Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is a very minor charge. Now granted, Epps did not enter the Capitol himself - but his open agitation of the attack nonetheless seems to me like it should constitute a significantly more serious offence, such as incitement to riot.
IANAL but it seems like 18 USC 2101 could be appropriate. Although 18 USC 2102(b) provides:
As used in this chapter, the term “to incite a riot”, or “to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot”, includes, but is not limited to, urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts.
So it probably depends pretty specifically on what Epps said and what the feds could convince a jury of. Was Epps urging or instigating others to commit or threaten violence? Or was he merely advocating an idea or expressing a belief that didn't necessarily entail violent acts?
Speaking of which, it's very odd that he did not go into the Capitol himself, given that he loudly and repeatedly urged others to.
The article notes there were a few others who went to the Capitol but didn't go inside. Do we have any information on what they were charged with? Might be a useful point of comparison.
Also the article you linked to references another NYT article from yesterday, when the charging was originally announced, and says:
Mr. Epps was also interviewed by the F.B.I. and was removed from the bureau’s list of suspects wanted in connection with the Capitol attack in the summer of 2021. “That should have been the end of the matter for Epps,” his lawyer wrote in the complaint against Fox.
I almost wonder if the FBI considered his conduct too minor to charge in summer 2021 and maybe lost track of his case in the interim since he wasn't on their list anymore? Then, Epps was back in the news with his interview and lawsuit so they decided they should get around to charging him? Given the harassment it sounds like he faced maybe he wanted to be charged to try and put rumors of his being a fed to bed? I might rather spend some time in jail or on probation than be inundated with conspiracy theory driven death threats!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
And this dichotomy is exactly what I'm criticizing. Masnick's entire shtick is to prevaricate between officially state-driven things that could be anywhere near the First Amendment whenever the censorship is something he opposes (see this) no matter how regulated speech is in that sphere otherwise, and then raising incredibly exacting standards for what counts as government action when it's something he doesn't care about (see for example this post conflating double-digit legal demands with the literally thousands of 'unofficial requests' from the government.).
I don't know how to tell you this but there's a difference between a government passing a law imposing criminal or civil penalties on someone and them clicking the equivalent of a Super Report button. The article specifically notes that Twitter did not comply with a majority of the government's unofficial requests. Twitter was (and is) free to ignore unofficial requests from the government. The doctors in the first article would not be free to disregard the government's prohibition on discussing certain topics with patients. The two things are different in very important ways.
Which is funny, because you'd think that people would be at least somewhat opposed to slurs that touched on them, and instead Twitter and Advertisers supposedly found tweeting "Learn To Code" at a handful of bargain-basement 'journalists' worse than having ads sandwiched between "KillAllMen" and photoshopped decapitations of a certain politician. And it was always like that.
Have you been on Twitter? Why would I think that? I'm sorry that advertisers and Twitter users don't share your ratings of what things are bad but their opinions are the ones that matter for Twitter's continued viability as a business.
Indeed, and he quickly papered over any potential problem by giving his friends at Twitter the most charitable possible explanations and possible facts, and then when those assumptions came false retreated time and time again, often in hilariously misleading ways. That link rests heavily on people not finding yet that any evidence of government pressure, and then despite all of the later releases his information since his comments never quite get around to revisiting the matter except to provide increasingly circumscribed reasons This Does Count.
I mean, yea. It's important that if you're going to allege the government pressured Twitter about the laptop story and that was the cause of their suppression people are going to want, like, evidence. So far none has been forthcoming. The best I've seen is some general warnings to Twitter about possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia.
((I don't think Musk will actually bring this case, or be successful if he does, and it's certainly not a multi-billion and maybe not even multi-million dollar tort. But that's more because it'd be worth pennies on the legal fee dollar even in the off chance he wins, and the standards for when a claim is an opinion of undisclosed facts or where it's just an opinion mumblemumble are an absolute mess. In addition to the obvious reputational risks.))
I think the ADL's problem with Musk becomes much more obvious phrased as "He made frivolous threats they had committed torts against him."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Citation that their ads will be equally effective? That there would be no difference in user base under various moderation schemes?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
When Masnick is discussing Twitter protecting people's first amendment rights he doesn't mean they didn't ban people (because banning people doesn't implicate their first amendment rights) he means they resisted subpoenas from the government demanding they de-anonymize it's critics, which does implicate their first amendment rights.
The criticism of pre-Musk Twitter was never that it banned CSAM or followed copyright law, Masnick knows that, you know that, I know that, the dog knows that.
Yes, the point of the article is that very few of the people who talk about being a "free speech platform" have any idea that there's tons of stuff they are going to be legally obliged to moderate. The piece is not about responding to criticisms of Twitter, it's about the specific convergent evolution of social media moderation policies as the first paragraph makes clear:
It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.
The actual criticisms are either glossed over ("level three" is hilariously short) or not engaged with at all (the godsdamned FBI called them and told them repeatedly not to run stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, while knowing that Hunter Biden's laptop had been out there, and I notice Masnick seems to have missed any mention about it).
What further elaboration is required? It turns out people don't like to spend time on a site where they are regularly called slurs! Advertisers think it damages their brand when their advertisements appear next to hate speech. Is this concept complicated? Masnick, in fact, has a whole article about Twitter and Hunter Biden's laptop.
Quite a lot of those "legal, financial, and social pressures" are just shared ideological capture, or only taken seriously because of shared ideological capture. There could be a plausible argument otherwise if pre-Musk Twitter's censorship focused on commonly-agreed slurs or clear falsity or other bad behaviors, but in practice for all that Twitter moderation had also always been arbitrary and inconsistent, it overwhelmingly ended up in a left-wing mode, encouraged and legitimized by a fairly small number of (overwhelmingly left-wing) partners that promoted these standards to both Twitter and its advertisers (and sometimes regulators!).
I don't even know how to respond to the implication that legal or financial pressures are due to shared ideological capture. If your primary revenue stream is from people advertising on your platform then it's important for the survival of your business in a non-ideological way that they continue to do that. You are somewhat at the whim of what advertisers like and want. Similar advertisers only want to advertise on your platform because they believe they can reach users who will buy things. If users abandon your platform en masse that is also bad for your business, so you are somewhat beholden to the desires of users, whatever your ideology. Legal pressure even more so! I guess X could stop reporting CSAM or responding to DMCA takedowns, but the end result would definitely be the end of their business! How is ideological capture related at all? Sure some social pressure and its response may be due to shared ideological capture, I acknowledge as much in another comment.
The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract.
What is the tort the ADL committed to constitute the "tortious" part of tortious interference? I am pretty sure they're his foe now because he goes around promoting open anti-semites like Keith Woods.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But these "social pressures", aren't they also a form of ideological capture among the institutions that exert said pressure on social media platforms?
Undoubtedly some of the social pressure on social media platforms come from institutions ideologically captured by Democrats, but hardly all of it.
top university faculty
judiciary
As of Jan 2021 the federal judiciary was actually majority appointed by Republicans although only slightly and this has probably reversed since. On the other hand, SCOTUS has been majority Republican appointed since, like, the 1960's
Overall, in the 54 years since Nixon first took office, there have been 20 confirmed appointments to the court, counting chiefs and associate justices. Republican presidents have had 15 of them, Democratic presidents just five.
media
This obviously depends on the media entity. NYT or CNN? Sure. Fox News or OANN? Definitely not.
big tech
federal govt employees
Are probably more split than you suppose, especially with respect to the Senate.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
All I can think of is TechDirt's Content Moderation Learning Curve. The convergence of large social media platforms on similar content moderation rules is less due to shared ideological capture than a combination of legal, financial, and social pressures all pointing in a similar direction.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is. Surely accusations are true or false because of facts in the world, not dubious statistical expectation. If we want to determine if the accusations are true or false we should examine the facts of the accusations themselves. At least one of them appears to have a great deal of contemporaneous corroborating evidence. Or did a woman go to a Rape Crisis Center and spend 5 months in therapy so that, a decade later, her false accusation would appear more credible?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But this rule doesn't require you to "tell the government everything about [your] finances." It just requires companies to tell the government what natural persons ultimately own and operate them. Why shouldn't the government be able to get this information?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What is the objectionable Step 2 that this regulation makes much more likely to occur?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
A post long on assertion and short on reason or evidence.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
So it sounds like your objection is to some hypothetical Step 2, rather than this actual policy.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Ok, why is it unreasonable for the government to want to know what natural persons are benefiting from their grant of limited liability?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
How is it virtually impossible to operate a business without a limited liability corporate structure? Many businesses in the United States are sole proprietorships which do not have limited liability.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It seems fine to me. If you want to enjoy the legal benefits of limited liability or operating as a corporation rather than a natural person the government wants to know to whom those benefits are actually accruing. Incorporation and limited liability are ultimately creations of the government. What's the counter argument? That there's a natural right to be able to operate a legally distinct entity in a way that shields you from liability of that entity's operations? I'm skeptical.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I feel like professional sports is an obvious one. There's really only one employer per-sport (NHL, NFL, etc). There are individual teams within that but the org has a lot of control over how people are allowed to move between teams and so on. It's probably as close to a literal monopoly as one can get.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
You say this is a country thing but I'm pretty sure Google is a pretty large outlier on this. I work for and we definitely don't have fully stocked kitchens and free fancy lunches.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think it depends on the ratio of employees to employers. Sure those employees have hundreds of thousands of potential employers, but those hundreds of thousands of employers have (tens of?) millions of potential employees.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, it's possible that working conditions would have gotten better anyway.
As to Google I think that's more to do with the nature of software engineering as a profession. There is not nearly as much potential for harm compared to someone working a mining job or with heavy machinery or similar.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Insofar as part of the point of a union is to protect workers from abusive or unsafe work environments that would seem to apply just as well to government employees as private employees.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, in a fantasy where they are in control and can stop at any time. Actual rape is not like that!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, but my point is that inferring that people wanted to fuck their step siblings by their consumption of such porn would be a bad inference. Feel free to exclude stepcest porn. What fraction of women who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their fathers? What fraction of men who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their daughters? I think the percentage is very low in both cases.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
Generally the point of unions is to try and rebalance the allocation of surplus generated by production more towards workers than it would otherwise be. The reason companies makes things (in an economic sense) is that things are more valuable post-production than the constituent parts were pre-production. There is often an imbalance of power between employees and employers (especially when the work force is large) that can enable employers to capture a very large (perhaps total) share of this surplus. Unions exist to try and ensure workers capture more of the surplus generated by production, generally by making it more difficult for employers to fire employees. This is more effective in higher-skilled industries because the costs to mass-replace employees are higher but it can work in low-skill professions as well thanks to legal protections.
Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?
No, definitely not.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference.
Can you clarify what a "reasonable inference" is here? At least in my case it's definitely false.
It won't be totally accurate, but we're talking about inference here rather than divine revelation - "this is likely" is just fine for that particular bar, and the inference gets more accurate the more information you volunteer about yourself.
Sure, what I'm saying is P(wants to be raped | has rape fantasies) is, like, < 0.0001. A very small fraction of women who have rape fantasies would actually enjoy being raped.
I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them. Maybe my proclivities just lead to me encountering more women of a certain type, but c'est la vie. But as for the actual question you'd have to get a lot more specific, because asking whether they would enjoy being raped is like asking if they'd enjoy eating food - the precise details do in fact matter. And in my experience, people do actually want to experience their sexual fantasies, even if they would prefer/only do so in a matter that doesn't have severe consequences for the rest of their life. Hell, there are women who actually set up and arrange "consensual non-con" orgies in the rationalist community.
I feel like this paragraph evinces a misunderstanding of what is bad about rape. Rape is not bad because rapists are rough or sexually aggressive. Plenty of women enjoy those things in a consensual setting. Rape is bad because of the lack of consent, the loss of control, and uncertainty about what is going to happen. Even in CNC scenarios the parties have generally agreed in advance what is going to happen, who is going to be involved (and how), and should have a safeword to call the whole thing off if it gets too intense.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Your inference is incorrect. In fact, sometimes in these games I'll make a quicksave and just go on a rampage murdering innocent people. Do you think I'm some aspiring mass murderer now? What does this fact tell you about my proclivity to killing actually innocent people?
Predicting you'll be arrested is not generally admission of guilt to a crime. You can be wrong, after all! Also note how Epps caveats his comments with "peacefully" immediately after the "We need to go into the Capitol" part. 18 USC 2102(a) requires the riot in question involve violence or threats of violence. Calling for entering the Capitol peacefully would seem to be the opposite of that. I've never been a federal prosecutor but I wouldn't love bringing charges under 18 USC 2101 just on the basis of what's in the video. As @huadpe notes in a parallel comment the speech would also have to pass the test from Brandenburg v. Ohio (and apparently nobody has been charged with incitement). I am not sure speech the previous night for violence the following day is sufficiently "imminent" under Brandenburg.
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