On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 01:27:02AM +0000, jim bell wrote:
>> https://attackthesystem.com/2020/10/15/facebook-twitter-declare-war-with-censorship-of-hunter-biden-story/#comment-330341
>> https://youtu.be/fdCLjW-_uwg          Saager Enjeti and Krystal Ball                 
>>
>> Jim Bell's response:
>> It sounds like there are MANY stories here, but at least one of them is that the FBI has apparently been ‘sitting on’ this information since December 2019. To help Biden win, we can conclude.
>> “The Deep State” strikes again.
>> But this story should have been released months ago.
>> 25 years ago, I invented the Assassination Politics idea, which became the AP essay.   https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
>> Since then, I have virtually NEVER named specific people, or small groups of people who should be targets of AP.   For reasons that I have considered obvious,

>I would have thought "preservation of self's liberty" would have struck you clearly by now :/

Ha ha ?    I am assuming you intended that somewhat humorously...    That could be a factor, but too many people these days (in common political discourse) denounce each other, to make what I say all that out of the ordinary.  I've long pointed out that I won't be the one implementing AP, for example.   

If we compare the political environment of 1995 and 2020, the 'Overton window'   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window  of AP could have been seen as "unthinkable" in 1995, but in today's wacky reality, it could easily be seen as "acceptable" or even "sensible".  

Rather early (1995-1997, 2000), and occasionally, a few people would declare my AP essay 'right-wing'.  Initially I thought that opinion to be very odd, especially because at that time, my impression was that few 'right-wingers' called for the complete elimination (and not merely "overthrow", implying that government was supposed to be replaced with something else, that something else which was fated to be about as oppressive) of every government on the face of the Earth. 

Eventually, I figured it out:  I have read very little political writing in my life, and of that, the large majority is libertarian literature.  So, when I write, I think I don't unintentionally copy the patterns used by others.   I concluded that the people doing that labelling (calling it "right-wing !") simply read my AP essay and noticed that it simply didn't LOOK (use verbiage typical of) common left-wing screeds.  Since the people that were doing that labelling didn't see any signs that I was writing in the usual, left-wing tradition, and due to their political cluelessness in general, they figured I MUST BE "right-wing".   'What other alternative is there?!?', they might delusionally say.  

>> I have long believed that people are usually able to decide for themselves who the real enemies are, and when the time comes, they will do so.  But there is now an emergency.  

>> At that time, 1995, if you had asked me, I would have predicted that all of the first 1000 targets of AP would be government employees, mostly higher-ups.  
>> But now, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have clearly and unambiguously declared war on at least half of humanity.  And the other half are too stupid to realize why they shouldn't be celebrating.  By doing this, they have irrevocably crossed a critical and seemingly uncrossable line, which as Saager says, cannot now be uncrossed.

>In the sense that now they have actually done the censorship they've done, and that's a historical fact, yes they cannot uncross that line, but to many on this list, their crossing of that line was obvious years ago...

That's absolutely correct.  I didn't mean to suggest that this is new!  Far from it!   While I have had a Facebook account for years, I almost never use it, so I don't experience any of the censorship.  But I know people who DO heavily use Facebook for political discussions, and they have been relating increasingly-outrageous examples of anti-conservative (and anti-libertarian) censorship over the last few years.  

But I think Facebook's and Twitter's treatment of this new story about Joe and Hunter Biden did not merely 'cross the line', really it 'pole-vaulted' (or even 'jet-packed' !) far over it!  Actually trying to SUPPRESS this story?   What do they think they will actually accomplish, here?   Have they ever heard of the 'Streisand Effect' ?

Is it really so implausible that Joe Biden would engage in corruption in 2015?   Even as early as 2009, he 'knew' that he would not be the tapped for the Presidential candidacy in 2016, since it was "Hillary's turn!" !  The death of his other son, Beau, was simply used as an excuse for why he wouldn't run.  He fully expected to be permanently retired in 2017.  So, using his son Hunter as the bag-man for that $3 million payoff was perfectly logical, in a weird sort of way.  

>On the other hand, an alternative, this time P2P, social media non-platform, may well solve this problem.

We can hope!  Especially given the "Overton Window" change, and today's amazing environment!  Even 10 years ago, it would have been hard to anticipate the kind of frenzied blinding hostility being displayed, daily.  SOME people might have argued about AP, in 1995 (disingenuously even then, I believe), that "Who hates other people so much as to donate money to see them killed!".   Well, in 2020, just about everything has changed.  

It COULD have been almost purely a good thing when the "town-square" discussions of the 1790-to-mid-1900's period got migrated to the Internet, mostly beginning 1995.  (I'm not intending to forget platforms like Compuserve and BBS's, of course.)   People with obscure hobbies that no-one within a mile of their own home practices, now can compare notes around the world.   But I think that has been ruined in the last few years, at least for political-type discussions.  

YouTube's banning of QANON discussions is a further example of PC idiocy, and even pointlessness. While I've paid essentially no attention to any QANON content (merely reading the frequent references to them in news), I see nothing at all to justify obstructing people from exchanging what others see as implausible opinions.   Does any major platform ban discussion of UFO's?  Alien abductions?  "Flat Earth"?  Ghosts?  Astrology?  Crop circles?   Why would they?  

For that matter, if they are taking the position that ideas THEY DON'T AGREE WITH should be obstructed and banned, why doesn't somebody issue a blanket-ban on religious subjects?  Or just individual bans on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism,  Sunni or Shiite, etc?  Or bans on dissent against those religions, or sects, etc? 


>I agree the situation regarding freedom of speech in the public town hall, and its attack by the Valley's behemoths, is serious.

>I would have thought you'd learnt your own lesson on naming things in the way you name them, but what would I know...

I think one difference is, now, the current "political" (ideological) environment.  I don't think, TODAY, that I am advocating anything that many other people haven't been thinking about, for years.  

>On the specific topic of AP, there is an old biblical adage that those who live by the sword, die by the sword.  It's a mataphor, example, allegory, principle (some might call it karma).

>Perhaps living by AP is not quite the wisest move.  Don't mind me, I's just a bumblin hippie wanna be...

Well, I had already concluded in early 1995, well before I wrote Part 1 of AP, that despite its premise, there wouldn't be all that many killings under AP.  The credible existence of that system would itself deter people offending others.