I am a "Parler User." I have an account and until it was taken down I used to check it every few days. Don't make assumptions about a person's politics from the mere existence of software on their device.
>I am a "Parler User." I have an account and until it was taken down I used to check it every few days. Don't make assumptions about a person's politics from the mere existence of software on their device.
There's nothing wrong with Parler users or anyone else per-se.
There is, however, a problem with violent insurrectionists.
It's unfortunate that a small group of people planned and executed a violent attack on the seat of US government, although unfortunate is nowhere near a strong enough term for their acts.
I don't know you, but if you don't participate in violent acts to support your political agenda and respect the rule of law, I have no problem with you.
Assuming that's true, even if (and I don't know one way or another about that) I vehemently disagree with your policy perspectives, I will defend your right to hold and advocate for those perspectives. Because that's what a free society is all about.
On the other hand, those that believe it's okay to use violence, lies and intimidation to achieve their political goals have no place in a free society and should be shunned, ridiculed, and if they perpetrate acts of violence, punished.
I'd posit that anyone who believes in our constitutional system of government and the rule of law would agree with all of the above.
When does an insurrectionist turn into a revolutionary?
In the 1770s George Washington and ilk were insurrectionists. Now we look at them as revolutionaries. Do people who fight for change only become revolutionary when it’s an argument you agree with? Are you an insurrectionist if you fight the government to the death (literally) for what you believe in?
Obvious disclaimer: I don’t hold a candle to this fight in either direction but can empathize with both sides
>When does an insurrectionist turn into a revolutionary?
They don't. The terms are synonymous.
>Obvious disclaimer: I don’t hold a candle to this fight in either direction but can empathize with both sides
Why is that obvious?
And as to the idea that you can "empathize with both sides," Who do you think those "sides" are?
They are most certainly not those of the two major political parties in the US.
They are not even those who consider themselves "conservative" or "liberal."
In reality, one side supports our constitutional form of government and the rule of law. The other side despises the rule of law and seeks to use violence, intimidation and lies to destabilize my home in an attempt to seize power.
The former are 98%+ of my countrymen (many of us disagree about a great many things, but not about our constitutional republic and the rule of law), and the latter are a tiny minority who wishes to impose their will on everyone else.
If you see things differently, I'd love to hear your arguments.
> When does an insurrectionist turn into a revolutionary?
A reasonable question in the abstract, but in this case the distinction is rather simple: 1776 was people revolting against a king to create a democracy. What we saw this month was quite the opposite - trying to undo democracy (i.e. negate the results of popular vote).
People used their voice to express their concern. Everyone dismissed them. They are the ones asking for a congressional oversight review and being rejected. They think something is being covered up. I thought the same way about 9/11 when it happened. It’s one of those believable far-fetched scenarios. But no one is legitimizing it and people are upset about it. Rather than be human about it we’re laughing them off then acting shocked and surprised when that group acts out.
For contrast, black people were claiming police abuse decades ago and the country turned a cheek towards it. Police abuse increased until technology put the power back in our hands. It’s very hard to look at where the protestors are coming from but it is very easy to dismiss it because of status quo.
Just a warning, and my downvotes are proving my point. No one wants to talk about it, they want to sweep ideas they don’t agree with under the rug. Just like my police encounters in the late 90s.
I’m sure at one point in your life you have said “my vote doesn’t matter, the president will be picked regardless of my input”. That’s what these people are upset about, and the solution seems about as attainable as politicians cracking down on abusive cops in the 1990s
Everyone dismissed them apart from all the states that held recounts, 60+ court hearings, endless media appearances aso on. They're being laughed off because of things like press conferences held at 'Four seasons total landscaping', attorneys making wild claims in press conferences and the meekly walking them all the way back in actual courtrooms, and bizarre public and private statements - like the President calling state officials in Georgia and spending an hour begging/threatening them to find votes for him.
Your downvotes aren't proving a point. Trump's and his supporters' complaints about the election were given extensive public airing but none of them have been sustainable under closer scrutiny, and many claims about procedure, constitutional law and so forth have ben flat wrong. I don't understand how you can claim Trump supporters don't feel listened to when there has been a non-stop barrage of accusations from them over the last 2 months. Why don't they listen to the opinions that come out of the courts?
In your own text you interchanged they to mean trump and his administration and then his supporters and then insinuated his voters. You are unable to distinguish the three. I don’t care about trump, I do care about how we handle the claim of election fraud. I do want to see a congressional hearing just like we did with Russian interference.
Would you agree at this point in time the two events are similar? A bogey man messing with the election that was only proven after the fact? I don’t care about trump losing and you should not either. You should be concerned that a lot of people think there is election fraud and as such the American government has a duty to investigate. Democracy?
That's a reasonable point but the context of trying to prevent an incumbent from being turned out of office suggests these insurrectionists were more reactionary than revolutionary - that is, they were trying to prevent rather than institute change. Admittedly, this a rather fine semantic distinctions, and many Trump supporters consider their guy to be fighting against institutional corruption in DC.
I agree it would be wrong to draw assumptions about individual Parker users simply due to being on the system. Plenty of journalists, pundits and just interested observers were on there just to see what it was like. But when we talk about “Parler users” generally, were really talking about members of the community compelled by and possibly contributing to the discussions.
For comparison I go on Fox News web site from time to time largely out of morbid fascination, but I don’t consider myself part of their audience because I don’t find any of it actually valuable or useful. And I say that as a self identified conservative, albeit a British one.
Not on TV, but we have a newspaper called the Daily Mail.
It's usually pretty good on general news and opinion, but it's pretty right wing and regularly publishes manipulated statistics and disinformation on climate change and EU issues. So it's like Fox on some specific topics.
The leading left wing paper is the Guardian (Sometimes referred to as the Gauniad due to it having pretty poor proofreading back in the day). It's way too leftie for me on opinion, it's grown a bit of a woke tendency, but is good on science and international news.
It's interesting where people's boundaries sit when it comes to the far left and far right. I would class the Daily Mail (alternatively known as the Daily Heil) as extremely right wing, their editorial slant appears to be designed to drag the Overton window as far to the right as possible by outraging middle England about Muslims, refugees and house prices. I also wouldn't call the Guardian even vaguely left wing any more, given their relentless campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn and backchannels with the "Blue Labour" crowd. Sure, it's left of most of the British press, but then again Dutarte is left of most of the British press.
On TV, I'd say Sky News isn't _that_ far off Fox. Extremely selective on their guests and very partisan in their correspondents.
Well I am a righty so although some of the DM stuff is poisonous, no question, my tolerance for what I would say are reasonable conservative views is higher.
I think all of those are reasonable takes except for on Corbyn. The Guardian didn't dislike Corbyn due to a lack of Leftyness, but because for all the fact I disagree with them politically, I can at least recognise that they have some standards and integrity.
Corbyn wasn't exactly a Left Trump, but not all that far off with the antisemitism, and sucking up to the fascist theocrats in Iran and Hezbollah, naked opportunism, etc. I wish more people on the right in the US had stood up for their principles in that way over the last 4 years.
Conditioned on the fact that these "Parler Users" were trespassing on the premises of the Capitol Building, you can build a pretty strong case that you're dealing with an insurrectionist.
There are definitely the instigators and the people who are dragged along. The instigators are the people at the front who pushed down the police and murdered one of them. They should get life without parole. There are also a lot more people at the back who see a bunch of people running in, don't see what happened to the police officers at the front, and just kind of go with it. They still need to be punished, but not with life without parole.
"I don't know what happened to the police, but if the violent insurrectionist mob in front of me calling for the death of Mike Pence thinks it's okay to go inside who am I to argue?"
I disagree, what if you were just mulling around the building? Sure, that's trespassing but that's on an entirely different level from active insurrection.
You'd need to be extremely distracted not to notice the lines, the fence and the Capitol police being overwhelmed and assaulted. I wouldn't try that with a judge.
"Hey, you guys are beating a cop to death with the American flag and breaking in to the Capitol, huh? After you get inside I'll follow you and mull around, you know, just while I'm here."
I don't think you can. The user base != the service, and not all users are equal.
When I look at the Parler situation, I think most likely poor management/decisions were the greatest contributing factor to their current predicament.
The management probably didn't think they had a hate-speech problem until it was too late. As such, they didn't have the systems in place to deal with it, and the systems they were going to put in place were going to be tempory (as highlighted by Apple's response to their app modernisation plan).
From any service, someone's presence at a political rally, followed by being present inside of the capitol building as a violent mob storms through while representatives are evacuated in fear of their lives, is a pretty good filter, regardless of them being Parler users, for "users who are probably either insurrectionists or journalists".
You can filter down from there, but even if you mistakenly think that fifty percent of Parler users just liked the idea of free speech platforms enough that they used a site frequented by the neo-nazis despite all that, it's likely that only the violent insurrectionists happened to be the ones in the crowd, and then in the capitol building, posting things to Parler as they went.
> I think most likely poor management/decisions were the greatest contributing factor to their current predicament
Like, having a panel of 5 human moderators "vote" on every piece of flagged content? As if that could even scale. It was never their intent to moderate in the first place, but rather to pull large segments of our political system into the very position we're now seeing -- namely, open conflict.
Honestly, there was no way for them to not know that, unless they never open their own site. Their site also had moderation structures in place - leftist opinions were removed fast. It was meant for right wing only.
I also signed up for Parler so I could view for my own eyes what was happening on their. It was as if Fox News and Twitter had a bad baby, and that baby was raised by the article comments on Breitbart.
From my understanding they censored antifa. The platform maybe wasn't "far-right" but it seems they had a bit of a bias to the right in how they moderated.
It does seem that the userbase overall skewed far right.
From my understanding, the way they moderated was to show content to 5 literally random Parler users and let them decide as a group what to do with the content.
This kind of by its own nature drags a platform in a specific direction based on where it started. It had a starting culture of being the alternative platform for conservative voices, and so over time that moderation technique would just push it further in that direction.
You can to a degree that left-leaning users were generally banned as soon as they were identified, as the site was primarily to collect data/demographics on right-leaning voters to target for fundraising and organising. Follow the money...
This isn't about you, but rather about the people who posted video that puts them at the scene of a crime. Parler-the-app doesn't broadcast location information that i'm aware of.
Not really. To geolocate a user the cell providers would need to know the absolute position of all the LTE repeaters and cells (which they might). But they'd also need to compensate for indoor propagation (which is much more complex than outdoor).
Also AGPS only provides satellite ephemeris, which enables a faster time to fix, not better accuracy.
A GPS repeater would only give accurate time, not position. The repeater only repeats the signal that's captured by the antenna on the roof. I use GPS repeaters frequently in my labs to supply timing to instruments.
Extremely questionable. GPS accuracy even outside isn't perfect and GPS accuracy inside is a crap shoot depending on the building. Someone could have been walking past outside and be shown as inside the building.
An insurrection is only a crime if you lose. Otherwise, it's a thing to be proud of for generations.
Now, there doesn't seem to have been any path to victory for them, and that casts doubt on the rest of their judgment. But at least in the moment, they believed they were heroes.
Plenty of the rioters streamed themselves live on Youtube, Twitch, and Facebook, while shouting their own names on camera.
Some of them even had their work-badges and IDs displayed during the riots, and bragged about their "accomplishments" on Facebook publicly under their own name.
Perhaps they saw the take over of the Hart Senate building during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings? Or AOC leading a take over of Pelosi's office? There were some minor arrests, but not much more than slap on the hand stuff, as I recall.
I don't think -- for even a single microsecond -- that anyone anywhere close to those hearings feared for the lives. It's absolutely absurd to compare the two situations.
This standard ("does anyone feel unsafe") should always be used as a check against ones haywire common sense.
I think that's a terrible standard. Actually, it's not even a standard at all as it can't be known until after an act, such as these, has begun taking place in which case it is too late. Unless something is known to everyone in advance to be "protest theater", so to speak, it is the act not an unknowable reaction that must be held to account.
- Kavanaugh confirmation hearings: did people feel unsafe? No.
- AOC leading a take over of Pelosi's office: No, probably the opposite. People were likely laughing about it and mildly annoyed.
- Mobs of people ransacking the capitol? Yeah, people felt _terrified_, and multiple people died.
See the difference? There's non-violent peaceful protest, and there's threats of violence, or actual violence, that one can feel in their bones, and which color the situation and subsequent charges should events fall out of line with our tradition of protest. Though events can't be known ahead of time, it's fairly easy in retrospect to judge intent -- i.e, AOC didn't enter Pelosi's office dressed in tactical gear and holding zip ties, with a mob of angry "Squad" members calling for the Senate minority leader's death.
It's offensive to common sense and morally dubious to compare these things, or to even bring them up in this context.
Was there a poll taken of the feelings inside prior and during these events which was then proclaimed to the protesting parties and the public at large? Is there any indication that the vast majority had any idea of the intentions and the contents of the pockets of those who sought to do harm? Does the moral quality of an action change depending upon the style of pants? The ethics of actions of others does not at all depend upon your feelings.
> > Does the moral quality of an action change depending upon the style of pants
No, maybe not, but perhaps there's something to be said when you look at the shirts people were wearing ("Camp Auschwitz") or the flags people were holding (Confederate, many), or the words people were speaking ("Hang Mike Pence!")?
> Is there any indication that the vast majority had any idea of the intentions and the contents of the pockets of those who sought to do harm
There's an enormous amount of testimony everywhere, in every major publication, on every news channel, about the feelings of those on the inside experiencing the mob enter from the outside. Your attempts to defend this are disingenuous.
> Policy enforcement based on feelings is inherently arbitrary and contrary to the rule of law
This is entirely not true in the real world. When a prosecutor brings a charge against someone, all sorts of factors are taken into account, based on prior law. The charge of "menacing" is a great example. How about "making threatening statements"? Or any number of other obvious examples that rely on subjective interpretation within a context.
Come on now, if the other events you mention had caused major fear you should be able to find some news stories or personal testimonies documenting that. Are we to believe that the incidents you mention were actually deeply traumatic but nobody bothered to say so?
Are we to believe that a poll was taken of how people felt after an event which then traveled backwards in time to before the event and was then communicated to the group which will cause the event in the future? This is actually what is required to argue with what I wrote.
The topic is "what were these people thinking in taking these actions?" My reply was "there were similar actions in the past which resulted in trivial punishments." Would amending my reply to "there were similar actions in the past which resulted in trivial punishments and no one took seriously anyway" somehow have made the group that entered the Capitol less likely to have done so? If so, please explain.
I am not interested in your red herring. You are claiming an equivalence between recent and previous incidents which is not apparent to anyone else,a nd seem unable to support your claim.
The topic at hand is a red herring? Unable to support a claim which was not made? I'm assuming you're referring to the final end results rather than "what could they be thinking?" which was, as stated, the actual topic.
From the article, the GPS data comes from photos or videos uploaded to Parler and released in the data dump. Twitter and other social media sites strip out that data, whereas Parler did not.
I'm curious what the accuracy of assisted GPS is inside such a large building. There's a part of me which thinks it could be highly accurate (probably lots of unique AP's to triangulate off known accurate locations) but on the other hand you're still deep inside the Capitol building which doesn't exactly have thin walls.
> The precise locations of Parler users inside the building can be difficult to place. The coordinates do not reveal which floors they are on ... the coordinates themselves are only accurate up to an approximate distance of 12 yards (11 meters).
I'm sure it will vary within the building, but suggested positions can be cross-referenced with the actual content of the video, which should be easy to geolocate in many cases (any area that's normally accessible to the public has probably been photographed many times).
I was confused as the linked threat didn’t seemed to have aged particularly badly. However, lower in the thread Greenwald claims that the insurrectionists organized on Facebook and 0 of them on Parker.
Any viable social media competitor needs critical mass. A conservative exodus to Parler would be one way to make that happen. Big tech just squashed a competitor while the "iron was hot" for Parler and even if it comes back online it might never get the network effect it could have gotten.
lobste.rs seems to be doing fine as a discussion site aimed at technologists.
This "hypergrowth at all costs" mindset is pretty suffocating. There's plenty of niche sites that are successful without the need of trying to be the biggest in the world.
Then maybe it's worth taking the whole thread into consideration.
The zero arrests comment probably is incorrect, but, does that take away from the larger point, especially with regards to the context of the nyt article?
Tl;dr: he made a lot of tweets on this subject. Cherry picking one part of one tweet doesn't say much about his overall point.
Thanks. I was about to comment about how things didn't seem to line up based off of the top-level tweet. I'm glad that yall scrolled down further than I did.
That describes a lot of what he gets up to these days. There's a reason why The Intercepts article on him leaving is as close as you can politely get to physically disowning him and his work.
I hadn't read that article, so I googled it, and assuming this[0] is the correct one, wow.
Some choice excerpts, which are even better in context so read the article:
> The narrative Glenn presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.
> it was he who was attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign — and launder them as journalism.
> We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be
> We have no doubt that Glenn will go on to launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon. In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks.
I recall him finding the most tenuous of reasons to defend Assad and Putin's conduct in Syria. It kept falling apart as the regime kept conducting further chemical weapons attacks. Everything could be dismissed as some grand imperialist plot against Assad. The goal posts moved dozens of times always in reaction to further news that detailed different aspects of the chemical weapons campaign.
Greenwald kept finding ways to dismiss the citizens on the
ground. Because surely RT.com knows better.
He then kept dismissing the joint international investigation team while it was in the field. Because surely Assad's own press releases know better.
After awhile he deleted his Twitter timeline[1]. Greenwald is not a journalist when he carries forward narratives like this, he is an activist. Just like when he carried forward narratives from "Guccifer 2.0" aka Kremlin during the 2016 election. What he is doing here seems really similar to his conduct from that era. He thought he found -the thing- that exempts something he want to defend from ire. Now an entire narrative is build around it. His little personal fort.
I'll never be able to forgive Glenn for using his name on Twitter to beat down Syrians who were giving first hand testimony and video evidence. He engaged against them like they were his enemy, likely because they were the enemy of his favored narrative and biases. Disgusting.
Here is an archived version of his tweet[2]. You'll need it in time after he commits another purge when he moves onto the next indefensible right wing trope he feels like picking up.
I don't like this. Please comment on what he states in his tweet, instead of bringing up old ones.
When you're right, you're right. Regardless of your past.
Greenwald has credibility because of his reporting on Snowden. That is primary and basically only reason why he is celebrity.
And due to that, for many (including me in past) he is given trust and benefits of doubt other people don't. So I see parent comment quite relevant - the truth telling is matter of past.
No but there WERE many honypot posts on Parler asking people to upload their phone recordings and identify who they were. Hundreds gave their contact info and specifically what they did during the attack.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, but rather make your substantive points thoughtfully. Also, please don't use HN primarily for ideological battle (which you've been doing a lot of lately) – that's the line at which we ban people: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Oh and while I have you: "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."
Will do, but I'm just deeply bothered by the rhetoric and current events. Censorship and narratives have a powerful effect on humanity and very worried about where this is leading.
Of course you are—it would be a rare person who isn't, and it's completely understandable and legitimate.
From an HN point of view we're all learning together how to manage that while remaining a functioning community. The site guidelines are designed to help that happen, or at least to stave off the decline (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
All members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff released a statement today that reads in part:
"The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional Process...
...the rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection."[1]
Additionally the FBI had a national press conference where they revealed the following:
"Federal prosecutors are looking at bringing 'significant' cases involving possible sedition and conspiracy charges in last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol... the Justice Department has created a specialized task force that will look at everything from travel to movement of the individuals."[2]
The message isn't "ban everything" but "ban the things that are a threat to democracy, according to the FBI and the Joint Chiefs." If you find yourself on the other side of the argument, maybe it's time to consider why.
They did not mention Parler as the story implicated. I'm not arguing on behalf of people doing illegal things. I'm arguing against the framing of an app as the problem instead of the people committing illegal acts themselves. People use text messages for comms, people use Telegram, they use phone calls, they use a myriad of apps to communicate. Framing Parler as the problem is just a way of justifying further lockdowns on political speech and selective censorship and banning and a delegation of our sovereignty and liberty to the biased discretion of powerful corporate entities.
Organizing an insurrection to overthrow an elected government is not political speech. It's a conspiracy to commit sedition.
If you have a problem with corporations complying with laws that clearly prohibit violent overthrow of an elected government, are you sure you want to live in a democracy? Or do you just not understand what that word means?
