'Facebook Knows It Was Used To Help Incite The Capitol Insurrection'

'Facebook Knows It Was Used To Help Incite The Capitol Insurrection'

• Re:

  What planet are you from. 1 day verses months of riots, murders, arsons, business destructions. It is dividing the country and sparking more racism all while putting on a show that that you guys aren't racist while calling everyone else Nazis, White Supremist, and every other istaphobe. Your post shows that you think what you guys are doing is A-OK. You are the problem.

  • Re:

    ^ I don't know who these abusive moderators are but silencing contrary opinions and those whose views you don't like is not the purpose of mod points. This isn't a spam, it isn't a troll, it is just a valid argument you don't want to hear.

  • • Tony Timpa [dallasnews.com] would like to disagree with you.

      Or at least, he would, if he were alive. Tell us if this rhymes with any event you know of: Police arrest unarmed man who is high on drugs in response to a minor report. Claiming that he was struggling with them, a group of five police officers shove him to the ground and restrain him. He pleads for his life with them ("You're gonna kill me!") as they kneel on him, pressing him to the ground for fourteen minutes, several minutes after he clearly loses consciousness. He dies during that event, which is clearly and entirely caught on video.

      Tell us if any of this stops sounding familiar: Timpa's arms and legs were cuffed before the police threw him to the ground. Two of the police officers faced no charges; the other three faced only misdemeanor charges, which were later dismissed. A federal court dismissed the government from the family's wrongful-death lawsuit, then later ruled in favor of the individual defendants because of qualified immunity.

      What is the relevant difference between Tony Timpa and George Floyd?

    • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday April 26, 2021 @08:39AM (#61314862)

      Killing too many unarmed black people causing the riots.

      Killing too many people period. I'm not saying everything is fine. Poor people, and black especially, are doing it tough in the US.
      But this idea that police shooting is a direct result of racism? You can look at the data, helpfully gathered on wikipedia.
      For one thing the proportion of people shot who are black is less than might be expected from other stats.
      People in black communities are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. They have higher policing, they call police more.
      Blacks are far more likely to be involved in confrontations with police. Maybe 50% of total violent crime. Yet less than a quarter of those killed by police are black.

      But here is what I find interesting: only a tiny proportion of police shootings are controversial. In most cases, the deceased was armed and directly threatening the life of another person. Take away the controversial cases, and the rate of police shootings in the US is still far, far higher than any other developed country.
      Black, white, or whatever. Even if police never made a mistake, and always followed procedure, the rate would still be sky-high. The real problem goes deep in American society, and is not as simple as race, or police training. I'm sure there are many factors, but in comparing the US to other countries, one factor stands out starkly: handguns. Police are scared, and rightly so. You can probably think of other things too.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:

        You are making very good points, and I think all reasonable people agree that the problem with policing in the US goes far beyond race, but what you might be missing is that what BLM protestors are actually asking for is exactly what you also seem to be asking for: that policing in general changes. This includes things like improving deescalation training for cops, but also the idea of moving funding away from a militarized police force towards different interventions, such as better mental health care, so

        • Re:

          A big problem is that most police departments preferentially hire veterans with combat experience. Sure, they give them a couple of afternoon sessions in deescalation training, but under stress the four or more years that they were trained to meet resistance with overwhelming violence will win out.

          • Do you have evidence to support that claim? There's at least one famous case [theguardian.com] where a (white) military veteran who became a police officer was wrongfully fired because he didn't shoot a suspected-suicidal person with a gun during a standoff, because he didn't think the civilian with a gun was a threat to anyone else. Longer writeup [propublica.org] if you want more of the story. He credited his military training with helping him assess that the armed man -- whose gun had no bullets -- was not acting like a threat. Two more-experienced police officers shot the man to death within seconds of arriving on the scene.

        • Re:

          "what you might be missing is that what BLM protestors are actually asking for is exactly what you also seem to be asking for: that policing in general changes"
          
          And yet angrily oppose changing the movement slogan to the more inclusive term "All" from the race driven "Black" or even just a shift to "Lives Matter" or "Civilian Lives Matter." As soon as you apply the lens of race you've made the issue racist and you'll seek racist solutions.
          
          That is why you now see black mobs surrounding court houses indicating

          • Re:

            Why is this a problem?

            There is no "Only" in the phrase "Black Lives Matter". There is no "More" in the phrase "Black Lives Matter". If you think there is, it is you adding it.

            If all lives actually mattered to you, then black lives would matter to you.

            Statistics like black men are twice as likely to be killed by police than everyone else? How is that "skewing"? (And if you're going to follow the usual script and talk about total numbers of deaths, you need to learn the importance of per-capita statistics

      • by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Monday April 26, 2021 @09:46AM (#61315146)

        > Police are scared
        Then they should quit their job - it's not even in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country (I think it was hovering around #30 last I checked). Roofers and delivery drivers, among many other jobs, are all at much greater risk of dying on the job than cops are.

        • Re:

          The last I looked, if you removed automobile accidents (mostly caused because they drive like assholes) they were number 28. If you left accidents in they were number 17 or 19 depending on the survey.

      • • Re: Blacks are *not* more likely to commit crime

          He died in custody, after saying he can't breath, with onlookers saying he's not breathing, begging the officer to check for breathing or take a pulse.

          Can someone have a heart attack while you take them into custody, sure, shit happens, drugs stress acts of god. Can you sit on them as it happens, sure... shit happens? I mean you were distracted or something, right? Can you be told by concerned citizens that the person is dying, and do nothing as they slowly die from an "unrelated medical condition"? Tha

          • I'm painfully aware that George Floyd was murdered. My point is that the report made it sound like a medical condition caused him to die, and in the absence of video evidence recorded the murder would have been swept under the rug.
            
            The phrase is "We write the reports". I was made aware of it by YouTuber Beau Of The Fifth Column. Until then I didn't pay the police report any mind. Finding out what's written in it vs what actually happened was chilling. It makes me wonder how many reports like that are out there...

    • The police have known since the 1970s that the best way to change a peaceful demonstration into a riot is to meet it with disproportionate force, second-most efficient is to remove the leadership so the protest turns into an uncontrolled mob.. They've known this for almost half a century, and it's in their training materials for every management position in policing, every SWAT team, every riot squad. Even the Israeli mercenaries that are training some of these departments know it. So what happened? In the 3% of protests which turned violent the police 1) arrested all the leaders they could put their hands on, and 2) met the previously peaceful protest with chemical weapons and rubber bullets.

      Mission Accomplished! Now they can paint the entire movement with the same broad brush.

      • Re:

        And out come the conspiracy theorists. Apparently the left isn't satisfied publishing books saying jews are "the face of capital" and claiming the holocaust is part of a white supremacist plot, they now need to blame a secret jewish conspiracy for why BLM riots caused two billion dollars in damages and killed 40-50 innocent people in just a few months. [arcdigital.media]

    • • Re:

        George Soros.
        You got yours from Fox, so lets call it even and let reality decide instead...

        Centuries of racial injustice vs losing a free and fair election.
        One group of people would seem to have a lot more reason to protest. Do they not?

      • Re:

        Over the course of their lives, 1 in 1000 black men will be killed by the police. The average is about 1 in 2000,half as much.
        
        But I think you're missing the bigger picture here. Sure, the danger to black men is "only" twice the average. But police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the US, whereas for most other democratic countries, it's not even a statistical error. So the problem here is that the police is inordinately dangerous to *everybody*. That's the problem BLM protestors are t

        • Re:

          Hmmm lets check that.
          
          Okay, so not a primary source and an obvious anti-gun bias but they provide sources and there is nothing like using the phacked stacks from the same political bias on a different issue. Young adult deaths below. Death by cop doesn't even make the list and 1 in 1000 means you have a 99.9% of wasting your time EVER having a single moment of worry over this issue vs 99.98%.1 in 2000. Of course those 1 in 1000 vs 1 in 2000 numbers are sourced from you.
          
          https://www.verywellhealth.com/top-caus

          • Re:

            About twice as likely, actually, making you off by 3 orders of magnitude.
            1/1000 may seem small, but it's really not.
            It should be more like 1/1,000,000.
            
            Other than that, you're dead on that death-by-cop-with-a-small-dick isn't a leading cause of death. But it's still *way* too fucking high.

        • If only BLM wasn't a racist terrorist group....

          Then you comment would make sense. Case in point. Days after the brookly center incidient, a cop killed a guy in Burnsville, MN. BLM was all setup to march and protest and do their "peaceful thing" until. it was report he was white!

• by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Monday April 26, 2021 @07:58AM (#61314710)

  Nobody wants democracy. If they did, there would be no electoral college, and the side who lost the popular vote would shake the other side's hand and say: "good game". There would be no jerrymandering and no voter suppression. I can't even imagine an America where people honestly cared about democracy.
  
  Americans just want their side to win at any cost and fuck democracy, let's be honest with ourselves please.

  • the side who lost the popular vote would shake the other side's hand and say: "good game". There would be no jerrymandering and no voter suppression.

    Agreed. Most people are interested only in their team winning, even if the team doesn't do what they want. This is why George Washington warned us not to form political parties.

    Nobody wants democracy. If they did, there would be no electoral college.

    Democracy != popular vote. Popular vote is just one way, and not necessarily the best. Many nations choose their highest office by a proxy vote by their representatives, or by coalition. Heck: the ancient Greeks drew lots for some offices! The US electoral college avoids one problem with direct election of the president: unequal geographic representation. Since the US has uneven population distribution, a direct election would mean rural areas have almost no say in the election. By giving every state at least 3 votes, regardless of population, it means those states have some say in the election and incentivizes candidates to pay attention to the issues there.

    • Sorry but this is nonsense. EC incentivizes pandering to swing states and nothing else. It needs to DIAF. Biden will give DC statehood, then PR, and then when EC favors D's, watch R's change their tune about the electoral college in a fucking heartbeat.

      • Re:

        And the D's will change theirs. They'll abandon the Interstate Compact in a flash if it means forcing them to elect an R.

        OP was correct though. The idiots at the capital should have headed to the local mall.

      • Re:

        I really don't understand people who rail against the EC but completely ignore how the structure of the Senate is a much bigger concentration of power irrespective of population.
        
        Both are fine and those whining just want their particular outcome. As soon as they lose the next election, or their Green Party candidate still only gets a blip on the radar, they would blame something else.

        • Re:

          Everyone knows the Senate is a concentration of power. That is desirable. What is not desirable is that the Senate is lopsided. The cap on the number of senators and the means of assigning senate seats to states, when assembled, result in a deliberately lopsided lack of representation for progressive states.

      • • I'll make you a deal, If you can successfully explain why we need 2 Dakotas, I will concede that DC and PR statehood are "wiping ass with the constitution".

          • Re:

            And two Carolinas, and two Virginias, the latter of which, which when the constitution was written, were a single Virginia and yet...

          • DC has 700,000 people w/o representation in Congress. If the GOP doesn't want them to be a state they need to be folded into Virginia. But they don't want that since it would turn VI deep blue. They don't want those 700k to have representation because of politics and power.

        • So, you expect that Biden and his Party will wipe their ass on the Constitution,

          We haven't seen that. What we did see is a Republicans make repeated attempts to repudiate the Constitution during the vote counting process, including trampling on state's rights to do so (wait, they say TEXAS should be allowed to direct the Federal government to overthrow GEORGIA's vote counting??)

          rig the system so they can cheat forever,

          We haven't seen that. What we did see is the Republican party working very hard to gerrymander state congressional districts [thefulcrum.us] so that even though more people voted for Democrats, the Republicans have a majority of congressmen. That's rigging the system.

          and then you'll laugh at the GOP when they want to put it right?

          We haven't seen that. What we saw was that the Voting Security Act-- to make it harder to tamper with election results-- was blocked by Republican senators. [thehill.com] That was back when people were worried about the Russians trying to tamper with the election, and the Republican party line was the Russians didn't do anything so there was no need to make elections more secure.

    • It's not so much the electoral college as the votes that come along with it. You could do away with it and still have state-based numbers of votes totalling senators + congresspeople.

      Doing away with that is the goal. And of political expediency, so such changes should not be done quickly because of political passions of the moment, something demagogues are good at.

      Keep in mind this system was the cost of creating the federal government. The many little states did not want the few large ones, and their interests dominating them. Hence the Senate, where all states sit at the round table as equals.

      This "not democracy" claim is a direct attack on what the many little states feared, and just points out with blinking lights why you might not want a few giant states dominating the whole nation.

      Remember, our nation is great because it is free, not because it is a democracy. Democracy is the servant of freedom, not it's boss.

    • Democracy != popular vote. Popular vote is just one way, and not necessarily the best.

      Anything else is watered down democracy.

      If popular vote is not the best way, then the education system has failed, because it SHOULD be the best way.

      The EC was explicitly deliberately created to preserve power for slave states. EXPLICITLY, DELIBERATELY [time.com]. This is literally not open to debate, because we have records.

      Heck: the ancient Greeks drew lots for some offices!

      And just look at how well that worked out for ancient Greece!

      • Re:

        Democracy is four wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch.

        Unlimited democracy is as dangerous to liberty as despotism. A good system of checks and balances, forces in opposition, to dampen that power is a necessary thing.

    • What the Electoral College Actually Does

      That is one (desired) effect of the apportionment of electors. It is by no means the biggest effect of the electoral college.

      It would be interesting if the electoral college did that. But the main effect of the electoral college is to amplify the power of large states that are nearly evenly split between the candidates, not rural states. You simply don't see candidates campaign in Wyoming; nobody cares, it's not a swing state. The "winner take all by state" effect, however, is HUGE. You see candidates

    • popular voteother type of vote

      " Since the US has uneven population distribution, a direct election would mean rural areas have almost no say in the election."
      
      And instead you have a WORST system : rural area which haws so much representation that the majority of the population do not count. The US system is much much worst than any other democracy : instead of the mob rule, you have the minority rule.

    • The US electoral college avoids one problem with direct election of the president: unequal geographic representation.

      Maybe, but that isn't its reason for existence.
      Its reason for existence is to prevent states with limited suffrage from having less say than states with greater suffrage.
      It's a direct graft of the 3/5ths compromise into the Presidential election.
      
      From the architect of the system, himself:
      "The people at large was in his opinion the fittest in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know & vote for some Citizen whose merits had rendered him an object of general attention & esteem. There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections."
      
      In the first several elections, New Hampshire had more voters than Virginia, with 6x the population.
      The South would never sign off on such a system.
      These days where poll taxes are outlawed, and direct voter suppression is outlawed (this was *not* the case in the early US, where you needed to own acreage in order to vote in Southern states) the electoral college does not serve its intended purpose, since its intended purpose is outlawed.
      
      We can argue that it serves a new purpose (the geographical one) but it was never its intended purpose.

    • • Re:

        Yeah, it was "how do we get the slave states to support the union", and the answer was "give them more influence over the vote than they deserve". Now we have to fix the fix.

  • Re:

    Your echo chamber informs you this is evil. Yet you want tiny DC to be a state to have two more senators. Which, of course, is why the Republicans don't.

    If you truly cared about representation, you'd give the remaining half-diamond back to Maryland, the way the other half was a long time ago given back to Virginia . Which, by the way, they might want back as it was given to the feds in good faith.

    The conclusion? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Liars and political hacks on both sides.

  • Lots want Democracy

    it's not so easy to get. Oligarchs have a lot of money and power, and they create systems to maintain and grow that money and power at our expense. You know, like the Electoral College (and the Senate while I'm at it, go look into why we have so few people in states like Montana and why we have 2 Dakotas).
    
    This isn't about one side winning or losing, this is about very, very wealthy and powerful people using that wealth and power to create a system that lets them claim 50%+ of all wealth globally.
    
    Thi

  • No matter what country it's in, people seem to think the popular vote should just be it.

    We have the issues in Canada. People wonder why certain smaller provinces have certain number of seats and this or that.

    You have to go back to the founding of the country. Believe it or not, in Canada our last province, Newfoundland only joined Canada in like 1949.

    Why would a small state/province decide to join a union if they would be basically ignored on any issues. Due to their smaller population, their votes would be meaningless. They wouldn't. No doubt when the United States was being formed, the smaller states wouldn't have joined either.

    So when the electoral process was being formed, they included certain guarantees in an attempt to make sure the smaller areas have some say.

    You can't just roll it all back now and say, sorry, now that we suckered you in, we're going to remove the protections so only the popular vote matters, which means you don't matter. Not to mention that leaving a country/union is often highly discouraged. Canada is a bit more friendlier to it. As recently as the 1990s Quebec was on the cusp of leaving canada. They felt out of place being French and wanted to do their own thing. Again... similar to just being smaller, Canada made quite a few guarantees to Quebec to get them into Canada. We can't just take it all back now.

    Just as another example. Quebec has a fair amount of leeway to protect it's French language/culture that just wouldn't fly in other provinces and would probably violate rights and be sued out of existence.

    But like I said, Quebec probably would have never joined English Canada without these guarantees. So I think it's fair that they keep them.

    The basic point is, the popular vote is not more DEMOCRATIC. Smaller states/provinces would not have joined to begin with and you can think of the electoral college or other guarantees as democracy on region.

  • Nobody wants democracy.

    No. What you wrote supports the statement some people don't want democracy. Not no people.

    If they did, there would be no electoral college,

    Not quite. I don't like the electoral college (more particularly, I don't like the winner-take-all-by-state counting of delegates to the electoral college), but it is democracy. It happens to be democracy with a weird weighing factor.

    But when you say "nobody"-- not true. Many people don't like the electoral college and want to change it. It turns out that changing the constitution was (deliberately) made to be very difficult. The fact that it hasn't changed doesn't mean that nobody wants to change it, it means that nobody had the sufficient supermajority to do so.

    and the side who lost the popular vote would shake the other side's hand and say: "good game".

    Agreed. Ronald Reagan's inaugural speech [yale.edu] is to the point, where he starts out by praising Jimmy Carter for doing exactly this.

    There would be no jerrymandering and no voter suppression.

    Many people want that.

    I can't even imagine an America where people honestly cared about democracy.

    You lack imagination, ok.,

    Americans just want their side to win at any cost and fuck democracy, let's be honest with ourselves please.

    If you said "some Americans" I would agree with you.

    • • Learn to scroll [Re:Some, not all]

        Are you aware the slashdot has a scroll up feature so you can see the exact words that a comment is responding to? And their context?

        Oh, wait, you're an anonymous coward. You barely know how to use a computer.

  • • Re:

      It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that wolf dining habits are a good model for national policy.

• Re:

  Oh, what a load of propo bullshit.

• Re:

  These Social Media companies have been promising to do better for years now, yet their sites are use to pushed an increasingly more radical agenda to people.

  Sometimes a companies says "I am sorry" then they will by their own free will push hard to make sure they fix the problems. I would like to point out Volkswagen with its deaslegate, VW did more than just what the punishment had them do, they used it as an opportunity to greatly change their business model, towards a greater push towards all electric.

• Re: (Score:4, Insightful)

  by srichard25 ( 221590 ) on Monday April 26, 2021 @10:51AM (#61315430)

  People are genuinely much more worried about right-wing insurrection than about left-wing civil rights protests because the worst-case outcome for latter is inaction, whereas the worst-case outcome for the former is the end of democracy.

  Is this sarcasm? The left-wing "mostly peaceful" protests of the last year resulted in millions of dollars of damage to businesses (many of them minority owned). Several business owners had their entire livelihood destroyed. The left burned down an entire police station! The left set fire to a building and tried to keep people locked inside it. Is what happened in the Chaz autonomous area what you consider Democracy? Are burning down and looting businesses Democracy?

  Go ask these people what they consider to be the worst case scenario of left-wing civil rights "protests":
  https://www.foxnews.com/us/deadly-unrest-people-have-died-amid-george-floyd-protests-across-us
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/looting-is-second-blow-for-reeling-businesses-especially-in-minority-neighborhoods-11591214595

  Remind us, how many innocent people were killed during the Jan 6th riot? How many buildings were burned down?

• Re:

  Explain to me how burning down a thousand buildings in minneapolis ALONE is a "civil rights protest". Or killing innocent people for protecting their homes, families, and businesses. How was a bunch of white child raping pedophiles and other violent felons roaming the streets burning down and looting businesses a "civil rights" protest?

  How are heavily armed militants seizing control of an entire downtown area, seceeding from the US, and murdering a half dozen people for disobeying their proclamations a "civ

• • Re:

    How is left-wing anti-American?
    Does America still stand for killing unarmed innocent black people? I know your country was founded on genocide and slavery. But that's meant to be in the past isn't it?
    Or is the right really trying to bring those back, now that they lost a free and fair democratic election?

    • • Re:

        I don't actually think you fundamentally disagree with BLM protestors, because it seems to me that whether you frame this as a problem of race, or a problem of class, is a minor matter of what you prefer to focus on, because both play an important role, and the two are interconnected. In the end, the outcome is the same: government force is used to harm people who are already disadvantaged, and the solution is most likely to change how government force is applied (e.g. to move funding from militarized polic

• • Re:

    Sure, historically, left-wing extremism (e.g. the Rote Armee Fraktion), have been a major issue. RIght now, though, the major issue are right-wing extremists. As soon as we invent a time machine and bring all of the left-wing socialist terrorists into this year (as if we didn't have enough issues already), we can rediscuss what we need to focus on. But until this happens, I would say that we're better of focusing on the threats that are active right now, e.g. right-wing militia members joining police forces

  • Well, that may be what CNN wants you to believe, but it's complete and total bullshit. We had months of

    Maybe a week or two of

    black-clad anarchists tearing down our history

    What, you mean pulling down statues of Confederate leaders? That's not "tearing down history," that is tearing down a deliberate lie that the Confederacy was a noble endeavor, not a war started by slaveholders who were terrified that the people they held as property might get their freedom.

    and attempting to dismantle the democratic foundations of the nation

    I can't recall any "black clad activists" trying to dismantle democracy. I'm not even sure what you're referring to. I do remember seeing a number of left-wing voter-registration drives, but that would be trying to strengthen the "democratic foundations of the nation," not dismantle them.

    , and one day where people resisted what they believed to be a usurpation of the democratic process.

    The constitution is very clear on how the presidential electoral votes are counted. The insurrectionists tried to stop that process. That is literally "attempting to dismantle the democratic foundations of the nation".