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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I find it interesting that the fbi came with a rather dumb response. It seems fairly standard to just accuse the other side of a conspiracy theory today. Just felt very basic to me and standard leftist to accuse the right of conspiracy theories and misinformation. I know people say for Ukraine don’t believe anything until Putin denies it. For the letters it’s about the point where you don’t believe anything until they call it misinformation and then you can mark it as factual.

It almost would have been better not to respond. I’m not even sure what they are referring to as a conspiracy theory. It seems like factual reporting that the fbi sought to censor a lot of tweeters. The question is whether you think this was bad or good or that it was a big deal that the fbi sought censorship

It seems like factual reporting that the fbi sought to censor a lot of tweeters.

Afaik, the calls for specific accounts to be banned had to do with those that were specifically talking about voting on the wrong days. The FBI was thorough but precise about this. They were also going after people who were pro-Russia, pro-Cuba, pro-Maduro, but these amounted to maybe a few thousand requests.

In the grand scale of Twitter, that's a drop in the ocean. But it's made worse by the targeted nature of the tweets. These were specifically about eliminating people who were against the views of the US establishment or talking about something the Feds decided was suddenly very critical to the security of the US.

They pushed and succeeded hard with getting Alex Berenson banned despite being American and only reporting factual data against official narratives. And I haven’t checked every ban but it seems like these types of actions are well against American norms and not OK.

It seems fairly standard to just accuse the other side of a conspiracy theory today.

Indeed. And this has trained me to think that modern conspiracy theory accusations are typically admissions that rightoids have a valid point.

Making the word conspiracy low status was truly the CIAs master stroke.

And basically inviting contradiction when they said it wasn’t about other agencies. At least wait until Taibbi is done and can’t just...drop something else.

If we’re going to get a sinister conspiracy, I want it to be better planned than this.

Turns out the argument that grand conspiracies require ultra-competence and great levels of coordination was wrong all along.

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