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Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
This was such a weird case. Usually when a country goes after a foreign business they enforce it by imposing restrictions within their own borders and threatening the operators with legal action if they ever enter the country. If the operators don’t visit the country and their banking doesn’t cross a business that must follow those laws (which is hard), it’s otherwise symbolic.
I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
This quote from the court is amazing:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all? Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates? Are they using this as a demonstration of why internet censorship is the only solution? It’s hard to imagine why they thought they were going to get anywhere with this case, unless failing was the goal
vr46 2 days ago [-]
The write-up from the lawyers is unintentionally hilarious
The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:
Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
dofm 2 days ago [-]
> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here
They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.
0dayz 1 days ago [-]
Despite said tarrifs hitting those who import more than export to the US?
dofm 1 days ago [-]
Hey, I said they were hypocrites, I didn't say they were smart
gcanyon 2 days ago [-]
> Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
Kimmel landed on a completely erroneous conclusion based on an insane false flag conspiracy theory – and voiced that live on air:
"the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it"
If you think that is not worth attempting to get a host taken off the air for (at least for a while), I don't think you understand how dangerous amplified disinformation can be.
Propelloni 1 days ago [-]
Well, people are not trying to take Fox News off the air for their many incidents of amplified disinformation, so maybe people think freedom of speech should be protected, even if people disagree with said speech?
Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.
alsetmusic 1 days ago [-]
> other is a news outlet
They specifically argued that they are an entertainment broadcaster in court defending Tucker’s show.
gadders 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
SideQuark 1 days ago [-]
Did CNN or MSNBC lose a billion dollar lawsuit for knowingly promoting false stories while, and I quote from the Fox case, calling their own viewers “stupid, stupid, stupid” for believing their content? Did CNN or MSNBC shareholders sue them due to the damage caused by promoting false stories on purpose?
Maybe there is some demonstrable difference to size and scale of willful dishonestly among outlets.
skarz 1 days ago [-]
1. Jury awards $5,000,000 in defamation lawsuit against CNN
Comparing either CNN or even MSNBC to Fox like this is a clear indication that you have never critically viewed these three channels in comparison.
The ridiculousness Fox gets away with and have gotten away with for decades is mountainous compared to anything else that boomers watch. Ailes and Murdoch wrote the playbook on modern disinformation and it is laughable to compare Fox to any other news channel.
Unfortunately, Fox has been so successful as an entertainment “news” organization that the other competing ones, praise be capitalist ingenuity, have adopted much of their scumbag playbook.
gadders 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Propelloni 1 days ago [-]
You clearly have not followed the thread. This is inane.
emsixteen 1 days ago [-]
What you've quoted does not line up with what you're describing it as.
tempfile 1 days ago [-]
This isn't misinformation. The MAGA gang were trying to do that. They were trying to score political points from it. They still are.
Of course, they were also correct. But these quoted statements are primarily about intention and motive, not really arguing (or even speculating particularly strongly) that the shooter actually was MAGA.
Incidentally, this does not seem like particularly dangerous misinformation at all. MAGA supporters are probably the safest group in America (it is, after all, not a safe country for anyone).
buckle8017 1 days ago [-]
"Of course they were also correct"
That's the important part here, touch grass.
gcanyon 1 days ago [-]
- they blame the left/some minority group for literally just about every violent act ever
- they say it in most instances, including this one, with zero evidence
- they say it, as in this instance, not to get to the truth, but to score political points
tempfile 1 days ago [-]
I would have guessed the important part is whether what he said was misinformation, since that's the whole thing we're arguing about.
> touch grass
cringe
jsLavaGoat 2 days ago [-]
1. It's a Pyrrhic victory at best, read it. In reality, 4chan won even though they technically "lost" their argument. They aren't enforced up. That's the win.
2. It's not really obiter dicta because it's a district court order it's not something you cite, really as binding precedent. But if you read between the lines, the court is only dismissing Ofcom because it is part of a sovereign, which means it cannot maintain it's other position. The judge was making it clear he thought Ofcom needed to stop. The ruling is addressed to the parties not really to a future court. If I were Ofcom's lawyer, I wouldn't be celebrating this.
American double standards have nothing to do with this case and it's just a sort of throw in everyone seems to need to mention here. So what? Are they good or bad? If you think they're bad to extend jurisdiction, then take the win.
Long arm jurisdiction is the opposite of what happened here. That's where you pull people into US courts that might not be US citizens for things that happened not in the US. Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country? Oh, but USA bad so you scored that point.
I think you're just seeing Lincoln's hat in the clouds.
Everyone on HN apparently thinks they have a law degree.
8note 2 days ago [-]
> Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country?
well yeah. whats good for the goose is good for the gander. if the US wants to go bug people in their own countries, even going so far as to murder a bunch of people to kidnap a sitting president of a country, youre gonna get others looking to do it in response, and as the US loses its privileged position on the world stage, its gonna have to start complying
StanislavPetrov 2 days ago [-]
>its gonna have to start complying
This is only true if, to quote the article being responded to:
>Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops
amanaplanacanal 2 days ago [-]
That seems... Unlikely?
2 days ago [-]
vr46 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
windowliker 1 days ago [-]
>4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026
Correct, but this update is in regards to Ofcom's evidence of 20th October in front of the parliamentary select committee to which they have to report, and at which they conceded that their ability to make legally binding cross-jurisdictional enforcement actions is limited when faced with the laws of another country. The wording she used is in fact very interesting: "If foreign courts decide to... try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money."
>Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
They have taken on the case pro bono.
tzs 2 days ago [-]
> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here: [...]
> [...], the CLOUD act, [...]
The CLOUD Act doesn't do what you think it does. Here's a comment from a while ago with more detail [1].
That comment, your comment, is misleading and legally selective - much like Preston Doo-dah's post.
The CLOUD Act bypasses traditional MLAT procedures, faced significant civil liberties opposition (EFF), and resolved a genuine jurisdictional dispute, not a mere drafting oversight. Claiming that data location is irrelevant ignores foreign laws and national sovereignty. Explaining why the US wants extraterritorial powers doesn't establish that it should have them.
tzs 18 hours ago [-]
Remember, this was in response to your listing the CLOUD Act as a US double standard.
Yes, the MLAT stuff is terrible, but it does not involve any double standard.
The non-MLAT stuff does not involve a double standard because pretty much every country has something equivalent.
The US version (and the foreign versions) are not extraterritorial because they are all compelling someone in their territory to turn over something that person controls.
If my government asks me for two files, one of which I happen to have stored on file storage service in my country, and one I've stored on a file storage service in another country, the fact that I scp from an in-country server for one an an out-of-country server for the other doesn't make it an exercise of extraterritorial power.
bothers 1 days ago [-]
> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here
And then you didn't. Don't throw 'obiter dicta' to the rubes and then completely fumble your distraction with the incoherent legerdemain of 'double standards.' Show some art, at least.
kernal 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
EA-3167 2 days ago [-]
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LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
International politics is done via Twitter now
EA-3167 2 days ago [-]
In the same way that a child tumbling down a hill is an Olympic gymnast.
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
I mean if they're in the Olympics then that is essentially true.
EA-3167 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
I'm saying that right now, certain high-profile idiots are making it matter by definition. Once they stop using Twitter for that, then it'll stop mattering again.
EA-3167 2 days ago [-]
The high profile idiots might matter, their participation on Twitter doesn’t.
Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
immibis2 2 days ago [-]
They didn't say it was, they said it was VIA twitter.
flir 2 days ago [-]
The medium is the message.
(Or at least, it heavily shapes the message).
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
They would literally announce new decisions on Twitter before anywhere else. High-impact political decisions and international decisions. You would be a fool to ignore it just because of the platform. You'd die on that hill.
> Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
The idiots aren't an active ingredient either. Russia and Iran could have used any puppets. These ones just happen to also twitch like a frog leg.
EA-3167 2 days ago [-]
I’ve never had a twitter account so yeah, color me dead on that hill. I’ve been getting my information several minutes behind you, but in a much more honest, reliable, useful, and complete form.
Turns out that when it comes to info quality is genuinely important, and I have no inclination to fish through raw sewage.
LoganDark 14 hours ago [-]
Oh, I never followed the live stream on Twitter either, because as you say - raw sewage. Some of it is funny (in a dark way) sometimes, but it's too much and I don't really care about much of it. So I often see secondary sources first anyway.
Before "truth social", Twitter was just often how those secondary sources would first hear of things to investigate. It's just one of the places where the shit would first come out. Hence "international politics is done via Twitter" not because it's good or proper to do so, but because that's simply what's been happening lately.
immibis2 2 days ago [-]
sauce is 404
vr46 2 days ago [-]
You're right, and I can't edit it now. Here's the corrected URL:
Damages awarded for libel/slander in UK courts are outsized super pay days, and many a foreign sheikh or business mogul has tried to establish that the matter under question was made known to UK citizens and therefore UK has jurisdiction, because the damages will beat anything awarded anywhere else in the World.
Weirdly, Trump has argued that this was damaging to his election chances (reminder: he won the election he's arguing about), and in a jurisdiction that the BBC can show the material wasn't available in, at least not legally and through their enablement.
As a result, even the BBC's critics in the UK (of which there are many), are seeing this as just a grifter trying to shakedown an organisation he doesn't like the reporting of, because he can't do it to a US network without getting into a first amendment quagmire.
vidarh 1 days ago [-]
The size of awards is just part of it. The burden of proof is just as much of an issue.
In the UK, an alleged defamatory statement is presumed false and the defendant needs to prove it is true, and that burden is unusually low compared to most other jurisdictions, and certainly much lower than in the US where the burden is on the accuser to prove the statement is false.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
Not for any speech. For misleading cutting his speech together.
amanaplanacanal 2 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment. The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
philipallstar 1 days ago [-]
> I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment.
Is clipping a video together to create a lie "speech"?
chimprich 1 days ago [-]
Are all errors "lies"?
The BBC admitted a mistake. The error was reported by an internal BBC investigation, not because Trump's team complained (it is highly unlikely they saw it originally, because it was an UK broadcast).
The BBC makes thousands of hours of video annually. You can't expect perfection, or to sue them for billions of $CURRENCY for every mistake.
The mistake in this case was to make their quite reasonable case (that Trump encouraged the violence of January 2021) very slightly more emphatically than was perhaps justified.
Trump of course showed his disapproval of the violence by pardoning all the rioters, including those convicted of injuring police with weapons.
philipallstar 23 hours ago [-]
It wasn't an error or a mistake. Defamation is bad no matter the recipient or the perpetrator.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
The content of the video and the narrative it supported, as compared to what was actually said, made it unreasonable to suppose mere error.
gadders 1 days ago [-]
I think you are bending over backwards to be as massively charitable as possible to the BBC. They are notorious for their left wing bias.
Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
chimprich 1 days ago [-]
> They are notorious for their left wing bias
They are notorious for their left wing bias by right-wing commentators and for their right-wing bias by left-wing commentators. By law they are neutral.
> Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen (how's that for twisting the truth?) and encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol. He wasn't stupid enough to explicitly call for violence, but the implication was there.
The circumstantial evidence supports this: the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
gadders 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
amanaplanacanal 1 days ago [-]
The judge and jury were in the courtroom and heard the evidence. You are just repeating political talking points to take the blame off the guilty. None of which has anything to do with the lawsuit.
chimprich 1 days ago [-]
> Yes, there were no postal vote irregularities anywhere. Everything was 1,000% above board. Would you like buy a bridge?
There is no credible argument that the election was stolen. This has been repeatedly challenged in court, and each attempt has failed.
> Political prisoners, ushered in by the docents. I don't think putting your feet on Pelosi's desk is worth 4 years in jail.
David Dempsey attacked officers with flagpoles, crutches, pepper spray and broken furniture after standing at a gallows talking about hanging Democrats
Daniel Rodriguez repeatedly drove a stun gun into officer Michael Fanone’s neck, causing him to lose consciousness and suffer a heart attack
Patrick McCaughey crushed officer Daniel Hodges in a doorframe with a stolen riot shield for over two minutes
Julian Khater pepper sprayed Police Officer Brian Sicknick in the face, causing him to collapse, and he died the next day
Do you really want to pursue this line of argument?
gadders 1 days ago [-]
Out of 30,000 protestors?
amanaplanacanal 1 days ago [-]
Only about 1200 were convicted, most of which plead guilty. Your 30,000 number is completely irrelevant.
gadders 12 hours ago [-]
Pleading guilty proves nothing.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
It proves that the defendants thought it would be even worse if they let it go to trial.
SideburnsOfDoom 1 days ago [-]
> Do you really want to pursue this line of argument?
It's trollish behaviour. You can't stop the pidgeon from playing Pidgeon Chess.
geoduck14 2 days ago [-]
>I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment.
Is it protected if you are challenging a UK company in the UK?
amanaplanacanal 2 days ago [-]
It sounds like it's in a US court.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
1A protection is entirely irrelevant, first off because freedom of speech is not a defense against defamation of character and second because the BBC is not American.
I think you misunderstand how the law works. It doesn't matter if the BBC is American, if the lawsuit is in an American court. It's going to be run under American law.
If he sues in Britain, then it will be run under British law.
philipallstar 11 hours ago [-]
Both places have defamation laws.
1 days ago [-]
stinkbeetle 2 days ago [-]
> I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment.
It is, the government can not prevent or punish people speaking on the basis that the government decides it was misleading.
A civil dispute between private parties is entirely different though. One can be found liable for misleading speech that causes damage to another party.
> The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
amanaplanacanal 2 days ago [-]
What damage? He's rich as fuck, and President of the United States!
philipallstar 1 days ago [-]
A sniper also shot him in the ear. Should nothing have happened about that for those reasons too?
amanaplanacanal 1 days ago [-]
I thought we were talking about a civil case, not a criminal one. Two different things.
philipallstar 11 hours ago [-]
My point is "He's rich as fuck, and President of the United States!" doesn't mean people can do things to him. The utter foolishness of putting people in a box so you don't have to treat them like a human any more is evil no matter what label is on the box.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
That is a complete non sequitur.
amanaplanacanal 1 days ago [-]
I'm saying it's going to be really hard to prove damages.
stinkbeetle 18 hours ago [-]
You didn't address what I wrote though, you just changed the subject and stated something incorrect. That's why it's a non sequitur. And a pretty rude way to interact with people having a discussion really. What do you gain out of behaving this way toward people?
"Thank you for correcting my misconceptions about the first amendment and civil disputes." Would have been sufficient.
> I'm saying it's going to be really hard to prove damages.
No you weren't saying that, we can see exactly what you said and it was just garbage. If you have some substantive contribution and opinion about the damages claims in the lawsuit and what it would take to prove them that would be great. The low effort worthless rhetorical questions didn't add anything though, other than to make you sound more clueless.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Let me lay it out for you:
This is in a US court, not a British one. It will take place under US law.
He has to prove damages. What might those possibly be?
It's extremely difficult to win since he is a public figure. He would have to show actual malice, which is not easy.
He actually has to sit for a deposition, which he seems unwilling to do.
Likely the case will just be dismissed.
throw10920 15 hours ago [-]
> other than to make you sound more clueless
Sound clueless? It was trumpeted from the rooftops when they made the utterly deranged claim that "rich" -> "no damages".
Is it possible it's a troll account?
stinkbeetle 2 days ago [-]
I'm not aware of what damages Trump alleges in the suit or if it has any merit at all. Being rich does not mean there is no damage or disqualify a person from restitution though. And holding public office or a government job doesn't disqualify a person from protecting their private interests, although I imagine it could make the case a lot more complicated.
Aside, using civil courts to attack opponents is certainly a problem, but in USA it favors the speaker a compared to a lot of other countries. In US the plaintiff has to prove the speech is false and for public figures that there was malice. Which in my opinion goes a bit too far and gives media corporations more power over politicians and other public matters. I think the public figure stipulation is reasonable and important to allow private citizens to discuss politicians and public matters so that's good, but I think there should be a counter to that which requires organizations reporting the news to have more duty to report truth and not mislead.
743947630229 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
otterley 2 days ago [-]
If misleading speech weren't protected by the First Amendment, Trump himself would be first in the frying pan.
Tostino 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
AlexCoventry 2 days ago [-]
Well, it's been clear for a decade that Trump doesn't respect American values.
2 days ago [-]
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
Kimmel's comments supported a narrative that justified the murder of a US citizen for his opinions (not even that, but third parties' understanding of those opinions). Kirk himself never proposed anything violent; the narrative was promoted based on wild misrepresentations to that effect.
But all of your objections here (or rather, more specifically, the choice to present them all together as a list of grievances, given that they are connected by a theme but not otherwise related or coordinated) are 1) blatant whataboutism and 2) an attempt to wage "ideological or political battle" in violation of HN commenting guidelines.
gcanyon 2 days ago [-]
> Kimmel's comments supported a narrative that justified the murder of a US citizen for his opinions
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
By pinning the blame on the wrong ideology (with full confidence, apparently based on nothing but his own world view, and implying that others were dishonest in coming to a different (ultimately shown to be correct, and strongly evidenced at the time) conclusion, he ran cover for the ideological group responsible, and their narrative.
otterley 2 days ago [-]
Are you suggesting that it's not OK to take a side in a debate, or that by doing so, you are sympathizing with a murderer?
You're going to need a jet pack to traverse the logical leaps you're making here.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
> Are you suggesting that it's not OK to take a side in a debate, or that by doing so, you are sympathizing with a murderer?
No, that is not even remotely what I said, and not even a plausible reading of what I said. It is a blatant mischaracterization of very simple logic that I laid out explicitly.
Again: Kimmel made factually incorrect statements that he reasonably should have known were incorrect, which tended to demean the character of his political opponents, by ascribing to them a false cover-up while falsely assigning a murderer to their side.
That is not "taking a side in a debate", because the ideology of Tyler Robinson was not a matter of debate.
otterley 1 days ago [-]
1. Can you point to the relevant transcript in which he does this?
2. "tended to demean the character of his political opponents" - this is the world in which we live, and quite frankly, much of it is well deserved. While he did not deserve to be assassinated, Charlie Kirk himself earned plenty of skewing. He was hardly a saint, and neither was his supporters. Also, Jimmy Kimmel Live is a freaking comedy show, not a news program or law enforcement press office. Unlike the Government, he doesn't owe his audience even the slightest semblance of impartiality.
3. Whether something is a matter of debate is often time- and circumstance-dependent. When news breaks out, it's usually accompanied by a great deal of speculation, and people make mistakes. Only in the fullness of time do the facts come out. I'm not saying it's necessarily right if Kimmel (like others) came to a conclusion before the facts were settled, but it's also not unusual, and people can and should issue corrections if they are wrong.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
> Can you point to the relevant transcript in which he does this?
Yes. Someone already linked it upthread.
> Unlike the Government, he doesn't owe his audience even the slightest semblance of impartiality.
He does owe them honesty.
> When news breaks out, it's usually accompanied by a great deal of speculation, and people make mistakes. Only in the fullness of time do the facts come out.
It was immediately obvious that the facts did not support his narrative to anyone who was actually attempting to gather the facts. Furthermore, that narrative should have been heavily discounted a priori on the basis of Occam's razor: obviously it is far more likely that a politically controversial figure gets targeted by opponents than by people on the same side.
otterley 1 days ago [-]
This is the quote?
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
Seems pretty harmless to me. The second clause of that statement is factual; that is what they were doing. They happened to be correct in the end, but the statement itself is still truthful.
zahlman 12 hours ago [-]
> The second clause of that statement is factual; that is what they were doing.
No; to "characterize" someone as "anything other than one of" your group requires that person to be of your group. The person in question was not of their group, and everyone reasonably should have expected it to turn out that way. The clear and obvious thrust of that quote is to falsely accuse a) the murderer of being a right-winger and b) other right-wingers of lying to cover it up. That's how English works; it's how Kimmel's sycophantic audience understood it; and it's how the justifiably offended right-wingers understood it.
otterley 7 hours ago [-]
> to "characterize" someone as "anything other than one of" your group requires that person to be of your group.
It does not. If I declare that "zahlman's not a family member," that's a true statement. If Alice, a third party observer of the conversation, then says, dramatically, "OMG otterley says zahlman's not a family member", that's also a true statement. There was no "requirement" that you actually be a member of my family for any of this.
What you're arguing about is not the truth or falsity of a statement, but the suggestions that emanate from it. How the audience might have interpreted it is subjective. It's not objective.
I no longer believe you are arguing in good faith. You're struggling mightily to make your argument cogent, you're getting a lot of feedback that it's nonsense, and yet you just can't seem to process that.
gcanyon 1 days ago [-]
> By pinning the blame on the wrong ideology
Please show where he pinned the blame on anyone.
zahlman 12 hours ago [-]
It's at the top of the second block quote in your source. It's extremely obvious, and frankly I'm extremely irritated that multiple people are disingenously asking me to demonstrate an extremely obvious thing based on their own citations while I get downvoted.
gcanyon 4 hours ago [-]
You mean this?
> KIMMEL: We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
That's not assigning blame for Kirk's murder. There is no way to interpret that as saying "Charlie Kirk's murderer was MAGA." It's saying that MAGA representatives were jumping to conclusions, prematurely focusing on blame assignment. To steel man your argument, you could say that it is saying the likelihood that the murderer was MAGA is greater than what the MAGA crowd is reporting. But since they were saying the exact opposite, that reduces to "there is a non-zero probability the murderer is MAGA" -- that's not an extreme position five days after the event.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
All muslims should die, all republicans should die are all protected free speech.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
You miss the point completely. ABC is not a government agency. You will note that at no point did absolutely anyone whatsoever propose prison time for Kimmel.
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
Then why do you give a shit. Anyone, government or private, can go and say they want to kill all Republicans, which Kimmel didn't say either, so I am not sure what exactly it is you are whining about. If you are so triggered about people spreading false narratives or downright fake news, you should be complaining about MAGA and Trump.
zahlman 12 hours ago [-]
That is nowhere near the standard of discourse expected on Hacker News.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
Why is it not? You still haven't explained why you are whining about innocuous statements and free speech. If you will keep whining for no clearly explainable reason, people will rightfully ask why you are whining.
StanislavPetrov 2 days ago [-]
Neither Kimmel or Kirk ever said anything that wasn't fully protected under the 1st Amendment, and anyone claiming otherwise is either ignorant of the law, a blind political partisan, or (more likely), both.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
You miss the point completely. ABC is not a government agency.
You will note that at no point did absolutely anyone whatsoever propose prison time for Kimmel. Kirk, on the other hand, lost his life in an act of what the evidence strongly suggests was vigilantism.
StanislavPetrov 23 hours ago [-]
You miss the point completely. The issue here isn't that ABC fired Kimmel because he isn't funny and his show was losing money. The issue here is that government regulators threatened and pressured ABC over Kimmel's Constitutionally protected speech.
Razengan 2 days ago [-]
> Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
You guys are basically Russia in denial at this point. Carried on by the momentum of your products that is heading straight for a massive disruption by AI.
vr46 2 days ago [-]
The UK is Russia in denial? I am massively confused
icantevenhold 2 days ago [-]
Basically everyone is Russia in denial at this point
trollbridge 2 days ago [-]
From the last few conversations I've had with Russians, they aren't remotely in denial but also feel powerless to change anything.
Razengan 2 days ago [-]
> but also feel powerless to change anything.
Is that also the case with the common Brit or American?
That was most of the point. America and the UK have become the evil twin of Western Freedom™ and still believe they're better, or know they've fallen but can't/won't do anything.
When you see a litany of bad shit like in one of the GP comments, like book bans etc, you can't be sure if they're talking about the US or the UK, they're basically equally as shit now.
vr46 2 days ago [-]
I don't want to waste my red pen marking this comment but thinking the UK is anything like the US or slightly similar in these regards is like using song lyrics as a source in your essay.
Razengan 2 days ago [-]
Hence the "in denial"
trollbridge 1 days ago [-]
No, America is utterly different than in Russia. In America people can freely and openly criticise the government under their own name. When I talk to someone who is in Russia they're very careful to use a communications medium not tied to their identity and where what they say will expire.
Likewise the talk of book bans is just silly. What books are banned in America?
Oh well, same thing. At this point the UK is basically the mutant kid sprouting from the body of that guy in Total Recall :)
The same shitty some of the worst authoritarianism among the Western world etc.
afpx 2 days ago [-]
sounds like you live in the bastion of righteousness. can we move in?
8note 2 days ago [-]
huh? the case here is the UK trying to get the US to enforce some UK law in the US
vr46 2 days ago [-]
No, the UK regulator was asking a service provider owned by a Japanese guy to comply with UK laws in order to do business in the UK, and the service provider sued the regulator in a US court. 196 other service providers agreed to comply
Razengan 2 days ago [-]
Well symbionts kinda work both ways :)
(yes I know Kuato was a good guy but I mean the UK seems like a hanger-on of the US now, both trying to make shit worse for their own citizens)
db48x 2 days ago [-]
Sanctions on the ICC are not censorship. The ICC has never had and will never have jurisdiction to threaten or pass judgement on Americans. Sanctions are an entirely justified response to their recent attempts to overstep their authority.
There are no book bans in the US. Individual libraries can be and are selective about what books they stock, and libraries for children justifiably avoid specific topics. The government has not actually banned any books lately.
The White House has not restricted reporting, it has merely denied entry to it’s press releases to specific parties. Those parties can still report on the facts (or make them up, as they are wont to do), they just cannot attend the White House’s press releases. Since attendance at press releases is by invitation in any case, this is definitely not censorship.
Supporting public broadcasting is not an antidote to censorship, and ending that support is not a form of censorship either. PBS was notorious for supporting only one political viewpoint, and there was just no need to waste taxpayer money on it. You would cry foul if taxpayer money were spent to advocate for political viewpoints that you don’t agree with.
Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed. That’s incitement to violence, which is not protected speech.
The US’s sanctions of Cuba are not related to speech in any way.
Or how about the FBI declaring that parents at PTA meetings as “domestic terrorists”? Or targeting the Catholic church as an “extremist organization”?
mrandish 2 days ago [-]
> That’s incitement to violence
While actual incitement to violence isn't protected speech, that wasn't even close to incitement to violence, which requires meeting three prongs clearly defined by SCOTUS.
I encourage you to review actual statements which SCOTUS has previously ruled are NOT incitement to violence. It's so incredibly narrow and particular, I was left wondering if anything can meet the definition. Jimmy Kimmel is so far from it your assertion is ludicrous.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
True, but irrelevant given that ABC is not in any way part of government. It was justified that the general public deemed those comments unacceptable, specifically because they were an attack on the very principles that made them legally permissible; and ABC was capable of, and morally justified in, punishing them (and also legally permitted to punish them).
tzs 2 days ago [-]
> It was justified that the general public deemed those comments unacceptable
Is this the same general public whose backlash over the suspension got it reversed a few days later by the network, and by Nextstar and Sinclair a few days after that?
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
Of course "the general public" is not a homogeneous group by definition.
Those who objected to the speech were morally in the right, because the speech clearly crossed a line. It baselessly accused others of trying to cover up a truth which would have been damaging to them, except that it turned out to be the exact falsehood that Occam's Razor would have predicted. And it did so with the force of broadcast media behind it.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
Since you hate free speech and think speech that are lies is evil, why aren't you complaining non-stop about Trump and MAGA?
da_chicken 2 days ago [-]
The prohibition against inciting violence has nothing to do with whether or not the speaker is a government entity.
Indeed, I think you should look at the speech that SCOTUS ruled is protected in the landmark Brandenburg v Ohio[0] case to see how extremely narrow the "imminent lawless action" standard is. It's ridiculously hateful and inflammatory, and filled with several non-specific threats of violence against minority groups. This was labelled protected speech. Brandenburg was a private citizen here, and he prevailed over the state of Ohio.
You miss the point completely. 1A is irrelevant because ABC is not a government entity. In the phrase "Congress shall make no law", "Congress" is not decoration, and "law" is interpreted literally.
The statements were frankly defamatory, and only not actionable because they didn't define a clear target nor cause demonstrable "actual damages".
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
What statement and who does it defame? Why does ABC being a private or government entity matter for its free speech rights?
zahlman 12 hours ago [-]
Kimmel's statement defamed right wingers. It's very obvious what statement, and how. This is not a question of ABC's free speech rights, nor of Kimmel's. The point is that ABC is permitted to discipline Kimmel for his speech, because neither of them is the government. I find your entire line of questioning clearly disingenuous.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
What statement again? Be clear, show us what you think is such an evil statement.
Why aren't you making a similar level of vitriol against the "they are eating cats and dogs" or so many other lies and nastiness maga makes?
cindyllm 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
How does it defame right wingers? You must be really insane to think Kimmel rightfully presenting the possibility the shooter could have been right winger is defamation. Is all political analysis defamation? You sound really confused. ABC's actions are quite distinct from the american governments illegal threatening of regulatory action against it, which is very much looking like a legal violation.
otterley 2 days ago [-]
> There are no book bans in the US.
When the government declares under penalty of law that libraries cannot stock certain books, that is a book ban.
Not true here in Florida. The governor banned and burned books that taught slavery was bad, revoked tenure and fired all teachers who were reported teaching that slavery was bad. The new state-approved textbooks teach that slavery taught blacks useful skills and that there was violence on both sides.
tick_tock_tick 2 days ago [-]
So you can't just go to a local book store and buy a copy or order it on Amazon? Oh wait you can? Crazy damn I really thought a banned book would mean I couldn't buy it at literally any book store.
Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
> Not true here in Florida. The governor banned and burned books
The books are not banned.
The public schools don't allow them, which is the case for many things.
Whether you agree with it or not, calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking" or "Florida banned pornography" because they're not allowed in schools.
otterley 2 days ago [-]
> The books are not banned...The public schools don't allow them
What's a word that means "forbidden from being included" or "disallowed"? "Banned"! Check your local dictionary, or just type it into your favorite search box.
> Calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking"
No, it's not dumb. Children don't go to school for the purpose of getting drunk or smoking. They do go to school to learn things, including things that might be politically controversial or divisive.
You know what is dumb? Gatekeeping truthful information from being accessible to kids because the curiosity it sparks might inconvenience some people.
theshackleford 2 days ago [-]
The acrobatics ya'll are performing to reach these conclusions sure are impressive.
lesuorac 2 days ago [-]
It's not a war, just a special military operations that lasts longer than WW 2.
CursedSilicon 2 days ago [-]
Remember. Over 20% of America still supports this fascism.
Statistically some of them would be here
zahlman 12 hours ago [-]
The parent comment should not have been flagged.
om2 2 days ago [-]
Praising a murderer for committing a murder is not incitement and is protected speech. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech loses protection only if it is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. A comment on a murder after the fact can’t meet this standard unless the comment is “go do another murder right now!”
Kimmel also did not praise the murderer. He implied (incorrectly as it turns out) that the killer was right-wing.
Your misstatements of the well-known facts and law in this case cast doubt on the effort you put into researching the other issues mentioned.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
He did more than imply the falsehood. He implied that people had no good reason to disbelieve the falsehood, and that the right wing was seeking to deceive on this basis for political gain. In doing so, he (perhaps inadvertently) ran cover for the ideology that was actually responsible.
Right-wingers have lost their jobs in the US many times for far less, even when their comments were on social media accounts unrelated to the job. When these responses are described as unjust or disproportionate, American left-wingers have consistently and repeatedly (across a span of many years) told me the same line about how 1A only applies to government and not corporations. Which is correct, but also entirely missing the point about bias.
otterley 2 days ago [-]
> Right-wingers have lost their jobs in the US many times for far less, even when their comments were on social media accounts unrelated to the job.
You make it sound like losing one’s job for being an embarrassment to their company is a bad thing.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
They were only "an embarrassment to their company" because of the aggressive doxxing and harassing actions of people who refused to tolerate entirely reasonable statements that they happened to disagree with.
For that matter, one time someone who wasn't even noted as right wing got "cancelled" for wearing clothing with a print that some feminists found objectionable. Clothing that was gifted to him by a woman.
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
Many women are antifeminist, yes. They are also hypocrites as they still vote of course. Was that new information to you?
zahlman 12 hours ago [-]
Opposing modern feminism is perfectly compatible with retaining the franchise. Not that that has anything to do with anything. There objectively was no remotely reasonable basis to object to the shirt.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
Why do you talk about free speech in one place and whine and cry about free speech of others elsewhere? Who cares? Cancellation was an exercise of free speech.
otterley 1 days ago [-]
> people who refused to tolerate entirely reasonable statements
Like what? have a link?
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
Canceling is free speech and freedom of association. Why do you hate others free speech?
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
How is right wingers losing their jobs which is a private transaction between free private entities related to a government whining and trying to misuse regulation against a company?
tzs 2 days ago [-]
> Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed.
Citation needed.
fidotron 2 days ago [-]
While Ofcom were barmy to even try this there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't, and somewhere that will have contributed to supporting the effort to do this.
While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.
margalabargala 2 days ago [-]
> While Ofcom were barmy to even try this
Quote from the article:
> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused
Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
fidotron 2 days ago [-]
Standard regulator strategy: try to make the one thing you actually want to comply be the odd one out and then point at them going "but why not you too?" (The FTC do this as well).
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
quietbritishjim 2 days ago [-]
X is different because it does have a business presence in the UK: UK advertisers
mschuster91 2 days ago [-]
> A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
The thing is, you can afford sticking the finger to the UK if you do not have any business interests there. A platform like 4chan won't be bothered even if the UK government says "all payments to be made towards 4chan for advertising are hereby seized until the fine is paid off". But places like Twitter or Meta, that derive millions if not billions of euros a year from the UK and European advertisers? Now that's a lot of money to lose, money that even American shareholders will complain about it being missing from the revenue sheet.
ozyschmozy 2 days ago [-]
> from the UK and European advertisers
Why would "European" advertisers come into this, I don't think ofcom has jurisdiction outside of the UK?
mschuster91 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that you can still enforce garnishment orders from the UK and Europe and vice versa. Brexit did not sever all ties.
ycombinatrix 2 days ago [-]
The rest of them presumably wanted to continue doing business in the UK & did not want to IP-block the entire country.
margalabargala 2 days ago [-]
Right, thus Ofcom were not in fact "barmy to even try this".
BikiniPrince 2 days ago [-]
How many of those organizations had business within Ofcoms jurisdiction? No one operating outside of their legal jurisdiction should have complied.
andybak 2 days ago [-]
Presumably a decent chunk of those might now reconsider?
shadowgovt 2 days ago [-]
it depends on what those other orgs want.
Not being able to do business in (or, depending on how serious they are about enforcement action, visit) the UK is actually pretty constraining. It's understandable if other companies decided they would prefer to find a middle ground that lets them provide one face to the US and another to the UK, or even that they're not interested in 4chan-style maximalism and found it non-onerous to comply with the UK asks because they're pretty in-line with the site's existing standards (I'd have to see the list of sites that complied to have a real opinion on that part).
echoangle 2 days ago [-]
And also this only worked once, but in the future other entities getting sued now know they can just ignore it.
Bender 2 days ago [-]
Did any of them move to a .onion? I would expect commercial sites to cave and some small sites to just move to Tor which probably accomplishes the same thing as far fewer people use the Tor Browser or Brave. I could also be delusional.
Aurornis 2 days ago [-]
> there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't
In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.
The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.
That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.
fidotron 2 days ago [-]
That's exactly what the US do though. We recently saw server seizures in Amsterdam, there is the US Cloud act and so on.
The US fundamentally disagrees with other countries on the limits of their own jurisdiction to include basically anything tangentially related to the US.
Again, I am far from anti-US but any outsider can see this for what it is: a one way street.
appplication 2 days ago [-]
Was this in violation of the Netherlands constitution or just not explicitly illegal in Amsterdam? I don’t know the details or the incident you’re referencing, but there is generally a distinction.
fidotron 2 days ago [-]
Basic property rights. If they weren't breaking Dutch laws then the server shouldn't be seizable.
Let's see the Dutch get a US based server that is violating Dutch laws. It will never happen.
telotortium 2 days ago [-]
Were they actually not breaking Dutch laws? Around terrorism-related activities I would guess the laws are fairly similar across Western countries, partly due to 9/11. Speech regulation has been consistently different between the US and Europe, including the UK - the US even passed laws to refuse to enforce UK libel judgments 15 years ago after Americans became aware of their abusive effects.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
immibis2 2 days ago [-]
A/I didn't break any laws at all, not even US ones. But the US president currently gets to override US laws, so they still committed a crime in the US despite not breaking any law, but even the US president doesn't have that power outside the US. No crime was committed in the Netherlands, nor in Italy. It's actually illegal in Italy for their Italian bank to keep A/I's money, since that's plain old theft - they're currently figuring out a way to give it back to them without triggering the mango.
piltdownman 2 days ago [-]
European countries need to get off Mastercard/Visa and US Tech and Energy dependencies first, otherwise it's just a shakedown by the US every time they hit an external legal system.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
> That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
You may note from the title that this is the "American Service-Members' Protection Act".
The current attempt to destroy the ICC is not due to protection of American service members, but Israeli ones.
The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
The admin (and perhaps many in the country) might like to think they can go alone, but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies.
While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
piltdownman 1 days ago [-]
It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
> It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.
The nickname is irrelevant.
The first line of the wiki does not support your claim: "all means necessary and appropriate" is much vaguer than "must invade", and no domestic law would change that an invasion of the Netherlands would be a violation of the sovereignty of a NATO ally.
> Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
Read further in my previous comment and find out.
> Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation
None was needed for that, not from NATO at least. Should've raised it with the UN, if that's what you meant?
> Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
I'm not saying they won't do such things, but it's bad for the US if they do. That said, Iran is looking like it'll be another Vietnam only this time with an oil crisis to match the OPEC crisis, so this is already bad with regard to energy sources.
And that's without everyone else in NATO is likely gearing up for fighting against the USA and Russia at the same time even if we'd very much rather not, and Israel itself (the country for which they are doing this to the ICC) is looking somewhat unstable and even the most allied parts are distancing themselves from the USA.
> A false equivalence.
That's my point: the behaviour with regards to Harry Dunn is a false equivalence with regards to these other things.
> ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent
No, not even close; even in the most egregious cases, and this wasn't an egregious example:
A person convicted of causing death by dangerous driving is liable to imprisonment for up to 14 years and a driving ban of at least 2 years for an offence committed before 28 June 2022
She was convicted in absentia and got "8 months in prison, suspended for 12 months, and disqualified from driving for 12 months".
8note 2 days ago [-]
maduro definitely wasnt breaking venesuelan law, as a clearer example, nor is Brazil's non-visa/mastercard payments system
The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review.
Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked.
But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
GeorgeWBasic 2 days ago [-]
Why be far from anti-US if this is what the US does?
AlotOfReading 2 days ago [-]
The US also has laws imposing restrictions on institutions outside their borders/jurisdiction. FATCA for example.
kloop 2 days ago [-]
But they do that via things in their control. For example, banks that don't follow FATCA cannot access the US banking system. It's rare for the US to send law enforcement to banks that don't comply
The UK would have been perfectly justified in saying 4chan can't access any of their systems.
kitd 2 days ago [-]
Ofcom knows it's barmy. They are pursuing foreign sites because a) they are required to by law, and b) they are under political pressure to do so. But I suspect they are quite happy that it has backfired, to help relieve some of that pressure and bring into the open the barminess of the OSA enterprise.
rcxdude 2 days ago [-]
This. The regulation organisations can sometimes try to make a point when they're tasked with enforcing an unenforceable or otherwise unworkable rule.
Gibbon1 2 days ago [-]
The US in particular had to proactively not enforce British Libel judgements against US citizens. Because the vast majority violate free speech rights.
tracker1 2 days ago [-]
As a US citizen, I'm inclined to agree.
philipwhiuk 2 days ago [-]
Ofcom didn't "try this"
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
squidmaster 2 days ago [-]
Ofcom started it. They sent nasty legal letters to 4chan first.
malfist 2 days ago [-]
Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who, this is supposed to be a happy occasion!
msm_ 1 hours ago [-]
>Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all?
Well, to quote the post:
>Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused, and only one is 4chan.
I think this was just a scare tactic.
jack_pp 2 days ago [-]
It's about honor, I remember Saddam Hussein saying that after they held against the US for 40 days they "won" the war, because in their culture when a higher power entity goes against a weaker one, it is without honor and the weaker entity "wins" honor by being able to defend for that long.
nilamo 2 days ago [-]
That's not unique to their culture. Remember The Alamo? That was 190 years ago and we still celebrate our defeat.
qup 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nilamo 2 days ago [-]
The greater meaning of... holding a position over a period of time that seems unreasonable against a far superior force? Exactly like the GP described for Hussein? It certainly sounds like we're celebrating the same things, unless I misunderstood your point...
btilly 2 days ago [-]
The greater meaning of a revolution that was fought to preserve slavery.
When we remember history, what we remember tends to be white-washed.
Der_Einzige 2 days ago [-]
The Mexican government and especially Santa Anna were not even close to saints and were not primarily fighting the Texans for reasons of slavery. The Mexican empire carved out slavery as being explicitly allowed in the Mexican state that become known as Texas.
btilly 2 days ago [-]
This is no different than what happened in the Civil War.
Each side had a list of grievances. A big one on one side, was the preservation of slavery in perpetuity. The other side wanted to preserve the unity of the nation as a whole.
You are right that Mexico was not fighting to ban slavery. But it was clear that eliminating slaver was still in their roadmap. Texas had only gotten an extension.
Similarly the election of Lincoln wasn't an immediate threat to slavery in the Confederacy. But the Confederacy still was motivated to head off the long-term threat to their economic system.
So the fact that Mexico wasn't fighting to end slavery, doesn't contradict the fact that Texans were fighting to preserve it.
lesuorac 2 days ago [-]
> [1]: The Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act
I mean, Lincoln being elected is a direct threat to slavery.
Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery." It wasn't, "We're getting rid of slavery in places that already have it." Which meant that it was not a direct threat to existing slave states. (Though there was a prospect that maybe, some day...)
Lincoln didn't like slavery. But he wasn't trying to ban it. It wasn't until the war had been going on for nearly two years that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Which basically said, "If you're still in rebellion a couple of months ago, we're going to free your slaves." It didn't eliminate slavery for any slave state that was part of the Union. It was an incentive to surrender. It was 2 years after that until the 13th amendment was passed.
It is very unlikely that slavery would have been banned during Lincoln's time in office, if the Civil War hadn't happened.
Was there a long-term prospect of a threat? Obviously. But there was no immediate threat. And so the fight wound up with protecting slavery on the one side, and asserting the indivisibility of the nation on the other side.
This is exactly parallel to the Mexico-Texan issue. Slavery was not being banned in the rebelling states.
lesuorac 1 days ago [-]
> Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery."
Pretty sure you’re arguing in bad faith.
A group of anti-slavery people organized into a political party and elected a man who gave a speech declaring that slavery itself needs to be abolished.
Pretending that Lincoln wasn’t going to attempt to abolish slavery is just as bad as pretending the civil war was about states rights (states in the confederacy had mandatory slavery; no right to choose).
No, I'm not arguing in bad faith. You are oversimplifying and mischaracterizing someone whose complex views tried to balance morality and the ugly facts on the ground.
Lincoln's actual beliefs can be seen in his own words. Let's take, for instance, the first of his seven debates with Stephen Douglas.
In this debate, Lincoln made it clear that he morally opposes slavery. He therefore opposed allowing it to spread. But he pointed out simply trying to suddenly eliminate it would create even worse problems. He therefore did not support abolitionism. He even supported returning slaves to slavery if they escaped to a free state. He only supported containing the practice, and hoped for a better solution over time.
This balancing act is made clear in all of his speeches before he was President. It is even visible in the Emancipation Proclamation. It was only after years of war that he came to support the hard-line stance represented in the 13th Amendment. It is extremely unlikely that he would have gotten there without having been hardened by the Civil War.
There really was no immediate threat to slavery. It was only a long-term, potential threat.
Here is an exact passage from his speech laying all this out.
"When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,-to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.
"When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter."
criddell 2 days ago [-]
Mexico was about to end that carve out. But slavery was only one of the causes (and you're right about Santa Anna).
The myth is that Bowie and Crockett battled until their last breathes. The truth is that Bowie was sick and died in bed. Crockett gave up and was executed.
That's all from the 2021 book Forget the Alamo.
2 days ago [-]
ruined 2 days ago [-]
exactly, defeat.
drnick1 2 days ago [-]
Iran is pulling the same trick now, claiming it "won" just because the regime did not fall (yet). This is despite having lost most of their conventional army, navy, and air force, and having also mostly lost control of the straits of Hormuz.
immibis2 2 days ago [-]
I thought the claims of Iran winning were based on Iran's opponent collapsing. But it's a very slow collapse, and still not definitive yet, but some people are extrapolating the trajectory, to see that at the current rate, Iran's enemy will fall long before Iran does.
rcxdude 2 days ago [-]
I mean, the Iranian regime has had one goal the whole war: survive. So it is a victory of sorts so far: the US has not achieved its strategic goal of regime change, and Iran has managed to inflict a fair amount of pain in retaliation.
(You could say the Taliban were even more thoroughly 'defeated' in Afghanistan while the country was occupied by the US, but it can hardly be said that it was a victory for the US either, given what happened as soon as they left).
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
> I mean, the Iranian regime has had one goal the whole war: survive.
No it wasn't. If Iran's only goal is to survive then it would have made peace with the USA and surrounding Middle Eastern territories decades ago.
This whole war is happening because Iran had great political ambitions than just thriving on its own.
Iran has been funding proxy terrorist groups for a long time now, specifically because it is trying to achieve larger goals than just surviving.
And on those fronts, well those proxy groups have taken a ton of damage and aren't long for this world.
rcxdude 2 days ago [-]
I'm not talking about beforehand (I said 'the whole war' for a reason). When the US attacked Iran, the Iranian government were either going to fight the war or they (the individuals that made up most of that government) were going to die. It's not surprising they are picking the first option by any means necessary, regardless of how they got into the situation in the first place. It's also what made the attack a very high-stakes gamble on the part of the US government, because either the somehow the Iranian government was going to crumble quickly in the attack (despite the best efforts of people who are quite literally fighting for their lives and still quite widespread support amongst the population), or the US was going to find itself embroiled in yet another overseas war with dubious benefits and high costs. To be clear, I have a level of love for the Iranian government that makes me think the first option is perhaps a little too good for them, but it still doesn't make the US's strategic decisions make sense.
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
> the Iranian government were either going to fight the war
You missed the perfectly reasonable 3rd option. Iran could stop shooting missiles at oil tankers, stop funding proxy groups, and make an arrangement for peace.
We both know though, that they are unwilling to do that. Because peace was never their goal. Instead, they wanted to achieve regional hegemony, and funded proxy groups to do that. But whatever, look how well that worked out for them.
Sure, if taking out the regime is the only pathway to stop Iran from continuing on its current path, then the USA is of course going to try that. But if there was an actual path the peace here, where Iran simply stopped its attacks, things could get back to normal fairly quickly.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
Israel can stop attacking and taking over land of random sovereign countries, shooting missiles into peaceful countries like Dubai. What is stopping them?
viler 1 days ago [-]
Israel has shot a grand total of zero missiles at Dubai. Which is not a country; the country is UAE, at which Iran has launched some 2,500 missiles.
What's stopping Israel from attacking "random" countries? Perhaps the fact that they're hardly "random", rather they all host proxy groups of the occupying regime in Iran, who have very openly been subverting those countries into bases from which to attack Israel.
Try again.
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
I misremembered. Israel fired a missile at a hotel in Qatar killing civilians.
If you have a problem with proxies, then Iran has the right to shoot down and occupy most of Europe and Australia as they have been American proxies for long and they are supplying their bases and infrastructure for Americans to launch attacks on Iran from. Iran also as far as I am aware has never sprayed chemical poisons on foreign countries farms to kill their food supply. Israel has.
How many of the Iranian attacks in the gulf were not those fired at American bases and soldiers in those countries?
viler 13 hours ago [-]
Are you serious? Literally thousands. Iran hit the international airport in UAE, residential buildings, random 'targets' in cities, and killed more civilians than US service members. I'm honestly not sure where you're getting your news at this point.
Israel did fire at that hotel in Qatar, but considering that the hotel was hosting the entire terrorist leadership of Hamas at the time, it was far less 'random' than what Iran has done. The very fact that Iran was using cluster munitions on civilian areas (in Israel and elsewhere), which is a complete violation of humanitarian laws and a war crime in itself, should tell you what their targets were.
As for your comment on proxies, it's clear that the regime in Iran does consider things this way, but they could have avoided that by doing a simple thing: not declaring war on the US the moment they were founded.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
> declaring war on the US the moment they were founded.
Where is that?
The first negative interaction between USA and Iran seems to be the illegal American coup and destroying Iran's democracy to put a dictatorial monarchy.
Then Iranians respond, correctly, by taking action against this treasonous state of matters.
>Israel did fire at that hotel in Qatar, but considering that the hotel was hosting the entire terrorist leadership of Hamas at the time, it was far less 'random' than what Iran has done. The very fact that Iran was using cluster munitions on civilian areas (in Israel and elsewhere), which is a complete violation of humanitarian laws and a war crime in itself, should tell you what their targets were.
There are lots of Israelis working in many places, and most are legally IDF members and or involved in various defense and intelligence companies. Almost every Israeli living anywhere in the world is a valid target for missile and drone strikes and assassinations under this logic.
stale2002 1 days ago [-]
> What is stopping them?
The militant groups obviously. If peace isn't possible of course Israel is going to play to win.
Israel was perfectly able to make peace with Egypt and jordan, for example, and they aren't invading them.
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
Egypt gets paid a lot of money by America for "reasons". The gulf arab states are dictatorships so its hard to gauge the actual population's sentiment. These two are still a bit far away. Israel sees borders and country maps as optional things, what military value do you think is there is Israeli thugs under IDF protection barging into and stealing other peoples homes in other countries? They are never content with their border and want to keep expanding.
stale2002 23 hours ago [-]
> Egypt gets paid
Oh great proving my point. They get to be at peace and get paid money to do so. Looks like a good deal all around. I guess peace is possible with the surrounding countries after all right?
hardbass 21 hours ago [-]
You forgot my point about Egypt and the gulf countries being dictatorships and the ground sentiment is hard to gauge. You failed to explain what is the military point of Israeli thugs moving into peoples private properties and robbing the land from them. Clearly Israeli is a hyperbelligerent war crazed terrorist who doesn't really believe in peace but wants to expand as far as possible. You failed to disprove that Israel isn't attacking Egypt only because it feels it isn't yet in the position to. Israel so no trouble "forgetting" its borders over several decades and expanding deep into Palestine and now into Syria, Lebanon etc. If Israel is going to rob innocent civilians, then it is a terrorist entity and other countries should rightfully bomb them until they desist.
stale2002 15 hours ago [-]
Nothing of what you said contradicts my point.
Whatever the government is of Egypt, it seems quite clear that peace is possible. There is no war with Egypt. Egypt is getting paid a bunch of money. Israel's army is not marching on the capital. It seems like they are at peace.
So the point stands that peace is clearly possible, such as the clear peace that we see between Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
Why do you think a country that sees borders as optional and just randomly rolls over into sovereign countries lands won't also eventually want to capture Egypt? You also still failed to explain what is the military application of Israeli thugs robbing peoples private houses from them at gun point? And that why this doesn't under any moral or legal system justify shooting and bombing Israelis relentlessly until they are repelled?
stale2002 14 minutes ago [-]
> won't also eventually want to capture Egypt
Because the countries are working together quite well right now, there is significant economic benefit to peace, and there is little to gained from controlling wide swaths of empty land, when peace and trade is much more profitable. Occupation is expensive and if its possible to maintain strong economic relationships that is much more mutually beneficial then the nonsense that you propose.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
I will jail Donald Trump. This will cause peace in the USA. Would you agree?
istjohn 2 days ago [-]
This whole war is happening because after his easy coup in Venezuela, Trump thought he could just do it again in Iran, and now he can't extricate himself without losing face. And American politicians on both sides of the aisle are subserviant to Israel.
OkayPhysicist 2 days ago [-]
They did make peace with the US. It was a whole thing, papers were signed, agreements were made, they pinky-promised to not make nukes, everyone walked away happy. Except the Israelis, who don't like their regional power status being challenged, and apparently Trump, who... didn't like that the Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?
Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.
viler 1 days ago [-]
Yep. They "pinky-promised" and continued enriching Uranium to 60%, which is completely unnecessary for any civilian use of nuclear power. Not only has the IAEA openly called it out, but actual officials of the occupying Islamic regime in Iran have now pretty much admitted that they have always been going for nukes. [1] [2]
The only thing JCPOA did was funnel billions into their hands so they could continue oppressing their own population within their own borders, and destabilizing the entire region outside of them.
It is simply common sense for any country not America to build powerful nukes and defenses against America. America has a habit of randomly attacking countries for imaginary or greedy reasons.
drnick1 2 days ago [-]
> Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?
They never gave up. The plan was always to lie and get sanction relief from the West, in order to to sell oil and fund Islamist terrorism throughout the region and the world. It isn't only about the nukes. Fundamentally, this is about containment of a dangerous anti-Western ideology. Same thing in Cuba.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
If it is about containing anti-western ideology why isn't American launching a Stuxnet on Israeli nukes?
viler 1 days ago [-]
Because Israel isn't the one who, I don't know, has been in open declared war on the US for 47 years ago and has turned "death to America" into its official stated policy. The Islamic Republic is.
Your only defense of the astounding level of evil represented by the occupying regime in Iran is to keep frothing at the mouth about Israel? That shows quite a lot. Try again.
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
Iran hasn't killed innocent British cizitens and officers in terrorist attacks continually for years. Iran hasn't attacked America. Iranian citizens haven't been as a trend found spying on America and funneling documents to their country for years. Iran isn't randomly expanding into other sovereign countries lands. Iran is shit to its people but it doesn't start random wars into random countries for no reason. Israel does all of the above.
viler 13 hours ago [-]
All I see there is either allegations, mischaracterizations, goalposts moving at supersonic speeds, and a wilful ignorance of what the Iranian regime has done re: killing Americans (Beirut 1983? TWA 1985? Dhahran 1996?) and civilians in other countries (Buenos Aires 1992 and 1994, everything Hezbollah has been doing in Lebanon and Syria, etc).
But from the rest of your messages here, it's clear that you despise the US as well, so there are natural ulterior motives to any arguments you make about other countries aligning with or against US interests. When you're hoping for someone to be damaged, then of course you'd try to manipulate them into mistaking enemies for friends and vice versa.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
You love lying and putting words into my peoples mouth. I don't despise the USA. I like the USA's ideals, it has to held to the fire to remind itself of its ideals. The US military has after all killed millions of innocents for all its talk of supporting democracy and peace.
How is it not common sense to develop nukes and study American military weak points and develop defenses against American military if you are not America? Especially if you have oil. Either you live a free life and get bombed by America or you become an American slave if you failed to do your homework. American gets weird whims and tends to start bombing random countries whenever they smell oil or a government that wants to go independent. Its healthier for both America and that country that they be independent and not a vassal state or one kowtowing to random American demands.
I looked up Beirut, the so called neutral peacekeeping force was trying to create a theocratic/Christian military entity in Lebanon, in which case its natural to think they are liars and actually invaders pretending to be peacekeepers. The attack hit marines and military people which are all valid targets. Americans killed the entire leadership of Iran so it doesn't seem there is anything wrong in Iran hitting political agents in the embassy either.
Bombing places of worship is evil, you won't have me arguing that. Which is why I find it strange you are not complaining about Israel bombing various churches and Israeli soldiers desecrating Christian icons or Americans countless bombings and "collateral damages".
TWA 1985 isn't Iran, its a Lebanese terror attack. If you want to say Iran pulled the strings, then great, there are countless excellent reasons to target Americans given the endless barrage of proxy forces and bases they have all over the world.
The Dhahran case against seems to have targeted military personnel only which is perfectly valid given American actions in Iran such as the treasonous coup.
I hate Iran, I don't like Iran at all. Unfortunately the problem is Israel, and the actions of American military make Iran look marginally better than either.
potatototoo99 2 days ago [-]
Their goals are to survive and control the strait of Ormuz. And they will do both because eventually the US will pull out, because to try to hold the strait is a financial drain. Just like Afghanistan. So it's a waiting game and everyone knows Iran will win. Orange man can say he won every day and after a year, 5 years, 10 years, 50 years eventually the US will have to admit defeat.
drnick1 2 days ago [-]
> Their goals are to survive and control the strait of Ormuz.
The surrounding states, which have been attacked by Iran and use the strait to export their oil, should grow a pair, close their borders with Iran, and use all the weapons they bought over the years from the U.S. and finish off once and for all the "Islamic Republic." It seems that, at last, the Saudis are stepping up to the plate and doing something about the Houthis. This is all because they did not finish the job last time.
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
> Their goals are to survive
As I just said before, if this was their only goal, they could have had it decades ago by choosing peace instead of funding proxy milita groups en mass.
The fact that they fund all they proxy groups shows that actually yes they have other goals beyond surviving (They they are quickly failing to achieve as their proxy groups get dismantled), and they are actually willing to risk war and risk their survival to attempt to achieve them.
GeorgeWBasic 2 days ago [-]
Quite the contrary. It doesn't matter what Iran does: their crime is existing without being under the control of the US. The US installed a puppet regime in Iran in 1953, and had a powerful vassal in the middle east, close to the Soviet Union. They freed themselves in 1979, gaining control of their own resources, and the US never forgave them for it. The only way the US would have allowed them to go on existing without attacking would be for them to become slaves again.
viler 1 days ago [-]
The whole tale of the 1953 supposed US "coup" has been started and amplified by Soviet propaganda, then taken up by the Islamists and their wilful servants, as we can see here. The coup was Mosaddegh's; the Shah prevented it. Read some real history.
As for "freeing" themselves in 1979... please talk to some actual Iranians and ask them how much of their country's resources are actually benefitting them, instead of going to regional terror proxies and into enriching corrupt Mullahs so that their sons and daughters could go live in luxury in the West they so despise. Ask them, too, how "free" they really feel.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
How much of the countries resources oil money beforehand was going to Iranians and benefiting them instead of going to a foreign British company? If that is your complain that nothing has changed other than the manager.
istjohn 2 days ago [-]
You're forgetting that a perfectly serviceable truce was established with the JCPOA until Trump tore it up to satisfy Israeli interests.
drnick1 2 days ago [-]
JCPOA was horrible. It was a lifeline to the regime and allowed it to build a massive arsenal of drones, ballistic missiles, etc., while it got to keep underground enrichment facilities. That nuclear program did not have a civilian purpose, its sole purpose was projecting power in the region and intimidating Israel.
The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Iran and of its regional proxies. Disarming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is a necessity before things like rebuilding Gaza is possible at all.
GeorgeWBasic 2 days ago [-]
"The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Israel and of its regional proxies"
There, fixed it for you. No charge.
viler 1 days ago [-]
What are Israel's "regional proxies", and how have they been acting against peace in the region in any way that's more destabilizing than Hamas, Hezbollah, Hashd ash-Shaabi, the Houthis, the Fatimioun, the Zainabioun, and all those other tentacles of the occupying Islamic regime in Iran?
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
Israel has 100+ nuclear weapons dude. And if it was in any real danger of actually being collapsed, I can promise you that it would use them. You better hope that never happens and instead Iran makes peace with them.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
Excellent, that clearly shows who is the volatile ultra terroristic madman in the region. All the more reason to check Israel right now.
stale2002 1 days ago [-]
> that clearly shows
Its called mutually assured destruction bro. Every country in the world would use their nukes if they were actually under threat of destruction.
Thats the point of having nukes. For them to be used as a deterent against collapse.
> All the more reason to check
They have the nukes already dude! They aren't going away. They aren't going to be destroyed. And the nukes don't disappear just because funding stops going to them.
The point being, the destruction of Israel would just result in all of their enemies being destroyed along with them, so you better hope it doesn't happen.
hardbass 1 days ago [-]
Israel doesn't need to be destroyed. The best time to solve the Israeli problem was of course during 1947. Its unfortunate that Britain got so weak at that point, ideally they should have instituted a militant zero tolerance marshal law there and shot on sight any Israeli or Arab terrorist. Israel can still be peacefully south africaed.
stale2002 23 hours ago [-]
> Israel can still be peacefully
They aren't going to massively change their demographics. They will never agree to that, and they would have to be invaded to achieve anything close to that. Which brings up back to them haveing 100+ nuclear weapons.
This goal of destroying israel, or massively changing their demographics has caused hundreds of thousands of arabs to die, over and over again, wasting on a doomed goal, seeing as Israel has a modern military and nuclear weapons that they would absolutely use if their military was at risk of being defeat.
The actual peaceful solutions look something like Jordan or Egypt, which are perfectly able to be at peace.
hardbass 21 hours ago [-]
Its not about arabs. I said south africa to mean hardline global sanctions and refusal to trade. If they want to nuke everyone just because people don't like trading with them, they are free to demonstrate their psychosis. Public opinion in the USA is changing, who knows what the future holds. If US support vanishes, Israel will have to scale down their hyperterrorism by a lot.
Again, the best solution would have been if Britain had refused to budge against Zionist terrorist attacks on innocent Brits, and instead prosecuted and executed them brutally, instituted a ruthless and militant martial rule there and shot all agitators on sight, and also done things like tax breaks for mixed marriages, etc. Since that golden opportunity for sanity and stability is gone, we have to see what the current options are.
stale2002 15 hours ago [-]
> If they want to nuke everyone just because people don't like trading with them
Nobody is going to nuke people over trade.
But, if the only thing that happens is that there are trade sanctions, well seeing as Israel considers changing up their country's demographics an existential threat, well it isn't going to end the state of Israel and nothing short of military action will cause that to happen.
Its certainly possible to motivate Israel to make some changes, but its not going to let itself be destroyed, nor will it ever accept 10 million immigrants into the country, and there would have to be military action to every make that happen.
The point being, Israel isn't going away. Its not going to be destroy. And if it was every a real threat, well they'd use the nukes.
Peace is certainly possible though. If the only thing you want is for both the existing middle east militant groups and Israel to stop fighting each other, and everyone exists where they are today, then great that peace is absolutely possible.
hardbass 8 hours ago [-]
Who said it has to accept immigrants? How can immigrants accept other immigrants? They just have to self deport back to their original countries. The point of a blockade is if others feel unsatisfied they can keep blockading them, including if some countries wishes, completely closing off their land and sea borders to Israel. What they do next is not my concern. Its their self created mess to solve. And if they want to use nukes over such an insane point, then the world far outnumbers them in nuke count and many countries have second strike capabilities. Something worth remembering.
>Peace is certainly possible though. If the only thing you want is for both the existing middle east militant groups and Israel to stop fighting each other, and everyone exists where they are today, then great that peace is absolutely possible.
It is, and under current situations its only going to happen if Israel is occupied by a brutal external military force that uses complete merciless totalitarian approach to any terrorism from any side. Nothing short of that is a peaceful solution unfortunately.
stale2002 20 minutes ago [-]
> They just have to self deport back to their original countries.
No actually. They would rather fight till the end than be ethnically cleansed (the vast majority of people being born there). They will never do that, and it would require military action to get anywhere close to that.
At which point it brings us back to the fact that they have a modern military and nuclear weapons, so military action won't work.
> What they do next is not my concern
Well, if peace isn't possible what would almost certainly happen is that most of the Palestinians will be kicked out. I mean, if it is that or them being kicked out, like what you propose, obviously they will fight to win.
> Nothing short of that is a peaceful solution unfortunately.
Oh I fully agree that the arab population isn't going to stop fighting. What is almost certainly going to happen is that peace won't happen and Israel will simply Win The Conflict, by exporting most of the gazan population.
I mean, the rest of the world is barely doing anything against them. They have little reason not to at this point, if peace isn't possible.
Which is sad, but hey. Thats war. It is unfortunate though just how many arab lives have been scarificed for nothing though, failing to achieve an impossible goal. Impossible because Israel is never going to let itself be destroy nor ethnically cleansed, and the rest of the world is barely doing anything against it, and, you know that modern military + nuclear weapons.
> And if they want to use nukes over such an insane point
Nukes would only be used in the case of a military invasion that seriously threatens them. If its just trade embargoes, and local militant conflicts, Israel would simply weather the storm, and/or kick out all the palestinians if they don't stop throwing their lives away for nothing.
> then the world far outnumbers
The rest of the world isn't doing shit right now dude. And the point is that no invasion is going to happen of Israel, precisely because of the nuclear weapons. Nobody is going to nuke anyway, nor will any other countries take action, and if the palestinians keep fighting for nothing the end result is that they will probably just be kicked out pretty soon.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
It is simply common sense for any country that is not the USA to develop nukes against the USA. It doesn't matter what your morality is or if you are a dictatorship or democracy, the USA just gets strange ideas and starts shooting and bombing random countries sometimes.
viler 1 days ago [-]
Mostly yes. Just a small correction - Iran does not need to collapse; its occupying Islamic regime does. It's what has already driven Iran into pretty much a state of collapse already; when it's gone Iran can be rebuilt.
GeorgeWBasic 2 days ago [-]
That's true: Obama bucked the trend. Overall, there were still many powerful interests in the US who despised Iran waiting to take power. I'd still call it just a matter of time.
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
No, actually. Iran did not stop funding proxy militant groups.
If Iran stopped funding Hezbollah then real peace could have been achieved.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
If Israel stopped randomly invading sovereign countries and launching missiles anywhere and everywhere into unrelated foreign countries like Dubai, spraying chemical toxins on farms in random countries, then real peace could have been achieved.
stale2002 2 days ago [-]
> 1953
You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
All the surrounding governments are at peace with everyone else. Iran could have had the same thing if it wanted. All it had to do what stop funding proxy militant groups.
Dylan16807 2 days ago [-]
> You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
The US government needing to get over it is their point.
Also the relevant year they're going back to is 1979.
stale2002 1 days ago [-]
> The US government
The US government is perfectly able to make peace with countries like Egypt and Jordan. Because those countries aren't funding proxy groups to destabilize the region.
As soon as Iran stops shooting missiles at tankers and stops funding militant groups, peace would be achieved.
onetimeusename 2 days ago [-]
Well, my reading of this is Ofcom did not lose overall and 4chan technically lost the lawsuit despite Ofcom having no way to enforce fines. I don't think Ofcom's purpose was ever to collect the fines either. Now keep in mind, 4chan is the first website that had ever been issued a fine by Ofcom under the UK's Online Safety Act. I think that is interesting because it's a noteworthy site which suggests the selection of it was more targeted. Note that is my speculation.
4chan sued Ofcom over the fines. Ofcom has been perhaps waiting for the outcome of this suit and is announcing they can't collect fines but I don't think that was the purpose. They have the power to instruct ISPs to block domains and to me it seems more likely that is what they will do and that was perhaps what they wanted from the beginning.
nonethewiser 2 days ago [-]
This is how the UK gets it's own great firewall.
Demand online services change their services to conform to their law. Because its accessible from the UK.
Services refuse.
Up goes the wall.
vr46 2 days ago [-]
I guess you don't know what actually happened. All but four of the 200 companies Ofcom asked for compliance, complied. The point is about any business that operates in the UK, and especially if it generates income from the UK, should be subject to certain laws in the UK. Not because they're accessible from the UK.
miohtama 2 days ago [-]
The UK has has this for years.
4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Because of this, it is questionable why Ofcom picked 4chan as a target it the first place.
windowliker 1 days ago [-]
>4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Correct. UK ISPs already implement a fairly wide-ranging block list (which even includes archive.org) for any subscribers who do not explicitly opt-in to 'adult' content access privileges.
kstrauser 2 days ago [-]
> Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Notably, the two countries involved literally fought a war about one's wish to enforce laws in the other, with the latter declaring that no, it'd prefer to operate independently of those laws.
Look, that was 250 years ago, and we've buried the hatchet. We've had our spats, but it's more like siblings arguing. Let someone else attack one of them and they get reminded that only these 2 are allowed to pick on each other. That said, our entire country was literally built on a legal system that says Americans aren't subject to British law. It's kinda part of our national character.
everforward 2 days ago [-]
I actually wouldn’t have been shocked if other countries had helped, and the powers that be may regret enforcing their sovereignty here.
Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).
Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.
I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.
I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.
nephanth 2 days ago [-]
No need gor a china-style great firewall. Just compel your local dns providers to stop resolving that website. That's what they do for copyright violations
Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority
Bender 2 days ago [-]
The infrastructure is already in place for a global great firewall. One need only to compel Google and Cloudflare to block a site in their DNS and most of the planet will not be able to reach it.
immibis2 2 days ago [-]
I'm continually surprised there are no operating systems, not even Linux distros, that run their own resolvers by default.
philipov 2 days ago [-]
Maybe they weren't allowed to not try? Like adding Denuvo to your game doesn't stop piracy, but your investors will be angry if you don't make the (wasted) effort at due diligence.
DANmode 2 days ago [-]
Those toolkits don’t even seem to be intended to stop piracy - they seem to add value by slowing it down long enough to make the first 2 weeks (days) of sales. The people using them usually understand that.
Gormo 2 days ago [-]
Yes, but the point is that the motivation for taking these actions isn't for them to be effective, but to satisfy performative requirements imposed by external parties.
munk-a 2 days ago [-]
There is an old saying "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". This is just yet another facet of CYA where we know it's of limited utility and the cracking will happen either way but if you specifically argued against Denuvo before the cracking happens it's your ass on the line for it.
DANmode 2 days ago [-]
Yes
gambiting 2 days ago [-]
Just to clarify something - these toolkits have gotten to a point where they can now go months without being broken. Yes everyone involved knows they will get broken eventually - but as you noticed the intention is to protect the majority of the sales which happen within the first weeks after launch. Just wanted to make it clear that the timescales have shifted from just hours and days to months lately.
account42 2 days ago [-]
I would expect that they expected to not be able to enforce it. It's a play to get the british public on board with even more draconian surveillance state laws and technologies which will be needed to protect their children from evil american companies.
pyronik19 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
nonethewiser 2 days ago [-]
>I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
Yes this is exactly what they thought, and no it is not surprising. Section 204 of the Online Safety Act of 2023 specifically says the Act covers internet services provided from outside the UK as well.
Of course the rest of us think its stupid. But the UK government doesnt.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
mattlondon 2 days ago [-]
The other option (and this is I admit charitable) is that this was always obviously never going to work and this was all a performative political thing in the first place.
By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.
Or they really are delusional. I dunno.
Arch-TK 2 days ago [-]
> Usually when a country goes after a foreign business they enforce it by imposing restrictions within their own borders and threatening the operators with legal action if they ever enter the country.
Yeah, unfortunately the UK isn't a country, it is actually a circus, so you can't apply any regular logic, you must apply circus logic.
lqstuart 2 days ago [-]
GDPR set a pretty bad precedent (unless they were following another) of having a law that magically applies to their citizens everywhere in the entire world. And all of big tech followed it because of corporate greed I guess? Seems like it'd be pretty easy to just ignore it and then just not pay whatever fines. See how random countries like not having Google.
schleck8 2 days ago [-]
> Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates
When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.
stinkbeetle 2 days ago [-]
> Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all?
State censors in western countries are becoming increasingly brazen and desperate. Despite the Orwellian slogans about "safety" they all constantly recite, their objectives are securing the supremacy of the regime not the interests of the people.
chrisjj 2 days ago [-]
>> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
How this judgment do that?
immibis2 2 days ago [-]
They're trying to punish someone purely for exercising freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We all know the USA punishes its own people for that all the time, of course, but only when the current administration agrees with the ruling, which this one doesn't. It's not that the constitution can't be violated - it's that violating the constitution can be used as an excuse in cases like this one.
chrisjj 2 days ago [-]
Thervare trying to punish violation of the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act.
What's that got to do with the US constition?
spacebanana7 1 days ago [-]
US courts consider enforcement of the Online Safety Act to be incompatible with the right of Americans to have free speech.
It's like the British government trying to enforce tea confiscations on US residents in a way that violates the fifth amendment protections against unreasonable confiscation of private property.
chrisjj 1 days ago [-]
Perhaps US courts have forgotten they have no jurisdiction in UK.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
No, not at all.
Byrne reasonably knew that FSIA applies; the point was to get the words on record that allow him to claim a victory in the court of public opinion. Filing the suit was irrelevant, that was the point: it highlights how Ofcom's attempts at enforcement were equally irrelevant and lacking in jurisdiction. Hence:
> All Plaintiffs seek in this action is a declaration that [Ofcom’s] Section 100 Orders, transmitted by e-mail, did not effect valid service in the United States.
No actual damages for the putative violation of rights; just an affirmation that Ofcom was FOS in trying anything in the first place.
And, per Byrne, the court gladly delivered:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution, if indeed Plaintiffs are correct in their constitutional claims.
Byrne and 4chan clearly are correct in the original constitutional claim, and Ofcom has received and will continue to receive $0 of the fines they purport to assess.
immibis2 1 days ago [-]
It's the exact opposite, it's UK parliament forgetting it has no jurisdiction in the US.
immibis2 1 days ago [-]
In the US, with a US court. Suppose I went to a court in your country and tried to punish you for insulting the king of Thailand. I'd be laughed out of the courtroom, right? Even though that's a serious felony in Thailand.
chrisjj 1 days ago [-]
> In the US, with a US court. Suppose I went to a court in your country and tried to punish you for insulting the king of Thailand
Considerable misunderstanding here. Ofcom didn't go to a US court. 4chan went to a US court.
And lost. Judge dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that Ofcom is protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
An obiter dictum is not a "judgment", in the first place.
spwa4 2 days ago [-]
> Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Not European politicians.
You see, in the EU international treaties supersede individual countries' constitutions in theory. This is the other way the EU is moving power to executive governments away from parliament and judicial branches.
Of course, in practice, you have at least a good chance that courts just ignore it (of course the laws of many European countries are a good match, the big thing you get many conflicts about is if 2 governments act on the same company/crime/...). Then the EU court makes a counter judgement ... and is ignored, despite the law. Which is one of the reasons you keep reading the EU is about to fall apart.
tamimio 2 days ago [-]
It’s not weird when you add a missing detail, that it is a honeypot!
nickdothutton 2 days ago [-]
It’s largely political. Even the rank and file staff there agree that it’s nonsense, being done for appearances.
topspin 2 days ago [-]
Exactly. Ofcom understood it needed a dog and pony show to answer the latest UK moral panic over 4chan. The headlines have moved on, and they can safely take off their costumes.
noja 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tick_tock_tick 2 days ago [-]
He lived in the USA's hemisphere. The USA has always exercises it's control of Europe less directly.
qup 2 days ago [-]
Yes.
What ties are there to the current conversation?
noja 2 days ago [-]
Because we are discussing law outside of the borders to which normal legal boundaries apply.
743947630229 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
p-e-w 2 days ago [-]
> they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.
Muromec 2 days ago [-]
>Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities
That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.
2 days ago [-]
thaumasiotes 2 days ago [-]
> Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.
wonderwonder 2 days ago [-]
The difference is that Britain is not a super power and has not been for a long time. There is only China and the US. All other western nations and many eastern ones are shells of what they once were.
cjs_ac 2 days ago [-]
This fits quite neatly with Dominic Cummings' comments to the House of Lords Constitutional Committee[0] about how the British Civil Service can't do anything because no one with any talent wants to work there.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBYvj4YQLE (full video is an hour and a half, but you can skip to any bit because he just makes the same handful of points over and over again)
I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.
For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:
Dammit, my edit window ran out of time. Alas. While the 22nd April, 3rd June, and 10th June sessions are from that committee, they are unrelated to the inquiry of constitutional safeguards. Skip to the 15th July session. Here's a link to the inquiry: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9861/the-uks-constitut...
Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
pja 2 days ago [-]
Failing to do anything constructive about the problems he’s identified is Cummings’ whole thing though.
He’s like an incompetent Cassandra: people keep on agreeing with his diagnoses, giving him power in the hope that he’ll fix things at which point he makes a complete hash of everything and leaves in a huff having made things worse than they were before.
If the right ever takes power in the UK in the near-ish future I expect us to go through exactly this cycle again. Cummings seems to be very bad at the politics of driving organisational change & making it stick, which is ironic given that criticising public bodies is what he spends so much of his time doing.
cjs_ac 2 days ago [-]
Sure, but even if he provides no solutions, providing insight into the problems is a worthwhile contribution.
Defletter 2 days ago [-]
Except that his grievances are extremely surface level.
For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.
What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.
In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:
> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".
roryirvine 1 days ago [-]
Cummings and people like him seem to think of officialdom as being something like a non-Newtonian fluid.
Trouble is, he thinks they're thixotropic - give 'em a big whack to get them moving faster - when they're actually by design closer to being rheopectic, absorbing sudden stresses to protect the nation.
So when faced with the multiple sudden gyrations in policy that we saw under the final five years of the last government, they of course acted as a dampener. That's what they're there for, that's why they're so valuable. But if you don't shock them and instead apply constant pressure in a consistent direction, they'll move smoothly, efficiently, and effectively.
For a good example of that, see Francis Maude's term in the Cabinet Office in the first half of the 2010s which changed the civil service very much for the better and was responsible for, amongst others, GDS, the Government Security Group, and a lot of open government initiatives.
foldr 1 days ago [-]
"I'm smart but my colleagues are all useless idiots" is an insight now? That's pretty much everyone's complaint about their colleagues in all of human history.
pxeger1 2 days ago [-]
"parliamentlive.tv" doesn't sound any more reputable, but apparently it's official despite the foreign TLD!
pjc50 2 days ago [-]
Cummings is an absolute crank. He had the opportunity to try and he ended up failing spectacularly, like Liz Truss or Yannis Varoufakis.
jiaosdjf 1 days ago [-]
He's not stupid tho, I've read some of his stuff and while I never agreed with Brexit I think he always proposed that there should be 2 referendums to validate the actual method of Brexit. He has a very fair point about the civil service.
His problem is he doesn't understand politics, and like Musk he's wasted his time getting involved with the worst people instead of focusing on what he's good at.
braiamp 2 days ago [-]
It’s funny because "no one with talent wants to work there" would explain an organization failure only if there were a competitive job market, one where talented people can freely choose their employer. There isn't, so the actual description is that the British Civil Service, due to having crappy managers and policies, can't do anything useful.
I'm pretty sure that if we ask the operative layer what should the policies be, they wouldn't even pursue this goal
proaralyst 1 days ago [-]
There is a competitive job market: working in the private sector. I think Cummings's claim is that talented UK citizens who would be very effective in the civil service are working elsewhere instead? I'm sure this isn't the whole of the explanation but it feels plausible to me
braiamp 22 hours ago [-]
That's not... competitive market. A competitive market in this case would mean that no matter what, the pay is equivalent on both sectors. It's not. Public service pays less and has the same politics annoyances of the private one. If it was competitive it would pay equivalently
Utter rubbish. Civil servants can't get anything done because they are chronically underfunded, and yanked around by the whims of the government of the day. Dominic Cummings' is not a reliable source either - he's ideologically at odds with the idea of government _doing_ anything, and because of that has caused a great deal of harm to the UK.
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
In an ideal world, exclusively-US-based companies that host message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging services, and the like would look at this saga and
1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low
2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story
Alas.
philipkglass 2 days ago [-]
Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector...
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
> Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based?
That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.
Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
philipkglass 2 days ago [-]
According to Discord's careers page, they're currently hiring people in the US, UK, Singapore, Portugal, and the Netherlands:
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
> They have a registered office in Schiphol:
Ah, I stand corrected. Discord has a branch office in the Netherlands. Thanks for the correction.
> Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
As I said:
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be *far* less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
Trampling on fundamental rights in order to chase marginally more money is neither admirable nor prosocial behavior.
shadowgovt 24 hours ago [-]
"Fundamental" gets very relative when a concern is international.
This reminds me of the time you could use Twitter as a sort of an oracle to tell whether Twitter thought an account was probably pro-fascist. This wasn't something they'd necessarily surface in the US, but for compliance reasons in Germany they had to suppress fascist propaganda so the backend was aware of flags on individual posts and entire accounts.
At some point, at least, the API did expose that state; after the API got yanked, you could still hypothetically find it by accessing Twitter from Germany via VPN and comparing visibility of posts and accounts in and out of that environment.
Which was very funny to me, because it meant that institutionally, Twitter had an opinion on these accounts but they made it increasingly difficult for US users to know that opinion.
"Freedom of speech" indeed. ;)
dogleash 2 days ago [-]
>It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.
philipkglass 2 days ago [-]
I'm commenting on how non-US laws may affect businesses, descriptively speaking, without prescriptively stating what I think that the law ought to be.
I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.)
However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
gpm 2 days ago [-]
Discord does business in the UK, Australia, and just about every other country of any relevance. It would be trivial for the UK courts to collect fines against them simply by ordering the payment processors handling payments for them in the UK to redirect those payments, for instance.
4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
> 4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
4chan is absolutely operating as a business ("4chan community support LLC") that accepts payments [0], as is Kiwi Farms ("Lolcow LLC") [1]. There is zero doubt in my mind that both companies have users in the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions that have the sorts of awful regulations that we're discussing. I expect that they also receive payments from users in those jurisdictions.
Given that you report that it's trivial to do, I wonder why Ofcom declined to levy its fines by way of commanding UK-based payment processors...
> And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
I mean even if all of these companies closed up shop and fortified themselves inside the US, the countries wanting to enforce their rulings would simply block the IPs of the offending sites or their providers. This is what happened with CF and spanish football broadcasting rights.
GeorgeWBasic 2 days ago [-]
Just bear in mind that many US states are implementing the so-called age verification laws, which will soon turn into identity verification laws. So simply being in the US doesn't protect them against having to comply with these things. Someone is going to have to fight the laws.
throwawayffffas 2 days ago [-]
The main difference is that most of the big players have physical presence in the UK. You can't argue British law does not apply to you when you have a campus in Kings Cross.
tourmalinetaco 2 days ago [-]
4chan and Kiwi Farms (via Lolcow LLC), to be more specific.
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
Rad. Thanks for the correction.
shadowgovt 2 days ago [-]
Here's the thing though: nobody has to agree 4chan is the hero of the story. It's also reasonable to look at 4chan and say "Gross and legally correct is still gross" and let them soldier on alone.
You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
> You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures.
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
shadowgovt 2 days ago [-]
> scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
simoncion 2 days ago [-]
> ...that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for.
No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.
Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.
(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
> Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good
What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?
(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)
shadowgovt 2 days ago [-]
Your twist on the argument is a fair one since the commenter you're responding to is equating fishing a drowning child out of a river with fighting formal scrutiny regarding their lax approach to policing CSAM on /b/ and /hc/.
Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.
It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.
2 days ago [-]
Klonoar 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
murphyslab 2 days ago [-]
The original German of the poem does say, at the final line, "Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte." That is, "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
Unless your definition of "opposition to totalitarianism" is very different from mine, I would hope it is transparent that the examples given in the comment you replied to are not such voices.
shadowgovt 2 days ago [-]
What of the wellbeing and interests of the vulnerable who stumble onto /b/ ill-equipped for the firehose? Are we their keepers also?
This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.
I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.
Levitz 2 days ago [-]
>This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
shadowgovt 1 days ago [-]
Have they built a framework that allows them to enforce it successfully, or is the enforcement a fig-leaf?
Here, 4chan's design works against answering the question satisfactorily; their commitment to anonymity makes it difficult to say whether they really keep minors off the site (purely anecdotally, the answer seems to be "Not really; everyone knows click-through confirmation is a joke," but that's anecdote). OFCOM allegation, indeed, is more-or-less that 4chan pays lip-service to keeping minors out but fails in practice, and they demand better of service providers then "Well, we told them they're not allowed and if they make it too obvious to ignore we give 'em the boot; what more could we possibly do?" Because OFCOM has a list of what more they could possibly do.
There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet as a whole - including fora like 4chan - has become deeply enough integrated into daily human experience that 4chan having an "Are you over 18" clickthrough is no more acceptable than a 21-and-up club leaving the back door unlocked and never carding once you're inside.
lukewarm707 2 days ago [-]
Think of the children!
This message was sponsored by SafetyTM.
Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
StanislavPetrov 2 days ago [-]
>What of the wellbeing and interests of the vulnerable who stumble onto /b/ ill-equipped for the firehose? Are we their keepers also?
No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government.
shadowgovt 1 days ago [-]
What happens when policing that is a practical impossibility because children can dive into a sea of information from thousands of unsecured nodes, utterly disintermediating their parents from that process?
That's the experiment we're running right now. The Internet is different from TV. It's interactive and bidirectional. Most importantly, it's decentralized. Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
(To be clear, there are definitely tradeoffs, and I see them. But I think it's important to steel-man the counter-position because the counter-position doesn't just go away. Especially since there's a non-ignorably-trivial number of citizens, in both the US and the UK, who feel the trade-offs are acceptable because they really do not like what they perceive open and unfettered Internet access to have done to one or two generations of humanity exposed to it in childhood at this point.
To argue against it, we have to face it, not dismiss it).
StanislavPetrov 23 hours ago [-]
>What happens when policing that is a practical impossibility because children can dive into a sea of information from thousands of unsecured nodes, utterly disintermediating their parents from that process?
I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child. The fact that it is common practice for a parent to outsource the raising of their child to strangers ("day care") and the government ("public schools") doesn't mean that is is smart, desirable, beneficial or conducive to raising a smart, moral and intelligent child. If your answer is, "I have to outsource the rearing of my child to others/the government because of XYZ", then my answer to you is don't have a child! The "trade-offs" that the non-trivial number of citizens in the US and the UK are choosing to make is to trade the freedom of other people so that they don't have to worry about properly supervising or raising their children. Sorry, you don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience, especially when trading away my freedoms ultimately does nothing to solve the problem your tradeoff purportedly solves, as children will always find a way to access the internet anyway.
>Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
No parent was forced to buy a TV and no parent is forced to by their child a device with unfettered access to the internet. Suggesting that we should strip away the rights and freedoms of every adult and entirely abandon the right to privacy and anonymity in a fruitless attempt to bulletproof society for children is a non-starter for me and many others.
shadowgovt 22 hours ago [-]
I don't think "if you're raising a child the way most Americans do, you shouldn't have a child" is going to be a productive argument against a more authoritarian internet experience that requires stronger IRL identity authentication of most users. I don't think it'll carry on most countries, including the US.
> You don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience
Precisely that trade is most of politics and regulation, be it "You have to drive on the right side of the road" or "You can't swear on FCC-licensed airwave broadcast." We took a very liberal stance to the Internet, and much of Western society seems to be reevaluating that stance in this era.
The challenge with the Internet is that accessing it is so ubiquitous that even if a parent wants to keep a child off it, it's pretty impossible. You can get on it at any public library. Certainly we're not banning children from libraries to keep them safe? That's unworkable.
You yourself assert that children will always find a way to access the Internet. The unfortunate conclusion drawn from the strongest form of that assertion is that we must therefore make the Internet they can access child-safe.
(I recognize how this is a non-starter for many. My concern is that failure to engage the argument may leave those for whom it's a non-starter at a severe disadvantage as the opposing view consolidates political power to effect change. I think the result of saying l assuming the status-quo holds is we're going to wake up one day to find half the Internet ID-walled and the other half behind Tor).
StanislavPetrov 18 hours ago [-]
>I don't think "if you're raising a child the way most Americans do, you shouldn't have a child" is going to be a productive argument
I didn't say it is a productive argument, I said, "I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child." I don't believe it is possible to make a productive argument in the United States because the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the capacity to think critically and make good decisions. The authoritarians who run our country will eliminate anonymity and privacy and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. It doesn't matter what argument you make.
And in my parent comment above that, I further qualified that by saying, "No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government. Our society is neither free or sane, but the point stands. Freedom is anathema to the authoritarians who are in the process of stripping us of our few remaining freedoms and what remains of our anonymity and our privacy.
That doesn't mean that we can't jawbone about how a free society should operate, and what people who give lip service to the concept of freedom should support. We can also point out that the authoritarians in charge could care less about the welfare or safety of your children, and must laugh to themselves about how stupid the masses are to trade what few freedoms they have left for the illusion of safety for their children. At least for now. Until posting unregulated messages is outlawed for the safety of the children, with all the usual suspects cheering it on.
shadowgovt 18 hours ago [-]
I think you're more blackpilled than I am on this topic. I actually still think that there is probably constructive middle ground. I'm just haven't quite seen it yet.
I strongly suspect it doesn't include 4chan of the future operating like 4chan in the early 2000s. Things do change sometimes. But hey, in the short run? They certainly can in the US. They will probably be banned in the UK very soon for anyone who doesn't know how to set up a VPN or access Tor, but across that bridge when we come to it right?
mm263 2 days ago [-]
This is just laying down the ground work for Russia-style deep packet inspection. “We don’t have a capability to censor the foreign internet, so we need measures to cut off the violating sites from our side”
ifwinterco 2 days ago [-]
I think it’s an open question whether the British state has the technical chops, money and willingness to implement a Great Firewall type solution.
The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great
jubilee33 2 days ago [-]
Why are you assuming that they aren't totally incompetent?
They look pretty incompetent from my perspective.
Or they just want to present the appearance of incompetence for an ulterior motive? That seems needlessly complex when they are already admitting their malevolence daily.
ifwinterco 2 days ago [-]
There are examples of the apparently ineffective British state suddenly gaining some teeth and some competence when they actually care.
One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.
That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.
If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area
u8080 2 days ago [-]
I heard the same argument for several years in Russia while government was building competences. They have money, so could just hire top tier commercial companies who are the best it their field.
Orygin 2 days ago [-]
They already track everything going through the undersea cables, why couldn't they start blocking at those points?
ifwinterco 2 days ago [-]
Getting the raw data is relatively straightforward, but my understanding is doing real time DPI at country scale without being easily circumvented (and without breaking the rest of the internet you want to work) isn't so easy.
If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through
superxpro12 2 days ago [-]
i too love the idea of deep government inspection of every piece of data i send
dannyw 2 days ago [-]
Splicing and mirroring a cable is about 10x easier than filtering it.
u8080 2 days ago [-]
Sorry for copypaste, but I still hope people will see true intentions of govt.
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).
windowliker 1 days ago [-]
The UK already has a very extensive block list which most ISPs already implement:
I don't see the need for extra tooling like DPI when the willingness and methodology to outright block sites at a higher level is already in place. Also bear in mind that the groups who have compiled the most widely implemented block lists are also major sponsors of the bill which this 4chan story refers to, so they have largely gotten what they wanted.
bnastic 2 days ago [-]
That's already been done, on the ISP level, some time ago. For torrent sites and similar, if I remember correctly.
crimsontech 2 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure it was to protect the children, or fight terrorism, or to save the NHS, or lower taxes.
foldr 1 days ago [-]
That's not based on deep packet inspection; it's just low tech stuff like IP blocks. ISPs don't have the resources or expertise to DPI encrypted traffic (which is the majority of network traffic now).
TZubiri 2 days ago [-]
deep packet inspection is not really necessary, headers contain information about the destination, as long as you don’t encrypt those, there is no need to do any decryption.
mm263 2 days ago [-]
You just need to follow this to the logical conclusion. They’ll ban using your proposed method, people will switch to VPN and other modern methods and to combat people still accessing the forbidden internet they will need DPI and TSPU-like devices
9x39 2 days ago [-]
I think the conclusion is more like mandating home and business web access is proxied at a national level and most other protocols disallowed. Use of VPNs without a VPN tax stamp and key escrow is prima facie evidence of violation of the Counter-Terrorism and Security act. Use of non-standard protocols is assumed to be criminal intent. Check with your approved internet provider for how to access the Internet safely.
TZubiri 2 days ago [-]
What proposed method? I'm explaining how things work. In order to send a packet, the destination address needs to be known to the delivering entities. Encryption occurs by using enveloping, the envelope is unencrypted, but the content is encrpyted.
This is how it works, if you want I can explain to you why it works like this, or you can work it out from first principles. But this is not a proposal.
VPNs are an asterisk and they work not by avoiding this natural unavoidable principle, but by tunneling, the VPN or proxy vendor is putting themselves on the headers, and on the backend they still route the packets to the destination by putting the intended destination on the headers.
If these VPNs don't comply with local regulations and are used to evade national restrictions they can and are often themselves subject to bans. But even if not, it acts as a sort of waiver and compromising element for all illicit activity.
Sometimes it's not necessary to completely outlaw something, it is sufficient to make it so that engaging in the outlawed activity is sufficiently uncomfortable and clear that it is illegal, forcing users to undeniably acknowledge they are avoiding the law. An example of this is trying to watch pirated movies without paying for them, yeah you can do it, but you gotta do some shady shit and dodge a lot of malware, and eat shady gambling ads and etcetera.
In addition to making you feel like an asshole, it removes any recourse you may have, it's very hard to make any claim later, you cannot really complain later if you were accessing it illegally to begin with. Nobody is going to pursue you to the end of the world not to access a pirated movie or an illegal website, but they pursue the distributor and make things very uncomfortable enough so that you are effectively hiding like a fiending outlaw.
iamnothere 2 days ago [-]
Likely yes IMO, especially since the UK is making moves to militarize.
hardbass 2 days ago [-]
Sounds good. Why don't you want a strong military in European countries? They should pay their own military tab.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
Did I say anything about not wanting nations to have a strong military? Why are you making shit up?
The bad thing would be tying that process in with growing internet restrictions.
andyhedges 2 days ago [-]
I hate to break it to you, but the UK has had a military for some time now.
mahboi 2 days ago [-]
This isn't what "militarize" means in this context or mostly anywhere
DANmode 2 days ago [-]
So has France, but their nuclear weapons program is new.
I don’t think it’s weird to point out the little guys (especially former or current EU) getting strapped.
mig39 2 days ago [-]
I think both the UK and France have had nuclear weapons programs since the 50s and 60s. Are you thinking about the "Northwood declaration" ? Where they both said they would coordinate their nuclear responses?
AnonymousPlanet 2 days ago [-]
The first nuclear weapon tests for the UK and France were in 1952 and 1960, respectively. Nothing about that is new.
The French have always had a very strong submarine fleet with nuclear launch capability. Nothing new about this in the slightest. This puts them in a very select group and is what still gives them some clout on the international stage.
DANmode 2 days ago [-]
> Nothing new about this in the slightest
Deep inland strikes from miles out while underwater/at sea.
foldr 1 days ago [-]
France has had submarine-launched ICBMs with nuclear warheads since 1971.
iamnothere 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
drawfloat 2 days ago [-]
We're probably at the weakest point in our history militarily, with few recruits coming in. People in government saying they are "going to have" conversations about war with the public (FYI, UK would be behind most other countries on this, many already have done in last 5 years) is very different to "militarization" in any way that would relate to this 4Chan decision, it's not even "we are actually doing something".
And politicians have repeatedly stated the need for better control of information, connecting it directly to the Ukraine conflict and perceived threats from Russia.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the push for information control is partly connected to military/defense goals.
praptak 1 days ago [-]
"Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops[...]"
Let's not pretend this is the only way (some) laws are enforced abroad. A US company wants your country to put you in jail for hacking hardware you legally own? No problem, they lobby this in trade deal negotiations and they get their way.
This is economic coercion instead of the fleet, so people don't get as angry about this as they should.
spacebanana7 1 days ago [-]
But the fleet is a necessary condition for economic coercion, otherwise the adversary could escalate the dispute kinetically.
miohtama 2 days ago [-]
Think of the kids the world we failed to protect by not having passport checks and government snitch at the 4chan login.
But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs).
And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
> No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
Does _not_ need to be foreign.
People in Western Democracies assume we are immune to dictatorships.
Plenty of dictatorships in our modern history were regressions from at least some form of functional democracy, many even regressed from long lasting robust democracies.
So much of the UK, EU comission, Palantir moves is straight up Stasi playbook.
It is almost disrespectful of German History and collective suffering for VDL to stand on the wrong side of history with this corporate puppetering.
miohtama 1 days ago [-]
You are right, in the case of UK, Israel is not the foreign government
2 days ago [-]
kypro 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
lifeisstillgood 2 days ago [-]
I think this is just one more case of “we thought we lived in Western Civilisation and all agreed on how to handle the problems of the world”. And we are discovering that we actually live in American Civilisation, and the differences are becoming insurmountable.
The problem is America cannot stand alone - everyone needs friends
hgoel 1 days ago [-]
Calling it "American civilization" seems wrong too when the president and his bootlickers frequently attempt to supress negative coverage and call for things that are very blatantly against the first amendment, let alone against the spirit of free speech.
sampli 2 days ago [-]
Because America courts should enforce foreign censorship?
jiaosdjf 1 days ago [-]
There is no "problem" with 4chan, it has existed for years, it is free speech, and no US administration should be expected to bow to anyone on it.
The problem is platforms that millions do use and have no ability to counter Russian, Mossad and other foreign influence. The problem is that we are all complete cucks to Israel and they've done everything in their power to ensure the likes of Tik Tok will never be able to teach children about their genocide or dragging us into their forever wars. The problem is private equity and corporate dystopia and our cretinous politicians.
nickdothutton 2 days ago [-]
When European governments say they will lead in technology regulation, this is what they mean.
windowliker 1 days ago [-]
Would you prefer your iPhone still had a proprietary charger cable?
trinsic2 2 days ago [-]
> I wish them luck in that important work. In the meantime, we Americans have plenty more work to do on this side of the pond to protect our border and prevent the British, Australian, Russian, and other foreign censorship regimes from crossing it.
We got our own problems with Authoritarianism. There is no need to protect our borders from something our own government and corporations are practicing day in and day out on our own people, in our own country. You might want to acknowledge that first, before assuming we got problems across the pond.
And BTW the real answer is to enforce antitrust and put an end to Citizens United to prevent money from flowing into our political institutions and reign in these corrupt business. You might want to add that as well to your point about the GRANITE Act
outoftheabyss 2 days ago [-]
Your quote references censorship specifically and while there are some creaks in the first amendment here and there, it is nothing compared to the censorship machine running in the UK and Europe.
trinsic2 2 days ago [-]
What the hell are you talking about? We have the same problems as the UK and they are just as bad. We are at the cusp, while the UK is further in, but we still have the same problems..
outoftheabyss 23 hours ago [-]
I’m British. There are a fair few of my fellow citizens in prison for tweets that would disagree
trinsic2 15 hours ago [-]
We have ICE agents rounding up people of color and disappearing them, so I'm not saying our problems are worse than yours I'm just saying we have common ground.
foldr 1 days ago [-]
I think it would be more accurate to say that the UK and US have different problems when it comes to freedom of expression, and each country tends to notice the problems in the other one more readily than its own problems (especially because the US right likes to use the UK as a whipping boy).
From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.
Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).
Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†
† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).
trinsic2 1 days ago [-]
Well for me, I'm looking at the U.S problems first and foremost. And I see the UK is having problems under the authoritarianism banner same as us. But I don't judge UK's problems with the U.S. I see the UK as having big problems with freedom and corruption of the political system but I'm not a UK citizen so I have no idea. I always start with my own country and feel sad about what's happening across the world. The topics that are important to me are surveillance and censorship, and those issues are happening across different countries. The point I was trying to make originally was that we the U.S. need to focus on our own problems and stop worrying about other countries problems until we fix our own. And here in the US we have problems with corruption that needs to be fixed. We need to stop allowing money to affect our political system first and foremost and secondly, we need to stop corporations from making the world worse by enforcing antitrust.
foldr 1 days ago [-]
I’d don’t disagree with any of that except lumping the current UK and US governments under the same “authoritarian” categorization. Trump is a classic authoritarian strong man pushing the limits of his constitutional authority. Nothing comparable is currently happening in the UK.
trinsic2 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not seeing how it's any different except you have a whole political party doing the damage of the same scale.
foldr 21 hours ago [-]
You'll have to be more specific, sorry. Which political party, and what damage? I am not saying that everything is perfect in the UK. I'm just saying that the UK does not currently have an authoritarian leader making an executive power grab.
trinsic2 15 hours ago [-]
The age verification laws using third parties to store digital id data that can be accessed and misused by 3rd parties is one example to me across the board that is part of an authoritarian agenda happening in many countries including the UK. We have a poster boy Trump that is being propped up as a dictator in the U.S by special interests (Instutionalists) that only have an interest in making money off the backs of the people by using our political offices for these corrupt practices. I read about the postal scandal in the uk and that seems remarkably similar to how our government and corporations work togeather to disenfranchise its people. I guess I'm saying we have more in common around these topics than we do differences. And trust me I'm not trying to lesson our role in what the U.S. is doing to the whole world. I'm doing my part to stand against what our government is doing. You can see what I'm doing on my website https://scottrlarson.com/blog. It's not much but it's the best I can do right now.
foldr 13 hours ago [-]
Ok, so you’re not talking about a specific UK political party.
trinsic2 5 hours ago [-]
Well I thought these things were torries related but I'm less sure about that. Not that it matters either way. Authiratianism seems like an epidemic that's affecting everyone with strong egos.
gupti 2 days ago [-]
I hope the precedent doesn't change to trying to enforce fines on foreign companies by instead arresting and fining employees upon arrival to the UK.
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in 2024 with France and Telegram...
gupti 2 days ago [-]
I hope the precedent doesn't change to trying to enforce fines on foreign companies by instead arresting and fining employees upon arrival to the UK.
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in France with Telegram...
2 days ago [-]
egorfine 1 days ago [-]
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
You don't say!
> American courts are not necessarily required to enforce foreign penal judgments
Shocking.
What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom? Plain censorship?
windowliker 1 days ago [-]
>What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom?
They are supposed to regulate domestic broadcasters and communications companies, and frankly have done a terrible job of it to date, like all the other 'independent' regulators set up after the waves of privatisation which sold off our public utilities (huge conflicts of interest involved when ex-regulators frequently move into board positions in the companies they were previously responsible for keeping in line). This new mandate to police the internet is a recent one for Ofcom which has greatly widened the scope of their remit, and as we all know, authoritarians never complain about being given more power.
game_the0ry 2 days ago [-]
Its adorable that the UK gov thought they could beat the internet.
The world wide web remains undefeated.
not-kinsale-joe 2 days ago [-]
It's annoying, in the UK you can browse 4chan but not Imgur
jiaosdjf 1 days ago [-]
Whats really weird is I'm in the UK and use PIA VPN on Community Fibre and for some reason 4chan only loads outside of the VPN.
This government really can go and fuck themselves, as can all our other useless and cretinous political parties. They've achieved nothing, at great cost, and at the expense of a million other issues.
All of our social media has been manipulated by the likes of Russia and Mossad for over a decade now. Our democracies are compromised, everyone is poorer and angrier, and they have sat here and done nothing but go after some fringe website and make people take selfies to wank.
____mr____ 6 hours ago [-]
>Whats really weird is I'm in the UK and use PIA VPN on Community Fibre and for some reason 4chan only loads outside of the VPN.
This is probably 4chans doing? lots of websites block traffic from popular vpn exit nodes
TZubiri 2 days ago [-]
does this mean the UK will block 4chan in the UK? if the defense is jurisdictional then 4chan can continue to serve US users, but there would be no recourse if the UK blocks it in their jurisdiction
miohtama 2 days ago [-]
The UK ISPs already did this earlier. What Ofcom really wanted is to flex their muscle and kill 4chan because it represents Satan for them.
What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.
tourmalinetaco 2 days ago [-]
4chan and Kiwi Farms, which is something the article intentionally glosses over. Honestly, KF is a far more “dangerous” place in the eyes of the UK government, as 4chan hasn’t been relevant for around a decade, and the combined efforts to deplatform KF traditionally has been fruitless.
pjc50 2 days ago [-]
It is not blocked in the UK.
I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.
EmbarrassedHelp 2 days ago [-]
They only temporarily backed down on targeting VPNs, while also saying that online platforms should block all VPN users who don't verify their ages.
Using a nationwide default blocklist to address 4chan would be appropriate behaviour for Ofcom, given its duty to protect kids.
Beyond that, it is just madness to try to control the US company or fine it. Going beyond this duty shows that not all biscuits are present at the afternoon tea.
It's not like Facebook, or anyone's personal life or business, depends on 4chan.
ryankrage77 2 days ago [-]
In my experience, ISPs just 'block' it at the DNS level. Using another DNS provider 'unblocks' everything.
TZubiri 2 days ago [-]
This is my experience too, I don't know why they don't do IP level blocks. It's pretty trivial to evade a lot of bans.
I think the Spain-Cloudflare case does IP level blocks and it has a lot of side effect damage, but if I recall they do IP-block level blocking because the vendor, cloudflare, provides header/envelope encryption and pooling, so the Spanish courts considers it legal to block the whole service even, alleging that they are not collaborating with court orders, they just choose not to block the whole provider to reduce the collateral damage, even if they consider they have jurisdiction to block all of CF
miohtama 2 days ago [-]
Pirate streams have better access to public IP addresses than legitimate services, so blocking Cloudflare does nothing but destroy legitimate businesses.
whywhywhywhy 2 days ago [-]
Why would they block it if they hope to get money from it.
jubilee33 2 days ago [-]
I'm not sure who the other three clients are,
But in the case of 4chan, people are also forgetting that it is well known to be an intel gathering and propaganda disseminating platform closely aligned if not run indirectly by the US government.
It's not blocked anywhere that much more tame sites are usually blocked, perhaps china is the only one I know of and even google is blocked there, and that makes me suspicious.
Yes there are organic users on there outside of the political places,
But many, especially those that are disgusted by the site, forget the very real impact that 4chan has had on current events, I just don't see any of this situation as organic.
neuroticnews25 1 days ago [-]
>It's not blocked anywhere that much more tame sites are usually blocked
Any examples?
lukeify 2 days ago [-]
We need to start collectively shaming individuals in the tech sector who work for these censorious government agencies and do their bidding.
MisterMunchkin 2 days ago [-]
Good, fuck off ofcom. We always mocked Chinese censorship but we’re not really any different now.
metalman 2 days ago [-]
4 chan is the most bent place on the internet that is just wide open, and in my short forrey I did see and read a bunch of horrible stuff, but there are other areas in there where certain counter culture groups with no violence or ranting seem to be hiding out for the privacy, and there are also people who go in to challenge some of the worst obscenities, and as it turned out I have a friend who does just that, even going so far as to learn the intricasies of these groups and chase them around the net to pick there horrible theories and causes apart, driving some of them completly insane in the process.
it's not like there are not worse places, and 4 chan realy is sort of cartoonish and juvenile, so the best thing is to openly acknowledge it and like all the bad stuff label it and remind people of the risks of getting caught up in this, or any, cult.
jiaosdjf 1 days ago [-]
4chan is ironically one of the few social platforms with no algorithm and where people can actually genuinely debate.
Reddit is complete trash, nobody can say anything that goes against the authoritarian mods on any subreddit, regardless of if those are good or bad rules, it's just an echo chamber. Twitter is hyperreal at this point, it's impossible to spend more than 3 minutes without being angry at the world.
4chan is so full of fake news, CIA/FSB/Mossad shills and doctored screenshots that it forces you to be skeptical, its not for the masses but I've seen genuine nuggets of gold on there. It's one of the few actual communities, where people actually "get" each other, which is ironic I suppose.
cindyllm 2 days ago [-]
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maxlin 2 days ago [-]
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draw_down 2 days ago [-]
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hansvm 2 days ago [-]
The "may" in that statement (may be moving towards...) is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I think it's true that if you want to predict future harmful manosphere beliefs then one of your best predictors is current actions aligned with the top of the funnel. That doesn't even necessarily mean those actions are bad, but the combination of all of them is suggestive of a certain reading diet.
Separately, are they all good? Testosterone has a lot of negative side effects, and I know I certainly wouldn't mind having about half as much. Jawlines and fiber have similar issues when focused on in the wrong way. Eating healthy, feeling good, and looking good are mostly orthogonal to those trendy behaviors. If they work for you then great, but there are other options too, and I don't think she's saying that you shouldn't want to eat healthy, feel good, and look good. Indeed, she explicitly says that fibermaxxing is bad because it replaces a healthy diet. She agrees with at least some of your goals and really only (potentially) disagrees with the implementation.
Dylan16807 2 days ago [-]
> So basically, if you're a male that wants to eat healthy, feel good and look good, you are an evil misogynist with dangerous beliefs.
This is the most disingenuous argument I've seen in a while.
That sentence does not describe a shift to eating healthy. Some of looksmaxxing is reasonable, but a lot is unsafe or being upset about things you can't really change. And nothing in there was "feel good", do you think having abnormally high levels of testosterone is "feel good"?
sampli 2 days ago [-]
But 4chan hurt my feelings!
draw_down 2 days ago [-]
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Good grief. This is sad stuff.
ImJamal 2 days ago [-]
Are you saying it is sad that American courts do not enforce foreign laws if they violate the US constitution? If so, then are you in favor of Russian, Chinese, various Muslim countries' laws being enforced in the US?
deaux 2 days ago [-]
I think you meant to ask "are you in favor of the CLOUD Act and FACTA (among others) being enforced outside the US?"
chihuahua 2 days ago [-]
Iranian Fatwas enforced/carried out by American courts, that could get interesting.
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mahboi 2 days ago [-]
What else should happen in this case?
drnick1 2 days ago [-]
No, it's called sovereignty.
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nonethewiser 2 days ago [-]
This isnt unique to the UK. China does the same thing. The UK will have its own firewall in time. They cant actually force foreign companies to comply with these laws so they'll have to blacklist them. It's exactly the same as China.
8note 2 days ago [-]
its the exact same as the US vis a vis tiktok as well
StanislavPetrov 2 days ago [-]
>China does the same thing.
No, China is smart enough not expect foreign courts to carry out the work of the Chinese censorship regime.
urbandw311er 2 days ago [-]
Maybe you could post your unwanted political opinions somewhere else?
mellosouls 2 days ago [-]
Note this nonsense headline and article is just more puffery from the theatrical 4chan side and doesn't represent any official legal position.
Of course ofcom knows its power is limited, that shouldn't stop it attempting to do it's job, however much that job might irk foreign operators publishing to ofcoms jurisdiction.
The fact is the US has different standards to the UK. It doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong but it does mean that those differences will cause cultural and legal friction that responsible operators will attempt to diminish within reason, while others will attempt to capitalize for publicity.
weberer 2 days ago [-]
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philipwhiuk 2 days ago [-]
This was a fairly stupid case. Ofcom didn't try to enforce it abroad, 4chan sued Ofcom in case it did (mostly for PR purposes).
Ofcom knows its rulings don't apply internationally.
So yes, the status quo is enforced by the US courts, as if it was ever in doubt and nothing at all has changed.
Orygin 2 days ago [-]
Didn't Ofcom send multiple threat letters to 4chan, requesting they comply with UK laws? That counts as trying to enforce it
tourmalinetaco 2 days ago [-]
Yes. Ofcom sent multiple extortion letters to 4chan and Kiwi Farms, demanding they pay up and/or submit to British rule. Saying it was for “PR purposes” is equivalent to saying that reporting blackmail is for PR. GP also fails to understand that specifically US courts have no jurisdiction to stop international extortion, which is a loophole through the FSIA. For now, this creates a gridlock: the UK has no ability to seize assets from non-UK entities, but are free to fine and declare non-UK entities as in violation, which aids internal and even international pressure to censoring speech critical of the UK government. In response, US legislation is being proposed (GRANITE Act) that aims to close this loophole.
jalev 2 days ago [-]
Cool. So 4chan is going to get DNS blocked in the UK and I can finally stop hearing about this and all the Americans takes on what my country's enforcement mechanisms should be.
privacyishuman 2 days ago [-]
What should the rules and enforcement mechanisms be? It seems your country is unfree and getting worse in terms of digital freedom.
I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
This quote from the court is amazing:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all? Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates? Are they using this as a demonstration of why internet censorship is the only solution? It’s hard to imagine why they thought they were going to get anywhere with this case, unless failing was the goal
1. 4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026. (sauce: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:
Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...
If you think that is not worth attempting to get a host taken off the air for (at least for a while), I don't think you understand how dangerous amplified disinformation can be.
Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.
They specifically argued that they are an entertainment broadcaster in court defending Tucker’s show.
Maybe there is some demonstrable difference to size and scale of willful dishonestly among outlets.
2. CNN settles out of court in defamation lawsuit
[1] https://apnews.com/article/cnn-guilty-defamation-afghans-137...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/cnn-settles-defamat...
Of course, they were also correct. But these quoted statements are primarily about intention and motive, not really arguing (or even speculating particularly strongly) that the shooter actually was MAGA.
Incidentally, this does not seem like particularly dangerous misinformation at all. MAGA supporters are probably the safest group in America (it is, after all, not a safe country for anyone).
That's the important part here, touch grass.
> touch grass
cringe
2. It's not really obiter dicta because it's a district court order it's not something you cite, really as binding precedent. But if you read between the lines, the court is only dismissing Ofcom because it is part of a sovereign, which means it cannot maintain it's other position. The judge was making it clear he thought Ofcom needed to stop. The ruling is addressed to the parties not really to a future court. If I were Ofcom's lawyer, I wouldn't be celebrating this.
American double standards have nothing to do with this case and it's just a sort of throw in everyone seems to need to mention here. So what? Are they good or bad? If you think they're bad to extend jurisdiction, then take the win.
Long arm jurisdiction is the opposite of what happened here. That's where you pull people into US courts that might not be US citizens for things that happened not in the US. Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country? Oh, but USA bad so you scored that point.
I think you're just seeing Lincoln's hat in the clouds.
Everyone on HN apparently thinks they have a law degree.
well yeah. whats good for the goose is good for the gander. if the US wants to go bug people in their own countries, even going so far as to murder a bunch of people to kidnap a sitting president of a country, youre gonna get others looking to do it in response, and as the US loses its privileged position on the world stage, its gonna have to start complying
This is only true if, to quote the article being responded to:
>Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops
Correct, but this update is in regards to Ofcom's evidence of 20th October in front of the parliamentary select committee to which they have to report, and at which they conceded that their ability to make legally binding cross-jurisdictional enforcement actions is limited when faced with the laws of another country. The wording she used is in fact very interesting: "If foreign courts decide to... try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money."
>Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
They have taken on the case pro bono.
> [...], the CLOUD act, [...]
The CLOUD Act doesn't do what you think it does. Here's a comment from a while ago with more detail [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226822
The CLOUD Act bypasses traditional MLAT procedures, faced significant civil liberties opposition (EFF), and resolved a genuine jurisdictional dispute, not a mere drafting oversight. Claiming that data location is irrelevant ignores foreign laws and national sovereignty. Explaining why the US wants extraterritorial powers doesn't establish that it should have them.
Yes, the MLAT stuff is terrible, but it does not involve any double standard.
The non-MLAT stuff does not involve a double standard because pretty much every country has something equivalent.
The US version (and the foreign versions) are not extraterritorial because they are all compelling someone in their territory to turn over something that person controls.
If my government asks me for two files, one of which I happen to have stored on file storage service in my country, and one I've stored on a file storage service in another country, the fact that I scp from an in-country server for one an an out-of-country server for the other doesn't make it an exercise of extraterritorial power.
And then you didn't. Don't throw 'obiter dicta' to the rubes and then completely fumble your distraction with the incoherent legerdemain of 'double standards.' Show some art, at least.
Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
(Or at least, it heavily shapes the message).
> Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
The idiots aren't an active ingredient either. Russia and Iran could have used any puppets. These ones just happen to also twitch like a frog leg.
Turns out that when it comes to info quality is genuinely important, and I have no inclination to fish through raw sewage.
Before "truth social", Twitter was just often how those secondary sources would first hear of things to investigate. It's just one of the places where the shit would first come out. Hence "international politics is done via Twitter" not because it's good or proper to do so, but because that's simply what's been happening lately.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
In a UK court, of course.
Damages awarded for libel/slander in UK courts are outsized super pay days, and many a foreign sheikh or business mogul has tried to establish that the matter under question was made known to UK citizens and therefore UK has jurisdiction, because the damages will beat anything awarded anywhere else in the World.
Weirdly, Trump has argued that this was damaging to his election chances (reminder: he won the election he's arguing about), and in a jurisdiction that the BBC can show the material wasn't available in, at least not legally and through their enablement.
As a result, even the BBC's critics in the UK (of which there are many), are seeing this as just a grifter trying to shakedown an organisation he doesn't like the reporting of, because he can't do it to a US network without getting into a first amendment quagmire.
In the UK, an alleged defamatory statement is presumed false and the defendant needs to prove it is true, and that burden is unusually low compared to most other jurisdictions, and certainly much lower than in the US where the burden is on the accuser to prove the statement is false.
Is clipping a video together to create a lie "speech"?
The BBC admitted a mistake. The error was reported by an internal BBC investigation, not because Trump's team complained (it is highly unlikely they saw it originally, because it was an UK broadcast).
The BBC makes thousands of hours of video annually. You can't expect perfection, or to sue them for billions of $CURRENCY for every mistake.
The mistake in this case was to make their quite reasonable case (that Trump encouraged the violence of January 2021) very slightly more emphatically than was perhaps justified.
Trump of course showed his disapproval of the violence by pardoning all the rioters, including those convicted of injuring police with weapons.
Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
They are notorious for their left wing bias by right-wing commentators and for their right-wing bias by left-wing commentators. By law they are neutral.
> Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen (how's that for twisting the truth?) and encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol. He wasn't stupid enough to explicitly call for violence, but the implication was there.
The circumstantial evidence supports this: the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
There is no credible argument that the election was stolen. This has been repeatedly challenged in court, and each attempt has failed.
> Political prisoners, ushered in by the docents. I don't think putting your feet on Pelosi's desk is worth 4 years in jail.
David Dempsey attacked officers with flagpoles, crutches, pepper spray and broken furniture after standing at a gallows talking about hanging Democrats Daniel Rodriguez repeatedly drove a stun gun into officer Michael Fanone’s neck, causing him to lose consciousness and suffer a heart attack Patrick McCaughey crushed officer Daniel Hodges in a doorframe with a stolen riot shield for over two minutes Julian Khater pepper sprayed Police Officer Brian Sicknick in the face, causing him to collapse, and he died the next day
Do you really want to pursue this line of argument?
FYI, yes they likely do want to argue. That's what they do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101690
It's trollish behaviour. You can't stop the pidgeon from playing Pidgeon Chess.
Is it protected if you are challenging a UK company in the UK?
If he sues in Britain, then it will be run under British law.
It is, the government can not prevent or punish people speaking on the basis that the government decides it was misleading.
A civil dispute between private parties is entirely different though. One can be found liable for misleading speech that causes damage to another party.
> The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
"Thank you for correcting my misconceptions about the first amendment and civil disputes." Would have been sufficient.
> I'm saying it's going to be really hard to prove damages.
No you weren't saying that, we can see exactly what you said and it was just garbage. If you have some substantive contribution and opinion about the damages claims in the lawsuit and what it would take to prove them that would be great. The low effort worthless rhetorical questions didn't add anything though, other than to make you sound more clueless.
This is in a US court, not a British one. It will take place under US law.
He has to prove damages. What might those possibly be?
It's extremely difficult to win since he is a public figure. He would have to show actual malice, which is not easy.
He actually has to sit for a deposition, which he seems unwilling to do.
Likely the case will just be dismissed.
Sound clueless? It was trumpeted from the rooftops when they made the utterly deranged claim that "rich" -> "no damages".
Is it possible it's a troll account?
Aside, using civil courts to attack opponents is certainly a problem, but in USA it favors the speaker a compared to a lot of other countries. In US the plaintiff has to prove the speech is false and for public figures that there was malice. Which in my opinion goes a bit too far and gives media corporations more power over politicians and other public matters. I think the public figure stipulation is reasonable and important to allow private citizens to discuss politicians and public matters so that's good, but I think there should be a counter to that which requires organizations reporting the news to have more duty to report truth and not mislead.
But all of your objections here (or rather, more specifically, the choice to present them all together as a list of grievances, given that they are connected by a theme but not otherwise related or coordinated) are 1) blatant whataboutism and 2) an attempt to wage "ideological or political battle" in violation of HN commenting guidelines.
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...
You're going to need a jet pack to traverse the logical leaps you're making here.
No, that is not even remotely what I said, and not even a plausible reading of what I said. It is a blatant mischaracterization of very simple logic that I laid out explicitly.
Again: Kimmel made factually incorrect statements that he reasonably should have known were incorrect, which tended to demean the character of his political opponents, by ascribing to them a false cover-up while falsely assigning a murderer to their side.
That is not "taking a side in a debate", because the ideology of Tyler Robinson was not a matter of debate.
2. "tended to demean the character of his political opponents" - this is the world in which we live, and quite frankly, much of it is well deserved. While he did not deserve to be assassinated, Charlie Kirk himself earned plenty of skewing. He was hardly a saint, and neither was his supporters. Also, Jimmy Kimmel Live is a freaking comedy show, not a news program or law enforcement press office. Unlike the Government, he doesn't owe his audience even the slightest semblance of impartiality.
3. Whether something is a matter of debate is often time- and circumstance-dependent. When news breaks out, it's usually accompanied by a great deal of speculation, and people make mistakes. Only in the fullness of time do the facts come out. I'm not saying it's necessarily right if Kimmel (like others) came to a conclusion before the facts were settled, but it's also not unusual, and people can and should issue corrections if they are wrong.
Yes. Someone already linked it upthread.
> Unlike the Government, he doesn't owe his audience even the slightest semblance of impartiality.
He does owe them honesty.
> When news breaks out, it's usually accompanied by a great deal of speculation, and people make mistakes. Only in the fullness of time do the facts come out.
It was immediately obvious that the facts did not support his narrative to anyone who was actually attempting to gather the facts. Furthermore, that narrative should have been heavily discounted a priori on the basis of Occam's razor: obviously it is far more likely that a politically controversial figure gets targeted by opponents than by people on the same side.
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
Seems pretty harmless to me. The second clause of that statement is factual; that is what they were doing. They happened to be correct in the end, but the statement itself is still truthful.
No; to "characterize" someone as "anything other than one of" your group requires that person to be of your group. The person in question was not of their group, and everyone reasonably should have expected it to turn out that way. The clear and obvious thrust of that quote is to falsely accuse a) the murderer of being a right-winger and b) other right-wingers of lying to cover it up. That's how English works; it's how Kimmel's sycophantic audience understood it; and it's how the justifiably offended right-wingers understood it.
It does not. If I declare that "zahlman's not a family member," that's a true statement. If Alice, a third party observer of the conversation, then says, dramatically, "OMG otterley says zahlman's not a family member", that's also a true statement. There was no "requirement" that you actually be a member of my family for any of this.
What you're arguing about is not the truth or falsity of a statement, but the suggestions that emanate from it. How the audience might have interpreted it is subjective. It's not objective.
I no longer believe you are arguing in good faith. You're struggling mightily to make your argument cogent, you're getting a lot of feedback that it's nonsense, and yet you just can't seem to process that.
Please show where he pinned the blame on anyone.
> KIMMEL: We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
That's not assigning blame for Kirk's murder. There is no way to interpret that as saying "Charlie Kirk's murderer was MAGA." It's saying that MAGA representatives were jumping to conclusions, prematurely focusing on blame assignment. To steel man your argument, you could say that it is saying the likelihood that the murderer was MAGA is greater than what the MAGA crowd is reporting. But since they were saying the exact opposite, that reduces to "there is a non-zero probability the murderer is MAGA" -- that's not an extreme position five days after the event.
You will note that at no point did absolutely anyone whatsoever propose prison time for Kimmel. Kirk, on the other hand, lost his life in an act of what the evidence strongly suggests was vigilantism.
You guys are basically Russia in denial at this point. Carried on by the momentum of your products that is heading straight for a massive disruption by AI.
Is that also the case with the common Brit or American?
That was most of the point. America and the UK have become the evil twin of Western Freedom™ and still believe they're better, or know they've fallen but can't/won't do anything.
When you see a litany of bad shit like in one of the GP comments, like book bans etc, you can't be sure if they're talking about the US or the UK, they're basically equally as shit now.
Likewise the talk of book bans is just silly. What books are banned in America?
Here is a list of banned books in the USA:
https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
Here is also a huge Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
Oh well, same thing. At this point the UK is basically the mutant kid sprouting from the body of that guy in Total Recall :)
The same shitty some of the worst authoritarianism among the Western world etc.
(yes I know Kuato was a good guy but I mean the UK seems like a hanger-on of the US now, both trying to make shit worse for their own citizens)
There are no book bans in the US. Individual libraries can be and are selective about what books they stock, and libraries for children justifiably avoid specific topics. The government has not actually banned any books lately.
The White House has not restricted reporting, it has merely denied entry to it’s press releases to specific parties. Those parties can still report on the facts (or make them up, as they are wont to do), they just cannot attend the White House’s press releases. Since attendance at press releases is by invitation in any case, this is definitely not censorship.
Supporting public broadcasting is not an antidote to censorship, and ending that support is not a form of censorship either. PBS was notorious for supporting only one political viewpoint, and there was just no need to waste taxpayer money on it. You would cry foul if taxpayer money were spent to advocate for political viewpoints that you don’t agree with.
Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed. That’s incitement to violence, which is not protected speech.
The US’s sanctions of Cuba are not related to speech in any way.
If you really want to cite American double standards, how about American banks denying service to Americans based on their stated political and religious beliefs? <https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...>
Or how about the FBI declaring that parents at PTA meetings as “domestic terrorists”? Or targeting the Catholic church as an “extremist organization”?
While actual incitement to violence isn't protected speech, that wasn't even close to incitement to violence, which requires meeting three prongs clearly defined by SCOTUS.
I encourage you to review actual statements which SCOTUS has previously ruled are NOT incitement to violence. It's so incredibly narrow and particular, I was left wondering if anything can meet the definition. Jimmy Kimmel is so far from it your assertion is ludicrous.
Is this the same general public whose backlash over the suspension got it reversed a few days later by the network, and by Nextstar and Sinclair a few days after that?
Those who objected to the speech were morally in the right, because the speech clearly crossed a line. It baselessly accused others of trying to cover up a truth which would have been damaging to them, except that it turned out to be the exact falsehood that Occam's Razor would have predicted. And it did so with the force of broadcast media behind it.
Indeed, I think you should look at the speech that SCOTUS ruled is protected in the landmark Brandenburg v Ohio[0] case to see how extremely narrow the "imminent lawless action" standard is. It's ridiculously hateful and inflammatory, and filled with several non-specific threats of violence against minority groups. This was labelled protected speech. Brandenburg was a private citizen here, and he prevailed over the state of Ohio.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
The statements were frankly defamatory, and only not actionable because they didn't define a clear target nor cause demonstrable "actual damages".
When the government declares under penalty of law that libraries cannot stock certain books, that is a book ban.
> If you really want to cite American double standards, how about American banks denying service to Americans based on their stated political and religious beliefs? <https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...>
Unlike your other examples, banks are private entities and can generally refuse to do business with whomever they like.
Not true here in Florida. The governor banned and burned books that taught slavery was bad, revoked tenure and fired all teachers who were reported teaching that slavery was bad. The new state-approved textbooks teach that slavery taught blacks useful skills and that there was violence on both sides.
The books are not banned.
The public schools don't allow them, which is the case for many things.
Whether you agree with it or not, calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking" or "Florida banned pornography" because they're not allowed in schools.
What's a word that means "forbidden from being included" or "disallowed"? "Banned"! Check your local dictionary, or just type it into your favorite search box.
> Calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking"
No, it's not dumb. Children don't go to school for the purpose of getting drunk or smoking. They do go to school to learn things, including things that might be politically controversial or divisive.
You know what is dumb? Gatekeeping truthful information from being accessible to kids because the curiosity it sparks might inconvenience some people.
Statistically some of them would be here
Kimmel also did not praise the murderer. He implied (incorrectly as it turns out) that the killer was right-wing.
Your misstatements of the well-known facts and law in this case cast doubt on the effort you put into researching the other issues mentioned.
Right-wingers have lost their jobs in the US many times for far less, even when their comments were on social media accounts unrelated to the job. When these responses are described as unjust or disproportionate, American left-wingers have consistently and repeatedly (across a span of many years) told me the same line about how 1A only applies to government and not corporations. Which is correct, but also entirely missing the point about bias.
You make it sound like losing one’s job for being an embarrassment to their company is a bad thing.
For that matter, one time someone who wasn't even noted as right wing got "cancelled" for wearing clothing with a print that some feminists found objectionable. Clothing that was gifted to him by a woman.
Like what? have a link?
Citation needed.
While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.
Quote from the article:
> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused
Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
The thing is, you can afford sticking the finger to the UK if you do not have any business interests there. A platform like 4chan won't be bothered even if the UK government says "all payments to be made towards 4chan for advertising are hereby seized until the fine is paid off". But places like Twitter or Meta, that derive millions if not billions of euros a year from the UK and European advertisers? Now that's a lot of money to lose, money that even American shareholders will complain about it being missing from the revenue sheet.
Not being able to do business in (or, depending on how serious they are about enforcement action, visit) the UK is actually pretty constraining. It's understandable if other companies decided they would prefer to find a middle ground that lets them provide one face to the US and another to the UK, or even that they're not interested in 4chan-style maximalism and found it non-onerous to comply with the UK asks because they're pretty in-line with the site's existing standards (I'd have to see the list of sites that complied to have a real opinion on that part).
In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.
The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.
That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.
The US fundamentally disagrees with other countries on the limits of their own jurisdiction to include basically anything tangentially related to the US.
Again, I am far from anti-US but any outsider can see this for what it is: a one way street.
Let's see the Dutch get a US based server that is violating Dutch laws. It will never happen.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y89k07we3o
You may note from the title that this is the "American Service-Members' Protection Act".
The current attempt to destroy the ICC is not due to protection of American service members, but Israeli ones.
The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
The admin (and perhaps many in the country) might like to think they can go alone, but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies.
While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/04/bolton-sa...
The nickname is irrelevant.
The first line of the wiki does not support your claim: "all means necessary and appropriate" is much vaguer than "must invade", and no domestic law would change that an invasion of the Netherlands would be a violation of the sovereignty of a NATO ally.
> Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
Read further in my previous comment and find out.
> Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation
None was needed for that, not from NATO at least. Should've raised it with the UN, if that's what you meant?
> Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
I'm not saying they won't do such things, but it's bad for the US if they do. That said, Iran is looking like it'll be another Vietnam only this time with an oil crisis to match the OPEC crisis, so this is already bad with regard to energy sources.
And that's without everyone else in NATO is likely gearing up for fighting against the USA and Russia at the same time even if we'd very much rather not, and Israel itself (the country for which they are doing this to the ICC) is looking somewhat unstable and even the most allied parts are distancing themselves from the USA.
> A false equivalence.
That's my point: the behaviour with regards to Harry Dunn is a false equivalence with regards to these other things.
> ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent
No, not even close; even in the most egregious cases, and this wasn't an egregious example:
She was convicted in absentia and got "8 months in prison, suspended for 12 months, and disqualified from driving for 12 months".The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review. Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked. But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
The UK would have been perfectly justified in saying 4chan can't access any of their systems.
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
Well, to quote the post:
>Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused, and only one is 4chan.
I think this was just a scare tactic.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/how-leaders-texas-r...
When we remember history, what we remember tends to be white-washed.
Each side had a list of grievances. A big one on one side, was the preservation of slavery in perpetuity. The other side wanted to preserve the unity of the nation as a whole.
You are right that Mexico was not fighting to ban slavery. But it was clear that eliminating slaver was still in their roadmap. Texas had only gotten an extension.
Similarly the election of Lincoln wasn't an immediate threat to slavery in the Confederacy. But the Confederacy still was motivated to head off the long-term threat to their economic system.
So the fact that Mexico wasn't fighting to end slavery, doesn't contradict the fact that Texans were fighting to preserve it.
I mean, Lincoln being elected is a direct threat to slavery.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_State...
Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery." It wasn't, "We're getting rid of slavery in places that already have it." Which meant that it was not a direct threat to existing slave states. (Though there was a prospect that maybe, some day...)
Lincoln didn't like slavery. But he wasn't trying to ban it. It wasn't until the war had been going on for nearly two years that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Which basically said, "If you're still in rebellion a couple of months ago, we're going to free your slaves." It didn't eliminate slavery for any slave state that was part of the Union. It was an incentive to surrender. It was 2 years after that until the 13th amendment was passed.
It is very unlikely that slavery would have been banned during Lincoln's time in office, if the Civil War hadn't happened.
Was there a long-term prospect of a threat? Obviously. But there was no immediate threat. And so the fight wound up with protecting slavery on the one side, and asserting the indivisibility of the nation on the other side.
This is exactly parallel to the Mexico-Texan issue. Slavery was not being banned in the rebelling states.
Pretty sure you’re arguing in bad faith.
A group of anti-slavery people organized into a political party and elected a man who gave a speech declaring that slavery itself needs to be abolished.
Pretending that Lincoln wasn’t going to attempt to abolish slavery is just as bad as pretending the civil war was about states rights (states in the confederacy had mandatory slavery; no right to choose).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln%27s_Peoria_spe...
Lincoln's actual beliefs can be seen in his own words. Let's take, for instance, the first of his seven debates with Stephen Douglas.
https://home.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm
In this debate, Lincoln made it clear that he morally opposes slavery. He therefore opposed allowing it to spread. But he pointed out simply trying to suddenly eliminate it would create even worse problems. He therefore did not support abolitionism. He even supported returning slaves to slavery if they escaped to a free state. He only supported containing the practice, and hoped for a better solution over time.
This balancing act is made clear in all of his speeches before he was President. It is even visible in the Emancipation Proclamation. It was only after years of war that he came to support the hard-line stance represented in the 13th Amendment. It is extremely unlikely that he would have gotten there without having been hardened by the Civil War.
There really was no immediate threat to slavery. It was only a long-term, potential threat.
Here is an exact passage from his speech laying all this out.
"When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,-to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.
"When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter."
The myth is that Bowie and Crockett battled until their last breathes. The truth is that Bowie was sick and died in bed. Crockett gave up and was executed.
That's all from the 2021 book Forget the Alamo.
(You could say the Taliban were even more thoroughly 'defeated' in Afghanistan while the country was occupied by the US, but it can hardly be said that it was a victory for the US either, given what happened as soon as they left).
No it wasn't. If Iran's only goal is to survive then it would have made peace with the USA and surrounding Middle Eastern territories decades ago.
This whole war is happening because Iran had great political ambitions than just thriving on its own.
Iran has been funding proxy terrorist groups for a long time now, specifically because it is trying to achieve larger goals than just surviving.
And on those fronts, well those proxy groups have taken a ton of damage and aren't long for this world.
You missed the perfectly reasonable 3rd option. Iran could stop shooting missiles at oil tankers, stop funding proxy groups, and make an arrangement for peace.
We both know though, that they are unwilling to do that. Because peace was never their goal. Instead, they wanted to achieve regional hegemony, and funded proxy groups to do that. But whatever, look how well that worked out for them.
Sure, if taking out the regime is the only pathway to stop Iran from continuing on its current path, then the USA is of course going to try that. But if there was an actual path the peace here, where Iran simply stopped its attacks, things could get back to normal fairly quickly.
What's stopping Israel from attacking "random" countries? Perhaps the fact that they're hardly "random", rather they all host proxy groups of the occupying regime in Iran, who have very openly been subverting those countries into bases from which to attack Israel.
Try again.
If you have a problem with proxies, then Iran has the right to shoot down and occupy most of Europe and Australia as they have been American proxies for long and they are supplying their bases and infrastructure for Americans to launch attacks on Iran from. Iran also as far as I am aware has never sprayed chemical poisons on foreign countries farms to kill their food supply. Israel has.
How many of the Iranian attacks in the gulf were not those fired at American bases and soldiers in those countries?
Israel did fire at that hotel in Qatar, but considering that the hotel was hosting the entire terrorist leadership of Hamas at the time, it was far less 'random' than what Iran has done. The very fact that Iran was using cluster munitions on civilian areas (in Israel and elsewhere), which is a complete violation of humanitarian laws and a war crime in itself, should tell you what their targets were.
As for your comment on proxies, it's clear that the regime in Iran does consider things this way, but they could have avoided that by doing a simple thing: not declaring war on the US the moment they were founded.
Where is that?
The first negative interaction between USA and Iran seems to be the illegal American coup and destroying Iran's democracy to put a dictatorial monarchy.
Then Iranians respond, correctly, by taking action against this treasonous state of matters.
>Israel did fire at that hotel in Qatar, but considering that the hotel was hosting the entire terrorist leadership of Hamas at the time, it was far less 'random' than what Iran has done. The very fact that Iran was using cluster munitions on civilian areas (in Israel and elsewhere), which is a complete violation of humanitarian laws and a war crime in itself, should tell you what their targets were.
There are lots of Israelis working in many places, and most are legally IDF members and or involved in various defense and intelligence companies. Almost every Israeli living anywhere in the world is a valid target for missile and drone strikes and assassinations under this logic.
The militant groups obviously. If peace isn't possible of course Israel is going to play to win.
Israel was perfectly able to make peace with Egypt and jordan, for example, and they aren't invading them.
Oh great proving my point. They get to be at peace and get paid money to do so. Looks like a good deal all around. I guess peace is possible with the surrounding countries after all right?
Whatever the government is of Egypt, it seems quite clear that peace is possible. There is no war with Egypt. Egypt is getting paid a bunch of money. Israel's army is not marching on the capital. It seems like they are at peace.
So the point stands that peace is clearly possible, such as the clear peace that we see between Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.
Because the countries are working together quite well right now, there is significant economic benefit to peace, and there is little to gained from controlling wide swaths of empty land, when peace and trade is much more profitable. Occupation is expensive and if its possible to maintain strong economic relationships that is much more mutually beneficial then the nonsense that you propose.
Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.
The only thing JCPOA did was funnel billions into their hands so they could continue oppressing their own population within their own borders, and destabilizing the entire region outside of them.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/ex-nuclear-chief... [2] https://www.iranintl.com/en/202204245312
They never gave up. The plan was always to lie and get sanction relief from the West, in order to to sell oil and fund Islamist terrorism throughout the region and the world. It isn't only about the nukes. Fundamentally, this is about containment of a dangerous anti-Western ideology. Same thing in Cuba.
Your only defense of the astounding level of evil represented by the occupying regime in Iran is to keep frothing at the mouth about Israel? That shows quite a lot. Try again.
But from the rest of your messages here, it's clear that you despise the US as well, so there are natural ulterior motives to any arguments you make about other countries aligning with or against US interests. When you're hoping for someone to be damaged, then of course you'd try to manipulate them into mistaking enemies for friends and vice versa.
How is it not common sense to develop nukes and study American military weak points and develop defenses against American military if you are not America? Especially if you have oil. Either you live a free life and get bombed by America or you become an American slave if you failed to do your homework. American gets weird whims and tends to start bombing random countries whenever they smell oil or a government that wants to go independent. Its healthier for both America and that country that they be independent and not a vassal state or one kowtowing to random American demands.
I looked up Beirut, the so called neutral peacekeeping force was trying to create a theocratic/Christian military entity in Lebanon, in which case its natural to think they are liars and actually invaders pretending to be peacekeepers. The attack hit marines and military people which are all valid targets. Americans killed the entire leadership of Iran so it doesn't seem there is anything wrong in Iran hitting political agents in the embassy either.
Bombing places of worship is evil, you won't have me arguing that. Which is why I find it strange you are not complaining about Israel bombing various churches and Israeli soldiers desecrating Christian icons or Americans countless bombings and "collateral damages".
TWA 1985 isn't Iran, its a Lebanese terror attack. If you want to say Iran pulled the strings, then great, there are countless excellent reasons to target Americans given the endless barrage of proxy forces and bases they have all over the world.
The Dhahran case against seems to have targeted military personnel only which is perfectly valid given American actions in Iran such as the treasonous coup.
I hate Iran, I don't like Iran at all. Unfortunately the problem is Israel, and the actions of American military make Iran look marginally better than either.
The surrounding states, which have been attacked by Iran and use the strait to export their oil, should grow a pair, close their borders with Iran, and use all the weapons they bought over the years from the U.S. and finish off once and for all the "Islamic Republic." It seems that, at last, the Saudis are stepping up to the plate and doing something about the Houthis. This is all because they did not finish the job last time.
As I just said before, if this was their only goal, they could have had it decades ago by choosing peace instead of funding proxy milita groups en mass.
The fact that they fund all they proxy groups shows that actually yes they have other goals beyond surviving (They they are quickly failing to achieve as their proxy groups get dismantled), and they are actually willing to risk war and risk their survival to attempt to achieve them.
As for "freeing" themselves in 1979... please talk to some actual Iranians and ask them how much of their country's resources are actually benefitting them, instead of going to regional terror proxies and into enriching corrupt Mullahs so that their sons and daughters could go live in luxury in the West they so despise. Ask them, too, how "free" they really feel.
The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Iran and of its regional proxies. Disarming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is a necessity before things like rebuilding Gaza is possible at all.
There, fixed it for you. No charge.
Its called mutually assured destruction bro. Every country in the world would use their nukes if they were actually under threat of destruction.
Thats the point of having nukes. For them to be used as a deterent against collapse.
> All the more reason to check
They have the nukes already dude! They aren't going away. They aren't going to be destroyed. And the nukes don't disappear just because funding stops going to them.
The point being, the destruction of Israel would just result in all of their enemies being destroyed along with them, so you better hope it doesn't happen.
They aren't going to massively change their demographics. They will never agree to that, and they would have to be invaded to achieve anything close to that. Which brings up back to them haveing 100+ nuclear weapons.
This goal of destroying israel, or massively changing their demographics has caused hundreds of thousands of arabs to die, over and over again, wasting on a doomed goal, seeing as Israel has a modern military and nuclear weapons that they would absolutely use if their military was at risk of being defeat.
The actual peaceful solutions look something like Jordan or Egypt, which are perfectly able to be at peace.
Again, the best solution would have been if Britain had refused to budge against Zionist terrorist attacks on innocent Brits, and instead prosecuted and executed them brutally, instituted a ruthless and militant martial rule there and shot all agitators on sight, and also done things like tax breaks for mixed marriages, etc. Since that golden opportunity for sanity and stability is gone, we have to see what the current options are.
Nobody is going to nuke people over trade.
But, if the only thing that happens is that there are trade sanctions, well seeing as Israel considers changing up their country's demographics an existential threat, well it isn't going to end the state of Israel and nothing short of military action will cause that to happen.
Its certainly possible to motivate Israel to make some changes, but its not going to let itself be destroyed, nor will it ever accept 10 million immigrants into the country, and there would have to be military action to every make that happen.
The point being, Israel isn't going away. Its not going to be destroy. And if it was every a real threat, well they'd use the nukes.
Peace is certainly possible though. If the only thing you want is for both the existing middle east militant groups and Israel to stop fighting each other, and everyone exists where they are today, then great that peace is absolutely possible.
>Peace is certainly possible though. If the only thing you want is for both the existing middle east militant groups and Israel to stop fighting each other, and everyone exists where they are today, then great that peace is absolutely possible.
It is, and under current situations its only going to happen if Israel is occupied by a brutal external military force that uses complete merciless totalitarian approach to any terrorism from any side. Nothing short of that is a peaceful solution unfortunately.
No actually. They would rather fight till the end than be ethnically cleansed (the vast majority of people being born there). They will never do that, and it would require military action to get anywhere close to that.
At which point it brings us back to the fact that they have a modern military and nuclear weapons, so military action won't work.
> What they do next is not my concern
Well, if peace isn't possible what would almost certainly happen is that most of the Palestinians will be kicked out. I mean, if it is that or them being kicked out, like what you propose, obviously they will fight to win.
> Nothing short of that is a peaceful solution unfortunately.
Oh I fully agree that the arab population isn't going to stop fighting. What is almost certainly going to happen is that peace won't happen and Israel will simply Win The Conflict, by exporting most of the gazan population.
I mean, the rest of the world is barely doing anything against them. They have little reason not to at this point, if peace isn't possible.
Which is sad, but hey. Thats war. It is unfortunate though just how many arab lives have been scarificed for nothing though, failing to achieve an impossible goal. Impossible because Israel is never going to let itself be destroy nor ethnically cleansed, and the rest of the world is barely doing anything against it, and, you know that modern military + nuclear weapons.
> And if they want to use nukes over such an insane point
Nukes would only be used in the case of a military invasion that seriously threatens them. If its just trade embargoes, and local militant conflicts, Israel would simply weather the storm, and/or kick out all the palestinians if they don't stop throwing their lives away for nothing.
> then the world far outnumbers
The rest of the world isn't doing shit right now dude. And the point is that no invasion is going to happen of Israel, precisely because of the nuclear weapons. Nobody is going to nuke anyway, nor will any other countries take action, and if the palestinians keep fighting for nothing the end result is that they will probably just be kicked out pretty soon.
If Iran stopped funding Hezbollah then real peace could have been achieved.
You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
All the surrounding governments are at peace with everyone else. Iran could have had the same thing if it wanted. All it had to do what stop funding proxy militant groups.
The US government needing to get over it is their point.
Also the relevant year they're going back to is 1979.
The US government is perfectly able to make peace with countries like Egypt and Jordan. Because those countries aren't funding proxy groups to destabilize the region.
As soon as Iran stops shooting missiles at tankers and stops funding militant groups, peace would be achieved.
4chan sued Ofcom over the fines. Ofcom has been perhaps waiting for the outcome of this suit and is announcing they can't collect fines but I don't think that was the purpose. They have the power to instruct ISPs to block domains and to me it seems more likely that is what they will do and that was perhaps what they wanted from the beginning.
Demand online services change their services to conform to their law. Because its accessible from the UK.
Services refuse.
Up goes the wall.
4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Because of this, it is questionable why Ofcom picked 4chan as a target it the first place.
Correct. UK ISPs already implement a fairly wide-ranging block list (which even includes archive.org) for any subscribers who do not explicitly opt-in to 'adult' content access privileges.
Notably, the two countries involved literally fought a war about one's wish to enforce laws in the other, with the latter declaring that no, it'd prefer to operate independently of those laws.
Look, that was 250 years ago, and we've buried the hatchet. We've had our spats, but it's more like siblings arguing. Let someone else attack one of them and they get reminded that only these 2 are allowed to pick on each other. That said, our entire country was literally built on a legal system that says Americans aren't subject to British law. It's kinda part of our national character.
Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).
Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.
I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.
I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.
Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority
Yes this is exactly what they thought, and no it is not surprising. Section 204 of the Online Safety Act of 2023 specifically says the Act covers internet services provided from outside the UK as well.
Of course the rest of us think its stupid. But the UK government doesnt.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.
Or they really are delusional. I dunno.
Yeah, unfortunately the UK isn't a country, it is actually a circus, so you can't apply any regular logic, you must apply circus logic.
When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.
State censors in western countries are becoming increasingly brazen and desperate. Despite the Orwellian slogans about "safety" they all constantly recite, their objectives are securing the supremacy of the regime not the interests of the people.
How this judgment do that?
We all know the USA punishes its own people for that all the time, of course, but only when the current administration agrees with the ruling, which this one doesn't. It's not that the constitution can't be violated - it's that violating the constitution can be used as an excuse in cases like this one.
What's that got to do with the US constition?
It's like the British government trying to enforce tea confiscations on US residents in a way that violates the fifth amendment protections against unreasonable confiscation of private property.
Byrne reasonably knew that FSIA applies; the point was to get the words on record that allow him to claim a victory in the court of public opinion. Filing the suit was irrelevant, that was the point: it highlights how Ofcom's attempts at enforcement were equally irrelevant and lacking in jurisdiction. Hence:
> All Plaintiffs seek in this action is a declaration that [Ofcom’s] Section 100 Orders, transmitted by e-mail, did not effect valid service in the United States.
No actual damages for the putative violation of rights; just an affirmation that Ofcom was FOS in trying anything in the first place.
And, per Byrne, the court gladly delivered:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution, if indeed Plaintiffs are correct in their constitutional claims.
Byrne and 4chan clearly are correct in the original constitutional claim, and Ofcom has received and will continue to receive $0 of the fines they purport to assess.
Considerable misunderstanding here. Ofcom didn't go to a US court. 4chan went to a US court.
And lost. Judge dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that Ofcom is protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
Not European politicians.
You see, in the EU international treaties supersede individual countries' constitutions in theory. This is the other way the EU is moving power to executive governments away from parliament and judicial branches.
Of course, in practice, you have at least a good chance that courts just ignore it (of course the laws of many European countries are a good match, the big thing you get many conflicts about is if 2 governments act on the same company/crime/...). Then the EU court makes a counter judgement ... and is ignored, despite the law. Which is one of the reasons you keep reading the EU is about to fall apart.
What ties are there to the current conversation?
Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.
That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.
The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBYvj4YQLE (full video is an hour and a half, but you can skip to any bit because he just makes the same handful of points over and over again)
I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.
For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:
- 22nd April 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/e79ae489-4db6-4159-88b...
- 3rd June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/f27d8b93-b09d-433a-8e6...
- 10th June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/097aadbd-b58d-4f76-90e...
- 15th July 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/87f1e00f-82b5-432b-af6...
- 2nd September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/110f81a5-32c4-4577-bab...
- 16th September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecf7a237-54c9-40be-922...
Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
He’s like an incompetent Cassandra: people keep on agreeing with his diagnoses, giving him power in the hope that he’ll fix things at which point he makes a complete hash of everything and leaves in a huff having made things worse than they were before.
If the right ever takes power in the UK in the near-ish future I expect us to go through exactly this cycle again. Cummings seems to be very bad at the politics of driving organisational change & making it stick, which is ironic given that criticising public bodies is what he spends so much of his time doing.
For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.
What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.
In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:
> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".
Trouble is, he thinks they're thixotropic - give 'em a big whack to get them moving faster - when they're actually by design closer to being rheopectic, absorbing sudden stresses to protect the nation.
So when faced with the multiple sudden gyrations in policy that we saw under the final five years of the last government, they of course acted as a dampener. That's what they're there for, that's why they're so valuable. But if you don't shock them and instead apply constant pressure in a consistent direction, they'll move smoothly, efficiently, and effectively.
For a good example of that, see Francis Maude's term in the Cabinet Office in the first half of the 2010s which changed the civil service very much for the better and was responsible for, amongst others, GDS, the Government Security Group, and a lot of open government initiatives.
His problem is he doesn't understand politics, and like Musk he's wasted his time getting involved with the worst people instead of focusing on what he's good at.
I'm pretty sure that if we ask the operative layer what should the policies be, they wouldn't even pursue this goal
1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low
2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story
Alas.
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.
Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
https://discord.com/careers
They have a registered office in Schiphol:
https://discord.com/company-information
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
Ah, I stand corrected. Discord has a branch office in the Netherlands. Thanks for the correction.
> Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
As I said:
Trampling on fundamental rights in order to chase marginally more money is neither admirable nor prosocial behavior.This reminds me of the time you could use Twitter as a sort of an oracle to tell whether Twitter thought an account was probably pro-fascist. This wasn't something they'd necessarily surface in the US, but for compliance reasons in Germany they had to suppress fascist propaganda so the backend was aware of flags on individual posts and entire accounts.
At some point, at least, the API did expose that state; after the API got yanked, you could still hypothetically find it by accessing Twitter from Germany via VPN and comparing visibility of posts and accounts in and out of that environment.
Which was very funny to me, because it meant that institutionally, Twitter had an opinion on these accounts but they made it increasingly difficult for US users to know that opinion.
"Freedom of speech" indeed. ;)
You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.
I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.)
However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
4chan is absolutely operating as a business ("4chan community support LLC") that accepts payments [0], as is Kiwi Farms ("Lolcow LLC") [1]. There is zero doubt in my mind that both companies have users in the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions that have the sorts of awful regulations that we're discussing. I expect that they also receive payments from users in those jurisdictions.
Given that you report that it's trivial to do, I wonder why Ofcom declined to levy its fines by way of commanding UK-based payment processors...
[0] <https://4chan.org/pass>
[1] The link that leads to [2] is labelled "Donate", but a sixty-second search turns up no indication that Lolcow LLC is a registered US charity
[2] <https://kiwifarms.net/account/billpay-support>
I mean even if all of these companies closed up shop and fortified themselves inside the US, the countries wanting to enforce their rulings would simply block the IPs of the offending sites or their providers. This is what happened with CF and spanish football broadcasting rights.
You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.
Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.
(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)
What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?
(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)
Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.
It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church#Aftermath
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marga_Meusel
> every voice of opposition to totalitarianism
Unless your definition of "opposition to totalitarianism" is very different from mine, I would hope it is transparent that the examples given in the comment you replied to are not such voices.
This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.
I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
Here, 4chan's design works against answering the question satisfactorily; their commitment to anonymity makes it difficult to say whether they really keep minors off the site (purely anecdotally, the answer seems to be "Not really; everyone knows click-through confirmation is a joke," but that's anecdote). OFCOM allegation, indeed, is more-or-less that 4chan pays lip-service to keeping minors out but fails in practice, and they demand better of service providers then "Well, we told them they're not allowed and if they make it too obvious to ignore we give 'em the boot; what more could we possibly do?" Because OFCOM has a list of what more they could possibly do.
There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet as a whole - including fora like 4chan - has become deeply enough integrated into daily human experience that 4chan having an "Are you over 18" clickthrough is no more acceptable than a 21-and-up club leaving the back door unlocked and never carding once you're inside.
This message was sponsored by SafetyTM.
Every single day And every word you say Every game you play Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government.
That's the experiment we're running right now. The Internet is different from TV. It's interactive and bidirectional. Most importantly, it's decentralized. Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
(To be clear, there are definitely tradeoffs, and I see them. But I think it's important to steel-man the counter-position because the counter-position doesn't just go away. Especially since there's a non-ignorably-trivial number of citizens, in both the US and the UK, who feel the trade-offs are acceptable because they really do not like what they perceive open and unfettered Internet access to have done to one or two generations of humanity exposed to it in childhood at this point.
To argue against it, we have to face it, not dismiss it).
I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child. The fact that it is common practice for a parent to outsource the raising of their child to strangers ("day care") and the government ("public schools") doesn't mean that is is smart, desirable, beneficial or conducive to raising a smart, moral and intelligent child. If your answer is, "I have to outsource the rearing of my child to others/the government because of XYZ", then my answer to you is don't have a child! The "trade-offs" that the non-trivial number of citizens in the US and the UK are choosing to make is to trade the freedom of other people so that they don't have to worry about properly supervising or raising their children. Sorry, you don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience, especially when trading away my freedoms ultimately does nothing to solve the problem your tradeoff purportedly solves, as children will always find a way to access the internet anyway.
>Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
No parent was forced to buy a TV and no parent is forced to by their child a device with unfettered access to the internet. Suggesting that we should strip away the rights and freedoms of every adult and entirely abandon the right to privacy and anonymity in a fruitless attempt to bulletproof society for children is a non-starter for me and many others.
> You don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience
Precisely that trade is most of politics and regulation, be it "You have to drive on the right side of the road" or "You can't swear on FCC-licensed airwave broadcast." We took a very liberal stance to the Internet, and much of Western society seems to be reevaluating that stance in this era.
The challenge with the Internet is that accessing it is so ubiquitous that even if a parent wants to keep a child off it, it's pretty impossible. You can get on it at any public library. Certainly we're not banning children from libraries to keep them safe? That's unworkable.
You yourself assert that children will always find a way to access the Internet. The unfortunate conclusion drawn from the strongest form of that assertion is that we must therefore make the Internet they can access child-safe.
(I recognize how this is a non-starter for many. My concern is that failure to engage the argument may leave those for whom it's a non-starter at a severe disadvantage as the opposing view consolidates political power to effect change. I think the result of saying l assuming the status-quo holds is we're going to wake up one day to find half the Internet ID-walled and the other half behind Tor).
I didn't say it is a productive argument, I said, "I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child." I don't believe it is possible to make a productive argument in the United States because the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the capacity to think critically and make good decisions. The authoritarians who run our country will eliminate anonymity and privacy and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. It doesn't matter what argument you make.
And in my parent comment above that, I further qualified that by saying, "No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government. Our society is neither free or sane, but the point stands. Freedom is anathema to the authoritarians who are in the process of stripping us of our few remaining freedoms and what remains of our anonymity and our privacy.
That doesn't mean that we can't jawbone about how a free society should operate, and what people who give lip service to the concept of freedom should support. We can also point out that the authoritarians in charge could care less about the welfare or safety of your children, and must laugh to themselves about how stupid the masses are to trade what few freedoms they have left for the illusion of safety for their children. At least for now. Until posting unregulated messages is outlawed for the safety of the children, with all the usual suspects cheering it on.
I strongly suspect it doesn't include 4chan of the future operating like 4chan in the early 2000s. Things do change sometimes. But hey, in the short run? They certainly can in the US. They will probably be banned in the UK very soon for anyone who doesn't know how to set up a VPN or access Tor, but across that bridge when we come to it right?
The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great
One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.
That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.
If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area
If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
I don't see the need for extra tooling like DPI when the willingness and methodology to outright block sites at a higher level is already in place. Also bear in mind that the groups who have compiled the most widely implemented block lists are also major sponsors of the bill which this 4chan story refers to, so they have largely gotten what they wanted.
This is how it works, if you want I can explain to you why it works like this, or you can work it out from first principles. But this is not a proposal.
VPNs are an asterisk and they work not by avoiding this natural unavoidable principle, but by tunneling, the VPN or proxy vendor is putting themselves on the headers, and on the backend they still route the packets to the destination by putting the intended destination on the headers.
If these VPNs don't comply with local regulations and are used to evade national restrictions they can and are often themselves subject to bans. But even if not, it acts as a sort of waiver and compromising element for all illicit activity.
Sometimes it's not necessary to completely outlaw something, it is sufficient to make it so that engaging in the outlawed activity is sufficiently uncomfortable and clear that it is illegal, forcing users to undeniably acknowledge they are avoiding the law. An example of this is trying to watch pirated movies without paying for them, yeah you can do it, but you gotta do some shady shit and dodge a lot of malware, and eat shady gambling ads and etcetera.
In addition to making you feel like an asshole, it removes any recourse you may have, it's very hard to make any claim later, you cannot really complain later if you were accessing it illegally to begin with. Nobody is going to pursue you to the end of the world not to access a pirated movie or an illegal website, but they pursue the distributor and make things very uncomfortable enough so that you are effectively hiding like a fiending outlaw.
The bad thing would be tying that process in with growing internet restrictions.
I don’t think it’s weird to point out the little guys (especially former or current EU) getting strapped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
Now we’re both wrong!
The French are now using submarines (striking distance and speed, blah blah)
and are apparently being looked at as the leader of “forward deterrence” in the region.
https://tvpworld.com/93637117/frances-nuclear-umbrella-which...
Deep inland strikes from miles out while underwater/at sea.
And politicians have repeatedly stated the need for better control of information, connecting it directly to the Ukraine conflict and perceived threats from Russia.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the push for information control is partly connected to military/defense goals.
Let's not pretend this is the only way (some) laws are enforced abroad. A US company wants your country to put you in jail for hacking hardware you legally own? No problem, they lobby this in trade deal negotiations and they get their way.
This is economic coercion instead of the fleet, so people don't get as angry about this as they should.
But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs).
And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action...
Does _not_ need to be foreign.
People in Western Democracies assume we are immune to dictatorships.
Plenty of dictatorships in our modern history were regressions from at least some form of functional democracy, many even regressed from long lasting robust democracies.
So much of the UK, EU comission, Palantir moves is straight up Stasi playbook.
It is almost disrespectful of German History and collective suffering for VDL to stand on the wrong side of history with this corporate puppetering.
The problem is America cannot stand alone - everyone needs friends
The problem is platforms that millions do use and have no ability to counter Russian, Mossad and other foreign influence. The problem is that we are all complete cucks to Israel and they've done everything in their power to ensure the likes of Tik Tok will never be able to teach children about their genocide or dragging us into their forever wars. The problem is private equity and corporate dystopia and our cretinous politicians.
We got our own problems with Authoritarianism. There is no need to protect our borders from something our own government and corporations are practicing day in and day out on our own people, in our own country. You might want to acknowledge that first, before assuming we got problems across the pond.
And BTW the real answer is to enforce antitrust and put an end to Citizens United to prevent money from flowing into our political institutions and reign in these corrupt business. You might want to add that as well to your point about the GRANITE Act
From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.
Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).
Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†
† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in 2024 with France and Telegram...
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in France with Telegram...
You don't say!
> American courts are not necessarily required to enforce foreign penal judgments
Shocking.
What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom? Plain censorship?
They are supposed to regulate domestic broadcasters and communications companies, and frankly have done a terrible job of it to date, like all the other 'independent' regulators set up after the waves of privatisation which sold off our public utilities (huge conflicts of interest involved when ex-regulators frequently move into board positions in the companies they were previously responsible for keeping in line). This new mandate to police the internet is a recent one for Ofcom which has greatly widened the scope of their remit, and as we all know, authoritarians never complain about being given more power.
The world wide web remains undefeated.
This government really can go and fuck themselves, as can all our other useless and cretinous political parties. They've achieved nothing, at great cost, and at the expense of a million other issues.
All of our social media has been manipulated by the likes of Russia and Mossad for over a decade now. Our democracies are compromised, everyone is poorer and angrier, and they have sat here and done nothing but go after some fringe website and make people take selfies to wank.
This is probably 4chans doing? lots of websites block traffic from popular vpn exit nodes
What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.
I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vf2citudDA
https://www.blocked.org.uk/site/http://www.4chan.org suggests the latter to me, but the checks aren't very recent
Beyond that, it is just madness to try to control the US company or fine it. Going beyond this duty shows that not all biscuits are present at the afternoon tea.
It's not like Facebook, or anyone's personal life or business, depends on 4chan.
I think the Spain-Cloudflare case does IP level blocks and it has a lot of side effect damage, but if I recall they do IP-block level blocking because the vendor, cloudflare, provides header/envelope encryption and pooling, so the Spanish courts considers it legal to block the whole service even, alleging that they are not collaborating with court orders, they just choose not to block the whole provider to reduce the collateral damage, even if they consider they have jurisdiction to block all of CF
Any examples?
Reddit is complete trash, nobody can say anything that goes against the authoritarian mods on any subreddit, regardless of if those are good or bad rules, it's just an echo chamber. Twitter is hyperreal at this point, it's impossible to spend more than 3 minutes without being angry at the world.
4chan is so full of fake news, CIA/FSB/Mossad shills and doctored screenshots that it forces you to be skeptical, its not for the masses but I've seen genuine nuggets of gold on there. It's one of the few actual communities, where people actually "get" each other, which is ironic I suppose.
Separately, are they all good? Testosterone has a lot of negative side effects, and I know I certainly wouldn't mind having about half as much. Jawlines and fiber have similar issues when focused on in the wrong way. Eating healthy, feeling good, and looking good are mostly orthogonal to those trendy behaviors. If they work for you then great, but there are other options too, and I don't think she's saying that you shouldn't want to eat healthy, feel good, and look good. Indeed, she explicitly says that fibermaxxing is bad because it replaces a healthy diet. She agrees with at least some of your goals and really only (potentially) disagrees with the implementation.
This is the most disingenuous argument I've seen in a while.
That sentence does not describe a shift to eating healthy. Some of looksmaxxing is reasonable, but a lot is unsafe or being upset about things you can't really change. And nothing in there was "feel good", do you think having abnormally high levels of testosterone is "feel good"?
Good grief. This is sad stuff.
No, China is smart enough not expect foreign courts to carry out the work of the Chinese censorship regime.
Of course ofcom knows its power is limited, that shouldn't stop it attempting to do it's job, however much that job might irk foreign operators publishing to ofcoms jurisdiction.
The fact is the US has different standards to the UK. It doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong but it does mean that those differences will cause cultural and legal friction that responsible operators will attempt to diminish within reason, while others will attempt to capitalize for publicity.
Ofcom knows its rulings don't apply internationally.
So yes, the status quo is enforced by the US courts, as if it was ever in doubt and nothing at all has changed.
https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm