Quote of the day—Casey Newton

Yesterday, I wrote about the sense that the fracture in our shared sense of reality seems to be accelerating. I asked whether platforms ought to take it as a moral responsibility to reverse that divide — and, if so, how. Today, I advocate for one smaller but still difficult and essential step in that direction.

It’s time for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to remove Trump.

Casey Newton
January 6, 2021
IT’S TIME TO DEPLATFORM TRUMP
[Note: I original scheduled this for next Tuesday as I had some other content I thought was of higher priority. Things are obviously happening much faster than I expected.


LOL.

That is so totally ignorant of human, and particularly U.S., psychology that it is hilariously funny.

Deplatforming is a relatively easy obstacle to overcome by someone with Trump’s stature. Even if every platform in the country succumbed to the rage mob he could rent a server, in a different country if necessary, and start his own blog. Individuals will post his material on Facebook and other sites with minor obfuscation to defeat the attempts at automated blockage.

If they block his site at the border encrypted VPN’s will bring his material in. Make it a crime to distribute his material and it will be distributed in a way that makes it attributable to tyrannical politicians.

It will be a fun game! I almost look forward to it.

The attempt at blocking him will make him all the more widely read. And all the time he will be mocking those who tried to silence him.

And that gives Newton a pass, assuming they actually believed what they wrote, on the stupidity of believing an attempt at silencing someone admired by millions is going to bring unity and tranquility. Trump is popular because he expresses a view shared by those millions. It seems the political left believes he created mindless followers. It’s probably more correct to say the masses created Trump.

As Michael Malice said the other day, “They thought Trump was the river but he was the dam.”:

I am of the opinion that if your goal is freedom then having your political enemies rapidly becoming tyrants furthers your long term goal more than hurts it.—Joe]

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9 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Casey Newton

  1. Absolutely, the more tyrant they become. The more resistance they will motivate. Just look at how fast they themselves moved in disrespecting the office of president. That respect won’t be returning soon.
    Joe Biden is going to pay the price for that. To say nothing of when the whore takes over.
    Disrespect will be the least of their worries.

    • And the more we will find ways to get around their attempts at blocking communications. After all, the internet was designed by ARPA to survive an all out war and we have a lot more tools than they did in 1966.

  2. It is almost as if they have not read ANY American history. Of all the people on the planet, we are the worst at that whole “compliance” thing. In fact, non-compliance is nearly a defining American cultural characteristic. Even those historically illiterate morons who can’t look any further back than Gamergate should be able to figure out that the LAST thing in the world they should want to do is piss off and wave a red cape in front of the average American dude who is bored and looking for a reason to get off his ass and prove his mettle. Gamers always want to level up. 🙂

    Odds? What are those?

  3. While we can find reasons to be positive, there are also reasons not to be so positive. Where are the men that were canceled over the last few years? Has anyone made a comeback?

    What does it take to set up a server – not much, but what about connectivity? Who controls the big pipes? It’s not the little guys. And all those pipes can be monitored and censured. That also includes the service providers. How many of us have Comcast? And even encrypted packets have to have addresses that can be used to censure. Decryption is not necessary. And you could quietly be put on a blacklist that would filter out all encrypted packets.

    And then there are payment systems. Nothing runs for free.

    • VPN Proxies are your friend. I use Private Internet Access. The destination coming from your computer could be, at your choice, Bulgaria, Greenland, or The Bahamas. As it leaves there it has the true destination.

      The Netherlands has very relaxed laws on what you can put on your servers. To the point that child porn is frequently posted there. I maintained a server there (as a proxy) for a couple years and I have never been in that country.

      The Internet shopping requires encryption as well as lot of other stuff. Most web sites use encryption these days (https). Even the the DNS is headed that way. And if they get as extreme as you suggest there is always Steganography. That you suddenly started sharing a a lot of pictures of kittens and grandkids just means that you decided you wanted to focus on the more important things in live rather than risk of running afoul of the local Political Correctness Officer.

      You can buy prepaid VISA or Master Card payment cards.

      • Thanks. I had forgotten about VPN and just signed up.

        BTW: I see that Biden promised a new “domestic terrorism bill” back in November, according to the Wall Street Journal and given the events of the last week I suspect that it will squarely be aimed at us. I can think of all sorts of things that could be done with such a bill that could quickly cripple our ability to communicate and I’m sure you can as well.

      • It appears that it is already too late for many.

        Parler is dead, cash flow has stopped, secrets are being reveled, its lawyers have quit, and a hacker archived all posts, including deleted posts, for law enforcement and other to comb through for prosecuting and doxing

        Even keywords and patterns of speech can be used to help identify who you are using posts from other forums. VPN slows down the process, but if it visible on the internet it can go into the hopper to be used against you.

        The full capabilities of tech are now being used – do not underestimate. Even tech like Steganography is not immune from data mining.

        • Steganography has two benefits. (1) it’s hard to detect; the difference between a plain picture and one with secret content is very small. (2) even if you know that a picture is a steganogram you still need to break the crypto to find what’s inside.
          I don’t know if a steganographic variant of PGP exists, i.e., one that lets you do the bulk data encryption once and wrap the data key into public key encrypted key messages for N readers. If the whole thing is then packaged inside a steganographic envelope, you have a way to send hidden messages to a group. Contrast with, say, steganographic bulk data encryption in tools like Veracrypt; that’s more for keeping privately held secrets, not for distributing them to selected friends.
          If such a messaging system doesn’t currently exist, it probably is time to create one. Hmm….

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