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posted by janrinok on Sunday January 07 2018, @11:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-not-bannable-if-it's-the-president's-tweet dept.

Many Twitter users have reported threats of genocide and the use of weapons of mass destruction by one Twitterati in particular, but Twitter does not think these violate the terms of usage at Twitter. Tweet, at Mashable.

The President of the United States possibly made another threat of nuclear war on Twitter, but the company doesn't seem to think the post breaks any of its rules. Donald Trump boasted on Twitter about how his nuclear button was bigger than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's, and people are calling (again) for the president to be banned from the platform.

Folks on Twitter are asking the platform whether this violates its policy against violent threats. So far the response from Twitter has been in the form of an automated response in which Twitter says Trump's message represents "no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior."

Mashable checked, just in case:

Twitter confirmed to Mashable that "this Tweet did not violate our terms of service," referencing the Twitter Rules against violent threats and glorification of violence.

"You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people," the rules state.

So it seems that if you are going to threaten serious "physical harm, death or disease" on Twitter, be sure to include everyone by using nukes, instead of just one individual or group.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Sunday January 07 2018, @04:35PM (12 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Sunday January 07 2018, @04:35PM (#619191) Journal

    I'd agree with the first definition of "fascism."

    Your second and third definitions repeat the tedious fallacy that fascism = socialism, according to the following logic:

    1. A dog has four legs.
    2. A cat also has four legs.
    3. Therefore, a dog is a cat.

    Your descriptions of East Asian political culture are quite wrong, too. First, China != Korea != Japan.

    Koreans are not identical to Diaspora Jews. There are some who were taken to Japan as slave labor by the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and their descendants remain there, as non-citizens. There are some who emigrated to the United States after the Korean War and political unrest in the South in the 70's and 80's. They have not scattered to the four winds as did Jews. If there's any group in Asia comparable to the Diaspora Jews, it's the overseas Chinese in ASEAN nations, whom everyone else in that region do call, "The Jews of Asia."

    Historically the Korean peninsula comprised several kingdoms, Shilla, Baekje, and Koguryo. They were first unified in the 10th century, though, for a period, and then permanently in about 1400. Their ethno-linguistic identity has been quite consistent throughout, though. Saying that they don't consider themselves a nation because they previously consisted of several kingdoms or because they've been divided since WWII is like saying the English don't consider themselves a nation because they once consisted of Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia, Sussex, etc and the Germans don't consider themselves a nation because they too were previously many states and were also divided after WWII. In short, it's incorrect.

    Your notion of East Asian states as "villages, writ large," is quite incorrect also. Japan, Korea, and China all had sophisticated polities for thousands of years. They had national armies, they had bureaucracies. Japan had the shogunate. China had its imperial system administered by scholar-lords who attained their positions through civil service exams. Korea had its feudal system. All of those were much more complex than the "village headman" portrait you have painted.

    Modern history in East Asia has been characterized by how those places have industrialized and responded to colonial pressures from the West. Japan got with the program very quickly so they were able to mount the challenge they did in WWII. China languished because it's a large, complex country that was not able to resist colonialism as effectively as Japan. Korea was quite buffeted by events in its two larger neighbors and it's only in the last twenty years that South Korea has hit its stride economically.

    One can drill down to more detail in each of those cases, but nobody wants to read all that here. Suffice it to say, your assertion, "all Asian civilizations do it the same way, merely with varying (over time and by place) levels of success." is not supported by fact. You cannot make that generalization.

    Frankly, most of what you wrote smacks of the heritage from European colonial triumphalist historians, who pushed a teleological view of events that portrayed everything as an inevitable progression to white European supremacy. It carries an implicit assumption of racial and cultural hierarchy. It doesn't actually shed light on any of the countries and cultures you're talking about so much as illuminate where you're coming from.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @09:49PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @09:49PM (#619295)

    Fascism isn't socialism, but it implies socialism. You can have socialism without fascism, but you can't have fascism without socialism.

    Fascism is socialism plus nationalism.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @10:31PM (#619308)

      Two bad two of the leading scholars of historic fascism (Roger Griffin and John Lukacs) disagree with you. In fact, the big three fascist regimes (Germany, Italy and Spain) used different systems (Dirigism, Corporatism, and Syndicalism).

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 08 2018, @03:27AM (6 children)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday January 08 2018, @03:27AM (#619386) Journal

      They have different ideological roots in the Western canon. Socialism, of course, goes back to Karl Marx. Fascism, however, has its roots in Nietzsche.

      Go read Nietzsche. He's quite enjoyable to read, relative to Marx, and you'll instantly see the connections to fascism in his concepts like "uebermensch" and the "will to power."

      Just because socialist governments and fascist governments have totalitarian qualities does not mean they are the same. Tsarist Russia also had totalitarian qualities, but would you really call them socialist or fascist? Well, maybe you would, because you're confused by distinctions between political forms of government like the diametrical opposites socialism and fascism, but nobody else would.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 08 2018, @08:34AM (4 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 08 2018, @08:34AM (#619459) Journal

        Modded informative, because your previous post is already modded as high as it can go. Thank you for that post. In a half-assed defense of some of the ignorance spouted by our fellow Americans, the east is pretty damned complicated. We are brought up through a school system that drums Western culture into us, and ignores most of Easter, African, and South American culture. We know diddly about Arabia, or the nations of Asia, or the history of Africa or South America because they just aren't important to our capitalism. The far east probably suffers most from that attitude, because there are several different very complex cultures there. Arabia is pretty simple, in comparison, and damned few Americans understand anything about Arabia. As for the other two continents - no one gives the smallest damn, it seems.

        It's shameful, really.

        And, I have to plead guilty, to some extent. I know far less about Korea than I know about either China or Japan. I was surprised in recent years to learn of empires, built and ruined, to the south of China. Vietnam and Cambodia are the primary examples. All my life, I thought China was the center of power, and all of civilization in that part of Asia, throughout history. Wow - empires. And, the average American never heard of any of it.

        Yep, shameful.

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @02:46PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @02:46PM (#619509)

          You'd never know the US is full of ignorant people with they way they talk online. VLM's writing and even your is often from a stance of absolute authority, but the percentages fail to back it up. The best part of reading this site is getting to see the warped rationales being used. You runaway are one of the better posters with the capacity for self-reflection so don't take this too personally.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 08 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday January 08 2018, @08:47PM (#619690) Journal

          It's partly the legacy of post-WWII education and priorities. We had invested so much time and energy in liberating and then rebuilding Europe that it dominated American perception of the Rest of the World. Japan was too far away to think about beyond superficial stereotypes like samurai and geishas. Thanks to the Cold War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and all the rest were reduced to a simple struggle against global communism. Nobody had to think much about them or their perspectives.

          We don't live in that world anymore.

          Even so, when you have provided context on the Middle East by pointing out Turks are not Arabs, and the like, it's still news to most people in America (and, let's be honest, most Europeans, because despite what they'd have everyone else believe they are mostly quite parochial, too). A significant gap has opened between what the world actually is, and what matters in it, and what the average American believes it is, and what about it they believe matters.

          On a certain level, how much does it matter that we don't, as a people, understand North Korea or Kim Jong Un? What's to know? We're gonna wind up nuking the guy to kingdom come anyway, and calling it a day. But for those who are curious, for whatever reason, a few good places to start are these:

          1. Korea historically has been smacked around by its more powerful neighbors China and Japan. They escaped Chinese overlords only to be colonized by the Japanese. Then their country was divided by Russia and the United States. They've had to constantly fight to survive individually and as a people. They're tough, resilient people, because they've had to be. If Americans are familiar with Poland's history, sandwiched between the Russians and the Germans, then it's a bit of a window into Korea.

          2. Juche [wikipedia.org]. It roughly translates to "self-reliance," and it is central to North Korean political thought in the way that Manifest Destiny is fundamental to American political thought. Juche was formulated by Kim Il Sung, who was fighting Japanese colonization while in exile in Manchuria and Siberia. He founded North Korea, of course, and ruled it until his death. Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un are his son and grandson, respectively, and they have continued the policies of Juche. That's why it's so hard for China to control North Korea.

          3. Read Bruce Cumings's The Korean War: A History [amazon.com]. He leans left and that cast on his work is irritating, but it's a good place to start understanding modern Korean history for the North and the South.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
          • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @10:05PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @10:05PM (#619743)

            Korea historically has been smacked around by its more powerful neighbors China and Japan.

            This is wrong. China indeed had been the 800lb gorilla since the ancient time, and in the earlier days (the first millenium AC) Koreans went toe-to-toe with them, although eventually they became a satelite state in the sinosphere.

            Japan, on the other hand, was a non-factor, irrrelevant in the geopolitics of the region, until they finally managed to unify under a shogunate in the 17th century.

            • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @10:13PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @10:13PM (#619746)

              China indeed had been the 800lb gorilla since the ancient time

              More specifically, China had been the 800lb gorilla in East Asia since the Han Dynasty. The dominant ethnic group in China is Han Chinese, and the name "Han" derives from the Han Dynasty, the first Chinese imperial dynasty that expended the Chinese territory somewhat similar to today and established Chinese part of the ancient Silk Road trading route.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @05:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @05:37PM (#619591)

        I would like to point out that Nietzsche was not a fascist himself and thought the people who were were misinterpreting his works (sometimes deliberately). He even foresaw fascism and argued against it, e.g. Ecce Homo's "Why I write such Good Books," The Case of Wagner and The Joyful Science. An overview is provided by Bastille (sp?) of the disconnect and how one doesn't imply the other, which is probably one of his most famous writings.

  • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday January 08 2018, @06:59AM (2 children)

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday January 08 2018, @06:59AM (#619440) Homepage Journal

    Very aptly said. In your last paragraph, you so very well explain what is now called orientalism [wikipedia.org].

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 08 2018, @08:57PM (1 child)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday January 08 2018, @08:57PM (#619696) Journal

      Thanks. Yes, that's it. Edward Said, the guy who coined that term, was onto something, because his concept stuck. On the other hand, at the same time he was criticizing the West for reducing the Orient to simple archetypes and forms, he was doing the same thing to the West. It's a little understandable because he's an ardent Palestinian activist with good reason to be pissed off at the West. But, it must be said, the guy is a pompous dick. He was buddies with the professor I worked for in college, Marvin Zonis, who was an Iran scholar, and I had the distinct displeasure of dealing with Said at several conferences.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday January 08 2018, @09:59PM

        by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday January 08 2018, @09:59PM (#619739) Homepage Journal

        He is a sociologist. I have done a side degree in sociologist. They are not STEM people, and that gives me a lot of context to deal with them. How much power they actually wield and how much they should, that probably can be debated.