WatDabney

If America is going to continue to be not Trump, it’s going to have to move fast.

With Musk threatening 60 Minutes staffers with prison and Trump taking over the FCC, it’s already moving into the official government-controlled media stage, and when (if) significant protests start happening, it’s going to quickly move into the gulags and mass graves stage.

And then, for all intents and purposes, the US will be Trump, like it or not.

I quite sincerely believe that the long term goal is for the US to formally ally with Russia in a war against the EU.

I’m not kidding.

By design.

The wealthy, led by Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg, among many others, have entered into open warfare against the common people.

It’s not an accident that I download epubs and read them on Moon+.

Amazon signaled clearly years ago that their goal wasn’t to make a convenient ebook reader, but to create an entire proprietary e-reading system designed solely to extract as much money as possible for as little value as possible. And this is just another step in that ongoing process.

Inevitably, all hierarchical organizations end up on the wrong side of history.

In hierarchies, people compete for position.

People with principles, morals, integrity and/or empathy will have choices that they simply will not make.

People without those things are not constrained. They can and will make whatever choices might benefit them, with no regard for the consequences to others.

So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchies, and hierarchies end up effectively rewarding and thus selecting for psychopathy.

Those who could do something about it won’t.

Those who would do something about it can’t.

Wat Dabney is a minor character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie, Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis (Michael Palin) goes to the city to make his fortune as a cooper. One of the first people he meets there is a legendary cooper named Wat Dabney (“the inventor of the inverted firkin”) who’s been reduced to begging because he’s not a member of the guild that controls the trade.

I first adopted the name on IMDb, back in the late 90s, but retired it when IMDb shut down their general interest forums, and didn’t use it on Reddit. I revived it for Lemmy.

Establishing that precedent just in and of itself would most certainly be more than enough motivation for anyone with a desire to manipulate or limit public discourse and access to the authority by which future bans can and will be implemented.

A motivation that hasn’t been mentioned yet:

Every successful attempt so far by the US government to control what Americans may and may not access on the internet has been rooted in pre-existing legal restrictions on the content, or on access to it. It’s just been things like piracy, CSAM, drug trafficking and the like - things that are illegal in and of themselves, so banning sites that are involved with them has just been a response to thecrxisting illegality.

This is the first time that the US government has succeeded in banning a site without pointing to violations of any existing laws, but simply because they’ve decided to do so.

That’s a significant precedent, and to would-be tyrants, an extremely useful one.

Citizens United was a death sentence for the ideal of the government representing the will of the people.

Trump’s election is the final nail in its coffin. He hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already brazenly selling influence

And if he and the oligarchs have their way about it, it won’t he long before we won’t even be able to say things like that. Not because the oligarchy will do something so doomed to failure as trying to censor it themselves, but because sites that don’t “choose” to censor whatever they want censored will be banned.

The point of taking down TikTok is twofold. One, they have a Boogeyman they can use to push it through. Two, if they can shut down an app with 170 million users then they can shut down anyone.

Exactly.

They needed a pretense for taking down a social media site in spite of the fact that it’s not violating any existing laws and in spite of widespread opposition to the takedown,and TikTok served both of those purposes.

And now, armed with Supreme Court approval, they can set about barring access to pretty much any site they want, for whatever reason they want, regardless of public opinion.

That’s true, and that’s why so many internet censorship it spying bills are officially to counter pedophiles.

Yes.

But that was just an interim strategy, and could never serve their long-term goal, since all it could allow them to do is to institutionalize the authority to censor in cases of activity already deemed criminal.

The difference with the TikTok ban is that neither TikTok nor its users have been accused of any crime. This ban is being enacted in spite of the fact that there’s nothing criminal about the site, and that’s a new power.

I honestly don’t think it’s trying to soften people up to the government banning social media.

I guarantee that that’s exactly what it’s about.

It’s not a coincidence that all of the domestic social media overlords have already lined up to swear their fealty to Trump (and to hand him big piles of money). They know which way the wind is blowing, and they’re ensuring that they don’t get TikToked.

Pornhub is different though, because they could base it in existing laws barring minors from accessing pornography. It didn’t really establish any new precedents, but instead simply expanded enforcement of existing statutes to the internet.

That’s not to say it was a good thing - it just doesn’t pose the same sort of existential threat that this poses.

The difference here is that there are no existing laws that pertain to TikTok, so it’s not justvthe application of existing law to the internet. This is an entirely new power - the authority to simply pass a law decreeing that a particular site is to be banned in the US, entirely regardless of the legal standing of the site or its content, but solely because those with the authority to do so have decided that that’s what they want to do

No government ever oppresses its citizenry by announcing that they’re setting out to oppress the citizenry.

They always, without exception, do it by first targeting someone the bulk of the populace thinks deserves it, and then only later incrementally expanding their reach.

Whether or not this particular ban is enforced is irrelevant. The point was simply to establish the precedent that the government can restrict citizens’ access to social media.

A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.

Meta has officially adopted the Musk/Trump conception of free expression - promoting bigotry and hate and silencing dissent.

We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Of course.

After many years of effortless romance and/or sex (I had the good fortune in my younger days to look like sort of a cross between Rob Lowe and Andre Agassi), I finally just burnt out on it and deliberately chose to pursue bachelorhood. I’ve never regretted it. (For whatever that’s worth).

I assumed that they were at least anarchism-adjacent - it’s pretty much a prerequisite for the bulk of their focus.

I hadn’t really looked into their political posting much though, and yeah - even with just a cursory glance, it’s promising.

And I hadn’t thought about that distinction between people who simply hold a position and people who “officially” wear the label in the context of anarchism (though I’ve noted it often with atheists), but yeah, there’s undoubtedly some truth there.

Thanks for the heads-up.