Discussion
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jmclnx: A better link:https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.
g-mork: I've read so much trump spam that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehePlanet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments
jauntywundrkind: It's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good.Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.
suzzer99: > For a party that has crowed so much about 1A!Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.
jacquesm: Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?A free press is worth its weight in gold you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
matthewdgreen: It would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.
curt15: "Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019
allears: Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.
pstuart: The irony of this would be quite amusing if it wasn't so dangerous. Where are all the "free speech absolutists" now?
refulgentis: HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.
gjsman-1000: Airwaves are not protected by the 1st amendment, due to the limited amount of bandwidth that physically exists. As such, the FCC has extraordinary powers, including enforcing watersheds, forcing children’s content hours (“E/I”), censoring the F-bomb, and enforcing a 7-second delay on live content to prevent another Timberlake Super Bowl.The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards.
matthewdgreen: So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.
verdverm: Every accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now
tombert: Fucking Christ.I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...
johnsmith1840: I mean it's not like any administration was any different? Numerous stories all over of how propoganda from US admins demicrat and republican flood the systems.And that's just the stuff we know. You don't think AI propoganda bots are flooding every social media you know of?Traditional news media has a totally wrecked credibility on both sides. If we are subsidizing what is clearly a dying market why not stop?I trust social media posts as much as Fox news or CNN (very little) which maybe is a me thing but I don't think I'm alone.Best news I can find now is finding one individual person whose personal reputation still can matter and follow them.
jacquesm: > I mean it's not like any administration was any different?If you really believe that then I don't think we're going to have much to discuss.
johnsmith1840: Wait there was active efforts to tailor free speech all over the place? Are you going to make an argument tyere has EVER been a US admin that didn't try to do this?
jacquesm: You're probably right.
skeledrew: Is a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?
jacquesm: Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdathttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press
bathtub365: [delayed]
jacquesm: Well, we have a bunch of really problematic accounts on HN and I suspect that rather than to go into 'endless curious conversation' with those characters people just give up at some point. It's interesting in a way because one of PGs most famous post is the one about 'no broken windows'.
thrance: During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pentagon-chie...
johnsmith1840: Ok I guess? I find it hard not to see democrats heavily pushing for anti free speech across numerous systems.Simplest points are: 1. Hate speech 2. Covid 3. Europe as a whole (correlation)Hard to say america is terrible for free speech when you contrast it with the more liberal europeans that actively arrest on hate speech. If more extreeme democrats had their way we'd 100% be arresting people for hate speech.I agree with the covid ones because to be honest people are dumb. But it's dishonest to say only trump is after free speech.If you think trump is big bad then you need to realize the trumpers have thought the SAME about your party for like a decade now. In their eyes they are just returning the favor.
pstuart: I'm all for having conversations with those having other viewpoints, but it doesn't seem to be possible when they don't argue in good faith (or even grounded in reality).I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
650REDHAIR: If it wasn’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all.We’ve seen it every 4-8 years for decades.
jacquesm: Yes, (1) dogwhistle for 'racism is ok' (2) my bodily autonomy beats you staying alive (3) see (1).The number of people that are comfortable with outright racism and xenophobia on HN is scary, the number of people that are unable to see the hand behind the curtain during a time when we were very vulnerable and who seem to take their personal comfort above the health of others is scary as well. But I guess that what you get when you tell a good chunk of the world that they are movie stars authors and celebrities.COVID was interesting: as pandemics go this was a mild one, and yet, we fucked it up and here you are using it as a plank in your argument that the government has too much power. Sorry, but if that was your takeaway then you really were not paying attention and you probably have no clue about biology.If you have the time and the spare cash go buy the book Spillover, read it and then check the date when it was written. Also realize that it is about the next pandemic, not the previous one. It probably won't do your sleep any good but at least you'll be a bit better informed.
Rodeoclash: Thank you for taking the time to write this out. I've long since given up having any debate with people on these subjects so it's heartening to see some still flying the flag.
