The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

Facebook is not government owned. They are free to allow anyone to use their service under their own terms of service and free to ban anyone they feel like.
You keep completely ignoring the point that these social media platforms have become the new town squares and that taking people off of those is effectively stifling their speech.
 
Trump crash?

Don’t Be Shocked If Trump’s Economy Goes the Way of Bush’s

The formula is basically the same: tax cuts, higher spending and deregulation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-03/trump-s-economy-could-mimic-george-w-bush-s



Trump would have been charged with obstruction were he not president, hundreds of former federal prosecutors assert

More than 370 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he held.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...946a1a-7006-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html

STATEMENT BY FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTORS

We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
https://medium.com/@dojalumni/statement-by-former-federal-prosecutors-8ab7691c2aa1
 
Trying to make a distinction between Republicans and Democrats in this world is a waste of time the establishment in Washington flat out does not like him for a multitude of reasons real or manufactured to try and influence public perception. It's not a coincidence that almsot every media outlet in this country broadcasts damn near exactly the same news stories down to their catch phrases and talking points every night when it comes to a Trump story.

To those of you who hate Trump with every fiber of your body what has he legitimately done that has personally affected you or someone you know. I see that most of his strongest critics on this site live on the other side of the world. Is he going around in the middle of the night personally burning down villages??

Do any of you agree that if the far right nut jobs are being banned from social media shouldnt the far left ones be banned as well?
 
To those of you who hate Trump with every fiber of your body what has he legitimately done that has personally affected you or someone you know. I see that most of his strongest critics on this site live on the other side of the world. Is he going around in the middle of the night personally burning down villages??

Speaking as someone who does not hate Trump with any fiber of his body, who actually saw in Hillary Clinton just more of the same problems that are afflicting the West, who thinks that Trump is basically an egomaniac with no care for anything else than himself, smart enough to do what he wants (which sometimes might even be what the US need) but not not smart enough to best the other diplomatic players, Trump has affected my life too, because his foreign politics is to put more room between the US and its allies.

But the biggest part of the effects of Trump's politics (both internally and externally) has not even started to appear yet. It will be start to become apparent only after the end of 2020, both for the US and for the rest of the world.

Do any of you agree that if the far right nut jobs are being banned from social media shouldnt the far left ones be banned as well?

I agree completely. Banning the extremes means banning both extremes. What I have problems with is how much to ban and who decides, because the distance between the two problematic end of the scale, between "anything goes" and "authoritarian censorship" is easily covered sometimes in a single mental step.
 
How does it affect you though?

I live in a country which needs strong allies to keep covetous eyes off of it, among a group of nations who still needs strong allies to avoid foreign Powers trying to split it up and dominate them separately; and the US is, in my opinion, a very good ally in that sense.

Some say it isn't, but I'm not convinced that the deals we could strike today with other superpowers can outweight what we have now (even with all the difficulties and things to address).

The US retraction has indeed already exposed the EU to new, disruptive foreign interferences.

But the real effects will become apparent later. Some of them may even be positive, like maybe the EU will stop fiddle about and push more towards unification, also for self-defense (and we are talking about moves that have started in early 2017 and have still not had an effect that the Average citizen can touch). A scenario where this is necessary is not a solid, stable, peaceful scenario, though, which is probably the major risk of this US retraction.

Things are changing fast, in this world; the Pax Americana worked from 1991 because of the incredible imbalance in strength; but this is changing, and more than two players with similar strength spell instability.

The US retraction and weakening bond with its allies mean a weakening US. More Powers are incresing in strength at the same time, and will try to cut those allies from the US to get them over to their own side, or to have them alone to be preyed. Think of the recent moves: the EU, Africa, Korea, South Asia...

What the US didn't need was an isolationist-leaning president.

Which doesn't mean that he can't also do good things, but surely not in foreign politics.

To prevent questions: would Clinton have done better? She would have probably gone too far the other side. But she was surely not the one that competiting Powers would have chosen...
 
I agree completely. Banning the extremes means banning both extremes. What I have problems with is how much to ban and who decides, because the distance between the two problematic end of the scale, between "anything goes" and "authoritarian censorship" is easily covered sometimes in a single mental step.
There is an argument to be made that banning such people will not change their views, it will just push them underground. Instead of voicing their views on a bigger platform where good people could combat them, argue with them, provide a counter voice, they are instead relegated to the dark recesses of the internet where they'll end up with an echo chamber of radicalization.
 
There is an argument to be made that banning such people will not change their views, it will just push them underground. Instead of voicing their views on a bigger platform where good people could combat them, argue with them, provide a counter voice, they are instead relegated to the dark recesses of the internet where they'll end up with an echo chamber of radicalization.

This is indeed one of the dangers. It has a balance in the fact that far less people will get i contact with the idea and, more importantly, with the too manipulation-competent preachers of that idea.

However, the balance is not fixed, it shifts depending on the social situation, on the strenght of the rest of the information, on the culture of the people listening, on their ability to think for themselves.

In a world where all the people are able to think freely and healthily and to get the right information, no ban is necessary; in a world where people are not able to get the right information, or have grown never excercising their ability to think freely and healthily, no ban at all on dangerous people will have dire consequences.

The answer is probably some sort of light ban, and giving the people all they need to be free to understand and choose.

The problem now is understanding how much is too much in our society. Consider I would lovely sign the "no ban" whenever that's reasonably acceptable.
 
The answer is probably some sort of light ban, and giving the people all they need to be free to understand and choose.
We already have a legal framework for that, trouble is that these platforms don't abide by said framework and do what they want.
 
Facebook and Twitter are.not the public square, they are the pub or comedy club adjacent to it.. The internet is the public square. The internet is a big place, and Jones can setup his own website to host his material. He can also go all old school and print his material and send it out.
 
It is not his political beliefs that got him banned.
 


If the report clears Trump, why would they need to keep it from Congress?
 
The Dems have access to a report that has only 2% redactions to the first volume, concerning collusion/conspiracy, and less then 1 tenth of 1 percent redactions to the second volume, concerning obstruction. All this talk about a cover up is crackpot conspiracy theory nonsense. It would be nice if big tech started banning these "dangerous" conspiracy theorists from their platforms to, you know, to protect democracy, or something.
 
The redacted material is only part of what they want.
 
I doubt the house Dems would accept only the underlying evidence not associated with the redacted material.

Personally, I think they're making unreasonable demands that they know the DOJ cannot legally comply with, so they can scream 'conspiracy' when they inevitably refuse to comply. This circus is never going to end.
 
The AG can go to the judge at the head of the grand jury to okay the release of some, or all of the info. There is even a president for this, Waregate. The only block to this is Barr.
 
Top