Comment by seph-reed
5 years ago
They fucked this up so badly.
They could have just banned him and said "It's a free country and they felt like it."
Instead they're trying to high-road, and it's.. such a mistake.
5 years ago
They fucked this up so badly.
They could have just banned him and said "It's a free country and they felt like it."
Instead they're trying to high-road, and it's.. such a mistake.
The high-road leads to where we actually want to be.
I was thinking about what you said in the other thread about trolls, and I think you're off-base. Trolls aren't zen master ego busters, they're the self-hating jerks they seem to be. The "zen master ego buster" story is just another layer of the ego trip.
The high-road leads to Trump agreeing with you that we need to prevent the spread of fake news to protect society. Then, as the duly elected leader sworn to protect society, he takes on that solemn duty and tasks the agency he controls, the FCC (the entity usually tasked with controlling media content), to make sure that all fake news and entities peddling fake news are permanently squashed so that they will not interfere in the upcoming election.
EDIT: and as if to prove the point, I've been trolled by someone who really doesn't want a race to the top, they just want to have the same easy answer that everyone who ever grew up in the blue would have. I said more words, you said less. Congratulations on your victory my fellow piece of shit.
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Only the inwardly good ones are zen master ego busters. Everyone is a self-hating jerk sometimes. I don't think that's a great label for trolls anyways. Saying they all hate themselves is more masturbatory than true.
> The high-road leads to where we actually want to be.
Absolutely agree. What I'm doing right now is high-roading about the paradoxical nature of high-roading a troll. In this circumstance, the true high-road is the low-road, and the true low-road is the high-road. I'm saying you're low-roading by thinking something that obviously has not worked is suddenly going to start. You're taking an irrational but popular position. You'll win, but be wrong: low-roading.
All of the problems currently most difficult are ones which our intuition inherently fails at, this being one. Similarly, most heroes journeys end where they began just with a better perspective. Similarly, the easiest answer is often the best, but it usually takes trying everything else to understand why. These long-arc experience-driven positions are hard to achieve, and hard to understand, but correct: high-roading.
Right now is one of those cases where we have to re-learn tactics that seem savage, but with the benefit of knowing savagery is context sensitive.
In this battle there's a side that cares about being right, and there's a side that cares about winning. Trumps side can literally physically kick the asses of the side that cares about being right. Not only that, but they've got trolls that can get under their skin and make Liberals pout, and whine, and cry.
Liberals are largely more rational/correct about most things.
Personally, I believe that true leaders should be able to win a race to either bottom or top. They should be able to beat others physically, rationally, and emotionally. Trying to do this "fact-check" stuff is just liberals patting themselves on the back for being justifiably more rational. But that's not what matters now. What matters is that liberals should be better at trolling, and better at fist fighting because that is the only dominance that will create the change this world legitimately needs.
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In conclusion, just ban the POTUS and say it was for the lulz. As long as everyone knows you're not actually that dumb, it's the best possible strategy for dealing with trolls.
It's a risk. It's not a mistake. I appreciate they are trying to thread a very difficult needle. I'd argue democracy's continued survival is predicated on being able to both have a flattened playing field where every voice is accessible and like-minded people can find each other easily (what the Internet has enabled so far), and a way of inoculating people against lies intended for malicious manipulation (which the Internet has also enabled). Getting there, if we can, will be messy and ugly. Failing will be fatal to the idea that people can effectively self-govern.
We'll, they're certainly escalating. I don't think that Trump actually wants to shut Twitter down, nor does he want to get banned there. The banning would rile up his base, but it would do so at the expense of his primary channel of communication. This action puts the ball back in Trump's court and asks him how far he wants to actually go.
let the white house spin up its own activitypub instance, then.
shouldn't public communications occur on public infrastructure?
Well that's the ridiculous part of all this. Anyone with $20 and a half hour to spare can whip up their own blog on their own domain and post anything they want. As far as accessibility goes, that website will be 100% equal to Twitter.
These private platforms are only being conflated with public infrastructure because people have such a narrow view of what constitutes "the internet." It's ridiculous for a politician's primary means of communication to be over a private platform to begin with. Could you imagine if Clinton only talked to the press via AOL chatroom? The fact that we're debating it as though Trump is being censored by CSPAN just shows how much the abnormal has become normal.