[unholiness]

> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no

Right. Even the Post Office is not required to deliver pipe bombs.

The issue is that right now, that's not the standard. Amazon /hasn't/ taken down sites in the name of political censorship, but it /could/. The implications of that are important, and they're why I find it hard to be satisfied with justifications like "Amazon is a private company, they can do what they want".

[tsm_sf]

This is what everyone decided they wanted twenty years ago. Loss of public space was a huge topic of conversation, and the end consensus (IMHO) was that the internet itself was the public space and everyone was free to make something.

From that perspective this looks like a conversation about ease of access rather than free speech. Amazon's the only way to build something on Amazon, but nothing's stopping me from creating something myself.

I don't see being able to buy eyeballs on the cheap as a fundamental right. If you care enough, build it. If others care, they'll come.

[epistasis]

Right now, the US military could side with Trump, launch a fascist coup, start rounding up enemy politicians for assassination, and eliminate any freedom at all for anybody who doesn't who enough MAGA support publicly. They haven't, but they could, and it's happened frequently enough in other countries.

Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.

So my question is, why the F are we even talking about Amazon? Because it's just a BS distraction from the elephant in the room.

It's time to stop engaging with sophistry and fight back the fascists that are trying to take away all our freedoms. And this big fear of big tech is exactly the type of distraction that lets fascism flourish enough to gain a stronghold.

[happythomist]

> Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.

Politically motivated refusal of service by Amazon or other Silicon Valley firms is at least an order of magnitude more likely than any coup by the US military, much less a Trumpist one.

[epistasis]

Preposterous, the ranks of Q anon and MAGA are filled with ex-military and law enforcement. They flashed their badges at the Capitol police force! We are that close!

Meanwhile, this political shutdown is pure theory, a straw man floated to distract us from the violence that seethes on the platforms used to organize a fascist overthrow of the government.

But even if we take your probability assessment, the damage times the probability places a violent military coup as a HUGE problem compared to Amazon stopping business with someone.

[jessaustin]

Wow, maybe all that "defund the police" stuff was right?

[lovecg]

I’m curious what was your estimate of the likelihood of what happened last Wednesday before it happened? Were your priors updated in any way since then?

[NateEag]

I can't speak for OP, but long before the election, I was expecting violence around the US if Trump lost.

I didn't predict an attack on the Capitol, but it didn't really surprise me, either.

I speak as a conservative who is aggressively anti-Trump but believes many of his voters would not condone what happened at the Capitol.

[tstrimple]

Many may not support it, but nearly half do including many elected Republican politicians. This isn't a fringe Trump supporter issue, but a major issue within the Republican party and with American conservatism in general. Maybe the perception of conservatives being censored is just a reflection of the reality that they support using violence to obtain their goals at much, much higher rates than liberals do and are just suffering the consequences of their actions?

https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/

[NateEag]

Thanks for the numbers. Good to see some evidence my hunch was right - I'd say 43% of the sample is "many".

YouGov speculates in their presentation of the data they gathered that perhaps more Republicans approved because they saw the actions as basically peaceful:

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

That belief strikes me as crazy, but if they genuinely didn't think there was violence going on, hard to read it as being okay with violence.

[happythomist]

That's basically my thinking as well, for what it's worth.

[blitz_skull]

I'm pretty sure violent rhetoric is an entire ocean apart from mailing literal bombs..

Or are we still on that "words are violence" thing? I can't keep up.