Echo

I certainly hope some of the stuff in the investigation into Rudy’s buds traps him up and pulls him in. What a prick he is.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. Barr – 1,100 former Justice Department prosecutors telling you to GTFO is something that should give you pause.  Your actions will not be forgotten.

The eyes….

Bink, You think calling SFB Hitler will swing votes? If so I’ll wear a button. 

I never go to Yahoo. I get a CNN feed and Mrs. P gets AOL news. I stick with WaPo and NYT and go to a few others for local and regional issues that percolate from other sources. Comments at all of them are harsh. 

Sorry for the bandwidth, but… along the lines of the calling them stupid comments above…  Ms. Rubin nails it – or them. That query came to mind when Harvard Law school graduate Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) descended into sheer quackery and decided to perpetrate conspiracies about the origin of the coronavirus. The Post reports: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China. Cotton referenced a laboratory in the city, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” He said the lab was near a market some scientists initially thought was a starting point for the virus’s spread. This is unadulterated nonsense, one step removed from anti-vaxxer rubbish and UFO-spotting. (“In response to Cotton’s remarks, as well as in previous interviews with The Washington Post, numerous experts dismissed the possibility the coronavirus may be man-made.”) * * * Trump has merged the know-nothingism of right-wing populism with a far more dangerous intellectual evolution from defense of limited-government conservatism, which was formerly at the heart of modern conservatism, to outright worship of authoritarianism. Now, far too many conservatives have reverence for executive power and reject constitutional government. Attorney General William P. Barr and his cheerleaders from the Federalist Society embody this frightening development. Donald Ayer, former U.S. deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush, writes that Barr advocates “the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances.” For Barr, limited government means limited checks on the president, the antithesis of the framers’ vision. Ayer writes: For whatever twisted reasons, he believes that the president should be above the law, and he has as his foil in pursuit of that goal a president who, uniquely in our history, actually aspires to that status. And Barr has acted repeatedly on those beliefs in ways that are more damaging at every turn. Presently he is moving forward with active misuse of the criminal sanction,… Read more »

Bink, my experience is that hate speech is not common, unless calling someone stupid is hate speech, and I assume all the mainstreamish sites are filtered.  For instance, Wapo has commenting rules and is moderated, although it is not human moderation at the first cut, but rather algorithms that pick up on profanity and certain offensive language typically aimed at morons, like calling them a moron, imbecile, etc.  and apparently human moderation based on reports by other commentors that the target comment is offensive or an ad for instance, and you find that out when you try to respond and get a message that the comment no longer exists (although obviously it was there when I’d respond and get that message).  I’ve not been able to get a real grip on the rules, but they are pretty easily gotten around – for instance bullscheisse is never blocked, and people use spacing and symbols for letters, although sometimes that won’t work – like substituting a “$” for and s won’t always get past the censors.  I’ve had a few comments blocked for not conforming, but IMHO they have been mild by most standards – e.g. I’ve had a comment that began with “What in the hell are you talking about?” blocked.  I’ve also had comments blocked that literally quoted SFB’s profanity in the article or opinion piece I was commenting in response to blocked.  Go figure.  I find that the Times tends to be a solid level above Wapo with respect to the level of insults – but I figure that’s only because it has a higher level of readership (maybe).

Bink, Facebook and the other conglomerates operate under different clauses of the First Amendment. Freedom of the press is a more difficult nut to crack judicially than freedom of speech when it comes to large media platforms. After four years of Trump, a Twitter platform is probably exactly what you’d like to have an order to put forward your ideas.