I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
NYTimes offers pessimistic view of how to deal with (especially right wing) domestic extremism
I discussed the NYTimes editorial on the Issues blog,
but now I see the NYTimes print headline that produced outrage, “Trump urges
unity vs. racism”, link. (Umair Haque continuedthis storyon Medium.)
The New York Times continues a discussion which, in my
own setup, I placed first on my “Bill on Major Issues” blog Sunday, with an
article by Nicole Perlroth et al
The article is correct in that in practice it is
harder for law enforcement and the criminal justice system to ferret out true
terror dangers from white supremacy than it was for radical Islam, because the
former is closer to our own political power center, and because of the “stochastic
terrorism” risk inherent in memes, dog whistles (which change) and the difficulties
in drawing lines as to what is acceptable behavior, where attitudes about
personal association are less private in the Internet age and can have
insidious public consequences.
It’s also true that gun control alone will not remove
threats which could be carried out in other ways (in Japan there was an arson
incident; in Sweden, as Tim Pool has pointed out, there have been grenades). But
there is no excuse for Congress’s not implementing some reasonable gun control
reforms.
The article mentions that the scale of tech platforms
makes it impossible to draw lines effectively in policing inciteful speech, and
that the supposed tech prejudice against conservatives may be deceptive because
the extreme right generally has more capacity to create extreme damage than the
extreme left (Antifa notwithstanding, or even Dayton).
Tim Pool, above, refutes Trump's placing emphasis on the "dangers" of video games. Pewdiepie and Minecraft are not a problem.
The problem does have to do with the problems with a
hyperindividualistic society in which many people simply cannot function as expected,
so they tend to rejoin tribes where they find more sense of purpose.Our problems may not be so much with racism
as with cognitive ableism. Update: Aug 9 The Wall Street Journal offers an op-ed by Clint Watts as a Saturday essay on how to fight specifically bottom-up domestic terrorism. It notes that extremists have been driven into corners by major social media. Update: Aug 12 From USA Today, here is an op-ed by R. Derek Black, "This is how white nationalists think about shootings", p 5A in the print edition (I bough it today), tricky URL. However the deplatformings and payment processor cutoffs he supports have ensnared people who are not white nationalists by the usual meaning.
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