I honestly wonder where these protests are being planned. I've been scouring all the places that the implied crowd frequents as I have for years (social media and it's impact fascinates me) and I've seen few mentions of a planned activity and all such mentions have been in the vain of, 'Do not go to any armed protest on inauguration day it is a false flag'. I imagine if people are actually planning things which we should believe because the FBI has said it is true it means that the plotters have moved off of public social media and into the shadows of various end to end encrypted tools.
You forget how young and Bay-Area-centric this platform is until you read a comment like this.
Social media is a biofilm blip on the actual peer-to-peer communication network of the US. Ex-military, hams, church groups, school groups, softball teams, public safety, fraternal organizations, book clubs, trade organizations, retiree organizations, even just large corporate types or anyone born before 1990...your screen is not reality, and they knew it and know it. COVID didn’t and won’t leave a dent in the fender.
They never left the old ways, in part because they saw social media as “the shadows”. They never left social media because they were never on social media. Can’t say they were wrong...
BTW, they are the builders and doers, not the “influencers”. They know how to physically accomplish things, like build the modern world, and take things apart (appropriately) when necessary.
“You really don’t want them angry, you wouldn’t like them when they get angry,” to paraphrase Bruce Banner.
No armed protest is going to be planned in "church groups" or "softball teams". Social networks have been significant players for 15 years now and the internet longer. If there are "armed protests" being planned they will likely be happening on the internet on various message boards on fringe sites.
The "conspiracy theorist" would see these warnings as further pretext to instate the Patriot Act 2.0[1], this time under the guise of domestic terrorism.
I saw them. They were found on 4chan, Parler, Twitter, TD.win, and other similar sites before the suppression and current psyop campaign kicked in. That's part of why most of those sites either got shut down or purged many of their right-wing users.
It's happened many times. More recently, in 1983 someone set off a bomb outside senate chambers to try and kill senators. IIRC Bill Clinton pardoned them.
I feel like all the talk about Trump and Parler getting "cancelled" has to be interpreted in this context. This isn't over. People tried to overthrow the government last week. They're going to try again soon. There is a credible threat of imminent violence across the country.
After September 11th, we shut down air travel across the country for a week because we just didn't know if there were additional threats out there. Would anyone have complained if tech companies shut down a website known to host and inspire radical Islamic terrorism?
Today we face a far more dangerous threat. Imagine if the mob had succeeded in capturing most of Congress -- we could be fighting a civil war right now.
We don't know what else the "patriots" have planned, nor what the FBI, Facebook, or Twitter have seen in private messages and groups. Maybe let's prioritize everyone's physical safety for a few weeks.
>If these people get violent it's big tech's fault for banning them and the media for ridiculing them.
This is immoral, and dismissive of personal responsibility. If these people protest, it is arguably the fault of big tech and the media. If these people get violent, it is their fault, unless big tech and the media are literally and personally committing physical violence against them (which is the key difference between this and the BLM riots).
Oh really? How bout all those riots, looting, and arson? Or are we just going to ignore that? How bout all of the normal people who lost their lives to racially motivated violence?
The businesses destroyed?
The people who didn't have insurance?
Don't want to hear excuses for one side over the other. The fact is, things have gotten to the boil over point on both sides. No one is innocent in any of this, and nothing is accomplished except more damage to the Union.
That's brilliantly funny if you meant it that way, but this headline and story has hallucinatory levels of fiction as pretext.
People who don't care about being lied to like that don't need to be oppressed, they will convince themselves of anything they need to believe all by themselves.
>People who don't care about being lied to like that don't need to be oppressed, they will convince themselves of anything they need to believe all by themselves.
This is exactly the psychological fault exhibited by people who are trying to justify the very real events at DC.
I could see flagging this on the basis that it's not hacker news, but flagging it on the basis that you're certain it's false seems like shaky ground to me.
