WatDabney @ WatDabney @fedia.io

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1 yr. ago

The masks are coming off.

I'm proud to say that I've never once bought anything from Amazon. Long before Bezos started to reveal the depths of his psychopathy, the company just grossed me out. There's something about businesses that are that large and that dominant that just makes my flesh crawl (the same reason I never shop at Walmart or eat at McDonald's or get coffee at Starbucks or...)

But at this point, it goes way beyond that - Bezos, alongside Musk and Zuckerberg and Ramaswamy and Thiel and so on - is a direct threat to humanity. He and the other would-be oligarchs, under the umbrella of Trump's ego, are deliberately setting out to destroy the ideals of liberty, democracy and justice in order to build an autocracy in which they will be the masters they believe themselves rightfully to be, and the rest of us will be relegated to being serfs, slaves or corpses.

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.

I would say it doesn't feel that way because the bulk of the establishment media are fawning over him, and that they're fawning over him trying to curry favor, or at the very least trying to avoid getting TikToked.

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.

Mm... there's some merit to that I guess, but that's expecting more integrity from a politician than is likely even possible. If he wasn't an ego-driven opportunist, he wouldn't have had a political career in the first place.

No - I still blame the DNC first and foremost. Biden's unfitness wouldn't have mattered if the DNC hadn't cynically and self-servingly engineered his win.

Right, but again, the only reason that was relevant is because the DNC sabotaged Sanders and forced Biden on us instead.

"Peasants" works too.

I think the most accurate term really though is "livestock."

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.

Trump has owned hotels and casinos for decades now, and hotel housekeeping and groundskeeping are among the most common occupations for undocumented immigrants, so Trump is fully aware of the role that they play.

The thing is though that this has never really been about undocumented immigrants. It's really just a strategy to divide the common people against themselves so that we can't effectively oppose the coming autocracy.

And it's working.

Of course they will, because otherwise the Toddler in Chief will throw a tantrum.

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

Just the latest salvo in the proxy class war.

The bigoted, hateful hard right-wingers have been and are being very deliberately and methodically indoctrinated into serving as the footsoldiers in the privileged parasite class's proxy war against the left.

And Meta is ready to play its part.

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