Comment by shiado
5 years ago
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.
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.
Presidents are also commanders in chief; a civilian that has ultimate control of state’s violence monopoly. Still the distinction between lawful/unlawful applies.
Wasn't Trump referring to stand your ground laws?
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).
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no, it's a clear reference to Walter Headly
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/where-does-phrase-...
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Minnesota does not have a Stand Your Ground law.
"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.
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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.
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.
He is the commander in chief. He has the capability to threaten violence.
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.
> 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).
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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.
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Are you honest to god defending the president saying that American citizens should be shot?
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No..he actually can't
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.
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
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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.
> He is the commander in chief. He has the capability to threaten violence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Yes, shooting is the answer. Shooting rubber bullets, that is, and deploying tear gas and fire hoses.
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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.
Glorification?
He is instructing police to shoot protestors as long as there is looting.
I think that's pretty much what they're already saying?
isn't that any gun company?
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.
Only if you think that there are only Americans in this world.
Hint: there are non-Americans too.
Downvotes? HN really thinks there are only Americans on this planet? Of dear.
It applies to all presidents. It just that the US president tweets a lot.
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.
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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.
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This is a really, really bad take, along the same lines as "the US is not a democracy, it is a republic!"
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.
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Also don’t forget that Hamas has many official twitter accounts in various languages.
Have they posted suggestions of shooting their own citizens and not been sanctioned by Twitter?
Why draw the line at "their own citizens"? Have they posted suggestions of shooting people who aren't their own citizens?
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> Really interesting.
Is it "really interesting" that Twitter is paying extra attention to the President of the United States' Twitter account? I don't think so.