Something like this "What did you do today for the victory?" https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/33/2f/c2332f9706f7b768243f... or this "What did you do for the airforce?" or this http://www.sovmusic.ru/jpg/posters/ussr0550.jpg

If they were a foreign non-state actor, it probably would be criminal offense to provide aid or transmit money for them. (For fairly obvious 1st amendment reasons it’s not possible to do that with fellow Americans, which is why the statutes specify foreign terrorist groups).

I’m not terribly surprised that everyone is dumping them.

If you are a politician, are you comfortable with a few tech CEOs holding the power to destroy your campaign? Especially when the CEOs live in the same region and contribute to similar causes? Wouldn't you seek to rein in the power of companies that have the power to destroy you? Or seek to use this power against your political enemies?

"Don't attempt a coup," you say. Sure. But the stated reason by the companies is generally that Trump campaign encouraged and promoted violence - are you sure that this rational will be narrowly applied going forward? Especially when there's an effort by some to redefine hurtful language as violence?

If having active/robust moderation is a hard requirement to exist as a viable app, wouldn't this prohibit new social media companies from going viral? FB/Twitter spends millions and employs an army of contractors to moderate their platforms. Can a new startup that's growing exponentially build moderation before they're shut down by Apple/Google/AWS?

On a related note, does it concern you that the last two social media apps that seriously challenged FB/IG/Twitter are Tik Tok and Parler, and the American government forced a sale of the former and private companies collectively decided to boot the latter?

Hey, I'm just being paranoid. I'm sure these monopolistic companies will use their power perfectly going forward and never make any mistakes. I'm also sure that government will respect their reasonable use of power and leave them alone.

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Also, just to clarify: I'm thinking this from the POV of the non-violent conservatives who are seeing this as an attack on their politics, and who can then use this as a justification to block BLM/"antifa" protests for "peace" if they come back in power.

plus their equity vesting structure is absolute trash and doesn't allow employees to get any gains from the stock rising before vest. stay away.

Free speech limited by inciting violence, OK, but should be applied evenly. Anrifa, BLM, weren't deplatformed, right?

The politics of the new right are for some reason considered an existential threat by big tech, and the global security and intelligence faction.

We can't have a situation where Trump can actually deliver results and give the people hope and risk upsetting the control system, so we need to remind everyone they belong to a global control structure, introduce a virus, and coordinate an exaggerated curfew response to remind everyone to be afraid and that we're really in control, not some new fangled ideologue making promises of renewed greatness and destruction of the control system

The government could do nothing. But businesses who are answerable to nobody can do whatever they feel is best.

Hopefully they always make the right choice.......

In all these years, the only actual existential danger to society to materialize are precisely the entities that are now being deplatformed.

Excuse me if I don't take all this hand wringing on behalf of unstable insurrectionists seriously.

I imagine there must be some conditions that would make one say "we are enabling this individual's actions" to some definiton of "actions" that you disagree with.

Yes the extreme right is ridiculous. But the extreme left is too.

Spend some time outside silicon valley and other liberal hubs. Understand the perspective of others.

I am not in favor of violence. I am not in favor of Trump's behavior. However Trumps stance on policy typically aligns more closely with what I believe than Biden. Behavior like this alienates me.

Again, I do not love Trump. Far from it. But these moves come across not as anti-extreme-right, but anti-conservative.

Companies with business before the US and foreign governments should not be making these decisions. The potential for corruption is absolutely huge. Do we really want Tik Tok deciding what the US President can and can't say.

This is going to further erode trust in US institutions. To believe Trump isn't lying about the election you have to think there's a massive conspiracy to keep him out of power. Well...

Banning people from sharing beliefs doesn't make them less popular. Banning racist speech has NOT worked in Europe.

This is disproportionate to what Trump actually did. This is not to downplay the seriousness of a riot inside the Capitol Building. The timing and nature of the act are repugnant and the people who did it deserve to spend some quality time in federal prison. Trump's false rhetoric about the election being stolen undoubtedly (and foreseeably) motivated these people. But I don't think what he said can be fairly read as advocating what happened. There was no threat whatsoever of the government being overthrown. Trump and people like him will ultimately find a way around these actions. And once they do they will cease to be effective. Individual states can probably step in and ban this sort of thing. And I fully expect most Red States to have done so by the end of the year. These tools should be preserved for a true emergency. Which this isn't.

The right solution to the issue of disinformation is changing libel laws. NYT vs Sullivan was probably a mistake. And several states have criminal libel laws that could have plausibly been applied here.

This is the line. If they simply protested outside, it would have been fine.

Although I am not okay with total ban forever.

The courts should be the ones deciding on such matters. We ought to have a civil debate about this. Both sides feel they are right.

I also agree that Big Tech is way too powerful and Republicans strongly feel they are suppressed. That ain’t right. Big Tech needs to be held in check. They don’t enforce their policies uniformly, neither is there a due process where both sides of the argument are heard and recorded before a judgement is made. Someone wakes up and clicks a button “Ban” without much recourse for their actions.

That’s the problem. We need more objectivity and accountability in the system.

Doesn't this push Trump to accept bitcoin. Wouldn't bitcoin get a big boost making him richer as the donations increased?

By doing this now highlight how much Stripe profitted when the going was good. But it also signals when the going isn't good they will not stick with you.

Well, OK, this is freedom of speech…for Stripe. They don’t like what Trump has done. They are a private company. It’s their ball. They can take it home whenever they want to.

Speech has consequences, and if you foment a hostile takeover of Congress, you pay your price.

Greater decentralization, smaller polities and a less powerful federal government could be a workable solution. It doesn't have to go to the point of secession. It is possible to respond with tolerance and let all sides live according to their wishes.

Let’s not undermine the significance of techs decision to censor here. The potential blowback could be in tens of millions of users abandoning these platforms for alternatives.

So should we give them credit or was this a political decision? Maybe the DOJ will drop its cases against big tech. Maybe the senate/congress will stop calling the CEOs to testify.

In either case, is Amazon acting on legitimate orders from law enforcement, or are they taking the law into their own hands?

Other than your comment, I've yet to hear anyone imply this is a legal, rather than a moral, matter.

Edit: I see this is the Stripe thread, not the AWS/Parler thread. I agree Trump has broken the law, though it is true that even criminals have regular bank accounts that don't get cancelled as soon as they're accused. Same thing applies, Stripe was not acting on a law enforcement request. It's vigilante justice, even if it's on the right side of history. I don't like the precedent.

Really think about it: the President of the United States incited a mob to attack the Capitol to prevent the certification of the vote of his political opponent.

He did this by pushing constant lies and propaganda for months, and urging his followers to "fight" for him. Go watch his speech and then try to tell me he didn't know exactly what he was doing.

> Trump saying to head down the street

I'm honestly flabbergasted that you can see the culmination of Trump's actions from the past year (or however long he's claimed the election would be rigged) as just saying "head down the street".

They failed, but they tried.

Not to mention four years of telling their base the election was stolen or hacked, followed by a pointless impeachment.

This is the new norm. And both sides are indeed complicit and escalating.

Honestly it is ugly how stupid and easily swayed they think the public are.

The time to ban and disconnect from Trump was about 3 years ago.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/0cd2285d-5e39-4d54-81e7-f4c657364...

"Our store is only accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero as payment methods"

Could spearhead the shift to decentralized cryptocurrencies.

We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.

It's going to be impossible to rely on American corporations to serve you if your opinion goes against ruling consensus.

In fact, the USGOV can now point to these very actions as evidence to push for tech regulation. It's very similar to how during Vietnam War, many on the South Vietnam side switched sides to fight their own.

When the smoke cleared, the first people to go were those who switched sides to help the communists come into power. Reason: once a traitor, always a traitor.

They made their choice, we'll see the consequences of their actions now.

It's one thing to ban a normal person or business. But to ban Trump, the current sitting president, leader of GOP and the person that represent almost half the country, is tall order.

There's good reason why business should avoid politics, like Coinbase has done so far. It's a slippery slope that doesn't end well for the business.

Let’s call what happened last week what it was: a terrorist attack against the seat of government perpetrated by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election.

You need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask if you’re the bad guy. As arch-conservative a figure as Mitch McConnell describes this as a failed insurrection and you make excuses for it.

For the record, Orwell was a leftist. Yes, 1984 was a warning about the USSR, which he hated, but the idea that he was warning about creeping leftism in general turning into authoritarianism is to really misunderstand him.

For the record, he hated the authoritarian right just as hard as he hated the authoritarian left, possibly more so. He participated in the Spanish civil war, following his own advice that everyone pick up a rifle and shoot a fascist. He was wounded in action by a sniper bullet to the throat.

By the terms of his place and time, he considered himself a libertarian (that word later came to be a right wing phenomenon in America, self consciously co-opted from the left). We’d typically call him a democratic socialist; someone who wanted the government to help solve the “social problem” (where the term “socialism” partially comes from) of poverty and what not, but he was also wary about giving too much power of the government to control people.

He was a complex guy with even more complex political opinions. Sadly our Cold War fueled reading of 1984 has flattened out a lot of his nuance from him.

Do I need to remind you that Trump encouraged the protest to be peaceful? Then released a video telling everyone to go home, peacefully? Those involved in the violence are being arrested.

"People" online have held up bloody Trump heads, wished for Trump to die. The extreme left isn't this super peaceful always tolerant group. The extreme right isn't either.

I think it's pretty stupid. The entire Iraq war was based on lies. Trump in particular is a terrible liar but has lied consistently for forty years.

Has the GOP, specifically the GOP, advocated for the violent overthrow of the United States Government?

And if they can't, well, we all know Republicans don't trust filling out documents (i.e. ballots) when it isn't done in person. So perhaps the best solution is for supporters to drive to their local GOP office and hand deliver the cash.

Private companies using their liberty to deny service to the leader of the United States government seems like freedom to me.

There's a bit of false equivalence here. The fire was, on one hand, a false flag (from the very link you posted), and on the other hand, a stroke of luck.

Whereas here, it was an attempt at taking human hostages (reference: the many more recent videos of insurrectionists with human zip ties and small arms) and disrupting election certification with human shields in the form of a mob of conservative protesters. Which by every definition would be an attempted coup.

And don't get me wrong, I'm saying quite explicitly that there were legitimate, Trump-believing protesters in the crowd who either got swept up into the moment or genuinely fear for the state of the country but who were not in it to overthrow a legitimately elected government. However, within the crowd were people who came equipped to overthrow leadership followed by blending right back into the crowd, and they coordinated on platforms such as Parler with impunity, which is precisely why deplatforming the platforms is the appropriate next step.

It's not because of everyday conservatives who feel duped. It's because of the conservatives who came together to enact violence and disrupt the democratic process.

That’s a rather incomplete definition:

—quote—

Threats to democracy involve officeholders’ abuse of the official powers given to— them within a democracy through the unconstitutional extension of those powers either temporally or substantively. This abuse is most dramatic in a coup d’état. The traditional coup occurs when one part of the state attempts to take over other organs of the state using force or the threat of force. Because the military represents that part of the state meant to control a monopoly of force,3 the military is the most frequent – but not the only – culprit. Other kinds of coups could occur if a head of government uses unconstitutional means to dismiss judges who deliver unwelcome judgments (what Dr. Mort Halperin calls an “auto-coup”), or to get rid of an “uncontrollable” legislature in order to rule by decree instead (another form of autocoup). A distinct but functionally similar threat is of the erosion of democracy, where officials abuse their constitutional powers to take over gradually the powers of other institutions, as in Zimbabwe.

—end-quote—

https://eprints.qut.edu.au/42605/1/World_Politics_Review.pdf

> There are two key components of this definition. The first is that it is illegal. […] But an even more critical aspect of Powell and Thyne’s definition is that it requires the involvement of elites

And the attack on the Capitol was both illegal violence and with the involvement of elites, who egged it on because they sought to benefit from it, so what’s your point?

Good question.

Like with all the mainstream media that 'reported' in front of the federal buildings and businesses that got looted and burned down, the shootings in the CHAZ/CHOP areas and the continuous riots and chaos all over the summer last year as seen on Twitter, they told me that there was 'nothing to see here' and it was a 'mostly peaceful protest' which everyone knows is absolute BS.

Both the GOP and Democrats instantly condemned the Capitol riots, but as for the summer riots, but not a single condemnation from the media of those events or even the Democrats disavowing the summer riots in June that are still continuing to this day.

The outrage did not fit their narrative. Neither did it fit their definition of what they think a 'mob' is, since the main culprits behind it were BLM and Antifa, as usual.

They're "coming for" police reform and transparency.

Please don't misrepresent or generalise very disparate groups of demonstrators.

Same accusations were made against peaceful many time in history.

There is also evidence of police instigating violence: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/26/opinion/blm-p...

At the end of the day, we must also recognize that corporations are still run by humans. Those humans make decisions within the context of their own biases and interests. Those interests are also legal requirements in some cases.

It's a tough situation, but even companies which do not have a legal requirement to do so, should be able to express their own views, and be accountable for them. I believe that actions (or threats) by Trump towards twitter earlier on expresses how the Government at the time thought that social platforms should have some accountability.

> "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that.... happen again." ..... Trump

With the current state of the right wing in the US, there is a clear and present danger of us losing our democracy. When you look at the statements about the election from last _June_, or the purges at the Defense Department last fall, it is clear that this nonsense (and it is nonsense, 59 court cases and counting) about election fraud was premeditated, and so was this coup attempt. This is the Beer Hall Putsch, and it’s a mistake to see how lucky we got and say there is an equivalence to protests against police violence.

Assuming you’re arguing in good faith, what you’re missing is that the outrage from this event isn’t about the five dead people, tragic though that is. It’s about the fact that armed protesters just walked into the Capitol Building while Congress was in session. We are very, very lucky we don’t have dead congresspeople. What do you think the mob that beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher in the Capitol building would have done to AOC if they’d gotten to her?

We cannot afford to make the mistake Weimar Germany did. We cannot assume that because this failed the problem is gone. We cannot appease these people, we cannot treat them as benign. They must all be identified and prosecuted, and their enablers in Congress must be expelled from our governing bodies.

IED: https://youtu.be/dm_lZxmPxUU

As for that chants: go to any of the videos of the various occupations from the summer. If that really does come from a 2015 march instead of 2020, fine, but go to any video and find the same activity (arson, assault, IEDs, lasers) and chants like "no justice no peace".

> they’ve never had a chance or a credible threat

Agreed. But neither did the Trump rioters.

[1] http://ibgvr.org/philadelphia-shooting-victims-dashboard/

Can you source these in the case of BLM? That's what I'm missing. Preferably equivalently specific plans, which amount to "our intent is to physically harm police officers and destroy a police precinct" at a minimum.

> how long the violence took to kick off, or who made the first escalation don't strike me as very relevant.

I think they're highly relevant to discussing the goal of the protests. If a group of protestors shows up and demonstrates peacefully, but is eventually goaded into violence by the group they're protesting[0], that's very different from a group that essentially immediately attacks the people they're protesting.

And, of course, all of this entirely assumes that both groups have equally valid concerns, which is just plainly not true and important to realize. If you're going to take a stance that violence is absolutely never valid, that's an interesting opinion that I don't believe I share. But if you're of the opinion that violence may be an acceptable response to injustice, well, there's a whole lot more reason to believe that BLM protestors have justification for their claim of injustice than stop-the-steal protestors.

[0]: I'll reiterate the importance of this, in general, especially with police tactics that escalate and force violence, such as kettling. While I don't think that specific tactic was present at the 3rd precinct events, tactics that escalate violence are often used against BLM protestors, to predictable results. The fact that violence was reached quickly and without any of those tactics at the capitol speaks to, I think, a different mindset.

Feels like a weird thing to push back on. You kinda admit that you personally might support the violence. If even you admit this, then really you should not be pushing back hard on this assumption that other people also supported it.

It should not be an out there claim, that other people supported the violence, when you are kinda implying that you support it yourself.

I just don't think that you should act flabergasted, or surprised, or indignant, or demand large amounts of specific evidence, at someone making a claim that other people supported or wanted violence to happen, given that you kinda are saying that you support it yourself.

> The context we're in is advocation for violence prior to the events

"Nobody advocated for violence before it happened, but now that it did happen I definitely think that the violence is justified!" feels like a pretty poor argument to me.

If you are going to imply that the violence was justified, then really you should not push back on this idea that other people thought it was justified to, and endorsed it prior to the event.

My argument is that, well no, both sides aren't the same, as shown by the fact that only one set of protestors was openly advocating for and planning to attack people. The burden of proof is on you to show that they both sides are in fact the same. I obviously can't prove a negative, and so far you haven't provided anything concrete.

No, not "understand". Instead you implied that it would be justified and also acceptable.

In this situation I really would not consider you much different than the other side if you are attempting to say that the violence was justified and acceptable.

If you are saying that it was justified and acceptable, which your comment pretty clearly seemed to imply, then I would consider the difference between you and "the other side" to be very small to the point where the difference doesn't matter that much.

That's pretty close to advocacy for violence to say that it was justified and acceptable.

Because of his office and the manner of use, yes, explicitly, under the limited public forum doctrine.

The POTUS is part of the US Government. Twitter is not.

So... no.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...

>Could it be construed the other direction?

No.

Trump has appealed the decision to SCOTUS, which is still considering whether or not hear it [1]. Given that Trump's Twitter account is now banned, I suspect SCOTUS will dismiss the motion as mooted.

[1] See https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/trump-v-knight-f... for the docket information.

Twitter is not an elected official.

This is not hard.

I don't think even the last election was a success for democrats to be honest, it was a pretty close call. But that is another metric. Trump became president and had his full term. I don't think past you would call even the current situation a success, you just reduced your expectations.

The supposed fact checkers had a clear bias and couldn't establish trust. That will take some time to get back and I doubt democrats will have success with programs that require any form of solidarity because you still define yourself as opposition to Trump. There is still a huge and solidified division. Hard to govern, but we will see.

Another hallmark is they tend to be mostly immutable, or unchangeable voluntarily. Society generally doesn’t accept that it’s reasonable for a person to change their gender, sexual orientation, race, age etc in order to participate in all facets of society.

I don’t think political affiliation meets that standard. Although I imagine that some might consider their political affiliation to be as core their identity as religion.

There's no such thing as a “general protected class”; there are different lists (and different effects of the status) of protected classes in various categories of law (public accommodations, employment, housing, etc.)

This is just not happening. Except apparently in the minds of many HNers who live in some bizarre alternate reality.

PayPal kept doing that so much that regulators (FTC? I forget) finally made them stop holding pseudo-cash accounts for people until/unless people specifically requested it. Laws take time to catch up.

> why not obvious billion dollar ones? why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?

Again: I'm not opining on what they should or shouldn't be doing. All I'm saying is, if you think the fact that it's not a utility is a good supporting argument for this, I'm saying their classification is far from obvious to me. But if you have other arguments to make, I'm not expressing any opinions on them; I'm solely replying to the "it's clearly not a utility" bit.

It's sad, but at least we have a digital public square?

America also turned away a lot of Jewish refugees for similar reasons. Most of the ended up victims of the Holocaust. It's only after the war that the "we had to fight this great, singular evil" emerged.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

https://twitter.com/LiteraryMouse/status/1347873498925064194

I think you read this slightly wrong -- drop the government (political adversary != government adversary) and relax imprisonment for threats of violence:

"coercion of executives through threats of violence"

...and we've got something a lot closer to what we already see today.

"Objectionable views" is an objectionable notion for many. And "unified messaging" from monopoly information and communication corporations (owned by an astonishingly small subset of humanity) is not a legitimate source of authority for determining what is or is not "objectionable".

This is the entire point of political systems: resolving conflicts of views and providing a mechanism for harmonious, fair, and productive societies. Unless the plan is to medicate people, in which case sure, a perfectly homogenous body politic may be in your future.

It's in Stripe's best interest to deny services to Trump because coups and unstable governments are just bad for business. That's why the business lobbying group the The National Association of Manufacturers is calling for invoking the 25th Amendment

This is part of their statement:

“This is not the vision of America that manufacturers believe in and work so hard to defend. Across America today, millions of manufacturing workers are helping our nation fight the deadly pandemic that has already taken hundreds of thousands of lives. We are trying to rebuild an economy and save and rebuild lives. But none of that will matter if our leaders refuse to fend off this attack on America and our democracy—because our very system of government, which underpins our very way of life, will crumble.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/business/national-associa...

Financial services companies have always chosen their customers carefully, If there were antitrust concerns with this they would have already been addressed - because this is SOP.

And as an aside, "armed" versus "unarmed" is largely immaterial. I don't care if you and five hundred of your buddies show up with supersoakers and pool noodles with the intent to overturn a vote count, it's a direct assault on democracy.

According to this[0]:

"More than 60 people were arrested, at least 50 police were injured, and officers confiscated guns, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails."

And this[1]:

"An Alabama man allegedly parked a pickup truck packed with 11 homemade bombs, an assault rifle and a handgun two blocks from the US Capitol building on Wednesday for hours before authorities ever noticed, according to federal prosecutors.

Another man allegedly showed up in the nation's capital with an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and told acquaintances that he wanted to shoot or run over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, prosecutors said."

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tall...

[1] https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/feds-p...

The fact that the criminal is the President of the United States and his enablers is incidental to the principle.

No one wants to ban any reasonable political views. But when a political party organises public mass violence, subversion, insurrection, murder, intimidation of public officers, the attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, among other crimes, that party - and especially its leaders - loses all claims on the patience of the public and on the tolerance of private sector service providers.

Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith. The reality is that criminal acts took place on a scale that was truly shocking.

Anyone who provides goods and services of any kind to the individuals and organisations responsible has a moral and legal duty to stop doing so - immediately.

However not only did all the big tech companies not withdraw support for Biden or prevent his campaign from using their apps, they doubled down and censored the story so most voters would not hear of it before the elections.

Again, big double standards at play here from a moral sense.

The larger issue here is that the internet really isn't so decentralized as it used to be.

There's like 10-20 major companies that control the majority of services people use, or the underlying infrastructure that powers the whole internet. This goes against the original design of the internet which meant it to be fully decentralized so no single entity or small set of entities could prevent the flow of information.

We should try to go back in that direction, either through competition and free markets or by enforcing it via existing or new regulations to prevent situations like this from ever happening again.

Sex workers face this problem. Even in countries where sex work is legal, the payments industry refuses to deal with them (in part because the chargeback rates are high for these kinds of transactions). They're forced to deal in cash and have all sorts of problems because of it (not least the fact that depositing large amounts of cash triggers money laundering regulations, and doing that too much can cause a bank to close the account).

Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.

We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.

> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.

> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

> the one we created when we kidnapped millions of people in Africa and stripped them of their original culture

Nobody was kidnapped. Individuals were bought from already-existing African slave trade markets(markets which had been run by and for Africans (and Arabs), preceding any European commercial relationship.)

Although you may have used the term kidnapping liberally (& with some artistic license), it is fundamentally not true & very misleading.

In Africa, buying and selling slaves was widespread at the time.

I think the treatment of African slaves(& their descendants) in America is bad enough without having to exaggerate the origin.

I agree anti-Black racism is far more destructive. But I’m not trying to establish a hierarchy of the kinds of racism. I think anti-Black racism is far more destructive than anti-Asian racism, but as an Asian I’m pretty happy to see both kinds be deemed taboo in polite society.

We can’t have someone’s skin color being used in pejorative terms, and insofar as there are many people who think it’s acceptable, that only underscores why I’m tremendously skeptical of private sector censorship, where those people will disproportionately be in charge of shaping debate.

Assuming the owners of said building do not want you there, occupying a building is at best trespassing and at worst breaking and entering.

Civil disobedience is explicitly breaking a law because you believe it to be unjust, with the full expectation that you will be arrested and possibly punished for your actions.

When most people talk about "protesting", I don't think that's what they're talking about.

Always a rather arrogant phrase, but especially absurd now.

Payment providers are just a front end for their networks, so it's easy to switch providers like Stripe, but you can still be banned by underlying network like Mastercard and your business will suffer.

Of course Stripe does not have a monopoly, but the broader discussion involves major players that can function as a cartel.

That is manifestly not the comparison being made. Antifa and BLM rioters burned down apartment buildings with people still inside in Kenosha. Over the summer, dozens of people were killed and there was billions of property damage (that's peoples homes and livelihoods, not just "stuff"). And Democratic politicians - including the VP-elect - provided bail for these criminals. Many democratic DAs in cities like Portland simply refused to press charges.

That being said, I abhor that Capitol police were attacked and that there were people who breached the Capitol with violent intent. But the deplatformings have gone well beyond the fringe few who actually engaged or promoted violence.

How many guns, bombs and zip ties? Was it even enough protestors to be called a minority who bought bombs? The press would love a few photos of people with guns storming the capital, because those that I've seen look like very poorly behaved tourists with souvenirs and selfies. Gallows happen to be a traditional prop at protests (eg, [0]).

> If they had found a senior official I don’t think they would have been safe.

Nobody feels safe when a protest gets out of hand, but that doesn't make it a fact that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America were about to be injured. It is entirely plausible that the mob would have screamed at them then been broken up. That is the most likely scenario.

[0] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tommy-robinson-leads-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...

>most of the damage was on insured property

Government property is insured by taxpayers

>93% of the summer protests where peaceful

I'm not sure how to confirm/disprove that statement. I'd posit that most protestors at the capitol were peaceful, but I'm not sure how to confirm/deny that either.

>mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president

Where I live "ACAB" is a trendy chant used to devil-ify police

EDIT: Also, is this not the same thing? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3217754/Black-Lives... - not sure how trustworthy this is

> molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene,

I have seen molotovs used at BLM protest

All this to say - it's not black and white; I also feel there clearly is some double standard going on here. I disagree with (what i think is) the premise of the capitol protests, but it does not strike me as that much worse than what people were supporting a few months ago.

100%? Literally all of them? Every one?

I'm not looking for a metaphorical response here. Which parts of your response are backed actual evidence and which parts are assumptions based on your instincts and filling in blanks?

The don't come up with these conclusions themselves. Only one very influential "leader", with a Twitter following of 88M, has been claiming elections are a fraud in America:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-longstanding-history-c...

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37673797

Appeasing his followers has been tried for the past ~5ish years. That led to Jan 6. Further appeasement will lead to worse outcomes unless trump is politically and legally, and _socially_ contained.

They know he pushes hardline policies, they know he's super-antagonistic, they know he's been impeached for corruption, they know that half of what he says makes no sense. They may not like or approve of Biden (I don't either tbh) but Trump voters absolutely know who he is. Poll after poll has established that a plurality of them them don't really give a shit about democracy and that loyalty to Trump is their top concern.

I think what you're worried about is that if they get shut down they will become more aggressive, and I agree that's highly likely. But the approach of appeasing these people and soothing their ruffled feathers has been tried for years and they have just become more and more aggressive over that time. You have a draw a line somewhere, and their attempt to overrun Congress and halt the confirmation of an election seems like a good place to do it.

People have sat by and watched for 4 years and did nothing whilst Trump worked to erode institutions, culminating in the American people democratically voting in a free and fair election to oust President Trump. The reaction to that was an attempted fascist coup. Clearly doing nothing has failed catastrophically. Perhaps there are more optimal solutions to this attack on democracy, but the posters here clutching their pearls over what is a relatively light response to an attempted coup should spare the rest of us the faux outrage.

no one has suggested this and none of the actions of the past few days can be categorized as this

Trump’s campaign (for an election that has ended) is not the only campaign in the country

How is that relevant to Stripe? They aren't the government. They're not even one of the top ten biggest payment processors.

I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith. More's the pity.

...or, conversely, we should compare damage and lives lost during Black Lives Matter protests to all damage and lives lost by Trump-supporting white supremacists.

If somebody speaks in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, do they make a sound?

Yes, they technically have free speech, but in reality not really.

The purpose of speech is that you might persuade somebody else. If there's nobody to talk to, you might as well not speak at all.

As I had mentioned in another comment a few days ago, it stands to reason that were the government to outsource the censorship to private entities (like Orban is now doing in Hungary, where almost all the media is in his pockets) than everything would be technically legal, even though it would definitely be against the spirit of the law.

As a matter of the fact the US right does seem to say that the same thing is happening right now, i.e. that the US mainstream media is "in the pockets of the left" hence the censorship.

The Pirate Bay is more or less a link register today after having been pushed to the point where they can not even sustain hosting torrent files, they can only host mag links.

This is far cry from running an actual platform or business on the internet.

Chances are that Trump is going to own a big part of it. That is why Trump is not on Gab or Parler, because he will compete with them.

That trended because Trump supporters built a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol on Wednesday.

It's only ironic if you choose to ignore the fact that one of those cases involves discrimination against a protected class and the other does not. If you don't ignore that fact then the irony is only applicable from those who were espousing the "free market, free speech" position in the previous case.

If you have trouble understanding this distinction, that's OK. No one really needs you to understand it. Just stay away from them, and we shouldn't have any problems.

For that to be true the people invading the capital would need to have intent to kill, weapons, and minutes access to those representatives. How many of those things are proven to be true?

So people end up conflating the ostracism of Trump and those in his periphery with an attack on the Republican party.

The problem with Parker and Gab is that they are only for the problem users. In fact, in an interview with Kara Swisher the CEO said that they have panels of volunteers that judge whether a post should be removed. The blind leading the blind.

No, he was ruled in favor of because the US Supreme Court found anti-religious animus in the enforcement process leading to the State ruling against him.

> Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith.

No, it wasn't. The decision specifically notes that he objected to being required to make cakes for same sex weddings entirely, on both free speech and free exercise of religion grounds [0], not that he was willing to do so dependent on messaging, so any such willingness he might have had was not a basis of the decision.

Instead, the Court found animus toward Phillips’ religious views by the state commission that found against him, both expressed in the process and evidenced through difference in how Phillips was treated vs. other bakers in similar cases before the same Commission, which mean that whether or not the law could otherwise have been enforced against him, the specific government act had an impermissible purpose, requiring it to be struck down. [1]

Note: All quotes from Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)

[0] “Phillips raised two constitutional claims before the ALJ. He first asserted that applying CADA in a way that would require him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed. [...] Phillips also contended that requiring him to create cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his right to the free exercise of religion, also protected by the First Amendment.”

[1] “The official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments—comments that were not disavowed at the Commission or by the State at any point in the proceedings that led to affirmance of the order—were inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires. The Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. For these reasons, the order must be set aside.”

His custom cakes are small works of art. If he'd be forced to create one against his beliefs, why not force a far left painter to paint a favorable portrait of Trump?

And indeed this situation has little to do with Silicon Valley corporations offering generic services to millions of people. They are like supermarkets, who should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone.

The baker discriminated against the couple but the supreme court punted on ruling on the laws and just said the goverment hadn't acted correctly in that case so threw it out. The law is still on record and baker has to abide by it and stop discriminating against gay couples unless the court someday rules otherwise

Section 230 refers to the ability of one party to sue over the speech of a third party. That's not in play here at all.

Rather, this is about freedom of association.

Stripe can associate (do business, in this case) with whom it chooses (with some restrictions[2], but this isn't one of them), and that freedom of association is protected by the constitution[0].

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1_2_13_1/

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

> Rudy, you did a great job. He’s got guts. You know what? He’s got guts, unlike a lot of people in the Republican party. He’s got guts, he fights. He fights, and I’ll tell you.

> We’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.

> We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

> I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

> It was going to be great. And now we’re out here fighting.

> I want to thank the more than 140 members of the House. Those are warriors. ... Where is Hillary? Where is she?

> But it used to be that they’d argue with me, I’d fight. So I’d fight, they’d fight. I’d fight, they’d fight. ... What happened to Hunter? Where’s Hunter?

> Now that’s many, many times what it would take to overthrow the state. Just that one element. 400,000 ballots appeared from nowhere, right after the election. (Use of “overthrow the state.”)

> Let them get out. Let the weak ones get out. This is a time for strength. ... They want to indoctrinate your children.

> We did good. We got rid of the ISIS caliphate. ... In Wisconsin, corrupt Democrat run cities deployed more than 500 illegal unmanned, unsecured drop boxes, which collected a minimum of 91,000 unlawful votes.

> When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do.

> Looking out at all the amazing patriots here today, I have never been more confident in our nation’s future.

> So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

- POTUS Trump

That’s only part of the stuff he said during the speech immediately before they marched, at his direction, to the Capitol building. He mentioned being peaceful once in his speech. Most of the undertones of the speech were about fighting/being strong for their way of life and belief in him being the rightful winner.

If your definition of fascism is specifically centered around nationalism or racism then this doesn't really work, but I don't think the word fascism implies this, only that fascism is usually associated with regimes using fascist authoritarianism to enforce racist and nationalist ideologies.

I think US might look exactly same in a few years. The mighty benevolent Party will care for thankful citizens, with the exception of a few outcasts who can't even create a simple website and are laughed at all over the media and social networks. And of course the Party will win all the subsequent elections for the next 70 years.

Speaking of landlords who discriminate, Trump has never done anything to deserve a shred of respect. Long before day one. If anything they're saving gullible people from sending money to a conman

Look back a few decades and this is exactly the same argument that segregationists were using. You've basically just said: "That shopowner has a right not to deal with blacks, why do they keep harassing that poor man by trying to buy his goods?".

> I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.

Those people didn't leave pipe-bombs at both party headquarters, call for their own Vice President to be hanged, or storm the Capitol building though. It's both transparent and dishonest to try to equate the two. Especially when you consider that Trump was one of the people peddling the birther nonsense about Obama and that pretty much everyone involved with the trump campaign was actually found guilty of some form of corruption. Trump himself has only escaped charges by virtue of being the President.

See this is part of the problem.

You are lumping together two different organizations that are nothing alike as somehow part of the same cabal.

Many different people from many different groups and organizations are reaching the same conclusion about Trump and the rise of violent right wing extremism.

Different parts of society are agreeing, and then in each of these parts there are individuals making decisions.

Well it's hard to argue against it when the people being cut out are trying to pipe-bomb your headquarters as well as the Democrats :/.

But to give you a partial answer anyway: Many criminals are never convicted. Many _known_ criminals are never convicted, due to lack of undeniable proof. Some criminals are convicted on lesser crimes, just to get them off the streets. There's plenty of evidence to support the position that Trump is a criminal. He may never be convicted but not because he's innocent.

No one is saying that every member of that mob had intentions to kill. There is no doubt that some people in the mob did and they got shockingly close to having the opportunity to do it.

[1] - https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1348334770103660553

Evaluations are hard to make when all the sources you trust are lying to you.

I don't want to infantilize anyone, but I'm not going to pretend that most Trump supporters are fully understanding the facts but simply coming to different conclusions. They are clearly and proudly ignoring the facts.

Do you really believe that?

I'm not seeing the parallel to Stripe choosing who they want (or don't want) to do business with.

Especially since there is no "blacklist" circulated and used by everyone in that industry.

Stripe doesn't owe anyone the right to use their services. Just as an airline can bar anyone for most any reason (unless that reason is membership in a protected class[0]), Stripe can do the same.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

No, it's not a private business.

> They were within their rights to make a blacklist

No, making an agreement in restraint of trade is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Internet businesses are natural monopolies and being banned from one can ruin your life without trial in a way that was unprecedented for private companies to be able to do in the past. In the near future somebody who is banned from both Paypal and Stripe will be close to being perpetually unbanked in some lines of work. The way progressives have cheered on giving tech companies this much power over our lives has been dispiriting

Where did I say that wasn't appropriate?

I strongly believe that those big social media companies not only have too much power and influence, but that their business models are exploitative and morally repugnant.

Which is why I don't use them. At all.

In fact, I detailed[0] how I thought this issue should be dealt with the other day.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25688032

As a single source yes. But if you consider the total share of voice of the other side across all media Fox News is a distinct minority.

> In recent years, federal authorities have described American extremists as the most urgent terror threat to the country and beefed up resources against them, carrying out a wave of prosecutions this year to head off potential violence as the presidential election approached.

https://www.propublica.org/article/domestic-terrorism-a-more...

I think it would be very difficult to argue that last week's invasion of the Capitol Building was neither violent nor politically motivated.

I don't think this is true at all. There is a lot of resentment out there from poor whites who have been getting the short end of many sticks lately. They may be better off than poor blacks on average, but they do not enjoy political power. Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because the people who enjoy political power are white, that all, or even most, whites enjoy political power.

I believe both protests were by groups lacking in power, and that this sort of thing is only going to get worse as economic inequality increases.

Most people don't have power, and it's getting worse as power is concentrated into the hands of the few. As bad as black people have it on average, pitting poor blacks against poor whites is a distraction from the real power disparity, which is that a lot of people in the US are really, really poor. Whilst the elites pay lip service to the issues faced by blacks, whist doing almost nothing to help (a rich black kid getting into a better school does nothing for the impoverished masses), the poorer whites don't feel like the elites are even pretending to try to address their problems. And they're right.

The US needs to fix its inequality issues if it expects either side to stop protesting, and violence is only going to get worse as people see their issues not being addressed.

Storming the capital was not a bright idea, but angry people are stupid, and they're going to just cause as much destruction as possible until life for them gets better. History is littered with examples of inequality leading to violent uprising.

It's entertaining as hell.

If you carve yourself an exemption to not accept some behaviour or beliefs, you are no longer tolerant. And you still think that you are, it's just a hypocrisy.

If you can't convince enough people that your message is worth propagating, maybe it isn't. If you can, you will have the means.