mopgoblin on 21/2/2021 at 22:15

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Heartening to see nbohr squeezing every last drop of mileage out of that badweird-takes-are-free-speech thing.



I definitely agree that it's a question of decorum, but I find it a little hard to understand the thinking (in those circles) behind it not being okay to celebrate someone's death when he would have celebrated yours, or when he has celebrated the deaths of others like you. If there are no gay people in those circles, and it's expected or intended that there aren't, then that's a bit of a red flag in itself.


Thinks or believes, sure. But once you have words, you can also harm or kill. One person saying hateful things is usually pretty impotent, but when they've got a major radio show or half a million followers online they can do some real damage, because open expressions of bigotry embolden other bigots to act as well as speak. When you have thousands of people without big platforms doing it you can get much the same effect. I don't know if legislation is always the answer to that (though I definitely think it is for some of the worst cases) but this stuff does harm people in vulnerable minority groups - people without the resources, platforms, and numbers to counter with their own speech on that scale - and there needs to be something done to counter that harm.

Often the situation is not that the majority disapproves of hateful speech; the majority are usually indifferent to the harm, and sometimes even contributing to the problem on some level themselves. The issue is that punching down always hits a lot harder than punching up, and when you're also a numerical minority that can mean a lot of punches (both figuratively and literally), as well as structural discrimination and even being targeted by abusive legislation.

Nameless Voice on 21/2/2021 at 22:49

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And what it boils down to for me is influence and harmfulness.
It's not supposed to be about what "the majority" thinks, but rather how likely the words are to cause actual harm to others.

If someone has the opinion that "all blacks are smelly and dumb", and they express that opinion, well then people are probably going to disagree with them and not want to associate with them, but it's still fairly harmless in the grand scheme of things.

But, if someone has the opinion that "all blacks should be lynched", and has the level of influence that their opinion carries weight with others, so that there's a real risk of harm to black people because of that opinion, then the rights of all the people likely to be harmed should always come before the one person's right to freely express their opinion.


So, the above is me taking specifically about hate speech legislation - e.g. that it should be illegal to stir up violence and hatred. I believe it should be (and am glad that they are soon going to bringing in some legislation to this effect in my own country), but I know a lot of others would disagree.


Meanwhile, the "court of public opinion" is an entirely different issue, and there really isn't any argument to be made there.
If one person has the right to freely express their opinion, then everyone else must also have the right to freely express their opinions that they don't want to support that first person. Either both people have the right to freely expressing themselves, or neither does. There's no middle ground there.

Also... I don't think anyone is ever truly free to express any opinion that they might have.
If you think your boss is hideously ugly and has a really annoying voice, then that's your opinion, but you're certainly not going to tell him that, or publicly share that opinion with the world.
Not technically illegal, but you wouldn't expect to be able to do it without repercussions. The same should be true of offensive-but-not-technically-illegal opinions in other areas, such as bigotry. Even if you freely have the right to say something, you don't have the right to decide how other people should react to what you said.

Tocky on 22/2/2021 at 03:12

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I have no idea if a shred of any of the crazy stuff you posted is remotely true but if you think black folks can't figure out who has been trying to gerrymander them out of a voice and make it more difficult for them to vote then you are nuts. The reason they vote Democrat is because that is the party who isn't constantly trying to keep them down. You seem to want to work backward and put the results before the causation. Of course blacks can figure out who has their interests more covered. They don't have to push that non-Democrats are racist. They have eyes and ears. They can add two and tow and get four.

Every time they protest that cops shoot them more it is Republicans who come up with all lives matter and blue lives matter and try to get the cop off. Do you really expect them to vote Republican after you constantly try to make them the bad guy in every situation? And why do you do that? They know. You however seem to jump through all sorts of hoops to justify that behavior and blame it on them. Look at you smearing BLM right now. You don't think they can figure that out? Of course they vote blue. They know the Tiki torch carrying Proud Boys and Promise Keepers and Boogaloo Boys are all Republican. YOU can't figure that out? Seriously? Nobody has to SAY Republicans have the most racists. Nobody is working to "push the Act Blue narrative" that non-Democrats are racist. They have these things called brains and can figure that out by what Republicans DO.

june gloom on 22/2/2021 at 06:13

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Al_B is Scottish. SubJeff lives in England. Who are you?

Cipheron on 22/2/2021 at 06:34

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Another important fact here is that ActBlue isn't even a "PAC", it's a credit-card processing organization, which handles the details of donors for you.

Basically it's *exactly* like Patreon but for political organizations. ActBlue charges a transaction fee of 3.95%, but in perspective, Patreon charges 5%.

So why would they have an ActBlue account? Because it's *cheaper than Patreon*, not because they're "funneling money" anywhere. So they probably have both a Patreon and an ActBlue, but they'd direct you to ActBlue by preference since ActBlue doesn't take such a big chunk of the cash.

The reason it doesn't fund Republicans is that Republicans have their own, identical, payment-processor called "WinRed", which again is the same deal, a Patreon-style website but specifically for donating to conservative fund raisers.

(https://winred.com/)

BTW i lied when I said "identical". While ActBlue was set up as a non-profit organization, Republicans are never ones to miss a way to grift their followers of a buck, so when they made WinRed to compete with ActBlue, they made sure to register it as a for-profit corporation.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRed)

They also don't disclose their finances:



Additionally, since ActBlue is an literal non-profit they by definition don't have profits to even send to the DNC, even out of their 3.95% service fee. WinRed on the other hand, is a fully for-profit actually owned by the RNC apparently.

And they've been bullying rival conservative payment processors out of business:



Thanks for drawing my attention to this. The Republican version of ActBlue sounds like it's run by mafia bosses compared to the Democrat version.

While there are no plausible links between ActBlue and the DNC, their own actions show how this is not true of WinRed and the RNC, who have been actively trying to destroy OTHER conservative donation platforms, and demanding that all conservative donations be funneled through their proprietary for-profit payment processor.

EDIT, probably just the tip of the iceberg:

(https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/11/01/impeachment-open-thread-subtle-as-a-rock-through-a-window/)



(https://americanindependent.com/gop-chairwoman-ronna-mcdaniel-corruption/)

Quote:

Ronna McDaniel is facing rumors that she and other RNC officials are poised to personally benefit from a new fundraising platform.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel reportedly "choked up" as she faced internal party accusations of corruption surrounding the process to choose the party's online donor platform, according to Politico. The outlet reported on Wednesday that McDaniel "grew visibly emotional," according to eyewitnesses, when meeting with senior party officials over the issue.

(https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/trump-winred-kushner_n_5d27bcf8e4b0060b11e9cbf5?ri18n=true)

Quote:

President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have chosen a fundraising system that profits a former White House staffer and a company invested in by Jared Kushner's brother ― passing over a cheaper platform that already has contracts with thousands of GOP candidates and committees.

“I am pleased to announce the launch of (http://tmagac.winred.com). This new platform will allow my campaign and other Republicans to compete with the Democrats money machine,” Trump announced via Twitter late last month. “This has been a priority of mine and I'm pleased to share that it is up and running!”

Oh right, all makes sense now. There's a family member of Trump involved. Trump doesn't give the first shit about literally anything unless there's some personal profit for himself in it, it makes sense that if he's adamant that people use the Winred platform there **had** to be some direct money funnel into his pocket involved, and explains why they're using mafia tactics to strong-arm other Republicans to exclusively use this over-priced platform vs the alternatives. It took a while to find the above, but the rest just tumbles out now:

(https://news.yahoo.com/concerns-mount-over-jared-kushners-role-in-gop-money-machine-090000260.html)

Quote:

WINRED is the proposed small-dollar “payment processor” that the Republican National Committee and the campaign of President Trump hope to spread across the universe of Republican campaigns to generate enough money to keep up with the Democrats' wildly successful small-dollar fundraising machine, ActBlue.
...
Trump tasked Kushner with the job, according to Republicans familiar with the effort who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the White House.
...
The WINRED machine represents the merger of the GOP's valuable collection of voter data, the Data Trust, and Revv, an online payment processor run using Stripe. From the start, Revv had a leg up because Trump uses it for his online fundraising. But other consultants urged the WINRED team to adopt a more widely used platform called Anedot, which they argued would be easier and cheaper.
...
Among concerns cited by some Republican consultants contacted by Yahoo News, was that Jared Kushner's younger brother, would benefit via his investment in the technology company underlying WINRED, Stripe. Kushner's firm, Thrive Capital, invested $30 million in Stripe in 2014 and made a second investment in Stripe, for an unstated amount, in September 2018.

EDIT: sorry this got edited so much. At first I assumed WinRed was just the GOP version of ActBlue, but as I delved into it, I smelt the shit smell and had to work out where the stench was coming from. Pure greed it turns out.