Judge Blocks US Officials From Tech Contacts in First Amendment … – Slashdot

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Pizzagate, Jewish space lasers, election denialism, threats of violence, doxing, conspiracy to overthrow the government, … alll a_OK now
The Republican party has given up even pretending to care. On the side of tax dodgers, on the side of violent fascists, …
Eventually Republicans do end up hoisting themselves by their own petards over these sort of issues. Citizens United is pretty much the basis of Disney’s case against the state of Florida. Some LGBTQ+ owned businesses are considering the recent SCOTUS decision as permission to refuse service to right-wingers.
Oh yes, also the rights of Christians to abstain from doing business to customers now means anyone of any religion can refuse to do business. Given that many Christians fervently argue that atheism is a religion, that applies here too. Hypocrisy comes back to bite people in their own ass.
And yes, it is hypocrisy. When have you heard anyone say “I refuse to make you a wedding cake because I saw you look at another woman with lust in your heart”? Or “I refuse to do your taxes because I saw you visit a cas

Discussion of race in class room, or LGBTQ in colleges, or information about birth control, abortions…. nah, not covered by free speech. Pizzagate, Jewish space lasers, election denialism, threats of violence, doxing, conspiracy to overthrow the government, … alll a_OK now
The Republican party has given up even pretending to care. On the side of tax dodgers, on the side of violent fascists, …
They care — about the wrong things. And it’s not just the classroom: It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama [nytimes.com]

As lawmakers and parents seek to restrict what is taught in classrooms, many teachers are seeing efforts to limit what works they can stage.
A: You did not read the filings, or the judge’s order.
or
B: You did, and you know that what you posted was crap, but you’re hoping other people did not read the actual documents and will be mislead by your drivel.
NOBODY in this case alleges ANYBODY in government colluded with Big Tech to suppress communications about race, LGBTQ, birth control, abortions, etc. Your entire 1st paragraph is delusional. The Republican party is NOT the party refusing to face the issue of government-BigTech collusion to control information. Tax dodgers? You mean like hunter biden writing-off drugs and prostitues as deductions on his taxes?
Incidentally, “fascists” are the guys who unite government power with corporate power and then control communications for the manipulation of the masses…
Just thought you might want to learn about the real thing instead of the cartoon version you apparently have in mind.

The Republican party is NOT the party refusing to face the issue of government-BigTech collusion to control information.
The Republican party is the party refusing to face the facts [theguardian.com].

No, by discussions it will say how slavery was wrong, how apartheid was wrong, how racism is wrong.
Yes, about that… [youtube.com]

Yes, about that… [youtube.com]
Yeah, I already knew cartoon kids went to cartoon schools that look like that from watching South Park. How about some real footage of actual students in an actual class in the real world? [youtube.com] Swap out the flat screen TV for an overhead transparency projector and not much has changed since I went to school decades ago.
It usually boils down to “what will get me the most votes?” I can guarantee you these attorney generals would NOT have sued if Trump did the same thing and they’d argue vigorously that there was no basis to sue. But put a Democrat or (real) Republican in the driver’s seat and they’d sue if it got them a few more votes.
I honestly don’t see why they’re opposed to this, except or some twisted theology that the federal government is allowed to do literally nothing (especially if one of their guys isn’t in char
this is exactly what wokeness is about. Hatred of white people and heterosexual men
That statement is a good example of the hostile media effect [wikipedia.org] which is “the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists’ point of view. Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them.”
Unless you know of a reliable, politically neutral source for your cla

And so they should vote correctly for the party that will maximize racist and sexist policies against heterosexual men and white peoples.
Haven’t you ever heard the expression “Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It’s not pie.”?
To misquote Animal Farm: some rights are more equal than others.

It can. If I don’t get a job or a spot in college because I’m the wrong color,
Indeed this is historically a major issue with non-whites in the country, lasting even to today. Oh wait, you honestly believe that white men are losing out on jobs because of their race? Scuse me while I laugh at the naivete.

It can. If I don’t get a job or a spot in college because I’m the wrong color, then yes, my life, Liberty, and pursuit of happiness has been negatively impacted by your increasing the “rights” of someone else.
Addressing education/job/housing discrimination is a tough one, because we can’t just wave a magic wand to erase prejudice. It’s always going to require some sort of compromise, where neither side is going to be fully pleased with the outcome.
However, I was mostly referring to issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, where simply existing is considered an affront by the American right-wing.
>What are you talking about, woke us about recognizing that differences exist and respecting others.
I’m not sure the woke are really very famous for respecting others.
> could undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
  Benito Mussolini
—
Can you handle the truth about the west: https://www.youtube.com/watch?… [youtube.com]
What do you mean, against fascism? It is literally one of the pillars of one political party’s platform.
And just so everyone’s on the same page [imgur.com] as to what fascism is about. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Yes, that’s the Democrats.

> What do you mean, against fascism? It is literally one of the pillars of one political party’s platform.
I think we’re both acknowledging the democrats are fascist. The question is are we going to stop it. 🙂
Yes, yes. It’s the Democrats who are fascists. It’s the Democrats who are against human rights, who want religion and government intertwined, who want to protect corporations, who want to do away with labor unions and employee rights, who are against intellectuals. Yup, certainly sounds like Democrats. Can’t think of any other party who embraces the virtues of fascism like Democrats do.
Ruling on injunction https://www.washingtonpost.com… [washingtonpost.com] (just the document, not paywalled).
“…states [wikipedia.org] that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.”
In other words, unregulated speech deteriorates into censorship just as surely as unregulated markets devolve into monopolies.
Trevor Noah on free speech / White House Correspondents Dinner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?… [youtube.com]
Even rational leftists understand

In other words, unregulated speech deteriorates into censorship just as surely as unregulated markets devolve into monopolies.
This is highly misleading, as implying that unregulated speech causes censorship to occur is simply not true. The censorship occurs only as a consequence of lack of explicit protections for unregulated (as in free) speech.

In other words, unregulated speech deteriorates into censorship just as surely as unregulated markets devolve into monopolies.
We’ve had the internet and its totally unregulated speech for several decades now. The internet is no less censored than before, despite every country’s government trying to censor it with laws and regulations. While those can keep a few major social media sites from promoting undesirable content, it’s still incredibly easy to escape that kind of censorship.
Not a good reason to tolerate criminal activity by the government.
Every tyrant claims to be limiting speech for safety and the general welfare. Every damned on of them.
Free speech is messy, and uncomfortable, it can make people very unhappy.
The alternative is a gradual slide into totalitarianism, and death camps, or violent uprisings.
Every tyrant claims to be limiting speech for safety and the general welfare.
And Hitler loved to paint; therefore, painting is bad, right? That’s your argument.
Free speech is messy, and uncomfortable, it can make people very unhappy.
Tell that to the conservative states who are doing all they can to ban books about racism and sexual identity! [theguardian.com]
The alternative is a gradual slide into totalitarianism, and death camps, or violent uprisings.
Wow, the “right not to tolerate the intolerant” [wikipedia.org] leads to all that? Are
People need to be allowed to read all sorts of bullshit and especially believe it. First, a lot more morons die. Which is good for the overall gene pool. Second, with more people sick and dying, lockdowns get to last longer, which means there is no talk about RTO and we can stay in the comfort of our home office.
I demand that people are allowed to die for my comfort!
I think it’s less that paranoids survive, it’s more that people who can gauge information for credibility do. If you’re constantly paranoid and don’t believe anyone, you will eventually die in a burning house when someone tells you to go outside and you don’t believe them this was the better choice because you fear they want to kill you.

I think it’s less that paranoids survive, it’s more that people who can gauge information for credibility do.
I think it is hubris to assume that one’s ability to establish credibility of information is above average. Even if you are trained as an analyst or investigator, your conclusions are only as good as your access to unfiltered information. Even then it takes inordinate effort, hundreds of hours of research, to independently establish an event or a fact to be true. In many cases, where esoteric subject matter expertise is required, it is simply not possible to for unfolding events. For these reasons, ‘truth’

People need to be allowed to read all sorts of bullshit and especially believe it. First, a lot more morons die.
From where I sit, it seems like most of them survived and moved to Florida.
No vaccine is side effect free. That’s why I wouldn’t exactly want to have a malaria vaccine while going on a trip to Norway. But with the chance in climate, this might change.
The first smallpox vaccine had horrible side effects, up to and including a nontrivial chance to actually die of it. Compared to the disease, though, it was still the better option.
Now, we’ve come a long way since then, and taking the chance with the vaccine was in this case actually statistically sensible. But then again, I wouldn’t
When all the newspapers had a picture of the accretion disk around Sag A* or the SMBH in the center of M87 on their frontpage, nobody doubted the science.
When the newspapers headlined how LIGO ‘saw’ intermediate mass BH mergers, nobody doubted the science.
Yet when presented with a simple correlation graph of the concentration of CO2 and global temperatures, US politics spoonfed by Big Oil seeds distrust.
When presented with scientific facts about vaccines, US politics seeds distrust.
And that’s accepted by th
The image of the accretion disk, the orbits of material spiraling into the SMBH, the shadow of the SMBH on that disk, those are all actual pixels resolved by the Event Horizon Telescope.
Unless you mean “artist rendering” like infrared pictures are just frequency shifted so we can see them with the very limited spectral range of our eyes, but that doesn’t make it any less a picture.
Just like the x-ray of that broken arm isn’t any artists rendering. It’s a picture already.
This judge needs to be disrobed for impeding the President’s and the government’s freedom to discuss whatever the fuck they want. It’s clear he didn’t even read the first 5 words of the second amendment.
The government doesn’t have ANY rights.
Have you even looked at the constitution?
Where does it say in there anywhere at all that the government has rights? Any rights?
Please enumerate the rights of the government.

The First Amendment is a restriction on the power of government to restrict speech.
Exactly but what you seem to forget is that the court itself is part of the judicial branch of government and so is subject to this same restriction. Thus the court using its governmental powers to restrict free speech in a case where the executive branch of government is accused of using its governmental powers to restrict free speech is definitely ironic.
What government doesn’t get to do (allegedly) is pass laws which conflict with the constitution. It can ask corporations to do stuff, and they can say no. Unless it’s a matter of national security of course, nice big loophole there.
The explosion of social-media platforms has resulted in unique free speech issues— this is especially true in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.
Althoug
> This is the right decision even if it is for dubious reasons.
Half a million Americans died unnecessarily because they were sold COVID disinformation for political gain.
The average person in the US does not have the right culture, education, and critical thinking skills to avoid being strongly affected by right-wing propaganda, even when it’s killing them. You might say, “let them die”, but there are plenty of people they can take with them on the way out.
When people are pushing dangerous proven lies that are killing hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens… isn’t that well over the line where you want to start curbing free speech a bit? Plenty of Western democracies manage to find a line between “whatever the hell you want” and “only government-approved groupthink” and it seems to serve everyone a lot better than where the line is generally drawn in the US.
Sue them, have a authenticated user symbol on each post so people can at least know if they lie they can be prosecuted.

The average person in the US does not have the right culture, education, and critical thinking skills to avoid being strongly affected by right-wing propaganda, even when it’s killing them. You might say, “let them die”, but there are plenty of people they can take with them on the way out.
This maybe so, but I don’t think the statement is any less true of the average congressman. In fact due to selection bias they are just probably better lairs and a greater desire for power.
The whole purpose of free speech is to limit the power of politicians, which they have vastly more than the average person, letting them influence speech behind scenes is unacceptable.

Half a million Americans died unnecessarily because they were sold COVID disinformation for political gain.
Firstly I don’t unde
>Firstly I don’t understand how anyone got that figure
You take the excess death toll during the main phase of the COVID pandemic and compare it to other developed countries that weren’t being run by right-wing populists.
The US lost about twice as many people as it would have if a third of the population hadn’t effectively gone batshit insane.
On the other hand, St.Gritty was born. FAFO.
Not even brave enough to post under a pseudonym. What, afraid your primary account’s reputation would suffer?
You’re pushing more disinformation with your sarcasm.
Your inability (or refusal) to understand probability is just sad. I assume you want to live in a simplistic world because you lack the capacity to understand reality. Reality doesn’t care if you understand it, you still live by its rules… pretending that’s not true is just a temporary delusion that will eventually sort itself out.
The average person in the US does not have the right culture, education, and critical thinking skills to avoid being strongly affected by right-wing propaganda, even when it’s killing them. You might say, “let them die”, but there are plenty of people they can take with them on the way out.
That’s funny to me. I was talking to a Harvard educated economist and a neuroscientist that has a PhD in psycology today; they happen to be husband and wife.
“Solar doesn’t work here.” “EVs are an environmental nightmare.
Hahahah. Bleach and needles ARE available at every pharmacy
The fact that both sides are attacking my comment is good evidence that I got it right

When conspiracy believers are accusing social media of censoring “conservatives” (not the word I would use)
How about “domestic terrorists”?
Yes, lets put people that have problems with proven [substack.com] malfeasance [substack.com] on the terrorist list.
I didn’t realize that Biden fought for segregation 200 years ago or that Robert Byrd lived to be 200+ years old. Funny how the parties switched but Democrats just continued their hijinx.
Now how many other State projects exist only to whip up support for other State-approved GroupThink?
Just mark government policy posts as ads, problem solved!

So you’re in favor of people telling others completely false and wrong information, information which could get them killed.
Personally, I feel the existing framework for dealing with such speech is adequate without the government getting further involved. If someone slanders you, you can sue. If someone posts misinformation, it can be handled by community moderation or by the platform voluntarily (without coercion from Uncle Sam) establishing their own clearly defined acceptable content policies.
If a platform wants to be a hotbed of misinformation and lies that aren’t running afoul of libel/slander laws, as long as that’s the hill the owners of the site wish to die on, that’s their right.
When the argument is that misinformation is harmful, what you’re really saying is that you think the American public is collectively too stupid to think for themselves. Perhaps we should be improving our public education standards so we don’t have a population of easily impressionable sheeple in the first place?
The government has no place deciding what is misinformation or truth. Especially when partisans in the government treat opinions that differ from theirs or inconvenient truths (does not fit the ideological objective) as misinformation. The government has the ability for ‘experts’ to publish guidance to the populace. We also have the press that can investigate and challenge misinformation (if only they’d go back to the concept of showing both sides of a story).
I think the biggest difference here is that s
In favor of all the lies all those government people and social media companies shovelled for YEARS in favor of masks, lockdown, experimental vaccines, and pushing the lie of Trump-Russia collusion, or the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian propaganda.
“So you’re saying…”
Someone is channeling Cathy Newman.

You don’t get to whine that your free speech was being restricted by the government.
Yes you do, you should be able to whine about it, that’s free speech, if you think you should be able to shout fire in a theater, you should be able to state that.

Telling people to take a horse medication instead of a vaccine is not just fake information, it’s a lie at best, fraud and depraved indifference at worst
You or the government should be able to sue, and the a judge and jury should decide, not a back room chat with your person in authority decide what should be published. The difference is on is an open discussion, with right of reply, the other is not.
Suing for slander is not the same as telling someone they couldn’t say something. Freedom to speak isn’t freedom from the consequences of speaking. If one can prove that someone intentionally spread lies about them in order to harm them, then they have a legal case for slander.
Many animal and human medications are the same. But they’re marketed under different names and have different dosages. But, keep looking only at a single side of the story put out to make a single person look bad. There were a lot of unknowns with covid and a lot of experimental treatments (based on known medications with known impacts on certain symptoms). There was also a whole lot of ‘because Trump’ denouncements of nearly everything which is a very dangerous way to react to anything.

Telling people to take a horse medication instead of a vaccine is not just fake information, it’s a lie at best, fraud and depraved indifference at worst. .
While ranting about lies, one might take care to avoid doing so yourself. While Ivermectin did not turn out to be an effective treatment against COVID, calling an antiparasitic drug with established safety record in humans a horse medication is a deliberate lie.
If there were human doctors willing to prescribe it to covid patients, nobody would have resorted to the equestrian supply.

Telling people the most widely human-used anti-parasitic on the planet is “horse medicine” to keep them from considering it *isn’t* dangerous misinformation? The reason that lie was spread is because you can not EUA a drug in the US if there is any valid alternative treatment that *has* been properly tested.
No, telling people medicine formulated for 1500-2000lb livestock animals that’s sold at feed/farm stores “horse paste” is not misinforming them.

I literally stood in my uncle’s feed store and listened to customers tell my aunt they were buying it for themselves before “the gubbmint” stopped them, and some of them had traveled quite a distance because they were slow to take it off their shelves. They honestly thought people were just joking about the whole situation. My cousin actually got arrested for
I don’t know anyone in (a). I know a lot of people in (b) and almost everyone is in camp (c) now anyways.
a) You know Robert F. Kennedy.
b) If you know people in b then they’re anti-vaxxers because there is no such thing as an untested vaccine. EVERY vaccine has been tested [hhs.gov] before the public gets to use it. Nor were the covid vaccines [reuters.com] “experimental”.
c) Non sequitor. Not getting a booster, as I haven’t, is not the same thing as a or b. If you’re not at high risk, a booster isn’t needed. Just like any other

b) If you know people in b then they’re anti-vaxxers because there is no such thing as an untested vaccine.
You are playing semantics game. Everyone understands that means inadequately tested [bmj.com], which points to the same issue – we can’t have the voluntary consent for a treatment [nejm.org] without full disclosure of risks.
> Human trials weren’t just not double blind, they weren’t even single blind; part of the way through they told every test subject which group they were in and switched them to the vaccine.
They admitted it to anyone that would listen.
“Pfizer did not know whether Covid vaccine stopped transmission before rollout”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts… [youtube.com]
“No… we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market. And from that point of view we had to do everything
Sounds like “the context” is that they rushed this.
> The vaccine was not tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market.
And yet the CDC, The president, the media and your doctor lied the entire time.
They’re still lying to you you’re just too much of a narcissist to admit you were duped.

As a young non-fatass, I was never at risk. I guess I never need the vaccine then.
Never at risk? Young healthy people died from COVID. I was talking to an ER nurse and she said watching them die was the worst. Because they are so healthy they’d last over weeks on a ventilator slowly withering away before finally dying. She also talked about dying people begging for the vaccine and having to explain it was too late for it to work.

> c) Non sequitor. Not getting a booster, as I haven’t, is not the same thing as a or b. If you’re not at high risk, a booster isn’t needed. Just like any other vaccine.
Ok, for one, you can’t generalize vaccines like that, and secondly, whether a booster is “needed” is more a question of risk tolerance, but overall, at least the first booster should improve your outcomes regardless.

As a young non-fatass, I was never at risk. I guess I never need the vaccine then.
Most people aren’t quite as healthy or even young as they think they are.
> You’re endangering someones grandma. You’re clogging the hospitals.
That was very true then it is much less now, hence boosters are no longer recommended except for those at high risk.
The people I know, claim to be in group a. They are against this vaccine, but it seems that they became against other vaccines as well. I don’t know how they live with being vaccinated against a bunch of diseases (in the USSR, some vaccines were mandatory and those people are old enough to have reached adulthood in the USSR). The reason they are against the vaccine is because “it’s bad” or “they put chips in it”.
For me it’s this – the Ministry of Health (or whatever the department, like the CDC in the US) d
You don’t need a medical degree to have a valid aversion when they get caught outright lying to you on pretty much every significant claim they made.
d. The agency and doctor are right about some vaccines and not others.
d is the most believable to me.
While I got the vaccine and believe that it is safe, I can see how someone may think that this particular vaccine maybe less safe based solely on the time it took to release it. Also in my eyes silencing doctors that disagree that the vaccine is safe only increases my skepticism of the vaccine.

For me it’s this – the Ministry of Health (or whatever the department, like the CDC in the US) decides if some medicine is safe or not. If I go to a doctor and get a prescription for whatever, I have to trust that the doctor knows what he/she is dong and that the government has certified the medicine correctly.
I suggest you read up on Thalidomide. There are a whole generation of 50 somethings with missing limb parts due to their mother’s blind trust of the medical establishment.

The government should not be censoring speech
How do you feel about Title X speech restrictions?

Gotta protect that free speech when there is a buck to make.
Or a minority to oppress.

Gotta protect that free speech when there is a buck to make.
Or a minority to oppress.
State coercion only applies to white Christians apparently. Would you still feel so smug if a Muslim baker or web designer was forced to create something with a homosexual wedding? Or were you referring instead to the oppression of those pesky over represented East Asians applying to elite schools?
That’s all disinformation, some of it by carefully chosen phrasing presenting the truth in a misleading way, and some of it just simple outright lies.
And you bought it and you’re still proudly parroting it like an idiot after all this time.
Lets reword that for the mentally impaired:
a. The vaccine helped prevent many people from getting infected.
b. Because of a, the vaccine did indeed help prevent people from spreading the disease, AND it ensured that the effects of the disease were greatly reduced. Many people who would have otherwise died were saved by this: the death rate for unvaccinated was between 3.0 to 4.4 times higher that that of vaccinated patients.
c. The vaccine was tested for harmful side effects, and we know the vaccine had almos
You have a bizarre and twisted and frankly utterly wrong view of the US.
Yes we have true freedom of speech. We do not have to ask our government to say things.
What’s wrong with that? You prefer what? 1984? Some other dystopian nightmare of your master’s making?
Taxes: I’ve paid more in taxes in my best years than most people will earn in a life time. Don’t tell me any bullshit about how rich people don’t pay taxes. Knowing I had big money coming in the first time I looked at all sorts of crazy shit inc
Americans are obsessed with the notion of “freedom” above all else.
Republicans are obsessed with the notion of “freedom” above all else.
There: fixed that for you.
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