There's mass protests in Sudan and China over military shooting citizens and extradition laws, yet all us free thinkers on YouTube are clutching our pearls over Steven Crowder whose rights have not been violated. His stupid videos are still up and even if they weren't YouTube is still a private company. No one is constitutionally owed space on their platform or ad money from them.
Having said that, there's a very real problem over there because YouTube's crappy algorithm can't distinguish between hate speech and anti-hate speech. Or between history and political rants. They really need human being down there to do this work ( yes, I know it's a massive undertaking). That's what the discussion should revolve around, not the First Amendment .
The thing about a lot of these types of protests is that the people involved know they have absolutely no chance of convincing their governments to change, it's mostly a demonstration meant for an international audience to try and get world powers to intervene on their behalf. The problem with that is, like we've seen in the Arab Spring, Ukraine, Venezuela, and many other places, the US and our allies don't really offer these protesters much in the way of concrete support. Even if they do manage to succeed we don't help them follow through in the aftermath, and in the ensuing chaos it's easy for authoritarian dictators to re-emerge, promising a return to stability and prosperity, such as we've seen in Egypt.
And the sad truth of it all is that, despite our supposed mission to spread democracy around the world, the US and the rest of the first world have tried to keep the circle of liberal democracies small and made it difficult for aspiring nations to join that club. We rely on developing countries for cheap labor and natural resources, and few citizens of those countries would vote for that to continue forever, they want democracy precisely because they want to be on the other side of that equation, to enjoy the kinds of freedoms and lifestyles that we in the developed world do. But the living standards that we enjoy are only possible because of exploitation, and if everybody started using up resources at the rate that Americans do, the Earth would be fucked in pretty short order. So if the choice is to share with the rest of the world and see our own lives made somewhat worse, or to keep these countries under the thumb of dictators that will suppress their demands for a bigger slice of the pie, it's pretty easy to see which one of those we'd pick, democratic ideals be damned.
Last edited by PwrdOn; 06-12-2019 at 04:38 AM.
Some comic book fans behave like people who are willing to go on hunger strikes simply to protest that filet mignon is not on the menu today.
Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)
Buried Alien - THE FASTEST POST ALIVE!
First CBR Appearance (Historical): November, 1996
First CBR Appearance (Modern): April, 2014
Chicken Parmigiana is basically the Big Mac of Italian food (which does not prevent me from loving it).
Man of Steel should not be hated because Superman killed.
For crying out loud it's not the 1st damn time in Movie History that Superman killed.
Also he had a negative reaction with screaming so it's freakin obvious he did not want to kill Zod.
I enjoyed Man of Steel which made Superman a Marvel style character which makes him relatable.
Undeniable he killed Nuclear Man in the embarrassment hot garbage movie Sueprman 4 The Quest For Peace, and he also killed the Evil Superman in Superman 3.
The best thing to happen to socialism in the US has been the Republican party - by the combo of calling everything they don't like socialism and going all in on crony capitalism they might have done more to make the younger generations think more highly of socialism than any actual supporters of the concept.
Dark does not mean deep.
Well all the recent flip flopping by the GOP just reveals a pretty fundamental truth - that none of these -isms really matter and that people will always just invent whatever ideological justification for actions that conveniently serve their interests. The real problems with socialism have always lay in its implementation, places like the USSR and China were really better examples of authoritarian nationalism than doctrinaire Marxism, though communist movements do have a tendency to swerve in that direction. It's just a lot easier to convince people to sacrifice their lives for the honor of the motherland than for abstract principles like controlling the means of production. Even the famed Scandinavian system leans heavily on collective national identity to prevent people from trying to claim too big a slice of the pie, and you can see it fraying a bit in recent years as those countries have become more diverse and people don't have the same level of trust in each other as they used to, though nowhere near the level of that white replacement nonsense the alt right loves to push.
There ought to be a rule against comparing everything that happens to 1984, especially if you have never actually read the book which I imagine is the case for most of the idiots online who are constantly referencing it. Especially these days, when it's pretty clear that the greatest threat to our freedoms is not the suppression of ideas, but the white noise created by a deluge of nonsense that drowns out all of the meaningful talk in a sea of incoherence.