U.S. Politics: I Did Nazi That Coming

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

30 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

 

All times are interesting.  

[Dr. Pepper]

8 hours ago, Sword of Doom said:

There is no discourse to be had with these people. There is no way you can debate them and there is no way you can only protest them peacefully. They are domestic terrorists. They are a danger. 

This video is exactly the reason Nazi's shouldn't be given any sort of platform.  Every opportunity they are given to address the public is more opportunity to recruit.  This is not ok.  No one should be ok with this.  

[Zorral]

In the meantime for the let the established authorities and rule of law determine what is what, we have this coming out of the federal Department of Justice, as directed by Jeff Davis Sessions:

Quote

 

US government demands details on all visitors to anti-Trump protest website

 

The US government is seeking to unmask every person who visited an anti-Trump website in what privacy advocates say is an unconstitutional “fishing expedition” for political dissidents.

The warrant appears to be an escalation of the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) campaign against anti-Trump activities, including the harsh prosecution of inauguration day protesters.

On 17 July, the DoJ served a website-hosting company, DreamHost, with a search warrant for every piece of information it possessed that was related to a website that was used to coordinate protests during Donald Trump’s inauguration. The warrant covers the people who own and operate the site, but also seeks to get the IP addresses of 1.3 million people who visited it, as well as the date and time of their visit and information about what browser or operating system they used.

The website, www.disruptj20.org, was used to coordinate protests and civil disobedience on 20 January, when Trump was inaugurated.

“This specific case and this specific warrant are pure prosecutorial overreach by a highly politicized department of justice under [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions,” said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost. “You should be concerned that anyone should be targeted simply for visiting a website.”

The warrant was made public Monday, when DreamHost announced its plans to challenge the government in court. The DoJ declined to comment. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.

The government has aggressively prosecuted activists arrested during the 20 January protests in Washington DC. In April, the US attorney’s office in Washington DC filed a single indictment charging more than 217 people with identical crimes, including felony rioting.

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Ghazarian said that DreamHost provided the government with “limited customer information about the owner of the website” when it first received a grand jury subpoena a week after the protests occurred. But the government came back in July with the much broader search warrant.

“We’re a gatekeeper between the government and tens of thousands of people who visited the website,” said Ghazarian. “We want to keep them protected.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been advising DreamHost, characterized the warrant as “unconstitutional” and “a fishing expedition”.

“I can’t conceive of a legitimate justification other than casting your net as broadly as possible to justify millions of user logs,” senior staff attorney Mark Rumold told the Guardian.

Logs of IP addresses don’t uniquely identify users, but they link back to specific physical addresses if no digital tools are used to mask it.

“What they would be getting is a list of everyone who has ever been interested in attending these protests or seeing what was going on at the protests and that’s the troubling aspect. It’s a short step after you have the list to connect the IP address to someone’s identity,” he said.

Wide-reaching warrants for user data are sometimes issued when the content of a site is illegal such as pirated movies or child sexual abuse imagery, but speech is rarely prohibited.

“This [the website] is pure first amendment advocacy – the type of advocacy the first amendment was designed to protect and promote,” Rumold added. “Frankly I’m glad DreamHost is pushing back on it.”

It’s not the first time that the US government has sought to unmask people protesting against Trump or his policies.

In March this year, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a division of the homeland security department, ordered Twitter to hand over the phone number, mailing addresses and IP addresses associated with @ALT_USCIS, an account that purported to convey the views of dissenters within the government.

The account, whose username is a reference to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is one of dozens of alternative Twitter accounts established after Trump was inaugurated. The unverified accounts claimed to provide an uncensored view of civil servants who disagreed with Trump’s policies.

To protect the identity of the person running the account, Twitter launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that it would have “a grave chilling effect on the speech of that account in particular and the many other ‘alternative agency’ accounts that have been created to voice dissent to government policies”.

After public outcry over the administration’s overreach, CBP dropped the request.

 

 

[Ormond]

12 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

Now this is a protest gesture I can get behind whether in the end it's deemed legal or not.

As was expressed on NPR, the Charlottesville events are actually going to result in more Confederate monuments being removed much sooner than they would have been otherwise.

And I just an hour or so ago ran across the fact that the statue of General Lee in Charlottesville is not going to be destroyed. It isn't going to be taken outside of Charlottesville.  It's not going to be hidden away in storage or even put in a museum. It's going to be transferred from a small park downtown to a larger park on the north side of the city, still easily available for anyone in the public who wants to go look at it. And the white supremacists thought that was enough to descend from all over the country on that one small Virginia city.

[Zorral]

17 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

Millions of Germans, Italians and Spaniards failed to see the obvious wrongness of fascism in the first half of the 20th century. I fear that far too many historically illiterate folks in the US are likely to fall into the same trap if current discourse continues.

Actually quite a few millions of Germans, Italians and Spaniards did see the obvious wrongness of nazis and fascism from the git go, but they got killed, imprisoned and / or otherwise silenced.  The lucky ones packed up and got out before the worst happened.  But there is no USA to run to these days to escape the madness that we're growing here. So we have to stop it.  Somehow.

Public resistance and making fun of the asshats obviously matters, at least to a degree -- it forced the orange to finally, grudgingly, condemn by label the nazis and kkk and their related white surpremacists who created hell in Charlottesville this last weekend.  But in the meantime his boy Sessions on his behalf is trying get the names and numbers and ISP addresses of everybody who opposes him and his.

It is being said that he's afraid to come to NYC after all, as many protests and demonstrations are being planned to show antagonism against his utterly impossible reign.  He was supposed to get to NYC Sunday, but he went back to DC, where he issued that condemnation that he didn't mean.  Now he's to show up, maybe tomorrow?

Another note:  Woo, you all were busy here the last two days.  The whole site was down for me, at least, until this AM.

 

[Shryke]

2 hours ago, Morpheus said:

There isn't satire as wild as the times we're in, it is a new frontier of human stupidity and ignorance.

The longer this goes on, the more it becomes obvious that God is a hack writer.

[Zorral]

9 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I just watched this and it is a powerful piece of media. Thing is, I'm left with the impression that it does as much to bolster one aspect of the Neo-Nazi argument as it does to hurt it. There was no attempt at discourse here. Very little of what is depicted in this piece resembled a peaceful protest by either side. I think both sides of this shitshow can post this particular video and proclaim a PR victory of sorts. 

 Why can't we protest them peacefully? Had they just been left to hold their little fascist circle jerk, made their shitty little speeches, wave their failed, defeated little symbols? Tape them. Scream at them. Chant your protest slogans, but let them dig their own fucking hole with their shitty words and failed ideology.

 Wouldn't that have looked worse? 

How can there be peaceful protest when what is being protested comes armed with a knife and  five guns?

Maybe more than five guns.  He's so careless he can't keep track of his guns and thinks this is funny  and boasts about it.  He's like the POTUS who is u-no-who that can't keep track of his fave twitter images and throws out there this AM the one of a train running down CNN 'fake news' -- and this guy's finger is on the nuclear button.

[drawkcabi]

34 minutes ago, Ormond said:

As was expressed on NPR, the Charlottesville events are actually going to result in more Confederate monuments being removed much sooner than they would have been otherwise.

It's not worth even the loss of one life, let alone three, but I hope that happens. Something good coming out of the bad in the same vein as Charleston SC.

[Frey family reunion]

1 hour ago, Dr. Pepper said:

This video is exactly the reason Nazi's shouldn't be given any sort of platform.  Every opportunity they are given to address the public is more opportunity to recruit.  This is not ok.  No one should be ok with this.  

I agree with you, but ironically we have the ACLU to thank for some of this.  They have successfully fought previous attempts of cities to prohibit the Klan and the Nazis from protesting.

[Dr. Pepper]

11 minutes ago, Frey family reunion said:

I agree with you, but ironically we have the ACLU to thank for some of this.  They have successfully fought previous attempts of cities to prohibit the Klan and the Nazis from protesting.

I used to support the ACLU and also even supported the type of free speech that compelled the ACLU to defend nazis.  I was fucking stupid.  My eyes are open.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

30 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I used to support the ACLU and also even supported the type of free speech that compelled the ACLU to defend nazis.  I was fucking stupid.  My eyes are open.

And at some point if we continue along that path, your mouth will be shut. And many other mouths as well. 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

How can there be peaceful protest when what is being protested comes armed with a knife and  five guns?

Maybe more than five guns.  He's so careless he can't keep track of his guns and thinks this is funny  and boasts about it.  He's like the POTUS who is u-no-who that can't keep track of his fave twitter images and throws out there this AM the one of a train running down CNN 'fake news' -- and this guy's finger is on the nuclear button.

Did anyone get shot or stabbed at this event? Do you think it more or less likely that someone would've gotten shoot or stabbed if the counter-protesters had been wholly non-violent?

I'm not advocating that they should be allowed to be armed, they shouldn't be. I have to imagine that a big part of the reason this event was shut down and a state of emergency was declared was due to the fact that one side was an armed camp.

[Dr. Pepper]

11 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

And at some point if we continue along that path, your mouth will be shut. And many other mouths as well. 

Our mouths are already being slapped shut.  

I'm just going to reiterate that we are talking about nazis.  Other countries with anti-nazi speech laws do not somehow have this crisis where no one can speak.  It's not a valid ideology.  We put limits on speech all the time, and it doesn't cause the crisis you think exists.  What has caused it is not limited groups that exist exclusively to incite violence.  

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

5 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Our mouths are already being slapped shut.  

I'm just going to reiterate that we are talking about nazis.  Other countries with anti-nazi speech laws do not somehow have this crisis where no one can speak.  It's not a valid ideology.  We put limits on speech all the time, and it doesn't cause the crisis you think exists.  What has caused it is not limited groups that exist exclusively to incite violence.  

How is your mouth being slapped shut now? 

 

Other countries with anti-nazi speech laws had first hand account of nazi terror visited upon their societies. A number of them were mutated by that horrific ideology. Those societies then collectively decided to adopt that policy through a democratic process.I think that this is a reasonable idea to discuss, and if you could get enough people onboard to support the passage of such a law, so be it. Failing that, we're talking about suppression of speech in a country that was founded in part on a belief in Free Speech.  

[Crazydog7]

Anyone saying let them make their little speeches and go back to their little troll caves really needs to watch that Vice News thing. HOLY SHIT. 

[lokisnow]

21 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

How is your mouth being slapped shut now? 

 

Other countries with anti-nazi speech laws had first hand account of nazi terror visited upon their societies. A number of them were mutated by that horrific ideology. Those societies then collectively decided to adopt that policy through a democratic process.I think that this is a reasonable idea to discuss, and if you could get enough people onboard to support the passage of such a law, so be it. Failing that, we're talking about suppression of speech in a country that was founded in part on a belief in Free Speech.  

Yes founded on free speech as part of a social contract, that is to say, with inherent limits, not free speech unlimited to include genocide or snuff or pedophilia, etc. 

There are boundaries--that's why it's a contract--and pure anarchy is something no one (other than far right and far left extremists more interested in purity of idea than participation in society) wants.

[Swordfish]

On 8/14/2017 at 5:31 AM, OldGimletEye said:

I think for this reason, is why, I think simply amending the constitution to ban the promotion ethnic violence, genocide, or ethnic cleansing would be the best solution.

That way we could avoid some of these thornier problems of what is or is not an incitement to violence.

I don't think that solves your problem, because you still have to define what constitutes 'promoting ethnic violence, genocide, or ethnic cleansing'

You've just sort of shifted the problem around a bit.

 

 

On another note, I'm sad this thread isn't titled 'In Godwin we trust.....'

[Swordfish]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

In the meantime for the let the established authorities and rule of law determine what is what, we have this coming out of the federal Department of Justice, as directed by Jeff Davis Sessions:

 

Yep.  I mean, some of those people were promoting violence.  So by the logic of this thread, the DOJ actions seem reasonable here.

Nothing scary at all about trusting the government to appropriately attack free speech.  

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

5 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Yes founded on free speech as part of a social contract, that is to say, with inherent limits, not free speech unlimited to include genocide or snuff or pedophilia, etc. 

There are boundaries--that's why it's a contract--and pure anarchy is something no one (other than far right and far left extremists more interested in purity of idea than participation in society) wants.

Sure, absolutely. Yelling fire in a crowded theater, etc, etc. How we determine those limits without restricting our rights across the board is a really dicey proposition IMO.

[Zorral]

45 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Did anyone get shot or stabbed at this event? Do you think it more or less likely that someone would've gotten shoot or stabbed if the counter-protesters had been wholly non-violent?

I'm not advocating that they should be allowed to be armed, they shouldn't be. I have to imagine that a big part of the reason this event was shut down and a state of emergency was declared was due to the fact that one side was an armed camp.

A car was used to kill and maim.  How is that different?  Unless you're saying Fields was too poor to have that very expensive personal arsenal?

Also, the cops were too intimidated and frightened by all those guns to intervene . . . .  They say differently now, but one of the first extensive press conferences addressed by the Charlottesville police -- chief? supervisor? -- basically said they were out-gunned and outnumbered.

Also, did you miss how frightened that young woman was who interrogated the armed lunatic in that video?  She had a far more backbone than I do, to confront him as she did.