A lot of handwringing about this poll where people say violence against the government can be justified. But the poll doesn’t ask whether it IS CURRENTLY justified. It asks whether it can EVER or NEVER be justified. And “never” is just obviously wrong. washingtonpost.com/context/dec-17…
Our country was founded by a bunch of people who engaged in violence against the government. If our current government is legitimate, then violence against the government has to be justifiable under at least some circumstances.
The poll really just seems to be testing who passed civics, not whether there’s some groundswell of support for violent revolution next Tuesday.
If you worried about those poll results, ask yourself how you’d answer if they polled you. Would you really say violence against the government can *never* be justified? Under any circumstances? Unless you’re an absolute pacifist I doubt you really believe that.
Answers to the follow-up question of WHEN violence might be justified. “Government takes away rights or freedoms” is a little vague (every real world government does that to some extent) but “dictatorship/coup/military takes over” sounds like a pretty good reason.
It’s true the number of respondents giving the correct answer has increased over time, but given the popularity of coup/military takeover, I don’t know if that’s just radicalized Fox viewers.
It might, e.g., include folks who previously would not have considered the scenario—because it would have seemed too fanciful—that a president might lose an election and seek to cling to power anyway.

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More from @normative

5 Jan
The really jaw-dropping thing is that he just shrugs it off by asserting that the secretaries of state who certified some of the results were “put in power by George Soros.” Impressed he managed not to add “and the Elders of Zion…”
The whole psychotic interview. Everyone who was unpersuaded by Navarro’s laughable “evidence” of election fraud or his bonkers legal theory that the VP can unilaterally nullify elections is either a Soros plant or a “Koch network conservative.”
Which, I suppose, is what he HAS to claim to rationalize why nobody outside the Renfield club, including Republican most election officials, found his “report” remotely persuasive.
Read 4 tweets
28 Dec 21
Apparently novelist, YouTuber & media critic @thelindsayellis is withdrawing from public life in response to what is frankly the dumbest and most inexplicable online hate mobbing I’ve ever seen.
Here’s @thelindsayellis’s account of the aforementioned mobbing. A lot of kvetching about “cancel culture” is overblown, but there really are groups of folks who take perverse glee in wrecking lives over the most ludicrously trivial of perceived offenses.
Ironically, the barking about “cancel culture” is loudest from folks on the right who are largely immune to it. The scoldmobs are most vicious to folks on the progressive left, since those are the only people they ultimately have any power over.
Read 4 tweets
13 Dec 21
I know this makes me hopelessly elderly, but I really despise the contemporary usage of “content” (and, by extension “content creator”). Imagine describing your favorite novelist or composer or painter or director as a “content creator.”
It’s a depressing way of thinking about creative work, because it admits the work itself is essentially filler. Never mind whether what you’re creating is political argument or comedy sketches or musical performance.
Shovel some undifferentiated sludge into your skullholes! The idle minutes and hours of your tedious existience must be filled with something! And that something is content!
Read 6 tweets
6 Dec 21
Y’know, I don’t want to defend everything anyone wrote about the Steele Dossier, but… the original reporting on it was, in fact, quite accurate. As was most of the *reporting* (as opposed to punditry) I recall seeing on it. buzzfeednews.com/article/kenben…
Here’s the original Buzzfeed article. They say it’s “unverified, and potentially unverifiable” and note that it “contains clear errors.” They make clear they regard it as newsworthy mainly because it’s “circulating at the highest levels of government.” buzzfeednews.com/article/kenben…
There’s certainly a decent case against publishing it—I probably wouldn’t have, at least at that time—but at some point the fact that the FBI is investigating it makes it newsworthy independent of the credibility of the underlying claims.
Read 7 tweets
1 Dec 21
OK, I guess I need to spell this out, because apparently a lot of people find it confusing. It is absolutely true that *in practice*, *today*, the repeal of 230 would likely induce MORE censorship from risk-averse companies.
That’s because, demonstrably, there’s little mass commercial appeal for platforms that do no moderation at all & get taken over by porn, spam, and trolls. But it’s also true that Section 230 (part of the Communications Decency Act) was partly meant to enable censorship.
Here’s the background: In 1991, a federal court held in Cubby v. Compuserve that the service was not liable for defamatory content posted by users. Compuserve was a mere distributor of the content, not a publisher, because it did not review or control user content.
Read 17 tweets
1 Dec 21
Mary Anne Franks dumping on 230 as a special protection for an “industry,” which is importantly misleading. It protects a category of conduct—for businesses AND users—not just “social media companies."
I keep hearing bizarre claims like “well, newspapers don’t get 230 protection.” But every newspaper that allows user comments on articles relies on 230. So does every individual with a blog or YouTube channel or e-mail listserv.
Individuals with e-mail lists & YouTube channels are less attractive litigation targets than deep-pocketed technology companies, of course. But they’d also be a hell of a lot easier to bully.
Read 4 tweets

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