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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Volunteer reddit moderators purged trump supporters from their subreddits with no institutional backing whatsoever! You'd expect - and did see - the same from progressive twitter moderators without FBI intervention. Most being hired after '16 is explained by most twitter hires as a whole being recently - if a company's exponentially growing employee count (including if it overhires), most employees are recent. Thinking the FBI is somehow a specific central organ that's dictatorially intervening isn't right - are there even any specific pieces of evidence for that - distributed consensus and pressure from all parts of civil society, including your leadership and employees is much more accurate. And 'pressure from leadership and employees' is just being part of it and agreeing!

Also, most of those employees are in 'security', as opposed to 'trust and safety' or similar, and ex-FBI hires make sense for that.

Of course it makes sense you put them in 'security'. They're ex-FBI, duh.

But are they doing actual security, or are they there to ensure compliance ?

The political editor over at Newsweek who got the half-Arab/half-Russian reporter fired was officially doing something related to sports.

His slack activity showed something else.

Because twitter is where marching orders for all the second-hand ideas dealers are handed out.

It's where likes and retweets can be used to reward worthy causes and sink unworthy causes.

Thinking the FBI is somehow a specific central organ that's dictatorially intervening isn't right

The entire plot against Trump was very heavy on FBI people.

FBI apparently orchestrated the J6 farce.

You know, when it comes to you, I can't decide whether you're a reflexive contrarian or something else entirely.

We can read their "experience" tab on linkedin (most of them aren't visible logged out, cba to make a throwaway):

Doug leads the Special Security Support Team for Twitter, managing Corporate Security efforts to detect, assess and mitigate threats to Twitter's most visible employees and events.

Focused on crisis management; business continuity; flexible & remote workforce security; and security training & education for the best flock of rock stars in the world. đź’™

• Generate crisis management plans for offices, data centers and events. Lead efforts to test the crisis framework of those plans via tabletop exercises with leaders worldwide.

• Proactively and reactively lead teams to assess and manage global incidents and crises affecting Twitter’s employees, offices and reputation.

• Integrate with global risk teams to assess validity and priority of risks. Utilize intelligence data and findings to drive decisions.

• Collaborate with operational managers to ensure procedures are in place to support and/or minimize risks to employees who are traveling or receiving threats online.

• Responsible for oversight of Twitter’s emergency communications system.

--

FBI apparently orchestrated the J6 farce. ... You know, when it comes to you, I can't decide whether you're a reflexive contrarian or something else entirely.

To illustrate the point with some hyperbole - If, hypothetically, I was a dark elf silently plotting to dismantle the USG, execute Plan Moldbug, and install BAP as Emperor, it'd still be (if I was talking to other live players who too might take action) worth contesting confused claims about how the Cathedral works and uses power - lest my allies box shadows and spend years on based political projects that accomplish nothing.

You expect Intelligence people to put things like "* And oversees compliance with government directives and assorted 1st Amendment violations" in their LinkedIn?

twitter has "trust and safety" people whose job it is to censor threats, cp, racism, extremism, etc. there are a lot of people who explicitly that. the people that OP linked whose profiles I could view and get information from very clearly laid out security (computer or physical) roles instead.

rewording my question: do you expect them to put a smoking gun in their Linked in profiles?

Them working for T&S isn't a smoking gun though, it'd just be twitter hiring people to do a task they explicitly claim they are doing and intend to do. If an ex-FBI person is 'preventing extremism on twitter', they're just one of a hundred twitter employees doing that, it isn't illegal or anything. Most 'normal' people, and especially the 'cathedral', will just read that as 'fbi person who works at twitter now', and not infer any "government directives" or "1st amendment violations". Despite that, the linked individuals are just twitter hiring people with security skillsets for security roles.

Them working for T&S isn't a smoking gun though,

Nobody said that it is, why are you fixated on it?

FBI apparently orchestrated the J6 farce.

What's the evidence for this?

What's the evidence for this?

Evidence in addition of proven FBI SOP of infiltrating, manipulating and inciting all kinds of "right wing" "racist" "extremist" groups?

What standard of evidence? You are not going to see evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" until documents are declassified (wait few decades) or fall of the regime and opening of archives (good luck waiting for this).

But, for starter, see this twitter thread listing interesting events around this event (sourced from impeccable mainstream sources).

https://twitter.com/BoltzmannBooty/status/1422298278188748802

You got me wrong. That was not an adversarial comment. I actually know next to nothing about this whole thing.

From a (very cursory) reading of that twitter thread (God I hate twitter, I hope Elon sinks it soon), it seems as if there were a handful of FBI undercover agents among the Proud Boys, one of the many groups involved in Jan 6. Then there is some far-fetched speculation that they may or may not have been among those people giving orders? Unless I am missing quite a lot, that's fishy, but a far cry from "the FBI orchestrated J6".

Not only FBI, Secret Service and DHS were also informed in advance that Trumpers will spontaneously decide to desecrate the temple of freedom and democracy.

Some non-Twitter links from non-respectable sources digging deep into this rabbit hole.

Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol

Meet Ray Epps, Part 2

This means Epps came to the Trump speech early in the morning with the sole intention of recruiting a mob to follow on the heels of the Capitol breach team he would personally oversee while Trump was speaking—the very breach team we have covered in this report whose operators would remove the fencing, signage and barricades before the masses would arrive at the Capitol.

Let’s put this all in context:

Ray Epps flew 2,300 miles from Phoenix, Arizona to Washington, DC for a Trump rally, supposedly as a Trump supporter.

Epps arrived at the rally entrance more than two hours early, camped out to constantly shout recruiting instructions about coming to the Capitol after the speech, but then skipped out on the speech itself, because he was too busy personally orchestrating the Big Bang Breach Team that kicked off the riot and tore down the fencing, barricades and signage, which made rallygoers totally unaware of the legal booby trap they had walked into.

Article is one year old, what happened to Ray Epps since then? Arrested and tortured like the rank and file rioters?

Nothing. NYT debunked all crazy conspiracy theories, there is no need to do anything.

During the interview, committee officials said, Mr. Epps said that he was not an F.B.I. informant and denied reports that he had urged protesters to go into the Capitol at the behest of federal law enforcement agencies.

"the fbi has informants in right wing groups and sometimes encourages lone wolf terrorist attacks to pad their arrest and conviction numbers" isn't evidence for "the FBI orchestrated a bunch of people showing up on Jan 6". That there were some informants at Jan 6th doesn't prove much - if J6 was fully organic, the FBI would still want their informants there to inform, and even if those Proud Boy people weren't used as informants at all, they'd still show up to the protest considering they're proudboys.

if you avoid politics, reddit can be tolerable...sometimes.

I feel like every message board has had purges since 2016. Whoever moderates anything has had to decide if their Trump or not Trump. It’s a weird world that things that had a great deal of bipartisanship for decades suddenly found themselves needing to choose a political party. It always felt like it was coming more from blue tribe spaces, but perhaps red tribe has down it too. I feel like any blue tribe tilted space has had full moderation of anyone Trumpy since atleast 2020 (which includes non-Trump lovers who weren’t full on board with every narrative).

Many of the purges occurred BEFORE 2016; it was Gamergate that revealed how deep the rabbithole went.

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