Having a monopoly is legal. There's laws against using certain practices to create one, and laws against exploiting a monopoly in particular ways, but the Feds went anti-trust on Microsoft because it was using a monopoly in desktop OSes to try to dominate the Web.
Anyone can start a Twitter-like site. Becoming successful is more difficult. We've seen market dominance be overthrown before: Google taking over web search and Facebook against all similar services.
True, we did have a candidate who told his supporters to use their Second Amendment rights against his opponent, and threatened to throw her in prison, said he wouldn't necessarily accept the results of the election if it went against him, offered to pay legal defense for people using violence against dissenters at his rallies, and swore up and down that the election was rigged. Many of his supporters are really offended that the world has changed in the last fifty years, and refuse to change with it, and blame minorities for their own failures, and in a police shooting figure that the victim had it coming. I don't think of them as left-wing, myself.
As far as hate speech goes, have you noticed what some people say about blacks, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and liberals? It goes both ways.
My leftist friends and I agree on a lot of things, but disagree also.
Let's see. Milo was apparently attacking people personally in various ways, for no good reason. Scumbag. What was the nature of attacks on Coulter, Maulkin, Ingram, West, or Caine? They've been badmouthed, but leftists get badmouthed also, so I'm not sympathetic. Thomas wasn't attacked for how he thought, but because there was credible evidence that he was a habitual lawbreaker, which doesn't go well in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
I think we have different definitions of "prosecute" here.
Every time I read someone complaining about the prosecution of Christians in this country, it's a matter of wanting to be an asshole to someone, or spending public money on specifically Christian things, or wanting their dogma to overrule evidence-based facts in public schools, or imposing their religion on laws or the conduct of private organizations, or just being badmouthed, sometimes as viciously as those Christians badmouth people that don't fit in their limited image of humanity.
Gays and lesbians, on the other hand, have had their private sexual behavior made illegal. They've been typically prevented from marrying the ones they love, up until very recently. They've often been the targets of violence just for their sexual orientation. They've often been prevented from conducting business like normal people. Crimes of violence against LBG people have very often been simply not investigated.
Now, I've had well over half a century of experience being white. I've been badmouthed, and at one time thought I might be a target of racially inspired violence (turned out they just wanted to scare me, which they were quite successful at). People have not refused to do business with me. The police accept my reports. I married the love of my life. My experience with being prosecuted is much more similar to the Christian paranoia (as far as I'm concerned, they'd be a lot better off if they figured this Jesus guy had a clue about what he was talking about) than the LBGQ discrimination.
And spewing off a lot of hate speech and insulting individuals makes internet forums less useful, and drives people (in Twitter's business model, products) away. I sometimes describe myself as a survivor of the fall of soc.history.misc. I've seen this happen a lot of times. I'm in favor of free speech, but there are things you will not be allowed to say in my house. There are things you will not be allowed to say in a particular coffeehouse, because it drives off customers.
I strongly support your right to say what you want, although I may deplore what you say. I don't see any right to say whatever you want on someone else's nickel.
I wouldn't seriously call anyone a Nazi unless they belonged to the party or were closely associated with it. The word "fascist" has become generic, and nobody expects it to be limited to Italian politics. I see a lot of fascism in Trump's campaign and some of his initial actions as President-elect.
As long as left-wingers are typically called "socialist" is if it were a curse word, and accused of having policies similar to the Soviet Union's, I'm not real sympathetic with right-wing people objecting to being called "fascist".
Sure. People operating a publicly oriented business who discriminate against people because they are in certain defined classes are violating the law. You're free to complain about it if you want.
Those don't look like actual threats or personal harassment, and I think Twitter's policy allows them, just as I understand it would work in reverse. If I post something like "gotta kill Cederic" with enough details to make it credible, that's illegal and should be banned. If I started harassing you in particular, that would be banned.
As I understand it, Milo was attacking specific women, rather than just posting that all women should be raped or something like that. Apparently, he was also falsifying messages in some way, and that is a reasonable basis to ban someone in a conversational forum.
It wasn't a hate crime. The internet harassment campaign might have been.
A private company has certain restrictions on it. A private company operating a public business has others. These are conditions of doing business in the US.
If you find Twitter cancelling accounts of people in protected classes (actually, everyone in the US is in a few protected classes - I can't be discriminated in certain ways because I'm white, or straight, for example) for illegal reasons, that's illegal behavior.
Eich donated a large sum of money to a campaign to deprive certain people of their civil rights, people that Mozilla was trying to appeal to. That made him a very bad fit to be CEO, being himself a large PR problem.
You want to know an objective difference between homosexuality and child molestation? Consent. One is adults doing what they want in private, and another is by definition non-consensual (since sufficiently young humans lack the ability to make mature judgments - and this is a matter of brain structure, not just my opinion). I regard laws that try to regulate people's private behavior that doesn't affect nonconsenting others in a bad way as suspect at best.
So, to go through your list: Homosexuality is consenting adults doing stuff in private that doesn't affect the rest of us. Child molestation involves lack of consent. Bestiality is at least non-consensual on the animal's part, and animal rights are a debated topic. Circumcision harms no one else, there are medical arguments both ways, and is normally left to the parents. Pornography is a private thing involving consenting adults. Child pornography, the stuff that involves actual children, involves nonconsenting children. Abortion and infanticide are a matter of what protections certain tissue should have at what points, and abortion also involves the question of what a pregnant woman should be forced to do. I also consider the difference between what I consider moral and what I think should be legal. Assisted suicide is consenting adults in private. Honor killings are nonconsensual murder.
So, I find that the consensual adults in private criterion covers a lot of that stuff.
We can't let the states serve as laboratories for the Internet. It's interstate and international commerce by its very nature. We can do that with laws affecting things that stay in a single state.
AT&T is a natural monopoly. A baker is a public business, and must conform to certain laws. Twitter is a public business, and not a natural monopoly. Twitter may not deny accounts to people based on race, religion, and certain other legally specified criteria. They can deny service to people on the basis that they're assholes, as long as it's a personal judgment.
If someone cares to start something like Twitter but with different rules, it would have difficulty at first because of the network effect, but in the end the marketplace would determine who thrived.
People have rights. Ideally, we wouldn't need non-discrimination laws. Society being imperfect, we use imperfect means to help it improve.
Just remember that Hitler literally agreed with EVERYTHING you are saying. He just swapped "gay" or "jew" with Nazi based on his subjective emotional feelings to come to his conclusion.
Let's take a sentence from a post upstream of yours. "Gays are just as protected as anyone else." Hmmm.
There's nothing in "you must serve people of group X if you serve the general public" that leads to death camps. "Go ahead and discriminate against a group" does tend that way.
And it wouldn't have been nearly as big a deal if they hadn't started an internet harassment campaign against the women who just wanted to buy a wedding cake from a baker they liked.
All those calmly express opinions, many of which I disagree with. None of them are hate speech. None of them contain threats, or references to violence; they don't even contain insults.
Government regulation like AT&T is normally reserved for natural monopolies. It doesn't get applied to companies that are large, or monopolies that aren't natural (like Microsoft).
In fact, neither Facebook nor Twitter are natural monopolies. Some other company could come along, do things differently, and get popular instead, like Facebook did to Myspace. If you don't like Twitter's actions, you're free to start a competing service or switch to one or whatever you like.
There are some rules on operating a public business, including such things as how you may treat employees and that you must sell to the public. Historically, there are groups that have been discriminated against, and have found difficulties in finding places to do business.
My politics should be clear to anyone who's been reading my posts. I'm not all that keen on the Second Amendment, but I believe it's part of the Constitution and should be enforced. The big disadvantages of having people legally own guns are accidents, suicides, and theft by those not so law-abiding, and, really, we can live with those.
And, for the eight years before that, the Republicans did pretty much the same thing.
Why do you think that the Second Amendment survived Bill Clinton and Obama in good shape, but Hillary Clinton would have ignored it? That the court system would allow her to act against it? Why do you think that the worst attack on Second Amendment rights went through during the Reagan Administration.?
Look, don't you know that 99% of ALL mass shootings in the US have been by leftists?
No, I don't know that. Don't you know that Muslims (who have committed some of them) are generally not leftists? They may vote that way, but that's because the right wing overtly pushes them away.
It's pretty clear that you have no grasp on reality (and I don't think Scott Adams as a particularly good one either). You seem very ready to believe in over a million of people illegally voting and somehow not being noticed. Have you noticed that lots of Republicans seem very interested in making sure heavily Democratic voters have difficulty voting?
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Having a monopoly is legal. There's laws against using certain practices to create one, and laws against exploiting a monopoly in particular ways, but the Feds went anti-trust on Microsoft because it was using a monopoly in desktop OSes to try to dominate the Web.
Anyone can start a Twitter-like site. Becoming successful is more difficult. We've seen market dominance be overthrown before: Google taking over web search and Facebook against all similar services.
True, we did have a candidate who told his supporters to use their Second Amendment rights against his opponent, and threatened to throw her in prison, said he wouldn't necessarily accept the results of the election if it went against him, offered to pay legal defense for people using violence against dissenters at his rallies, and swore up and down that the election was rigged. Many of his supporters are really offended that the world has changed in the last fifty years, and refuse to change with it, and blame minorities for their own failures, and in a police shooting figure that the victim had it coming. I don't think of them as left-wing, myself.
As far as hate speech goes, have you noticed what some people say about blacks, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and liberals? It goes both ways.
My leftist friends and I agree on a lot of things, but disagree also.
Let's see. Milo was apparently attacking people personally in various ways, for no good reason. Scumbag. What was the nature of attacks on Coulter, Maulkin, Ingram, West, or Caine? They've been badmouthed, but leftists get badmouthed also, so I'm not sympathetic. Thomas wasn't attacked for how he thought, but because there was credible evidence that he was a habitual lawbreaker, which doesn't go well in Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
I think we have different definitions of "prosecute" here.
Every time I read someone complaining about the prosecution of Christians in this country, it's a matter of wanting to be an asshole to someone, or spending public money on specifically Christian things, or wanting their dogma to overrule evidence-based facts in public schools, or imposing their religion on laws or the conduct of private organizations, or just being badmouthed, sometimes as viciously as those Christians badmouth people that don't fit in their limited image of humanity.
Gays and lesbians, on the other hand, have had their private sexual behavior made illegal. They've been typically prevented from marrying the ones they love, up until very recently. They've often been the targets of violence just for their sexual orientation. They've often been prevented from conducting business like normal people. Crimes of violence against LBG people have very often been simply not investigated.
Now, I've had well over half a century of experience being white. I've been badmouthed, and at one time thought I might be a target of racially inspired violence (turned out they just wanted to scare me, which they were quite successful at). People have not refused to do business with me. The police accept my reports. I married the love of my life. My experience with being prosecuted is much more similar to the Christian paranoia (as far as I'm concerned, they'd be a lot better off if they figured this Jesus guy had a clue about what he was talking about) than the LBGQ discrimination.
And spewing off a lot of hate speech and insulting individuals makes internet forums less useful, and drives people (in Twitter's business model, products) away. I sometimes describe myself as a survivor of the fall of soc.history.misc. I've seen this happen a lot of times. I'm in favor of free speech, but there are things you will not be allowed to say in my house. There are things you will not be allowed to say in a particular coffeehouse, because it drives off customers.
I strongly support your right to say what you want, although I may deplore what you say. I don't see any right to say whatever you want on someone else's nickel.
I wouldn't seriously call anyone a Nazi unless they belonged to the party or were closely associated with it. The word "fascist" has become generic, and nobody expects it to be limited to Italian politics. I see a lot of fascism in Trump's campaign and some of his initial actions as President-elect.
As long as left-wingers are typically called "socialist" is if it were a curse word, and accused of having policies similar to the Soviet Union's, I'm not real sympathetic with right-wing people objecting to being called "fascist".
Sure. People operating a publicly oriented business who discriminate against people because they are in certain defined classes are violating the law. You're free to complain about it if you want.
Those don't look like actual threats or personal harassment, and I think Twitter's policy allows them, just as I understand it would work in reverse. If I post something like "gotta kill Cederic" with enough details to make it credible, that's illegal and should be banned. If I started harassing you in particular, that would be banned.
As I understand it, Milo was attacking specific women, rather than just posting that all women should be raped or something like that. Apparently, he was also falsifying messages in some way, and that is a reasonable basis to ban someone in a conversational forum.
It wasn't a hate crime. The internet harassment campaign might have been.
A private company has certain restrictions on it. A private company operating a public business has others. These are conditions of doing business in the US.
If you find Twitter cancelling accounts of people in protected classes (actually, everyone in the US is in a few protected classes - I can't be discriminated in certain ways because I'm white, or straight, for example) for illegal reasons, that's illegal behavior.
Eich donated a large sum of money to a campaign to deprive certain people of their civil rights, people that Mozilla was trying to appeal to. That made him a very bad fit to be CEO, being himself a large PR problem.
You want to know an objective difference between homosexuality and child molestation? Consent. One is adults doing what they want in private, and another is by definition non-consensual (since sufficiently young humans lack the ability to make mature judgments - and this is a matter of brain structure, not just my opinion). I regard laws that try to regulate people's private behavior that doesn't affect nonconsenting others in a bad way as suspect at best.
So, to go through your list: Homosexuality is consenting adults doing stuff in private that doesn't affect the rest of us. Child molestation involves lack of consent. Bestiality is at least non-consensual on the animal's part, and animal rights are a debated topic. Circumcision harms no one else, there are medical arguments both ways, and is normally left to the parents. Pornography is a private thing involving consenting adults. Child pornography, the stuff that involves actual children, involves nonconsenting children. Abortion and infanticide are a matter of what protections certain tissue should have at what points, and abortion also involves the question of what a pregnant woman should be forced to do. I also consider the difference between what I consider moral and what I think should be legal. Assisted suicide is consenting adults in private. Honor killings are nonconsensual murder.
So, I find that the consensual adults in private criterion covers a lot of that stuff.
We can't let the states serve as laboratories for the Internet. It's interstate and international commerce by its very nature. We can do that with laws affecting things that stay in a single state.
AT&T is a natural monopoly. A baker is a public business, and must conform to certain laws. Twitter is a public business, and not a natural monopoly. Twitter may not deny accounts to people based on race, religion, and certain other legally specified criteria. They can deny service to people on the basis that they're assholes, as long as it's a personal judgment.
If someone cares to start something like Twitter but with different rules, it would have difficulty at first because of the network effect, but in the end the marketplace would determine who thrived.
People have rights. Ideally, we wouldn't need non-discrimination laws. Society being imperfect, we use imperfect means to help it improve.
Let's take a sentence from a post upstream of yours. "Gays are just as protected as anyone else." Hmmm.
There's nothing in "you must serve people of group X if you serve the general public" that leads to death camps. "Go ahead and discriminate against a group" does tend that way.
And it wouldn't have been nearly as big a deal if they hadn't started an internet harassment campaign against the women who just wanted to buy a wedding cake from a baker they liked.
All those calmly express opinions, many of which I disagree with. None of them are hate speech. None of them contain threats, or references to violence; they don't even contain insults.
Government regulation like AT&T is normally reserved for natural monopolies. It doesn't get applied to companies that are large, or monopolies that aren't natural (like Microsoft).
In fact, neither Facebook nor Twitter are natural monopolies. Some other company could come along, do things differently, and get popular instead, like Facebook did to Myspace. If you don't like Twitter's actions, you're free to start a competing service or switch to one or whatever you like.
There are some rules on operating a public business, including such things as how you may treat employees and that you must sell to the public. Historically, there are groups that have been discriminated against, and have found difficulties in finding places to do business.
After the mid-Thirties, only in name. Previously the National Socialist party did have a Socialist wing, but it was terminated with extreme prejudice.
Technically, Christianity and Islam are religions that have inspired supremacist movements. Judaism seems to be more defensive.
My politics should be clear to anyone who's been reading my posts. I'm not all that keen on the Second Amendment, but I believe it's part of the Constitution and should be enforced. The big disadvantages of having people legally own guns are accidents, suicides, and theft by those not so law-abiding, and, really, we can live with those.
I've seen people who seemed to think that sentences like that were funny, although with different names, and I doubt their sobriety at the time.
The Second isn't there to facilitate rebellion, and rebellion of gun owners against the government is positively, definitely, not going to work.
And, for the eight years before that, the Republicans did pretty much the same thing.
Why do you think that the Second Amendment survived Bill Clinton and Obama in good shape, but Hillary Clinton would have ignored it? That the court system would allow her to act against it? Why do you think that the worst attack on Second Amendment rights went through during the Reagan Administration.?
No, I don't know that. Don't you know that Muslims (who have committed some of them) are generally not leftists? They may vote that way, but that's because the right wing overtly pushes them away.
It's pretty clear that you have no grasp on reality (and I don't think Scott Adams as a particularly good one either). You seem very ready to believe in over a million of people illegally voting and somehow not being noticed. Have you noticed that lots of Republicans seem very interested in making sure heavily Democratic voters have difficulty voting?