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At one of his campaign rallies, Republican Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump advocated shutting down parts of the Internet as a response to radicalism:
As the video below shows, Trump told a rally that "We are losing a lot of people to the Internet. We have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening."
"We have to talk to them [about], maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some way."
"Some people will say, 'Freedom of speech, Freedom of speech'," Trump added, before saying "These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people."
[More after the Break]
In two tweets, Trump turned his attention to Jeff Bezos's taxes:
The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.
The @washingtonpost loses money (a deduction) and gives owner @JeffBezos power to screw public on low taxation of @Amazon! Big tax shelter
Finally, a Trump campaign statement released on Monday calls for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on".
Trump is in good company when it comes to clamping down on free speech. In the wake of the San Bernardino attack, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton have hinted at renewing the war against encryption and denying "online space" to ISIS:
In his Oval Office speech on Sunday night about the fight against ISIS, President Obama devoted one line in his speech to the topic. "I will urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice," he said.
Meanwhile, Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, gave a talk at the Brookings Institution where she urged tech companies to deny ISIS "online space," and waved away concerns about First Amendment issues.
"We're going to have to have more support from our friends in the technology world to deny online space. Just as we have to destroy [ISIS's] would-be caliphate, we have to deny them online space," she said.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:23PM
This is an uninformed view. The major two parties have a lock on the system right down to the local levels. In NYC, for example, you have partisan primaries, ie., you have to be a Democrat to vote for Democratic candidates. You have to get something like 1500 signatures of registered voters to get a candidate on the ballot. But in practice you have to get 3x that, or 4500 signatures to be reasonably sure your signature sheets will survive challenges from the lawyers working for rival candidates. The Republican and Democratic party candidates have lawyers on retainer that do that work. Going door-to-door to get those signatures is fucking hard. I've done it. You're not going to get two of your pals together and canvas to get the signatures you need in the short period of time in which signatures can be gathered.
Through their local party political clubs, the two parties can get most of the signatures they need very quickly to get their candidates on the ballot. If they control one housing development in the district in question they can get the signatures they need in a fortnight. So dollars to donuts you won't even be able to get your upstart party on the ballot, much less get anyone to vote for it.
Then there are the challenges of starting a political party. It is very much non-trivial. A couple of them that have been around for decades, like the Greens, have been around for decades and do get on the ballot, but not one single candidate from them has ever been elected to dog catcher, much less something else. When you start a new party, you are mostly going to get kooks coming through the door that want you to champion their little pet peeve as the major issue in your platform. If you do happen to get any "normal" people through the door, they get instantly scared off by the kooks.
Then there are the difficulties of building organizations from the grassroots. Most Americans, the vast majority of Americans, have no idea how to organize. How do you run an event? How do you give the audience fair speaking time? How do you shut down the kooks who invade every event? How do you incorporate your organization? What should you put in bylaws? Et cetera, et cetera. And if key person has an emergency in their day job and can't come to an event, you're fucked and everyone that comes to your event sees you like the Keystone Cops.
So, if you had $50 billion and a couple of decades you could probably replicate the scope and depth of the two entrenched political parties such that you could offer a viable alternative to the Republicans and Democrats.
Do you have $50 billion? Are you willing to wait 20 years?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Troll) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 10 2015, @04:47PM
"Fucking hard" "Non-Trivial" "Difficulties" ...
Newsflash: Making meaningful change IS fucking hard. But it's never gonna happen if you just hand the reins to the Dems/Repubs.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:52PM
DeathMonkey, I'm not saying that change is easy. What I am saying is that expecting change through established channels that have been fully co-opted is foolish. I gave the greater part of my early 20's and early 30's to building an outside movement. I spent 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for most of a decade. I am a polymath myself, but even with that and with help from accomplished professionals, it was very difficult to make progress. We did make some, and that's all to the good, but positing that that is enough against a deeply entrenched structure of corruption is naive.
There is no person in Washington D.C. that wants the American people to actually be represented. Moreover, there is no person serving on any state legislature or sizeable city who does. At best, on your local school board there is someone who wants his or her position to serve others than him or herself. You could opine this if you travelled to any of those places and tried to meet the gaze of anyone there; they will not. No one in those places will look you in the eye, as an honest person would, because they're all scumbags who know they're stealing from your pocket.
As much as Americans lampoon French for going on strike, they're actually much closer to a real democracy than anywhere else. Everytime the elite mean to steal from the French, strikes happen. That is as it should be, constant resistance.
If America were still a real democracy, D.C. would have been stormed and burned to the ground when Snowden revealed the NSA's crimes. If America were still a real democracy, D.C. would have been stormed and burned to the ground when it was revealed that the Whitehouse ordered torture.
It was not, and now we must await the inevitable.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday December 11 2015, @12:22AM
Thank you for more calmly, and thoroughly explaining the logistics and justifications for my feelings of utter hopelessness in my country's political theater show.
It may be misanthropic, but I don't believe participation in such a system will yield meaningfully positive results when the people at the top don't consider themselves to be equal with the people on the bottom.
We're living Orwell's Animal Farm.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @01:15PM
The chance of successfully making positive change might be very low, but if you give up, it drops to zero. You're only playing into the hands of the elites by putting up no resistance. You keep saying that people are naive, but no one ever said that change is easy. It's perfectly possible to be a realist (not an idealist) and still work towards improving your country; you merely have to acknowledge that it will be a very long and difficult fight.
(Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:58PM
Thanks for the insightful informative post. Reminds me of G. William Domhoff on why third parties don't work in the USA: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html [ucsc.edu]
"So what should egalitarian activists do in terms of future elections if and when the issues, circumstances, and candidates seem right? First, they should form Egalitarian Democratic Clubs. That gives them an organizational base as well as a distinctive new social identity within the structural pathway to government that is labeled "the Democratic Party." Forming such clubs makes it possible for activists to maintain their sense of separatism and purity while at the same time allowing them to compete within the Democratic Party. There are numerous precedents for such clubs within the party, including liberal and reform clubs in the past, and the conservative Democratic Leadership Council at the present time.
This strategy of forging a separate social identity is also followed by members of the right wing within the Republican Party. By joining organizations like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, they can define themselves as Christians who have to work out of necessity within the debased confines of the Republican Party. That is, they think of themselves as Christians first and Republicans second, and that is what egalitarians should do: identify themselves primarily as egalitarians and only secondarily as Democrats.
After forming Egalitarian Democrat Clubs, egalitarian activists should find people to run in selected Democratic primaries from precinct to president. They should not simply support eager candidates who come to them with the hope of turning them into campaign workers. They have to create candidates of their own who already are committed to the egalitarian movement and to its alternative economic vision of planning through the market. The candidates have to be responsible to the clubs, or else the candidates naturally will look out for their own self interest and careers. They should focus on winning on the basis of the program, and make no personal criticisms of their Democratic rivals. Personal attacks on mainstream politicians are a mistake, a self-made trap, for egalitarian insurgents.
In talking about the program, the candidates actually do much more than explain what egalitarians stand for. By discussing such issues as increasing inequality and the abandonment of fairness, and then placing the blame for these conditions on the corporate-conservative coalition and the Republican Party, they help to explain to fellow members of the movement who is "us" and who is "them." They help to create a sense of "we-ness," a new collective identity. As candidates who present a positive program and attack those who oppose it, they are serving as "entrepreneurs of identity," an important part of the job description for any spokesperson in a new social movement.
Since egalitarians are not likely to have the resources to run at all levels in all places, what are the best places to start when a good opportunity arises? One possibility is in Republican-dominated districts where it might be easy to take over moribund Democratic Party structures that do not try to put forward serious candidates. There are now many such House districts that might be ripe for the picking. Winning in Democratic primaries and then facing seemingly invincible Republican incumbents in the regular election may be more useful than it might seem at first glance. For example, when a progressive group in Michigan launched such a grassroots campaign in a Republican district in 1986, with the goal of sending the incumbent a message about his support for Reagan's militaristic foreign policy, their Democratic candidate received 41 percent of the vote, 10 percent higher than the previous Democratic challenger. Such a large vote on the first try would be a wonderful starting point if it could be achieved in the same election year in a number of districts and states where the regular Democrats already had conceded the election to the Republicans. ..."
(Just joined so I could post this other than as AC)
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.