Does it mean any group seeking remedy against BigCorp with slogans like “Stop the Stink” to oppose a new dump can be shut down through lawyers if the group cannot prove their allegations?
This doesn't really seem comparable, does it?
Note well: I do not believe that there was in fact a steal. But if Facebook wants to do this, they're going to find out that there are several ways to modify or paraphrase this, and they're going to have to block significantly more than one phrase.
When do we just give up on democracy completely?
To be clear, I'm not indicating that the framers had the right idea about this. Rather, just mentioning that the risks of under-informed general populace exercising direct democratic election has been under consideration since the nation's founding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
Even through the progressive era when some of these things changed, parties were more powerful and they definitely filtered popular intent. And that way more than today. We didn't have small 'd' democratic presidential primaries until the 70s and this last one was the first for the Democrats.
EDIT: Although going along with your point, I also remember the framers wanting the electors to be determined at the local level (district) rather than state. That would change things significantly, IMO.
We have new technologies which are being leveraged to intentionally misinform people, in a society that has degraded public education and raised the cost of higher education to levels prohibitive for the majority of the population, and as a result, the society (as a whole) is no longer sufficiently informed.
So, how can democracy function if the citizens are not educated? It can't. We are now seeing the results of the effects mentioned above, and the tech companies in question are starting to realize it, and respond in only way they can, while still maintaining their own wealth and power.
House of Representatives was designed to allow for direct election and therefore allow for the “stupid” (as you call it) common man to influence government. Most of the other branches (e.g. judicial, executive, and the Senate) were appointed by the supposedly “non-stupid” members of legislatures and judicial boards.
The answer to the last question is no one should decide who is ignorant, as the thought of having someone decide this is well ... ignorant.
Coincidentally, there are a certain group of people opposed to public education, ahem, I mean, "indoctrination" - they will continue to be a problem, but hopefully smaller and smaller problem if we have better education.
1. Vastly improved education
2. Smaller governed regions (break up countries more).
I think the first is a given, but the second is because (big surprise) most people don't care to meet the needs of absolutely everyone because it's completely impractical and likely impossible.
Difference of opinion is why countries were formed. I'm amazed borders haven't changed more.
Democracy doesn't need to make people richer, healthier, or safer to function. Oklahoma's population is anti education and this is reflected in their government. Will that damage their children for the future? Likely. But democracy continues to function in Oklahoma anyway.
It cannot function if the losers turn violent and attack the government. At this point, "stop the steal" is almost a rallying cry for militant action as every other possible remedy has been exhausted. That is what makes it distinct.
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
Don't give up on democracy. It is hard. Nonetheless, it will always remain the best form of government we have seen. The United States Constitution is resilient as it has proven time and time again.
Yet they are allowed to drive cars, fly planes, raise children, buy guns and vote but somehow cannot decide for themselves what’s good or bad, and need a higher moral entity like Facebook to babysit them. I find this a weak argument.
>Once power loses its mask, once censoring dissent because it makes a mockery of the government is not just what power is doing, but actually what power says it’s doing, we enter a new stage of history—because serving this power is openly humiliating to the servant. Or at least, to any servant of intelligence, wisdom, conscience and character.
>At this stage, therefore, power is actively recruiting its own counter-elite. There is only one way to produce a regime change that sticks: a circulation of the elites. Therefore, we have taken a genuine step toward history. The gigantic gear has moved one click.
There is nothing wrong with conservatism, but for whatever reason there is a strong correlation between the right (at least in the last few years) and poor education.
I'd say most here can probably figure it out. I'm not saying I never get duped, but I can at least spot a total conman when I see one. It would appear many cannot.
That's an interesting hypothesis, but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. It's the current administration that's been calling for the repeal of Section 230, which is what would make platforms liable for their user's content.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkeamz/elizabeth-warrens-pla...
I'm sorry, but please justify or rephrase this. People chose to do violent things. Social media may indeed be an accelerant, but someone kept providing fuel and someone was asking "my kingdom for a match!" (or more accurately, "a match for my kingdom!"). And in response, a large number were prepared to provide matches and light fires.
Facebook has even blocked Ron Paul?!? (https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1348704640486014982)
FAANG is the bakery, and Trump and everything associated with him is the same-sex wedding cake.
2. Political beliefs are not a protected class like sexual orientation (should they be?)
Given that, this seems like even more of an open and shut case: businesses have a right to decide who they serve.
No, it ended with the conclusion that the particular state panel that rules against the baker did so with impermissible religious animus against his beliefs, and therefore the ruling against him was unconstitutional. “Compelled speech" was what a broad political group wanted the Court to rule on, but it's not what it did rule on, instead issuing a much more limited decision that dodged the broad issue almost entirely.
Just to be clear, I am not blaming them, I am just pointing out the hypocrisy.
The US is de facto converting to the Chinese model for the internet: All communication must be monitored, damaging content must be erased, and in serious cases, those responsible must be punished.
If Parler gets a foreign data center, I expect a "Great Firewall of China" with American characteristics will soon follow.
The term is apparently derogatory in nature, but imo it is an effective political metaphor for socio-political regimes that prominently feature bifurcated societies of ruling elite and voiceless governed masses: the palace and the street/market.
The “word on the street” has currency with the masses and nearly every utterance of the ‘palace’ is mistrusted, scrutinized, and parsed to the n-th degree to glean “the actual truth”. Conversely, the palace considers the word on the street to be irrational, volatile, and destabilizing, and dismisses it in its entirety as misunderstandings of “the common and the ignorant”.
It remains a minor puzzle as to why Soviet “misinformation” beamed via shortwave as Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and other fellow red states were never, afaik, jammed in the West, yet in 21st century, western heads are deemed extra sensitive to bad information and need to be protected from exposure to content that poses some sort of social and moral hazard.
It is helpful to remember that the only states doing the jamming (“to stop enemy propaganda and misinformation”) were authoritarian regimes, and imho instructive to reflect on why that is the case.
Actions taken by the US info-tech cartel recently will only serve to deepen the national divide, and (per historic patterns) erode the legitimacy of establishment voices and institutions.
[edited]
Or, they just put their thumbs on the scale and make sure your post isn't shown to anyone (or very few people) rather than your typical audience.
If they have 1.73 billion daily users, that's a lot of data to scan. I'm guessing they'll only go after the big fish.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
So we're left with 3 potential realities: 1) the tech oligarchs are recklessly ignorant about what they're doing, 2) they're recklessly emotional about the situation and don't care about the fallout, or 3) their decisions are calculated and the push-back from the extremists is desired. All 3 are worrisome.
Similar to the FBI making a press release today about upcoming “protests”.
I haven't seen this, all the bans I have seen are the result of ideological warfare and flamebait.
However you will get downvoted to -4 for questioning the integrity of the election. So don't do that ;)
Politics are off-topic on HN.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
In Nazi Germany Sturmabteilung or "Storm Division" was the paramilitary division of the Nazi party until it was replaced by the SS on the Night of Long Knives.
Some Neo-Nazis have kept up the language.
Stormfront is a popular Neo-Nazi website.
The Daily Stormer is another.
I don't follow Neo-Nazism but I am sure there are others.
So calling the riot a "Storming" is suggestive that it is an organized assault by Neo-Nazis.
The root reason for the violent riot at the Capitol last week was that many people have been lied to, and the lies are things that would incite people to fight. If you believed that America's democracy is no longer in place and has been replaced by a deep state dictatorship, you would probably fight against it yourself.
We must fight the beliefs at the source - stop the liars by making them liable for the damage they cause.
boy, we've taken quite a turn from where we were just a few years ago with conspiracy theories spreading like wild fire regarding Trump and Russia.
it would probably be better to actively engage believers of "Stop the Steal" with facts about the election vs. removing content that they are creating.
Anyway, why are you mixing up these two things?
- inciting violence at the Capitol
- claims of voter fraud.
He's been claiming voter fraud since before November 8th, and he didn't get banned then, so obviously that has nothing to do with it.
> so obviously that has nothing to do with it
is very much taking it too far. It's clear the voter fraud is the primary motivation he is using to incite the riots, and for many of the rioters it is their moral basis underpinning their actions.
Sure, it's definitely a bit spooky that people are going around saying the election was stolen when, as far as I can tell, there's no hard evidence of widespread cheating. (I'm open to changing my mind given sufficient evidence, I'm just saying that I haven't seen it yet.)
But this is the equivalent of Facebook saying "hmm, looks like there's a fire going on over there, better go and dump a barrel of oil on it to put it out". Of course people are going to notice that their posts are being deleted. And even if they didn't notice, Facebook is loudly and publicly announcing that they are removing those posts. This will naturally result in those people saying, "aha, this confirms that there is a liberal elite conspiracy against folks like me". It will only make them more certain that the election was stolen.
Honestly, I can't say I blame them for suspecting a conspiracy, given we've had similar moves by other tech companies. As a generally left wing person, what am I supposed to say? "Yeah, we know that all these social networks are acting all biased and stuff against people with your opinions, but it's not actually a conspiracy, just a bunch of people without the ability to predict what others will make of their actions all being idiots at the same time due to simple memetic contagion." I think that's actually what's going on, but I can definitely see how from the other side it looks like a conspiracy.
I don’t have any data to support any conclusion, just brainstorming.
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2...
It is obvious now that big tech companies are deep players in political games.
Maybe in a few years (months if you're optimist), it will be forgotten (because of these kinds of measure?) and the phrase will be allowed again.
Do you think someone prone to conspiracy theories is going to start listening to people who are actively campaigning for the destruction/deletion of information. We need consensus and half of consensus means listening.
Facebook 2019 revenue was 71 billion or so, which would put it at number 70 worldwide if it were a country. Maybe we should start to treat it like one.
I'm not implying the US government was behind this.
I'm suggesting that the end results in US and China are similar in some ways, though implemented by different actors.
Why should Facebook and Amazon use their resources to help this cause?
We, as a society, should be allowed to be very critical of our election process. Stifling discussions about the legitimacy of the election actually reduces my confidence in the election process. I’ve listen to their arguments and I didn’t believe them, but I feel good that people are allowed to do openly question election process and I trust the American people to make rational decisions about what constitutes a fair election.
If Parler were to try and get a foreign data center expect Goog, FB and the others to try to bully that country (we will remove offices in your country if you do not shut it down) or pressuring internet providers to block that countries traffic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/hong-kong-securi...
1. It is individuals and individual companies making these decisions, it is not federally required. (And if it was federally mandated, I’m sure impropriety could be handled by the courts.)
2. Companies are censoring the president, one of the main actors of the federal government.
This is hugely different from the Chinese model, where the Chinese government restricts things which are negative towards the government among other things.
At any rate, I’m sure many of the technical reasons are legitimate. For example, does AWS permit you to host bounty-hunting sites, where you could be paid to kill others? I doubt it, and I imagine many people support that stance, even if they do not support kicking Parler. So we admit that some censorship is ok and even beneficial. Therefore, what’s the line? Is it content which is promoting literal illegal activity? Content that likely will lead to illegal actions?
If that’s the case, then perhaps we should be advocating that these rules ought to be applied more evenly to even more types of sites and content. Or, perhaps the rules are applied evenly, and there have simply not been many other similar cases regarding AWS which have gained popularity.
Or, maybe AWS should enforce no rules whatsoever. Then they could become a haven for criminal sites, thus loosing their brand.
At any rate, this seems very different from China, and I’m yet to be convinced that we have started some sort of slippery slope.
Trump approval remains at 40%, that's more than enough to build counter-platforms for literally everything.
I would like to welcome this as an opportunity to break the power of major tech corporations and move towards open platforms.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be towards closed platforms that are simply echo chambers of a different persuasion.
Billionaire tech magnate Jack Ma vs. Xi Jinping: who got to censor who?
<lots of American counterparts> vs. Donald Trump: same question...
Seems like the precise opposite.
Why are people that believe in regulation of the world's largest corporations suddenly laissez-faire libertarians?
If you have opposed the Citizen's United ruling for a decade, don't suddenly act like you care about a corporation's civil liberties, including freedom of association and freedom of expression.
The answer is obvious: both sides want power more than they want to stick to their expressed ideals.
I believe social media should be regulated more tightly. Until then they have the freedom to remove the content according to their TOS.
Just because I’m pointing out that they have the freedom it doesnt mean I believe they should continue to have the freedom.
Government regulations are desperately needed.
Even more so, government enforcement of existing regulations are needed. There’ve been many threats of violence on social media with few being investigated.
I would also argue that there are a lot of folks (myself included) that see the curtailing of speech - regardless of "side", as a real long-term threat to productive and open communication. We need actual discourse and understanding, or all we're going to get is more us-vs-them polarization and ramping up of rhetoric and violence.
I strongly disagree with most of the opinions being voiced on the (far) right, but if they don't happen in the open they will fester into something grotesque and far more dangerous. Just because I'm disgusted by the opinions of a group of people doesn't it's a good idea for me to make the situation worse by silencing them. Not least of all because we will eventually reap what we've sowed once they grab power again.
I still can't help but shake the feeling that there are those with a real vested interest in a continuing and growing divide (and conquering) of the populace, regardless of the (externalized) cost.
I also believe that every association of citizens should have civil liberties. I have no desire or plans to become Facebook, but I want the freedom to make much smaller companies (or collectives, or charitable organizations, or whatever) and have the discretion to associate with whomever I want. If that right is taken away from Facebook, I am harmed.
If the ability to become Facebook-scale is taken away from Facebook, I am not harmed, because I have no interest in doing so. So that's what I advocate.
(If you search through my comment history, you can see this is not a new belief for me, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19338090 from two years ago agreeing unironically with Paul Graham's strawman suggestion that Google should not exist, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797482 from three months ago arguing in favor of Elizabeth Warren's proposal, and motivation, to break up Big Tech in a specific way following specific principles.)
If your side wants power more than you want to stick to your expressed ideals, go ahead, but don't drag me down to your level. My side's ideals look like an opportunistic and self-contradictory version of laissez-faire libertarianism simply because our position is not laissez-faire libertarianism at all.
¬(A & ¬A) = ¬A | A = True
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That has nothing to do with enjoying watching this chickens come home to roost.
The political scientist and author Frank Wilhoit talked about it in his works:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
1. These companies have every right to legally censor those they disagree with.
2. By exercising that right they put themselves at risk of being regulated more stringently (as utilities for example) when they demonstrate inelasticity in consumer choice.
3. I'd rather them not be treated as utilities because that hampers competition and thus impedes efficiency.
4. Your statement above is a farcical caricature of conservative ideology. Every product/service deserves a debate on what regulation is appropriate but as a society regulation only exists because bad actors necessitated its creation. No one wants car seats for their 8 year olds - we'd much rather be trusted to do the right thing.
The quote was made by a different Frank Wilhoit on the Crooked Timber blog / community.
Investigative work here: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1183470106816331776
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
The quote you're referring to is from a comment on a web page left in 2018:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
The name in the comment links to his site:
He's a music composer.
Because there isn't a free market, but a regulated market and there is a widespread perception (on both the left and the right) that the regulations are tilted in favor of the establishment and oligarchs, and against normal people, workers, consumers, and taxpayers.
Furthermore when there was protests which were marred by violence in 2020 the platforms were supportive of the protestors and continued to permit them to organize.
> what is the rationale for squaring this circle
If we want a free market, lets have a free market. If we want regulations, lets let those regulations reflect perspectives from both sides of the aisle. A regulated market for me, and a free market for thee, is not acceptable.
Any rationalization is post-hoc, done in support of the pre-existing (and pre-determined) goal.
As such, because it's entirely post-hoc, this leads to moving the goalposts, and any respective adjustments in rationalizations.
The primary question one must ask, in these circumstances:
Is my counterpart arguing in good faith?
If the signs point to bad faith (e.g., telltale language, gaslighting or similar methods employed, etc), then rational argument is not their currency.
Edit: My only thought is if people feel these companies are viewed as too critical to be self moderating than maybe these do need anti monopoly action to foster competition in the area. I absolutely do NOT agree with giving them any special statuses which would do the exact opposite of fostering competition.
If you believe in free markets as the most efficient mode of production and the most liberal way of life you will be against anything that undermines the freedom of the markets, be it private monopolization or governmental subjugation.
The question hotly debated is whether the Cabal of Twitter, FB, Reddit, and the like are large enough to distort the playing field through the sheer gravity of their scale. If you agree that they are you have to agree they have undermined the free market, and markets need to be rescued.
In the similar vein - you can argue that the only valid use of violence is to stop unsanctioned use of violence. There is no contradiction in both supporting and opposing use of violence at the same time.
But I do find it strange that people seem to think you can attempt a coup of the worlds most powerful country and face virtually no consequence or blowback? As the Emerson quote goes “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
Actually wait, being upset is not something you need permission for.
"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because "that’s not how the free market works" — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of "free market principles."" -- Kevin Carson
There's a few ideologies / models going on here. Eg:
- A company is like a person, with all the rights of free expression and self governance. From that perspective, twitter and FB are free to have whatever systems of regulation (or be totally arbitrary and capricious). And its up to the market to replace twitter/FB.
- A monopolistic social media website is part of the public square. So facebook is more like the US federal government than it is like the burger shop down the road. As such, facebook/twitter should be held to the norms of a government, not the norms of a business. They should allow free speech by the participants in that space, in accordance with the laws of the land. The market should be free to work inside twitter/fb.
Both of these stories are internally consistent, and both stories are consistent with the broad ideas of "free speech" and "free markets".
Even with ultra-conservative circles, there has always been some unpopularity with the party line on economic issues. Free trade, education, etc.
but i think we are allowed to be upset and criticize it or call for boycotts and condemn them. that’s our free speech.
just like if twitter banned any support of lgbt rights i’m sure the left would cry and not just dismiss it as “corporations aren’t held to the first amendment”
imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
> imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
Private people and companies are under no obligation to offer their help and services to people who wish to use those services to organize killings or any other crimes. In fact, it's extremely common for businesses to have (and enforce) policies against such use of their products/services, since it's obviously not in their best interest to be viewed by the public as an accessory to crime.
The "stop the steal" and similar posts now being removed under the policy are intended for recruiting people to an upcoming armed escalation of last week's riot and invasion at the Capitol (using the false pretense of election fraud by Democrat officials). Their purpose is to capture or kill anyone standing in the way of their goal to overturn the election result, at some point before inauguration. This isn't conjecture; the posts and the commentary surrounding them have been out there for everyone to see. This was also noted by Twitter in their recent announcement on the suspension of the outgoing president's account.
My hoped-for solution isn't for the government to step in and fix the problem. ("There oughta be a law!") It's for the company to be replaced by competitors with new and better products. (Or for the company itself to improve under competitive pressure.)
You no longer hear Republicans talk about Medicare or Social Security privatization, Obamacare repeal, Dodd-Frank repeal, etc because they've moderated on the free market idealism.
"Free market" is theory, not reality. There are no 100% free markets, nor are there 100% controlled markets. The free market is an ideal that you strive towards in a capitalistic society.
Also, the question of "why are they allowed to be upset?" is pretty wild. Who are you to disallow someone getting upset about something?
I suspect other countries and their citizens wouldn’t want American corporate interference. Free market forces will certainly cut down these corporate influence to size.
That’s my prediction. We will have to wait and watch. Time will tell.
Because there's a clear government-enforced bias. Can you imagine the shitshow if they banned, let's say, black people?
Obvious lie. The current government is controlled by the group pushing the "stop the steal" propaganda. No reasonable person would believe Trump's own government is compelling Facebook to remove it.
> Can you imagine the shitshow if they banned, let's say, black people?
Sure... And what, pray tell, does that have to do with removing _posts_ containing calls to violence? How are those two things comparable?
I don’t know how to answer your question outside of anology. It’s possible to want one thing and not another.
That is not to say that censorship is evil on its face. Like taxes, it serves an important purpose especially in private discourse. HN would not be as it is without the tireless efforts at moderation and censorship in the name of pruning out low quality discourse. To disallow all voluntary content discrimination or censorship is to lose direction. However, the key distinction is that the vast majority of the censorship on HN is not backstopped by the threat of government censorship to comply. If the calls for censorship stopped at the private sector and did not threaten the intervention of the government if they did not get what they wanted then I would have absolutely no problem with these private companies silencing individuals in much the same way I have no problem with HN banning people.
I suspect somebody will chime in saying that the censorship is now totally voluntary because they have realized just how bad the consequences of their existing policies are with the riots in the capital. To that I say, have you ever seen Zuckerberg talk about free speech [1]? Just look at 4:50 or so. 5:20, is literally a total refutation of the current arguments. At every step along this path he has spoken in favor of free speech and fought the calls for them to censor Facebook. As far as I can tell he is a true believer in the principles of free speech. There is no doubt in my mind that if he truly believed that the government would not intervene that he would not only not censor, he would immediately revert to their policies as of a few years ago with respect to censorship.
Really this argument seems to come from people saying that the 1st Amendment only applies to the government, so private censorship is totally fine. True, but are you really following the spirit of the 1st Amendment if you threaten government censorship? If people really thought the government would not censor, then they would assign zero credibility to the threat and ignore it. That people truly consider the threat is an indication that they feel it might actually be acted upon.
Also, I am not saying that government censorship is bad in all cases. There are cases where unlimited free speech may not be worth the consequences. However, such rules should always be carefully considered and we should not turn a blind eye to the fact that we are, in fact, using the government to stamp down on speech. It is with great regret that we should make such decisions since we can find no other alternative and we should acknowledge that we have engaged in evil to fight an even greater one.
We have too few competitors to Facebook for the market to work right.
For one thing, your argument is reductionist. Just because Republicans complain about how CNN chooses to run its newsroom doesn’t mean they want a government takeover of CNN. You can say that something private actors are doing is bad or risky without there being an implication that the government should stop that bad behavior.
I mean you can flip this around just as easily? Where are all the Fairness Doctrine liberals?
For the other: quite a few Republicans, especially the folks Trump brought in, are economically quite liberal. See: https://ibb.co/mbTycKP Trump took changes to social security and Medicare off the table during his campaign. The laissez-faire economic libertarian wing long held the advantage within the coalition, but a bunch of them have become Democrats over the last couple of decades, especially with the rise of Trump.
It's not a free market when a handful of companies can collude to shut out a competitor as they've done to Parler.
We have laws for actual harmful lies, such as falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But beyond that, it's a grey area, slippery slope, etc.
As per Hamilton and Madison in my first link above, the original intention was to have members of the electoral college be unbiased, well-respected, well-educated citizens who each independently voted for whichever candidate they thought would be the best president. Only the members of the electoral college directly voted for a specific presidential candidate. On a local level, the presidential election consists of electing members of the electoral college, who each were not originally envisioned to be pledged to one specific presidential candidate.
This system quickly proved to be overly idealistic, with respect to the fast rise of political parties in the US. Anyway, my original point was simply that an under-informed voting public was always a major concern in American democracy, rather than a new or modern concern.
Due process? Nah, never heard of it. Dismiss with prejudice? I'm not prejudice! (Magistrates in my state don't even have to be lawyers)
My god, no wonder there are people who want to actually abolish the police. Gave me a lot of perspective. I contacted a civil rights lawyer and he said I have a case, but that judges don't want to be bothered with it unless it involves significant financial damages. Says a lot about how much the system values our rights.
I don't know what a way to show that you are a rational, well informed, mentally fit citizen able to responsibly vote without falling for basic fakes news and misinformation attacks would be.
At least denial of reality should raise serious questions. How can we expect a flat earther, 6000year-old-world believer, climate change and holocaust denier to rationally chose who to put at the helm of a country?
Politics should be about people disagreeing on the means to address a set of common challenges, not about those who imagine living in another world so far removed from ours that they can't have a valuable opinion.
Your rhetorical question reads to me no differently than "Why bother giving people freedom in the first place if we're just going to punish them whenever they murder someone? We might as well just drop the pretense and imprison everybody by default"
I see your point, though.
For instance, many progressives are advocates of people losing their jobs for harassing coworkers. If you look at this position in isolation, it looks like they're arguing for a cold corporatism, that anyone who threatens the reputation of the corporation should be thrown onto the streets. However, many progressives are also advocates of stronger social safety nets for people who lose their jobs, whether by their own misdeeds or misfortune - from increased unemployment (or even UBI), to stronger tenants' protections, to government-provided healthcare. Firing someone for their misdeeds is much less cruel once those safety nets are in place, and the moral calculus very rapidly shifts to protecting their coworkers.
"Stop the Steal" is one of their rallying cries.
Only content that is literally illegal or is spam would be removed.
See where this is going? It is hard to craft rules that allow everything without leaving a site unusable.
Does government cheese have to be tasty? The point is to provide the public square, in all its public square glory. If you want something slick and curated, you're going to have to give up some rights.
There is ample evidence that "listening" does not tame or squash these positions on these platforms.
On other platforms they get orders of magnitude more interest because they were censored, and more people move to other platforms.
Once all this calms down, we can address the excessive power of the platforms with antitrust, so there are more of them to choose from.
So much of the executive craziness of the last 4 years is due to the ever growing power of the executive branch and executive orders being de facto law.
All this presidential overreach is about to (hypocritically) be put to use and further expanded.
You have to accept that there is a difference between questioning the results of an election and walking into the Capitol, killing a cop, and wrecking the place up. "The line" on what gets you deplatformed exists somewhere between those two points.
It looks like the original reason the 'stop the steal' page was removed from Facebook was for 'misinformation' and now they are blacklisting the slogan because it's associated with 'misinformation' and they also believe that talking about such things causes violence.
1. Companies are legally free to ban anyone they want. (in fact i side with right of the christian baker refusing to make cakes for gay weddings)
2. Companies shouldn’t ban people for their political opinions or restrict them from expressing them. It’s evil and immoral and horrifying behavior, but not illegal. if they do it, i will call it out as horrific. just like i think the baker shouldn’t discriminate against gay weddings even though they should legally be able to.
Let's say I (or my company) hosted an online message board, and a thread was brought to my attention with messages like "We need to hunt down every last Democrat senator and put a bullet in their head!", with replies like "Amen! I'll bring my rifles" and "What time should we meet?".
You'd better believe I'd "oppress" such speech and ban the users, and you'd be severely hard-pressed to convince me that such a response is a human rights violation. Those messages, or whatever fabricated claims were used to justify the threats therein, don't constitute "political opinions" just because political parties and politicians are named. Likewise, outright false/fabricated claims that "the Democrats" fraudulently/secretly changed the result of the 2020 election are, in no way, "political opinions" -- rather, they are statements of (false) fact, meant to incite viewers to violence for the fabricator's gain.
For me to un-publish such posts from my web site cannot be considered discrimination against a political group; it's refusal to allow my servers to help conspirators commit a violent crime. If you want to brand something as "horrific" here, it should be the posts I described and not the take-downs.
Nevertheless, I'll indulge you: While businesses in the USA generally reserve the right to refuse to do business with whomever they please, Federal law (under the Civil Rights Act of 1964) prohibits discrimination in public businesses made on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Many states also have their own laws further limiting discrimination, though I'm not personally that aware of how these have been tested in regard to online services serving many states/countries.
Beyond what's required under law, companies can have whatever policies they wish (but will have to deal with public outrage for implementing policies as disgusting as the one given in your example).
Edit: these aren’t nazis were taking about, they’re people who get a kick out of using the scientific method in a mistaken way
A lot of the mob on 1/6 probably really thought they were taking back the country from some corrupt Deep State and that Trump was this great guy who tried to fix the world, but has ben thwarted (although, saying all the non-Christian and non-Whites are not entitled to live here is not defensible). Like the lady who was shot, if you check her Twitter, she really bought into the whole QAnon brainwashing.
It's possible this is a deliberate grammatical ambiguity, but I think it could also be read as "I was not just willing to say it, my reality was being destroyed".
TROI: I read your report.
PICARD: What I didn't put in the report was that at the end he gave me a choice between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights, when in fact, there were only four.
TROI: You didn't say it?
PICARD: No, no, but I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.
The Facebook newsfeed is quite similar to TV, because you can only change channels, but have very little control over what is displayed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3G7n21p0kY
Lenin after securing power, quickly killed off or imprisoned people in his own communist party that he deemed might pose him a threat. Sadly this included most of the well meaning people and idealists.
Hitchens narrates a great and chilling example of this:
Iraq's 1979 Fascist Coup, Narrated by Christopher Hitchens
You've been doing it a lot lately, and we ban that sort of account. I'm not going to ban you right now, because you've also been posting good comments. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
No such defense exists. Should we treat every billion dollar company as a country?
Many accusations of hypocrisy boil down to just that - different people with different opinions treated by the outsiders as a homogenous group.
Even in 1976, Carter won with the traditional new deal coalition of southerners and northeast progressives. He won South Carolina by the same margin as Massachusetts. Even in 1980 against Reagan, Carter performed much closer to Reagan in the south than his overall national performance (outright winning Georgia, but coming close in most southern states).
The current alignment of southern states with Republicans really dates to the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Republicans started flipping Senate seats in the south.
Pinning this on Democrats’ support for the Civil Rights Act two decades before is one theory, but another is the industrialization of the southern economy. Southern New Deal Democrats represented agricultural states against protectionist northern industrial interests. But look at the economy of places like Georgia and Tennessee today. They’re built on low taxes and low regulation to draw companies away from high tax high regulation northern states. That started happening in the 1980s. Georgia is a really archetypal example of this: it’s probably the most openly pro-business big city in the country, and has a famously cooperative relationship between Atlanta Democratic mayors and Georgia Republican governors centered around attracting companies from places like New York: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...
> Buckley used the pages of National Review to promote a ‘fusionism’ of sorts between paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, tea-party enthusiasts, the deeply religious, libertarians, social conservatives and free-marketeers.
Particularly since Trump, a lot of the base is now economically moderate or even liberal, but socially conservative. The social conservatives are the ones who are most worried about the social liberals having increased power over online media platforms.
Apart from that, the deregulatory conservatives don’t believe that criticizing some practice of private business means going further to impose government regulation. To them, there is a role for self regulation. And the social conservatives and traditional conservatives don’t care about using the power of government for perceived proper ends at all. They are quite mad, in fact, at the limited government conservatives for giving up so much ground on things like healthcare and unions over those issues.
Plus, certain behaviours are in the interests of specific businesses but damaging to free competition as a whole: monopolies, censorship, etc.
You have to take each case on an individual basis, meet a standard of proof, follow strong processes, convince a jury, survive appeals, so it’s not easy.
But it can handle the grey areas that worry you. And while we’ve had ample opportunity, it doesn’t look like we’ve gone down a slippery slope.
A shadowban reduces the incentive to dodge bans via new usernames. Reddit mods don’t have Ip address access or other tools, so shadowbans are a necessary tool.
You weren’t banned for speaking contrary to the mainstream. You were banned for insults and personal attacks, indicating you weren’t likely to lead to productive conversations.
But let me actually amend my comment above here, it wasn't even that bad, the actual words were "lying a#s." I just felt like there was an interaction that didn't need to happen because people see different sets of comments, my original comment being nothing but fact and dry. I don't know how we can talk much about profanity derailing discussion when discussion is so fundamentally broken.
Of course the comment replying to you did the same thing: made a personal attack on you, and it derailed you into a personal attack with swearing.
I don’t necessarily think this is unreasonable if used judiciously against the type of account which has shown unwillingness to heed rules or mod warnings.
Agree that it's all over the place, but it's depressing to see left's attitude that they have the numbers now to attack the same free speech which helped so many efforts in the last twenty years.
So, when social networks' legal/liability or moderation teams take action on the precise content that was used to foment a coup, it's not terribly shocking from a legal perspective.
1: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-...
2: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s894/BILLS-116s894is.xml
If we are ok with that reason, then we are ok with that reason, and we must acknowledge what else is caught in that net.
This is a slippery-slope fallacy. Facebook removing content containing speech directly associated with highly illegal activity doesn't mean the country is becoming socialist.
If you tell a newspaper that they'll be regulated out of existence if they publish a certain opinion, it doesn't matter that the private platform is the one doing the censoring.
If you honestly believe there's even the slightest risk of that, why aren't you buying deep out-of-the-money put options like mad.
Second, you should be careful conflating Wall Street with the stability of the country. That's not how our monetary policy or economic system work.
But I'm not knowledgeable about history, so do elaborate if you know details please.
You don’t know what the term “protected class” means, and you should probably stop using it.
“Woman” isn’t a protected class, “sex” is. “Christian” isn’t a protected class, “religion” is.
Veteran status and age over 40 are notable examples; you are absolutely permitted to discriminate against non-veterans and against people under 40.
No such defense exists? Have you read this site every time a new wave of social media cancellations happen? After every credit card processing company ban a group of polemical people?
"They are a private company they can decide what to do"
Well, maybe if you are extracting 70 billion a year from society it is not that simple as "I can decide who to do business with"
I think the government would be very interested to initiate an investigation if Shell decided to not fill your tank because they discovered you are a neo-Keynesian, even if there is a Chevron station 3 miles away.
Every company is allowed to do "whatever they want" if you define "whatever they want" as "legally refuse to do business with an individual"
> I think the government would be very interested to initiate an investigation if Shell decided to not fill your tank because they discovered you are a neo-Keynesian, even if there is a Chevron station 3 miles away
What? Of course they wouldn't, companies are free to do business with whomever they choose as long as they do not discriminate against a protected class. People who post "stop the steal" is not protected, nor is it a class of people, it is a behavior prohibited by the rules of the platform.
Even if that was true, which it is not generally in the US, that's not analogous to what is happening. It's more like if Shell, instead of selling gas for money, was a peer-to-peer gas exchange service, and they decided not to let you participate because the traits of the specific formulation of gas you were providing didn't conform to what they wanted in their exchange network.
The Girondists were considered right only because Jacobins were super left and ended up killing thousands of priests, what few nobles they could still find, tens of thousands of suspected royalists in mass executions, and eventually the Girondists themselves too for being too soft. The Girondists went to the guillotine singing The Marseilles! Certainly not the royalists that lot.
I recommend the “Revolutions” podcast - about 30 hours worth of the French Revolution is better than any movie.
Also the history of revolutions is very educational in this day and age. I for one hope we will never experience anything like it.
It is no more reasonable to say that Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights into the 1960s (Truman integrated the military!) than it is to say that Republicans were religious conservatives. Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, and Northern Republicans were New Deal economic populists.
I did the (probably pointless) exercise a few years ago of reading the GOP party platform documents from 1972 through 2012, tagging each with specific issues like "block grant benefits to states" or "oppose campaign finance restrictions". I don't believe for a moment that these documents are representative of the real party, but it's interesting that you can watch the GOP's position change so clearly over time. Into the late 1970s, the GOP was open to abortion!
The parties have held relatively coherent positions since the 1980s; I think when people talk about the roles the parties have had in US history, as opposed to specific politicians, we should probably limit ourself to the parties of Reagan and Mondale and their successors.
Republicans had been trying to win southern whites since the turn of the 20th century. That caused a large number of African Americans to abandon the party. They started voting overwhelmingly Democrat in 1936.
But the Democratic Party didn't support the Civil Rights Act until 1964. And the south remained solidly Democratic well into the 1980s, outside of Presidential contests. Many completely white rural southern counties voted for Carter and Clinton. What explains that timeline?
You have to look at the economics and the law. FDR's Democratic Party was recognizably modern: technocratic, and proponents of the administrative state, regulation, and economic redistribution. Southern whites stayed in this coalition because the south was poor and agrarian, and had interests averse to those of northern businesses. New Deal programs were instrumental in industrializing the southern economy: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/.... In 1930, the southeast was the poorest region, with half the national average income. By 1970, the gap had closed dramatically, to 80%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-wealth-u-s-geogra...
The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to be a small-government, anti-regulation party during this time. Goldwater tried to win the south by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on small-government grounds, and while that worked in a few deep-south states, he lost every normally Republican state except Arizona.
By the time Reagan came along, a couple of things had changed:
1) The south's economy had dramatically industrialized, creating prosperous suburbs of the kind Reagan won all over the country.
2) The legal debate over the Civil Rights Act had long since been replaced by debates over affirmative action. The 1980 Republican Platform reflects this:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... ("However, equal opportunity should not be jeopardized by bureaucratic regulations and decisions which rely on quotas, ratios, and numerical requirements to exclude some individuals in favor of others, thereby rendering such regulations and decisions inherently discriminatory.").
With the illegality of de jure discrimination settled by Brown v. Board, and commercial discrimination settled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the debate shifted to addressing what we'd call today "structural racism." And on that point, the Reagan platform reflects the same limited-government Republican ideology that existed since before Hoover. And Democrats' support for government intervention and affirmative action reflected their broader 20th century ideology as well.
FWIW, I happen to side with Democrats on this one, at least with respect to economic interventions. But the parties have more or less the positions you’d expect ideologically.
There is a good book that covers this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133898/th.... It gives a similar but slightly more nuanced take than Pearlstein, which I don't think is wrong, just incomplete and a bit misleading.
1) Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, winning no Republican states other than his own, proved that opposing the civil rights act of 1964 wasn’t tenable for either party. It’s not like Democrats could have beat Reagan had they opposed it. They would have lost their northern base, just as Goldwater lost the Republican base in 1964.
It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.
2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.
We live in a new era, the most stark difference being mass communication accessibility. This helps smart people become smarter, but it also helps smart people manipulate uneducated people.
My personal thesis on the issues the US is facing involves far more than the systemic defunding of education, but also on economic issues, like how our monetary system has exported labor, leading to a larger class divide and the polarization we're seeing, as well as social media companies (and news companies) having an incentive to promote inflammatory content to generate ad revenue.
The entire history of civilization is a few cold blooded psychopaths manipulating gullible people into doing whatever is needed.
And if you think one side is better than the other you're on the receiving end too.
So, yes.
We’re way ahead of Germany or Italy.
The America that sent a man to the moon had around 5% of people with a college degree.
Elite overproduction, and especially overproduction of the youth with advanced degrees, continues unabated. Our institutions of higher education have been churning out law, MBA, and PhD degrees, many more than could be absorbed by the economy. In a Bloomberg View article published just a few days ago Noah Smith provides the numbers for the overproduction of PhDs (America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-04/americ...).
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-storming-of-the-u-s...
1) We don’t teach any religion in schools.
2) Many highly advanced EU countries are required to teach religion in schools e.g. many German states: https://eftre.weebly.com/deutschland-germany.html
Are we even allowed to have political discussions at school? It seems like it isn't allowed in primary and secondary schools.
Even at the college level it seems that minority opinion holders are basically shamed into being quiet or are dismissed as unintelligent when it comes to the biggest issues.
Do you think there was a time when the majority of the population were college educated? Or realistically had access to college education?
Also, it looks like percent of the population with a degree is higher now than ever.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-souther...
(Similarly, I think you've collapsed the GOP of the 60s too far down; the Rockefeller Republicans were, on domestic policy, square in the middle of where the mainstream Democratic party is today. George Romney would have opposed AOC, but so does Gina Raimondo.)
At any rate, when people debate which is the "racist" party, they almost invariably ignore the fact that the US was a 4-party polity in the mid-century, not a 2-party polity. What's changed since then is that we have, from 1980 through today, sorted down to 2.
Goldwater offered a libertarian justification for allowing the south to continue segregation. And what did that get him? He flipped five Deep South states, at the expense of losing every traditionally Republican state Nixon had won in 1960, with the exception of Arizona. Goldwater lost stalwart Republican states in the Great Plains and Mountain West, like Colorado, that had voted against FDR three out of four times. Supporting segregation was a political loser for Republicans.
Nixon and Reagan did not "run the same strategy." Neither supported segregation. They didn't have to. Democrats, having abandoned their segregationist wing, sought far-reaching government programs and social engineering to remedy economic and social disparities, as Democrats are wont to do. Nixon and Reagan pushed back on those policies, entirely consistent with Republican ideology.
This article does a good job explaining what really happened: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-myth-of-the-racist-re...
> The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
I know that religion is taught in the EU, I went to school in Denmark. And no one pushed it as reality, it was more of a learn this fiction because it has historically been important and some people still believe it. Not once was it presented as reality or something we should believe in.
We don't, and we legally cannot.
> I know that religion is taught in the EU, I went to school in Denmark. And no one pushed it as reality, it was more of a learn this fiction because it has historically been important and some people still believe it. Not once was it presented as reality or something we should believe in.
That is more than is legally permissible in the U.S. And even if people don't perceive the education as saying "this is true" it still socializes kids in a shared religious history and helps them understand the people who still believe it. There is nothing comparable to this in the U.S.
- Through the 1960s and possibly early 1970s, a solidly middle-class lifestyle remained possible without a college education. Apprentice and vocational tracks were abundant and viable.
- US Census data show a Bachellors-level local maximum attainment of about 25% in 1977, not exceeded until the mid-1990s.
- Many (though not all) who wanted a degree could get one. Money certainly wasn't the barrier. Yes, it helped (a lot) to be white and male, but former income and class barriers had fallen. By the 1960s, most undergrad programmes were fully co-ed, by the 1970s, graduate and professional. By the 1980s, both were female-majority in many schools if not outright overall.
- Debt loads on graduation were effectively nil at public schools. It was possible to study, work part-time, and save a little. On graduation, options were far more open for exploration, public service, volunteering ... or hedonism. This was a high point for Peace Corps work.
- Grad school was opening up tremendously.
- Academic positions for those grad students were numerous, in large part due to the rapid campus expansion.
Today's colleges deliver more graduates, both absolutely and as a fraction of population.
But as with automobiles and smartphones, what was once an optional luxury has become a necessity: many basic jobs request (though not all require) a degree. Debt loads are crushing. Secondary education quality is widely perceived as lower, and graduation rates there are effectively unchanged from the 1950s (whites) or early 1970s (all). What variation does exist largely trades graduation rates for aptitude levels.
There have always been some graduates who wind up in jobs that don’t require a college degree. But the share seems to be growing. In 1970, only 1 in 100 taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the U.S. had a college degree, according to an analysis of labor statistics by Ohio University’s Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart and Jonathan Robe. Today [2013], 15 of 100 do.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-25/why-are-so-many-col...
So ... yeah, today more people get a college degree, because they must, with possibly worse quality, far higher direct cost, and more constrained options.
Is this really progress?
I'd explored dimensions of this topic a few years ago, output here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=education&rest...
________________________________
Notes:
1. Try NCES: https://nces.ed.gov
Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
Plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
"Do you think there was a time when the majority of the population were college educated? Or realistically had access to college education?"
It seems overall the education of the population has risen, although it might not be as high quality. Also, this lower quality can lend itself to higher attainment (eg college entrance exams being more lax). Also, 1945-85 you would have higher number of people who never went to high school because 8th grade was considered sufficient when they were a child. So just through demographic change (sadly, those older people dying off) and an increase in the job market's demand for higher credentials we can see the level of education has risen over time, resulting in the most educated populace we've seen.
Elite overproduction, and especially overproduction of the youth with advanced degrees, continues unabated. Our institutions of higher education have been churning out law, MBA, and PhD degrees, many more than could be absorbed by the economy. In a Bloomberg View article published just a few days ago Noah Smith provides the numbers for the overproduction of PhDs (America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-04/americ...).
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-storming-of-the-u-s...
Q: Was a time when the majority of the population were college educated?
A: With the absolute peak being both now below 50%, as a strict mathematical statement: No.
Q: When did realistic access to college education peak?
A: The confluence of factors in the 1960--1985 period ... arguably approaches this. Access was not gated by cost, gender, geography, or within a fair approximation, race, but by aptitude and interest. Not perfectly, but better than at any period before or since. The 1977 local maximum (as percent of population) supports this. Present access seems more push-based (obligation/necessity) than pull-based (interest, aptitude), compared to 1960--1980, by rough sense. The BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) to "attend college" was far more appealing then as to now. How to measure this? Hard to say, though the "college premium" or noncollege average or, say, 10%ile annual income, might be proxies.
Q: In the years 1945-85 you would have higher number of people who never went to high school?
A: That's shifting the question from (as I interpreted it) "when the majority of normatively college-aged persons (say, 16--29) had access to bachellors-level education", to "when the majority of voting-eligible residents had a 4-year college degree". The 2nd is a restatement of the first question above, the answer is still "no".
Either way, if you want to translate peak educational achievement to total voting population, you'd have to shift numbers foreward by life expectancy. Say, by 65 years assuming educational completion by age 25 on average. So the US are presently bounded by the 1955 educational cohort, with both secondary and postsecondary attainment growing for the next 22 years to the 1977 maxima. Net of immigration's effect on numbers. By that argument, voter education levels will probably increase for another two decades, though college-level degrees will remain a minority.
This also highlights an issue with the data we're discussing, which measures total poulation educational attainment, and not education-aged attainment. That is, 80% population high-school graduation implies a higher graduation (or GED) rate by, say, age 19. So we're on the hunt for data actually answering our question. NCES does give diplomas conferred somewhere, these can be compared to cohort population with some finagling.
Understanding questions, data, and baselines is critical.
See, e.g., https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/educatio...
You might like this plot: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/amer...
Public High School Graduation Rates (Last Updated: May 2020) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp
Gives Adjusted cohort graduation (ACGR), the term you probably want. The racial divides are ... sobering. And not necessarily as expected.)
Q: Is education received as high-quality?
A: This is the tough one. Quality here needs to be considered as "fitness to purpose", and ... well, purpose has changed. There's also the credentialing role of education, and the more credentials you hand out, the less distinguishing they are, though by inversion, the more arbitrary earlier credentials may have been. High school graduation rates in the US in 1900 were, I forget if it was 6% or 10%, but low. Overwhelmingly male and white, so among that cohort, closer to 25%. (Much attainment gain has come from increased access, across numerous domains, not just education.) Curriculum and consequence were much nearer a two-year, or higher, college education, as were certification and networking benefits.
NCES does some measures, including very infrequent, but fascinating, National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), with assessments in 1985 (NAEP), 1992 (NALS), and 2003, covering prose, document, and quantitative literacy. The 2003 survey sampled 19,000 resident adults.
There's a psychology of cognitive development, notably Jean Piaget's (1896--1980) work on stages and level of development, which posits fairly persistent population limits on attainment levels, though I'm only very lightly familiar with the field and current state of knowledge.
Recent studies of computer literacy, however, tend to strongly corroborate Piaget's notions of general atrainment level, notably a 2016 OECD study of computer skills across 215,942 people in 33 countries. If you're in the infotech sector, the findings are sobering. Jacob Nielsen has an excellent write-up, and the study a keystone of my own "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User" essay.
The upshot is that the needle may only be capable of being pushed so far, and diminishing returns set in early. Increasing access and support at the lowest levels should have vastly greater returns than attempting to raise the highest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
Direct measures of knowledge and intelligence prove complex.
Q: Does this result in the most educated populace the US has ever seen?
A: Again, by a confluence of measures, I'm not comfortable drawing this conclusion. Fundamentally it confounds inputs (years of schooling), arbitrary indicia (diplomas conferred), and results (population intellectual capacity). It ignores not only shifting academic baselines (curricula, degre requirements, major course of study mix), as discussed, but other factors significant in a political context. A key one being the creation of a small number of tech or other highly-skilled professional hubs, which geographically concentrate educated populations. Given the electoral colleges effective "land vote" (two senate seats per state, regardless of population), education is systemically underrepresented in Presidential, Senate, and (similarly) statehouse politics (both states collectively and internally). This itself considerable dampens effects of education in muany political races and issues.
There's also the fact that educational attainment does not itself seem to preclude leadership in fascist politics, witness those in leadership positions of such movements around the world. A factor which somewhat un-asks the initial question. Mu.
On a number of grounds, I really don't see education by itself as a saviour, thogh it does play some role. More modest than many seem to advocate or hope.
A bit long and wandering somewhat from your specific question, I apologise. Hopefully useful.
Anybody can advocate for anything, from wanting to teach Satanism and anti-vaxx science to GMOs cause cancer and "New Math", but the curriculum doesn't bend so easily since there are federal standards. Beyond fear mongering and "leftist memes", any real examples?
