said. You are saying it’s okay for the president to say that looters should be shot, it’s just “in bad taste”.
“Stand your ground” isn’t about defending property with lethal force. Stand your ground is about whether or not you have a duty to attempt to flee (if possible) before applying lethal force. Castle doctrine is a similar rule, but more narrowly scoped to your own home. Without stand-your-ground, you have to demonstrate that you tried to, or were incapable of retreating before applying lethal force.
That being said, there are very few states of the union where applying lethal force to protect property is legal. Texas is the only one I know of. In Texas you could shoot someone to protect property even if you feel that your life and limb are not at risk, but that’s not the norm in other states.
All states allow some level of force to stop a fleeing felon, the well named “Fleeing Felon” rule, but Tennessee vs. Garner limited this to non-lethal force. So you could tackle a fleeing robber legally, but shooting one would be illegal outside of Texas.
Now Minnesota only has castle doctrine and stand your ground from your own vehicle. If one reasonably feels that life and limb are at risk in Minnesota you can apply lethal force, but if you’re outside of your home and car you have a duty to attempt to retreat first. In my opinion this makes shooting at looters to protect your business a dicey proposition legally, as arguably you should have just fled.
As always, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
This is also the same guy who promised to pay the legal fees of anyone who attacked protesters at his rally, and suggested that we should shoot migrants crossing the border. It strains credulity to believe that this time Trump was just asking people to not loot.
That’s pretty orthogonal to whether or not the political leader of the US should publicly say that looters should be shot.
No it isn't. Legs are hard to hit compared to center-mass, and the only reason you should be shooting at somebody is if you need to because they are an imminent threat; therefore you should be aiming for a part of the body that you have a higher probability of hitting and that, having been hit, has a higher probability of effectively stopping the threat.
...neither of which is an outcome in this situation, and looting is not a credible treat to people's lives.
First, are there circumstances in which a citizen could apply lethal force to protect life and limb? Obviously yes; shooting someone trying to light your house on fire is certainly something that is both plausible and plausibly legal.
Second, is it appropriate for the political leader of a nation to imply that people committing a crime will be shot for it on the street? Not "we will deploy the national guard to provide safety and security to the citizens" but "looters will be shot". I think the answer here is obviously no, that is not appropriate.
I will also add that this is also a case of tensions boiling over. While that doesn’t justify the arson, meaningful reform to defuse long standing tensions would be a wise move.
You’re right, everyone’s on edge, which has people acting funny.
The point is if you’re going to censor the president (or anyone, IMO) you should give them the full benefit of the doubt first.
Actually no, he doesn't have the capability to threaten institutionalised violence against US CITIZENS which might have or maybe want commit a crime which is not capital and don't even lead to to much jail time.
If he would have the right to do so he would be an authoritarian leader and the US no longer a democracy.
Even if the national guard is dispatched they can just arrest people, not shoot them down (except if that people try to shoot down the national guard, which they don't).
Violence conducted via the military or police, according to regulation, is lawful.
But violence conducted by citizens, or by members of the government or military that is not according to law/regulation, is not lawful.
I'm not saying Twitter's drawing the line exactly right, but it's somewhere in the right vicinity.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/where-does-phrase-...
I think Trump's saying that if things get out of control, law enforcement will start shooting. If I understand your post correctly, this would be lawful...
It is NOT legal for the Minnesota police to shoot a citizen that they believe is committing a crime unless their life or another person's life is under direct threat.
Is it "really interesting" that Twitter is paying extra attention to the President of the United States' Twitter account? I don't think so.
Twitter should either let him tweet whatever he wants or ban him.
Do heads of state somewhere not-stated to the public have some sort of social media diplomatic immunity?
You’re getting downvoted for a fair call out. There’s a deeper rot in this country where a select group believes freedom and fairness is something they can own and define, screw reality or objective fact. Anything else is biased and a conspiracy paid for by Soros, Obama, Hillary, Muslims, Hispanics, and the “swamp”.
Also Biden’s not the President (yet).
I think it's a point of contention (colored by existing political views) as to whether or not Twitter is selectively fact checking here.
Hopefully this isn't too controversial, there's a lot of hostility already in this thread, and I don't want to contribute to it.
Fact checking with partisan media sources does imply picking sides.
The phrase is the equivalent of “reaping what you sow”.
The tweets didn’t offer “sending in the police” it threatened to send the military in. Which isn’t the police.
Word matter. The fact I’m m reading this comment here is sad.
Maybe you didn't see that part because Twitter has hidden the tweet?
That's reminiscent of the very brutal police practices that sparked this chaos in the first place.
Shooting rubber bullets at rioters and looters is standard practice pretty much everywhere in democracies, and in non-democracies they tend to go straight to lethal ammo.
Needless to say there's also been some reporting and concerns of provocateurs among the protesters here as well using it as an excuse to inflame riots or start looting.
The looting in Minneapolis is a) rather ancillary to the larger protests against the police, b) an American tradition going back to colonial times, and c) a mix of opportunism and antipathy to US hypercapitalism. A few small stores have been damaged but the destruction has mainly been targeted against corporate retail outlets.
Personally I have never been part of a riotous protest, but in an academic sense I believe that destruction of commercial property does more to force a change in police activity than destruction of police cars and other public property (things that ultimately belong to the people themselves).
You can bet that there are more powerful people in the business community there, than on the police force.
I don't believe this is actively in the mind of most rioters, but I think it is part of the reason that rioting has a major impact on American politics.
“Not picking sides” often means siding with the status quo. That might be fine but it’s not the same as not picking a side.
The national guard?
But the fact of the matter is that the Citizens United ruling grants private corporations the right to free speech. He can continue to use Twitter, but they've literally got the right to campaign against him, editorialize, shadowban, or straight up ban him. He could choose to follow the site's rules, or run off to Gab. But he's doing it for attention and his tantrums and Twitter's non-enforcement actions are getting him a lot of that.
The government does not grant rights
Remember that it's only a matter of time until ownership changes or another larger platform gains traction, perhaps even one owned by a foreign government with significantly different ideas of what is "true", IE TikTok.
You and Twitter may want it to not be politics... But unfortunately both doing nothing and doing something are political moves by Twitter HQ, I'm afraid.
To define Donald as a troll is also political statement.
I wish he moved to Mastodon. Decentralized, open source. It only needs users
Imagine all the devs and supporters of Mastodon trying hard to come up with a pretext why it is okay to block him from the network via technical changes.
The statement that juxtaposed "looting/shooting" is akin to juxtaposing a combination not unlike "drunk driving/car wrecks" or "where smoke/there's fire" and the like.
But yeah, okay, just fly into apoplexy because you find the man tasteless and rude.
I found the attribution of the quote very informative and am very surprised it is currently downvoted. My own summary of the tweets is also downvoted, not sure what I could/should add to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347395
I tried to neutrally summarize the tweets, in case people wanted to know what they said without clicking.
Trump might be bluffing, but Twitter can't possibly know.
https://kstp.com/news/minnesota-national-guard-activated-to-...
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599895184/why-president-trump...
But he doesn't.
Also it is illegal for the federal government to use the military as a police force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
I don't know if you can call "censure" when your messages are still visible to the public, but the "editor-that-is-not-really-an-editor-but-sort-of" simply adds a banner saying "yeah, sure, right."
I can't wait for Trump to protest the flagging, and Twitter to respond that "flagging tweets while letting them visible" is just expressing their free speech. Surely Trump supporters are all in favor of free speech in a free country, right ?
Trumpy say pee pee and poo poo, and that's a no no.
Trump's base is not on Twitter. Fact checking tweets provides more grist for the outrage mill, and the media which his base consumes amplifies the conflict and not the substance. So the tweets will get worse and worse.
It's impossible to give Twitter good advice, it's a horrible position to be in.
"We start from a position of assuming that people do not intend to violate our Rules. Unless a violation is so egregious that we must immediately suspend an account, we first try to educate people about our Rules and give them a chance to correct their behavior. We show the violator the offending Tweet(s), explain which Rule was broken, and require them to remove the content before they can Tweet again. If someone repeatedly violates our Rules then our enforcement actions become stronger. This includes requiring violators to remove the Tweet(s) and taking additional actions like verifying account ownership and/or temporarily limiting their ability to Tweet for a set period of time. If someone continues to violate Rules beyond that point then their account may be permanently suspended."
Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
They've suspended the accounts of prominent people many times before.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
https://www.avclub.com/twitter-releases-statement-confirming...
"Twitter releases statement confirming it'll never ban Donald Trump"
0. https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1266347307391488002
P.S. I know this comment is auto-dead, and that's okay.
Trump and his cult are on twitter to try to bask in the legitimacy. If they're on their own, the raw charade of how childish and imbecilic their noise is becomes too obvious.
It's also a bit hilarious given that Gab, created because of crybabies like Trump and Scott Adams, has hilariously restrictive policies, just as The_Donald is one of the most snowflake-moderated subs on Reddit. The right really can't stand each other.
They didn't suspend Spike Lee who caused direct harm to a private individual who happened to share a name with an infamous individual: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spike-lee-settles-twi...
Edit: Don't understand the sentiment. Are there any radical left accounts with as much reach as the POTUS, that engage in similar behaviour that I am not aware of? If they exist, they should be trivial to link to. Looking at the top Twitter accounts, they consist of Barack Obama, YouTube, Modi, Bill Gates and a bunch of celebrities. Are any of those folks radical left? Will Lady Gaga or Katy Perry be opening the 2021 Superbowl halftime with "Internationale?"
I think so. The GP's use of the term "leftist lunatics" reads as a right-wing shibboleth to me.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/trayvon-martin-spike-...
You are missing the forest for the trees.
Twitter's business model is totally reliant on controversy. They want to treat/control, but not cure/extinguish.
Which is a separate reason that twitter's ethically conflicted in making almost any judgment calls on what's "allowable" speech.
Additionally, the nature of mud-slinging politics requires that ones opponents "follow" his online presence in able to attack. So if Trump leaves Twitter, not only do his followers go to whatever new platform he does, but so must his adversaries.
Twitter doesn't want that.
When a tweet is deemed response-worthy, they should post the report numbers. Value in numbers shields them in many ways and could legitimize their actions as a neutral party. Then, if they miss something, they can simply say there weren't enough reports. This will then empower the feature in the future.
I suggest this as active Reddit moderator with a community of 40,000+ subscribers who regularly has to enforce rules and uses auto-mod to help manage reports and shares that with the community.
-----------------------
You can report tweets for:
(1) Being not interested in it (you just get redirected to a mute or block button)
(2)It's suspicious or spam
---> The account is fake
---> Includes a link to a potentially harmful or phishing site
---> Hashtags are unrelated
---> Uses the reply function to spam
---> Something else
(3) It's abusive or harmful
---> It's disrespectful
---> Includes private information
---> Includes targeted harassment
---> It directs hate against a protected category (eg race, religions, gender, orientation, disability)
---> Threatening violence
---> They're encouraging self-harm or suicide
(4) It's misleading about politics or civic events
---> It has false information about how to vote
---> It intends to suppress or intimidate someone from voting
---> It misrepresents it's affiliation or impersonates an official
(5) It expresses intentions of self-harm or suicide.
-----------------------
It's pretty good but I would suggest the very simple following updates:
- Updating the main issue (It's abusive or harmful) to (It's abusive or encourages violence or destruction of property)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's misleading about politics or civic events) with (A political official is supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's suspicious, spam, or false) with (It's supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding chevron icons (>) as a visual cue that each main reporting issue has many sub-issues
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter has exempted Trump's accounts from all automated moderation. However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point), and how that scenario affects their bottom line.
They probably don’t want US institutions to dissolve into full-blown autocracy... But on the other hand, if that were to happen, then it would be better for the stock price if they hadn’t burned all bridges with the new leader for life.
You can bet that Zuckerberg is making the same calculus - except that he seems to have chosen a side. Facebook is no longer pretending to care about preventing autocracy. They are betting on the GOP coup succeeding, and are building bridges accordingly.
Note: no amount of downvoting by the alt-right fringe lurking here will make the facts go away. Downvote away since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs. You are an embarrassment to the technology community. You are the spineless, petty, cowardly foundation upon which all autocracies are built.
I think you are very far from reality
> Since assuming office in January 2017, Trump has made at least 27 references to staying in office beyond the constitutional limit of two terms. He often follows up with a remark indicating he is “joking,” “kidding,” or saying it to drive the “fake” news media “crazy.” Even if Trump thinks that he’s only “joking,” the comments fit a broader pattern that raises the prospect that Trump may not leave office quietly in the event he’s on the losing end of a very close election.
Also, how would he and his family stay out of jail if they can no longer control the judiciary and FBI?
-Large book deal, with title "Winning: How I Made America Great Again Despite All The Dummy Losers In Washington"
-Some sort of talk show or network
-But mostly, going back to licensing the use of his name all over the place
As for staying out of jail, he might not, but I suspect a combination of fuzzily enforced regulations and big money lawyers will keep him out.
The federal government is being stripped for parts, as we speak. Entire agencies have been gutted. Industrial conglomerates can literally regulate their own industries - for a price. Foreign leaders can influence foreign policy - for a price. Federally endicted criminals can get out of jail as if nothing had happened - for a price.
The level of grift and corruption is unlike anything the US has ever known. If Trump remains in power - which he is absolutely planning to do at all cost - it will only get worse. The end game for him is to create a new dynasty of oligarchs - at the same level of the Saudi royal family or Putin. Compared to that, the book deals and talk shows are nothing - crumbs. He wants to join the club. And that requires staying in power so that he can 1) continue stealing billions from the US public, and 2) continue corrupting the federal government to stay out of jail.
This seems true for a normal president, but Trump has never been shy about self enrichment even while in office, so it's not clear what incentive there is for him to leave.
I don't think insider trading law would apply, but in any case we seem to have established that he's above the law and can't be impeached. He, or friends beholden to him, could be trillionaires by the time they leave office.
It would certainly explain why he continually makes inflammatory statements about China and everything else, without seeming to consistently pursue anything.
2) Also, that seems like something which would make more money for someone else, which does not fit with my model of Trump's behavior.
The SEC is irrelevant if there's no specific law against it, never mind that there's no evidence anyone can prosecute for anything even if it was a crime.
As far as making money for someone else, doing a "friend" a favor is not the same thing as charity, nor is laundering money through a proxy. If you hypothetically give away a trillion dollars without receiving anything in return formally that doesn't mean you haven't bought something. Ownership is only the convention that other people think you own something, backed up by some sort of written records somewhere.
Meanwhile, Trumps only "autocrat" proof is words? He talks snit... What has he done to become a King? Nothing he's done so far isn't powers used by previous Presidents - including Obama.
What actual has Trump taken to expand Presidential powers? And what steps has Trump taken to become a King?
Because until actual actions are taken... words are just Trump talking shit. Which he's allowed to do...
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/attack-fun...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/politics/trump-state-d...
What do you mean by socialism? What socialist ideas did Obama institute? What is the "ruling class" within socialism?
Regarding Trump: what do you make of him removing the inspector general who had opened an investigation against Pompeo? What do you make of him pushing out Jeff Sessions because Sessions recused himself from the Muller investigation?
Put another way: what would count as stepping toward autocracy, other than an explicit suspension of Congress or the like? Barring outright coups, these things happen incrementally. See Hungary, Brazil, etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/shocked-by-th...
I don't see anything about jailing them - and I remember reading a story awhile back about but can't find it. So if I'm wrong on that point, I stand corrected.
With that said - Obama definitely attacked journalists from DC. Spying on them, following them, etc.
> Trump removing various people
Those people work at the Presidents discretion. All previous Presidents have fired staff at various stages for various reasons.
Trump is a businessman who is known for firing people... You may have seen his Reality TV Show. His catch line? YOURE FIRED!
https://www.rollcall.com/2017/05/10/a-list-of-notable-presid...
He has the ability to fire people at will.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165983
> The final vote was ten in favor and ten opposed, so Adams, exercising for the first time his Constitutional authority to break a tie, settled the matter in favor of the president’s exclusive removal power.
> The president’s authority to dismiss an appointee is now settled law, but with the text unclear, it had to be settled by the First Federal Congress.
> autocracy
Trump doesn't have the "unlimited powers" of a King or a Dictator though... you can claim it but he's got the same power as those before.
You could argue about "incremental" movements... but Trump hasn't moved the needle any further that I know of. Previous Presidents? Definitely... but Trump has been using everything previous Presidents have used - from Obama on back.
You are free to ignore the scientific consensus about the rise of autocracy in the US. Just like you are free to ignore the scientific consensus about global heating. But the facts remain the facts.
What happens to the “experts” when they are wrong?
Post your sources.
1. Sarah Kendzior. PhD on the topic of autocracy (specifically Uzbekistan). Investigative journalist on the topic of corruption in the Trump administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Kendzior
2. Tim Snyder. Professor of History at Yale university. https://www.timothysnyder.org/
3. Laurence Tribe. Professor of Constitutional law at Harvard. https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/laurence-tribe-mitch-mcconn...
Now, your turn. Can you cite credible experts who disagree with this consensus?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/one-year-after...
Go check into the Qanon cult and similar circles. There are conservatively probably a few hundred thousand people in this country that would take up arms against the (literal) baby eating pedophile illuminati. All he has to do is say "the storm is upon us" and provide instructions. "Where we go one we go all."
Can any constitutional scholars comment on what happens then? What if he as commander in chief orders the military to stand down? Would they obey him or protect the constitution? What about the national guard? Local police? What would any of these agencies do if removing Trump required opening fire on tens of thousands of Americans?
Reagan, Clinton, and Obama were much more broadly popular than Trump, but the thought of them attempting this and having any chance of success is laughable. I don't even think Bush II could have pulled it off right after 9/11 at the peak of his popularity and with his powerful religious right base.
Trump on the other hand has a fan base unlike any I've ever seen. If you don't believe me research Qanon. There's a shockingly large group of people who worship him as something almost akin to a prophet. I'm sure there's some percentage who would die for him. It's a bit disturbing.
I agree that it's unlikely, but it is plausible.
Personally I think he will leave office, but what he has accomplished is to pave the way for an actual future dictator.
If the COVID recession plus unlimited QE results in further divergence between the real economy and the financial economy I could definitely see real fascism or totalitarian socialism winning some day. As I've been saying for a while, which one we get probably depends on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue. I don't think people will care about left or right as long as there are pitchforks being handed out.
shrug
At that moment it is less about law than it is about character of other leaders. Does the Vice President, who is still the VP following his own election loss, contradict the POTUS' election fraud claims and call for violence? Necessarily on the table is 25th amendment and/or impeachment. A call for violent revolution to achieve the dissolution of constitutional order is unquestionably a violation of oath of office for any elected official.
People are conditioned to think that an impeachment would take a week or more. If Congresscritters actually get scared? They can follow strict rules of order and still get it done very quickly. Hours. The real impediments to speed are physical presence in the chamber. Not opposition. They will not wait for TV cameras, spectator chairs or tickets to get printed. If they really believe the POTUS is trying to incite an overthrow of the government, which is what autocracy means, they know full well they are inside the blast radius of imploding power.
IF a POTUS can use force to stop them, it is extra-constitutional, and at that point this person is not POTUS but something else.
At least since Augustus, dictators have been diligent in paying lip service to law and established tradition while trampling over both.
You feel the urge to defend someone whose actions are indefensible. Why is that? If I had to guess, I would say it's because you feel the urge to always be the contrarian. Whatever you feel the majority opinion is, there is an urge to go against it. This is probably because your feeling of self-worth is attached to the notion of being a contrarian. Going against the majority opinion makes you feel special, and in a way, it makes you feel superior. In my experience, it is a symptom of deeper issues - insecurity, fear of the unknown. The risk, if you don't address this issue, is that you will find yourself defending more and more extreme positions, and even seeking out more extreme positions to defend. This will cause social isolation, as people with more maintstream opinions such as "dangerous criminals should not be elected president" start avoiding you, and are replaced by other "contrarians".
At the end of the day there is no such thing as "the law". They are just words written on paper.
But I would love to be able to agree with you. That would be a better world. But the world we live in is where the President says "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a racist dog whistle to the 1960s, who "jokes" about staying past any term limits, where enablers in Congress and in the media allow him to toe the line of criminal behavior with no accountability as long as it benefits them. That's reality. I wish it were different, but I cannot take your position and reconcile it with what's in front of us today.
He’d also have to be astoundingly popular among the Secret Service for them to betray their oaths. His military support would tank, and him, his family, and administration would be in constant fear for their lives. IMO, he’s just not that insane, stupid, or popular enough to even try.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
The idea drives a lot of clicks and ad views though, so I’m sure we’ll see many more speculative articles before the election.
Maduro did it in Venezuela recently, that’s actually a more apt comparison as he packed their Supreme Court to do so.
- Informed populace. Really? It seems to me that propaganda and disinformation are rampant. The rise of radio broadcasts parallels the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Hitler understood the power of this new form of media, and used it to build a superior propaganda apparatus. The same thing is happening now with the combo of cable news and social media.
- Supreme court is now 5-4. The last two nominations do meet the bar of independence and due process. Neither do dozens of federal judge appointments that the Senate is railroading in unprecedented numbers.
- The entire GOP is compromised. Those who are not aligned with Trump have resigned. Remember Paul Ryan? Everyone who is left is fully aware of the new marching orders: absolute loyalty to Trump and his family. Breaking the law is ok - you will be protected. And if the law gets in the way, change it.
- The DoJ is compromised. For example, Federal charges were dropped against Michael Flynn, a federally indicted accomplice of Trump. That has never happened before.
- The election system is compromised. See the revelations by whistleblower Reality Winner. Note that no action has been taken - except exceptionally harsh prison sentence against Winner in retaliation for leaking the fact that the elect infrastructure is under attack.
- The FBI is compromised. Trump and his family have been under surveillance since the 1980s as known associates of the Russian mafia. It’s the only plausible explanation to the FBI leaving him, a known criminal, entirely alone, while choosing to sabotage Clinton with Comey’s eleventh hour announcement.
- ICE is now effectively a para-military operation loyal to Trump personally.
- The Treasury has been compromised by Russian agents since 2015. With Trump appointees now in charge, things have only gotten worse.
- Multiple state legislatures are compromising beyond repair. For example Missouri is deeply corrupt, and effectively controlled by the GOP in perpetuity regardless of popular vote. There is a vicious circle of electoral impunity leading to more dismantling of anti-corruption regulation, which allows more shady practices to tip the electoral scales even further. In Georgia, the secretary of state used his authority to “disappear” thousands of ballots and get himself fraudulently elected as Governor.
- Let’s not even get into the countless state and city police agencies that are infiltrated by white supremacists.
The coup is already underway.
I’d love to hear what constitutes your majority of news sources. And also where you live broadly. I almost can’t imagine someone outside of SF who ready HuffPost daily to believe this.
I’d give you 20:1 odds and happily take the bet. I’m very curious how seriously convinced you are about this, as it’s about as far outside what even my extreme leftists friends believe. Not to try and be macho or anything, but I’m very curious how strongly you believe this, or if you are mostly acting as a bellweather, trying to sound an alarm very early on a trend you think others miss.
Says who? You've never had a President try to suspend or tamper with an election.
Look at any nation that underwent major coups; factions form, and it tears the organizations you've listed apart at the seams. Because a conflict of legitimacy exposes those seams, and those seams are absolutely present today. A Secret Service agent, an army colonel, armed militia, border patrol agents—if they can be made to believe the results of the election are illegitimate, they may consider the best way to fulfill their oaths to be stopping the "illegitimate" president from taking office. They will think of themselves as the ones stopping the coup.
I'd love to believe that all of those dynamics you're describing are the same as they were 20 years ago. I'd also make your argument then. But they aren't anymore. It can happen here.
Trump now though? Nobody fears him, the majority disrespect him, government bureaucracy openly defies him. He doesn’t even have the House, nor enough Republican support to pass laws to enable a power grab, nor a Supreme Court loyal to him before the constitution.
It's no-longer a question of if the Democrats respond, it's a question of how.
Actual court packing is a terrible idea, last attempted by FDR, at great political cost. Hearing candidates actively propose plans for doing so boggled my mind.
Maybe not so much. Didn't this court gut important parts of the the Voting Rights Act?
So you need to look at scenarios where other people do stuff, and why it happens. Are there orders he can give and will people follow them? If not directly due to an order, how does it happen?
Without such support, all the can do is push peoples buttons. He can ask the national guard to go to the location, which the national guard will likely accept in order to look helpful and useful. He might be able to impose a curfew, through the courts will fight him there. He might even be able to impose rules against large gatherings, which again the courts would fight him over. But I don't see how officers and generals would accept an order to start shooting civilians. Even if we disregard the moral question, just the liability risk from "just following orders" makes me question how much control a president have over the military to do acts which the law and common understanding of the law says are illegal. Intentionally killing your own civilians is a pretty major step for any nations military.
Sending in the national guard is naturally still a terrible idea as someone is likely to get shot accidentally. There was a good reason why the 9/11 military posted at airports wielded guns with empty magazines. Trump has likely the ability to cause accidentally shooting when the looting starts by placing the wrong people at the wrong location with the wrong training and wrong gear. He has a much harder time to accidentally cause a military coup and disband elections.
What facts? What alt-right fringe?
Trump was voted in by tens of millions of Americans and still has tens of millions of supporters.
> At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point)
Trump is in his 70s...
> since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs
What true beliefs are you hinting at here and why would they take courage to write down?
I do not agree that the scenario you're talking about is probable (which is indicated by plausible). Perhaps you mean possible? Sure, but in that case it's also possible money instantly has no meaning, there is no Congress, there are no states, there are no judges or generals, there are no prison sentences, there are no laws at all whatsoever. Nothing matters, everything is possible.
That is a sense of unpredictability a society does not trend toward no matter how ill it is.
But try to understand that completely ending all constitutional order is not how revolutions tend to progress. Even in the U.S. civil war, there were two (federal) constitutions in place for two sets of states. There was order, even in that chaos.
I agree Trump has autocratic tendencies. But he is a weak minded fool. He will not make for a strong autocrat, he even contradicts himself and dithers too much for this. He is Side Show Bob. He's a distraction. To succeed he would need a very high percentage of authority, trust, and compliance - and there's just no way he's going to get that.
I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed one, we'll need a Congress.
That has never happened. I can tell you many examples from history, things that are way more likely than any of this. Including from American history. Some of those things are violent, even in fact violent for just one person, that are way more likely than autocracy.
Trump's best chance is for the election to proceed.
So, while you can't for sure predict what's going to happen next, just try to have some imagination for rare events that have happened rather than events that have never happened. Trump is a chickenshit asshole but that's like, the least remarkable or interesting thing going on here, because he's been a chickenshit asshole his whole life - not news! And that doesn't really highly qualify (or disqualify) him as an autocrat. He's not going to be one because he's just too incompetent and steps on his own dick every chance he gets. Just try to calm down, let him have enough rope to hang himself, and he will.
This is already part of American history. You're describing some amazing world where people follow the rules even during chaotic situations, and I guarantee that will not happen if there's a contested Presidential election with Donald Trump on the losing side. It will be a lot more like the racist South trying to claw back its power, because his most ardent followers are exactly the same kinds of people. He doesn't need to be good at being an autocrat, he just needs to encourage enough people to support him no matter what, and eventually he'll encourage someone who IS good at it. So you're right that he is not the risk, alone, but he's not alone. He's surrounded by enablers, criminals, and domestic terrorists who have a vested interest in his success.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but how would there be "no election" to that degree? Rather than a single, centrally-coordinated federal election, doesn't the US have 50 state-coordinated elections (emphasis on the plural)? So to truly cancel the elections in November, you'd have to have buy in from all 50 state governments. In a slightly more realistic (yet still unrealistic) scenario you'd still have a POTUS, but one elected by electors from the states that held elections, and there'd still be a House of Representatives, but only with members from states that didn't participate in the cancellation.
I suppose the situation would be similar to what must have happened during the Civil War.
Let's say a few states agree to the cancellation? For POTUS and VPOTUS, they need 270 Electoral College votes to win. If states drop out, it's decently likely no one gets to 270. That means the House chooses the president, the Senate chooses the VP. In the House, each state gets one vote. I repeat, one. In the Senate each senator gets a vote. This has happened before and it can take a while. It could possibly take weeks. Also, the Congress that decides this is the new one, not the old one. So some election needs to happen because House terms, every single seat, expires on January 3. Do they have quorum? Did enough states elect House members to have a sitting Congress? shrug
Most states are likely to still be red states in the 2020 Congress, so if the decision goes to the House, Trump will probably get another term. Again, each state just gets one vote.
But I'd imagine that the states that dropped out of the election would actually get zero votes, and and those would be the states most closely aligned with the president.
> Most states are likely to still be red states in the 2020 Congress, so if the decision goes to the House, Trump will probably get another term. Again, each state just gets one vote.
But like I noted above, the red states would be the ones that would be more likely to follow Trump's lead an drop out of an election. I only count 24 red-tinted states on Wikipedia's map, so a few drop outs would actually hurt the Republicans.
But if it got to the red states picking that, would they be obligated to pick an official presidential candidate? I'd hope the Republicans would at least pick a president that isn't as deranged as Trump. On the other hand, Trump's derangement isn't a completely bad thing, because it leads him to pursue his objectives incompetently.
Right. So you can't assume that outcome. You have to figure out some edge case that would cause toss up states to either drop out, or have their Electors challenged. I think it's less likely a state cancels elections, than having their Electors challenged, even though neither has happened.
>But if it got to the red states picking that, would they be obligated to pick an official presidential candidate?
Yes 11th amendment. House must choose from the top three receiving EC votes.
Statements like this won't get you taken seriously.
So definitely not "a counter incremented somewhere". This is a political decision.
which will be in 18 years
Approx. 4000 employees of Twitter all around the world. Every day 100k (edit: 100M) tweets are sent. The reports of tweets that violate the platform policy are (reported by public) enter a queue. These are then inspected by personnel hired by Twitter (number varies proportionally to the scale reports in the queue).
The personnel then go through a series of steps to take an action such as making you verify again, delete those tweets, suspending the account, or in the last resort ban the user permanently.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
[0] https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/#source...
When I worked there we handled about ~6k tweets/sec all day every day. (~500,000,000 tweets/day)
* highly customized and sharded, required team of senior MySQL DBAs to maintain, but still just MySQL.
>"... Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. .."
When a car manufacture represents their 18-wheeler fleet as a 'passenger cars' -- we understand that this is a lie and demand corrective action.
When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
I would be ok if their manufactured opinions are displayed to paid subscribers only, who want to care what Jack Dorsey thinks about President Trump, obamagate or Brexit.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?
I'm not even from the US and I know what "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" means and what outcome it envisions.
> When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
What are these opinions? Can you speak them out loud? Which opinions are being hidden? Can you write down the message of these opinions in plain words?
Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?
Using the military to quell civil unrest means people getting shot. Last time in 1992 on the order of George HW Bush, the resulted was 50 dead and 2000 injured.
Unless a person is talking about using the military to assist with natural disasters, the person is envisioning the violence of "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".
I think much of the media (bbc, reuters, vox, cnbc, msnbc, abc, cnn, buzzfeed, huffingtonpost, twitter's leadership) basically are the propaganda arm of the anti-Trump Coup.
The use a multi-level approach to execute and to protect it:
- to keep legitimacy of their disinformation efforts, keep 10-15% of the reporting as 'neutral', and then flood the 90% of the time with anti-president message.
This tactic allows for what I call: Plausible Deniability.
When you confront these propagandists about the majority of their disinformation compaign, they point to the '10%' and then claim plausible deniability ('eg we do not do everything wrong)
- Use War propaganda tactics [2]. With emphasis on 4 (We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!) and 5 (The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention)
- instigate unrest (and there are a number of tactics to do this, as we are seeing being unrolled)
When you use the above decomposition, it is, at least for me, easy to see what is going on and why.
With regards to:
>".. Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?.."
Sure. So let me re-iterate the context
Trump's tweet: >"... ....These THUGS are dishonering the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any Difficult and we will assume control, but when looting starts, the the shooting starts.
Thank you. ..."
The twitter suggests that the above is glorifying violence.
I think that an opinion, it is a wrong opinion. And leads to more violence.
I would interpret Trump's message as:
- Laws will be enforced. Help to local police is on the way (in the form of National Guard that Tim Woltz mobilized [1]).
- Physical harm to Innocent people and their property will lead to shootings.
I would interpret Twitter's handling of this as: we do not want law enforcement to enforce laws. Loot all you want, it is your right under the circumstances.
[1] https://www.newsmax.com/politics/tim-walz-george-floyd-riots...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Pr...
Is that in line with your expectations, given the topic and the manner in which my comments were written?
The idea that twitter's actions are going to lead to anything good is terribly misguided. The idea that acting out your collective trump derangement syndrome is helping is even more misguided.
and one they cant make a "winning" decision about. however this works out, Twitter will lose.
As much as I hate FB and dont use it, they have made the "safer" decision.
well done FB /s
Scapegoating blacks is how you win elections. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that it gets lots and lots of people to vote for you.
So yes, to the extent that winning elections is important to politicians, this sort of thing is made a priority.