disown

A stronger element of the power structure is silencing another. It's simple as that. Look at the relentless pro-censorship brigading on most social media. Lots of money, power and influence is being applied here. If this was china or russia, we'd call it a soft "purge". They'd call it promoting "harmony" or "protecting the people". Not sure what we are going to call it.

Seems like whatever battle Trump and his faction was waging behind the scenes the last 4 years failed and he simply failed to win over enough power/influence to his side. We'll never know what really happened, we can just guess.

But feels like history is happening. I don't think any of us have lived to through anything like this. I know I certainly haven't.

You claimed to be an absolutist though. And yes, you can be a free speech absolutist. Take a class in philosophy and educate yourself.

There are plenty of free speech absolutists who believe any speech, including direct threats, should be protected speech. That you should have the right to threaten anyone and everyone. Of course, acting out and carrying out the threats is illegal.

For example, if you said "I am going to kill you", free speech absolutist believe that should be allowed. Now if you actually killed someone, then you should go to jail. Meaning there differentiate the words "I am going to kill you" with "murder". In other words, murder is illegal, but saying you will commit murder is not. There is some nuance to it, but there are free speech absolutists out there.

But you are not a free speech absolutist. You lied about it. You aren't even pro-free speech. You comments clearly show that you align with the pro-censorship crowd because you use their terms and their logic.

Like I said, you are a meat eater pretending to be a vegan talking shit about veganism. But why?

> I've lived in Taiwan for a short period of time.

Are you the guy that keeps spamming blogs about "TSMC, chips and how taiwan is so important to the US" to HN?

> Furthermore, the Taiwanese people deserve the right to self-determination

Taiwan has 20 million people. Mainland china has 1.4 billion people. I believe the "self-determination" part is already settled.

> and our support if they decide to go their own way.

Nope. Let them settle it. We shouldn't have been involved in the first place.

> it's always been odd to me that the U.S. chooses to placate Beijing, at the risk of losing a reliable partner (Taiwan) in a strategic industry.

Are you serious? One is the second largest economy in the world. The other is taiwan.

Every week, there is some bullshit blog spam about how important TSMC is. Why is that? Who is paying for it?

> Wikipedia is incredible.

It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial knowledge is where wikipedia excels.

> I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.

In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc - which are ultimately all political.

> Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off

Definitely. It has it's uses like everything. But it is extremely flawed.

Censoring a president is far greater a threat to the republic than some silly protest. People like you exploiting a silly pathetic protest to justify censorship is the threat to the republic. I'd rather have the protests than censorship by tech companies.

It is not for a bunch of unelected tech elites to decide whether our elected leaders speak. That's not their job. Once we hand over that power to a bunch of tech elites, then we have the end of the republic.

Nobody voted for Amazon, Apple, Google to be our hall monitors.

If there is a "threat to the republic", then it's the job of the political leaders and law enforcement to deal with it. Not Tim Cook, not Zuckerburg and certainly not the idiots at CNN, foxnews or other media companies.

The collusion between tech and news industry is the greatest threat to the republic. Not some pathetic protest that amounted to nothing.

Have you ever bothered to ask who elected the tech industry to be our masters? Do you really want a bunch of unelected tech elite controlling our lives? Do you want these people to be lords over our elected leaders?

> That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.

Actually I described you to the tee.

> I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives

So you are against censorship or for it?

> Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.

Except that if tech companies collude together to prevent that. Fine, you say go make your own twitter. They do and then it gets banned from google play/apple store/etc. And down the line it goes. That's my point.

> I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech.

Who or what are you quoting? You just plucked a quote out of the ether. That's very dishonest and disingenuous. You almost write like a journalist.

> Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version?

Of course not. But then again, they are not a platform, they are publishers. But you already knew that.

> And YT deletes content mentioning election fraud, and twitter permanent bans the president, all under the historically totalitarian guise of "safety"

Also, really puts a dent into the anti-free speech argument that "you can go to another platform" argument.

I do love watching all these "tech/social media is evil" crowd here suddenly praising tech/social media and wanting them to have even more control over our lives.

Social media is so evil that we need them to control our lives even more. Wonderful logic that.