I didn’t know the details, but I knew pretty much what it was going to be.
PhilipTheBucket
joined 6 months ago
MODERATOR OF
Except for a brief flirtation with the idea under Bill Clinton, opposition to the ICC has been pretty much unanimous and bipartisan in the US government throughout its entire short history. For... well, basically the exact reason you just said.
They can both be true.
Part of fascism is that the exercise of "speech" operates in such a way that it drowns out opposing speech. There's a tendency to threats, deliberate deception, and mass-scale propaganda that by its structure is difficult to counter with "opposing" speech.
The original concept, that we can't ban Nazis from publishing Nazi newsletters to be read by other consenting Nazis, and making the effort to ban that will be a counterproductive waste of time, is still true in my opinion. People might disagree. There is a necessary corollary, though, that you do need to ban certain types of "speech" that, because of their structure (and not their content), are distorting the machinery that democracy needs to have in place to function.
- Have a Nazi rally where you hit any counterprotestors with a baseball bat? Not speech, banned.
- Have a Nazi rally where you carry signs saying Hitler was great? Speech.
- Post a Lemmy comment saying that Biden did some good things? Speech.
- Run 100 Lemmy accounts batching up comments saying Biden did good things, flooding them into related stories, to distort the overall narrative of conversation in ways no individual could ever match or counter-argue? Not speech, banned.
- Run a news channel which contains neo-fascist content? Speech.
- Buy up hundreds of local news channels so that you can create a unified appearance of a consensus in favor of neo-fascism, in a variety of stories that come up, while disguising your ownership so it's not obvious what's happening? Not speech, banned.
Of course, some people could disagree with some of those, I'm just saying my opinion on it. And there are grey areas in the blurry section between the obvious-to-me extremes. But that's my feeling on it: "Speech" in terms of communicating your message to a consenting audience isn't something the government can ever even make the attempt to ban, nor should it. "Speech" in terms of using machinery or power relationships to distort the conversation so that your point of view gets a leg up so you can win struggles for power, needs to be banned. A lot more than it is right now.
And this is all irrespective of the conversation about censorship by the government versus moderation by the private owner of a server somewhere. The private server owner obviously "can" do whatever they want, and I would support their right to do so, I'm just saying my feeling on the ethics of the situation and what they "should" be doing in terms of the values they uphold when they do moderation on their server. In my opinion.
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Kyiv Independent raises over $66,200 to support Ukrainian newsrooms hit by US aid freeze
(kyivindependent.com)
So there's a common belief about the constitution and bill of rights et cetera, that I think is a key mis-framing of what the founders actually said.
What they said about structures of government, revolution, liberty, and so on, usually gets interpreted as a prescription for government: You're permitted to make laws, but certain laws are off limits, you're not allowed to make those laws. What they actually said was something different: They said people are going to talk to each other. They're going to practice their religion. If a governmental body arises which is trying to tell them not to do those things, it's revealed itself as a bunch of dangerous crap, not a government, and it's the duty of the people to overthrow it and replace it with something better. Or else, they will deserve the unjust laws.
"Endowed by their creator" and "inalienable" and whatnot. It's got nothing to do with what the government is "allowed" to do, or not. They took a lot more pragmatic, old-world view of things.
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Protest planned against 'Russians at War' documentary screenings in Australia
(kyivindependent.com)
You should also know that the person you're talking to was talking up the Greens in the US, saying that it makes perfect sense for people to support them instead of Democrats and saying we needed to reform things to try to get them in power, back when that was the electoral message that would produce a particular impact on the electorate. It's only in Europe that they have nothing good to say about the Greens. They also contrasted Trump's environmental policies favorably to Biden's, who they said was causing all kinds of environmental problems.
https://ponder.cat/comment/332122
No it doesn't. This tactic disables vehicles for a few minutes, until someone fixes it, and is likely to produce a permanent opposition in the person whose vehicle was minorly vandalized to anything activist or environmental.
Green Party people getting elected, and then enacting policies which curb emissions or reduce dependence on ICE vehicles, disables vehicles.
Of course, if you were talking about some other kind of activism which is designed to more permanently disable certain vehicle for certain specific reasons, there are a lot more semi-permanent ways of doing it than this. This is tailor-made to be useless and annoying, which is why the Russians liked it so much, and made sure to leave a card by the Greens taking credit for it.
Why would a tactic that's deliberately designed by successful professionals to depress support for environmental causes, for pretty obvious reasons if you take a look at it, be a good thing to employ?
I'm truly fascinated to find someone out here saying, "Nothing to see here! Please disperse."
Those freezing episodes are rough to watch.
In the end, the ragged man comes for us all. And he will not be deterred.
They literally found the specific people who did it, and found the trail of evidence that led to the Russians, and the explanation for why the Russians didn't want the Greens in power.
It's also fascinating to me that the Russians are for people voting for Greens, in places where they can't gain power, and against it in places where they might actually come to power and enact some of these extremely-sensible policies that are on their web site.
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If only I'd sent you an article which referenced peer reviewed studies, things like:
Alas, if I wasn't stuck in the trap of referencing only media, I might have sent you something like that. In a comment.