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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: 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.