On 2/26/2021 12:15 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, February 26, 2021 at 4:57:33 PM UTC, AMuzi wrote:
On 2/26/2021 10:28 AM, Andre Jute wrote:

Okay, now that we've slapped down the mouth-foaming haters and the cheap shysters, let's get back to jailing that bad-faith book-burner, Zuckerberg.

On Friday, February 19, 2021 at 2:13:27 PM UTC, AMuzi wrote:
On 2/19/2021 4:13 AM, Andre Jute wrote:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...vernments.html

Article 230 should have been long gone. Zuckerberg is arrogant beyond belief, clearly convinced that these favours from corrupt politicians is his birthright. A few years on Rikers Island should straighten him out.

Andre Jute
Zuckerberg isn't bigger than any government.

Section 230 is well crafted but not enforced or applied as
written. Platforms have and should have libel immunity.
Publishers with a slat/opinion/agenda do but perhaps should
not to some degree.

The trouble started when the nattering busybody crowd
insisted that certain speech be limited, by ukase of
operators with no accountability. Like Topsy, it grew from
there.

Not snipping, because what Andrew says is a perfectly reasonable view: the law was, perhaps, good but the implementation failed. But what I really want to focus on is this:

We've come to such a ridiculous place that Constitutional
defenders and individual rights proponents from both right
and left (and even the great ignorant middle) are now
attacking our First Amendment together. I'm concerned, but
not ready to toss this baby out with the bathwater.

The baby is innocent and will survive stronger forces than the losers now aligned against it.

However, American media have long had another monopoly license that should be gone with S.230, in fact should long since have gone. That is the "absent malice" defence against libel. There clearly is malice in the present defamations of the mainstream press and television. Pull the fig leaf and their defamations, if continued, will close the responsible papers by the cost of the libel settlements. The newspaper owners will fire these bad actors wholesale, and that will be the end of the cancel culture too. I don't mind if the limp legislators want to substitute a "public interest" defence to libel, such as operates in the UK, as legitimate media do serve a public interest, exactly as the Founders intended.

What's more, the US should have a strong privacy law, like the one in France, to slap down the paparazzi, nauseating scandalmongers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Andre Jute
That's a good start for today.

Malice may be blatantly evident, even admittedly in the
extant case, but proving malice in a court of law is another
thing altogether.
.
That's because of the presumption that malice is absent in most newspapers, which is no longer the case, but once was near enough true (it was never 100% true). Remove the presumption and made the medium prove absence of malice, or public interest, and you've evened up the tilt of the playing field, away from the unrestrained power of the media and towards the victims of the media. The government is supposed to bring just evenly to everyone. I've never heard anyone claim that the Founders intended the media to have special privileges that are denied to other parties.
.
On this side of the Atlantic, we think that's great, and a
bulwark around free speech despite its many and famous
abuses. On your side, opinions are very different and
there's no middle to our different cultures.
.
Perhaps. I see it as a question of restoring a necessary balance. The balances I'm in favour of work very well here, in the UK and in France.

Further, this arrived in yesterday's mail:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/author/allumbokhari/

Thanks for that, Andrew. I've put Imprimis in my bookmarks folder "Good Reading". Bokhari favours an adjustment closer to what you want than my first version. (Hell, the man is so even-handed, I started reading from the beginning again, wondering if he understood the seriousness of the threat he was describing.) Fine, if that fits better with your culture, but Big Tech, and its gross impertinences against liberty and decency, doesn't stop at the American border.

It's ironic: when the Berners-Lee internet first started up, I was hotly in favour, writing somewhere that it would "free Everyman from the editorial supervision and interference of people like us" (paraphrased). An old editor asked me, "What did you learn when you fought in the Congo 'for the freedom of our black brothers'?" He had me there; a few nights before I explained at his dinner table that the problem in Africa was that freedom for many meant the freedom to practice genocide on a neighbouring tribe without white men tut-tutting and holding enquires and handing out death sentences for mass murderers. The irony is that I was the target in one of the first attempted cancellations on the internet; that instead I cancelled the trash who harassed me doesn't change the irony. The old editor was right, and I was wrong. Essentially, the American Founders were right to fear the mob, and and arrange to have their -- er -- enthusiasms filtered through slower-moving institutions. But
that's yesterday's error; I was much younger and less experienced then. Still, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Big Tech is a mindless vigilante mob that should be restrained, and a time isn't far off when restraint will not be enough. The other key thing I took away from Bokharu is how fast things move in the online world, a platitude but in this case of the essence because Big Tech is the Manchurian Candidate already installed in our midst.

Andre Jute
My first computer had glowing thermionic tubes and lived behind an airlock in a temperature- and humidity-controlled space.


I've written here before that our beloved founder:
http://www.yellowjersey.org/seanmorris.html

a PhD candidate in Slavic languages, often said, "The
eastern Europeans want to be free. They want to be free to
kill their neighbors and when the Russians leave, they will."

Which, as your account, may be overly pessimistic. On one
hand Yugoslavia but on the other the Czechs & Slovaks. A
hard rule isn't right for both.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971