/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I don't think we're going to get anywhere appealing to the laws of capitalist nation-states at this time. Journalism can only be protected by a mass movement to make the powerful afraid again.

And journalism, as an institution, still needs to develop a greater understanding of technology and distribution to get around the traditional economic levers that have produced roadblocks to effective investigation and reporting. As just one example, it's really sad to me that so many independent journalism outlets out on the web now still don't seem to have given any thought to the censorship-defeating properties of federated media platforms. Every time a video gets removed by Youtube or a message taken down by Twitter these dumb little bitches just run off to another top-down profit-seeking host that runs on exactly the same model, where they can be censored again as soon as it gets large enough to have to protect capital interests.

>>477371
Maybe we have to do both, push for better laws as well as move to more censorship resistant technology.

Look at the structural view over time. They keep making the laws increasingly horrible, repressive and unbearable, and then we keep compensating for that with liberating technology. In the long term that means the law gets replaced with technology, or encoded into software or something like that. Are you sure that's the way to go ? Will that be better ?

Once the legal apparatus is gone it probably can't be brought back. If they make the laws bad enough, people will begin to treat the law as a source of torture, just words the bullies say before they abuse you. The law becomes something that has to be avoided or combated. That's what happened to religious moral codes. Those used to be the rules that ordered society. But the horrors of theocratic doctrinal repression have changed society to be fundamentally hostile to moral enforcement. That can happen to legal systems as well.

Maybe this is just a inevitable historic change, but we should at least try to understand the process and have some agency over the direction where this is going.

>it's really sad to me that so many independent journalism outlets out on the web now still don't seem to have given any thought to the censorship-defeating properties of federated media platforms. Every time a video gets removed by Youtube or a message taken down by Twitter these dumb little bitches just run off to another top-down profit-seeking host that runs on exactly the same model
To an extend they are just following the viewers. There's more people watching on the big porky platforms. Some of them probably are aware, but think that perpetually migrating to the not yet sensored platform is a good enough fix. I never really understand why the capitalist media platforms complied wih sensorship, it's definitly hurting their bottom line because these systems are not trivial and come with a lot of costs.

Lets say these journalists see the light and go federated, how do they get the viewers to follow them ?

>journalism, as an institution, still needs to develop a greater understanding of technology and distribution
that's definitely true.

>>477370
I was thinking about something along these lines the other day - not about journalism specifically, but about the hostility of state "intelligence" (spy) agencies towards encryption. It's such a terribly disturbing thing, so insane, because they will claim that if people discuss things privately where the gov't can't see, they could conspire to do something bad… but these same agencies, meanwhile, have made it illegal to share some of the conversations they have, and people who share "top secret" documents with the public are thrown in prison. It's so incredibly telling. Are there really people who fall for this ruse, even now?

>What would be an effective counter ?

I think it's case by case. Unwavering devotion to every right ceded is important, I think - I don't trust the legal system, but I still think it's valuable to have the greatest legal defense of rights possible. Rights/civil liberties organizations are valuable, and should maintain total devotion to all stated rights for everyone; making exceptions is a mistake.

I think banning politicians/states messing with speech and journalism would presently be sort of a pipe dream; in the EU, especially. I think there needs to be harder, more continuous work done to oppose mass-surveillance and censorship and things like that… it's going to be a threat for a very long time, and workers need to organize in opposition to this insanity so that it can be opposed at every turn. There should be people ready to oppose it through law and through word of mouth, and people ready to oppose it through force.

People who have the time, resources, and interest should engage in any kind of citizen journalism that they can - just document stuff, anything, take note of what is happening around you.

I think it also would be a great idea for people in opposition to these censorious/surveillance tendencies to work on alternative internet infrastructure. That said, this stuff isn't some refuge to run to when the internet-as-it-exists is totally ratfucked… it's important to develop alternatives, but it's also important to remember that the public already paid for the internet as it exists. Communications infrastructure is ours, and there's no sense in paying for the Library of Alexandria and then just letting them burn it down because there might also be another library at some point.

>>477403
>about the hostility of state "intelligence" (spy) agencies towards encryption. It's such a terribly disturbing thing, so insane, because they will claim that if people discuss things privately where the gov't can't see, they could conspire to do something bad…
To me their crusade against encryption appears like something from the dark-ages a war against knowledge, because encryption is maths. They don't want people to have maths.

I'm not sure if the primary purpose of encryption is hiding information. Unbreakable Encryption is the only tool that truly makes information tamper-proof. Encryption makes it impossible to fake records. We currently use things like checksums to harden records against tampering, but those are less absolute, there are always high-effort attacks like hash-collisions and so on. So i wonder, do they want to mess with record-keeping ?

Just for the principle if you wanted to reliably hide information, encryption isn't the first choice, you'd use something else. As a metaphor, imagine a piece of paper that contains information that you want to hide. You put the paper inside a box with an incendiary device. If you give the box the wrong code while you open it the incendiary device burns the paper and irretrievably destroys the information. You can do that with digital information as well. I forgot the technical term.

Information privacy and hiding information strictly speaking are not exactly the same. Privacy means that nobody can access information about you without you granting them access. So encryption also has the feature that you can know whether somebody can or cannot observe you. The concept of Privacy was born out of the negation of the all-knowing god that observes and judges your purity. So all those privacy violations about spying on people, tracking people and breaking into their communications, that registers like a new form of cultural puritanism, with parallels to the theocratic age. It seems like the ultimate point of all that data collection is to discriminate against people based on some arbitrary purity standard. At least that's what we have to assume, since we can't rule it out.

In a democracy, this is reversed. So the demos or the people are the ones that get the information advantage, in order to judge via democratic processes the people who hold state power. Because the demos kept "unelecting" absolute monarchs with "bleeding edge technology" until it was finally formalized into official democratic processes that were based on more pleasant "pointy pencil technology".

Also people will always be able to covertly conspire against the government, that doesn't require technology. I get the impression that they're making this accusation against encryption as a form of misdirection. I don't believe that this is about the security of the state. The Soviets had loads of state security, and all it took to bring it down was corrupt sellouts getting into positions of power. The same thing is happening in the west, all those Neo-liberal politicians that sell out to private interests in exchange for bribes that's undermining the integrity of the government.

>but these same agencies, meanwhile, have made it illegal to share some of the conversations they have, and people who share "top secret" documents with the public are thrown in prison. It's so incredibly telling.
You are talking about the collateral murder video that was discovered by Manning and published by Assange. That was about a attack helicopter being ordered to gun down field-reporters from Reuters iirc. They tried to convince people that they should be allowed to use state secrecy to cover up murder. Asssange and Manning were kidnapped after that to intimidate other journalists. I'm not sure how to evaluate this, but if they get to have murder and kidnapping privileges, that's undermining the legitimacy of the legal system. During the medieval ages the king could just point at somebody and have them hung or decapitated. The bourgeoisie didn't want to be subjected to the fatal whims of a king, and that's the beginning of the modern legal system. The state gained legal authority by granting and upholding rights, and the first one was that was everybody had the right to live and hence nobody got to have the right to commit murder.

>>477403
>I think banning politicians/states messing with speech and journalism would presently be sort of a pipe dream; in the EU, especially. I think there needs to be harder, more continuous work done to oppose mass-surveillance and censorship and things like that… it's going to be a threat for a very long time, and workers need to organize in opposition to this insanity so that it can be opposed at every turn. There should be people ready to oppose it through law and through word of mouth, and people ready to oppose it through force.
You are correct about the necessity for organized labor to uphold civil liberties. It has to be said that in most EU countries censorship is explicitly outlawed. For example the German root document in the legal hierarchy states "censorship does not occur". Which was clearly ignored for example when the Zionist lobby could just get, shit they don't like, banned.

Look at the bigger picture for a moment. Historic events lead to the creation of protections for civil liberties, and yet those clearly do not seem to work. So what would a working system look like ?

We seem to always be on the back-foot defending against encroachment of civil liberties, that seems like a flaw. If we build a new system we should try to turn that around. I don't really have a concrete conception, can you switch civil liberties from defense into offense ? Make it into something aggressive, that's designed to eat problems like censorship. Something that grows stronger if somebody tries to fuck with it.

I don't know how to tell you people this, but you don't have a "right to say whatever you like" or a "right to truth". Such rights are not about your feelings. If you wanted that, you'd ask a very different question and wouldn't expect a court to tell you what you can get away with. The way this entire issue is framed is so transgressive and Germanic.

There is, regarding the public interest, an expectation that members of the public - you and me, not just a specially designated "press" class trained in "goodthink" - would have reasonable objections to policies, and that those who write and enforce laws are beholden to inquiries. Private firms, and private citizens, can be held to account so far as their affairs affect the public. Any large corporation certainly qualifies as "affecting the public". Private citizen in their home is not really doing anything in "public life", even if they have a public career. Guess what the priorities of today's oligarchy decide has "rights" and who is obligated to conform to arbitrary insinuations ad nauseum to force them to comply. It's all very Germanic, because they do not believe in any such concept and never did. It's disgusting their institutions were foisted upon the world. If you're going to think like a German, don't be surprised when all of your expectations of a free society are destroyed, and stop pretending it would be any other way.

That said, if people believe they're being lied to, they will investigate for themselves and share their findings with others. If you're already invoking an idea of "protecting your sources" and the clandestine nature of your investigation, you're invoking the terms the national security state set. This is an expedient - the natsec state has ways of delivering bits and pieces of the truth through approved conduits. Think of it like Freemasonry or many secret societies in cults - they give initiates bits and feed them crumbs leading the initiate where they want them to go, and the same is done with hoodwinking and giving signs that those in the know will identify and react to. In this way, it is possible to communicate a plan without direct lines of command and control, and that's very useful if you are ruling a country through intelligence agencies rather than "the public interest" with its laws and expectations. This has always been a feature of political society, so the public interest has always been something of a farce. Yet, until recently, there was a public that everyone had to maintain, even if they were working to cannibalize it from within. Naturally, secret societies do not let you disrupt their mechanisms of action, or play by any such rules. You don't have a "right to know" anything they do, even though you're going to be victimized by them sooner or later. That's the way they want it.

Ultimately, you the subject have to ask yourself what you're going to trust. If you trust institutions blindly, they laugh at you. Blind faith is for the cattle.

Any journalist telling you "I'm your best friend and super special source" is full of shit. Most of the investigators you are told are "truth tellers" are either outright liars or people fed enough information to be useful idiots like Sy Hersh, who appears earnest and honest but knows what lines he must stay within. If you're going to transgress information controls, you're dealing with something which will always involve occulting on all sides, and you the subject have to appear as if you know nothing.

>>477425
Hersh really fucked up recently regurgitating that fiction from one of his sources that the top Ukrainian general was negotiating with the top Russian general. I'm really surprised he got duped like that, and I wonder if anyone else in the past has tricked him similarly.

>>477424
>you don't have a "right to say whatever you like"
Fine there are a few edge-cases like you can't yell FIRE! in a crowded place, but those are very rare.
>you don't have a "right to truth"
It depends, in general people do have a right to lie, but when it comes to what powerful people do, yes absolutely people have a right to the truth, also scientific knowledge that seeks to approximates truth, you have a right to that as well.
>If you're going to think like a German
Dafuck does that even mean ? Stop speaking in riddles.

>If you're already invoking an idea of "protecting your sources" and the clandestine nature of your investigation, you're invoking the terms the national security state set.
Sneaky cloak an dagger stuff existed aeons before national security states did, so that attribution seems wrong. No matter, "protecting your sources" is meant literally, as in protecting the sources from persecution and retaliation. Keeping the sources a secret is just one strategy towards that end. But you are correct it would be preferable to do all that stuff in the open. But then it becomes necessary to organize sufficient force to frustrate potential threats to journalistic sources. Maybe you can enlighten us how to do that.

>Naturally, secret societies do not let you disrupt their mechanisms of action, or play by any such rules.
Your premise is that secret societies are powerful. Is that actually true ? The ruling class appears like an open conspiracy and they're not even subtle about it.

>Ultimately, you the subject
You're thinking in hyper individualist terms. Maybe it would be better to think about this in terms of base and superstructure to figure out what's what.

>>477426
>Hersh really fucked up recently regurgitating that fiction from one of his sources that the top Ukrainian general was negotiating with the top Russian general.
There probably was some background channel activity happening, there usually is during wars. So it's probably easy to get this shit wrong.
>I'm really surprised he got duped like that, and I wonder if anyone else in the past has tricked him similarly.
I don't know about tricked, but Hersh has gotten things wrong before, but you'll find very few journalists with a perfect record. But all things considered, he's gotten a lot of big scoops very right.

>>477427
>Fine there are a few edge-cases like you can't yell FIRE! in a crowded place, but those are very rare.
No, you don't have a "right to say whatever you like" anywhere in the history of American law, and this is all about subverting American law and replacing it with a Germanic impostor.
Really, saying "FIRE!" - making a false warning - has nothing to do with political rights one way or another. It's not inherently illegal or immoral to do things like that in a way that the state has any say in. A private establishment can enforce its own security, within the bounds of law, and so if a patron made a false alarm, the owner of the establishment would be the first to discipline that, for the owner's own interest. The state or society generally has no say in that matter. Pulling a false alarm is a dickhead thing to do, and nothing prevents a state from making such behavior illegal, but all of that has nothing to do with political speech or assembly. Such laws against doing that are numerous and are the rule rather than exception - that is, any magistrate which can pass laws has a lot of latitude to regulate speech. Free speech in particular mostly says the feds aren't going to smash your press "just because", and the feds aren't going to insist that everyone has to say the one acceptable idea. It has nothing to do with this Germanic "unlimited freedom" faggotry that derives from Kant and Hegel, which has nothing to do with freedom in the genuine sense or the legal rights. It is free assembly and political rights that were the more relevant part of the first amendment and similar laws of that sort.
The only reason this Germanic impostor is encouraged is to allow transgressive, Satanic people to conduct lawfare. Those arguments are routinely laughed out of court. Nowhere in American history has a "right to say what you want" ever been protected. All of those laws are about what the state will do to the press, what sort of laws against speech it can and cannot pass.
Making arbitrary laws against speech based on empty sentiment would be against the intent of society and the purpose of the law, for a variety of reasons, but again, that has nothing to do with a codified "right to say whatever you want". It would be understood that an arbitrary law like "you have to espouse the correct ideology in school or we will shame you and threaten your family" would not just be unconstitutional but a direct attack on any condition of freedom. Free people are not treated that way. Slaves are. This has always been understood. It would be such an egregious affront that such laws and such institutions would likely not be allowed to exist, and people agitating to impose such institutions would be a clear and present danger. This is why Germanic schooling could only be imposed in fits and starts, abrogating and brazenly transgressing decencies. It is exactly that sort of culture war that much of the first amendment sought to avert. The Germanic way of life is incompatible with freedom in any genuine sense, or even a sane society. Yet another reason why their failed country should just be dismantled, lest the poison continue to spread. But above all, the institutions spawning from it must be dissolved and replaced with something functional and compatible with life, let alone any life we would want to live. It is far too late for that, because fascism won, and the concept of a "legal right" is a quaint historical artifact. But, if we did defend ourselves, things like this, and this entire line of argument, would have been rejected, and those who conducted lawfare would not be allowed to seed that religion and insist on violent transgression and unlimited threats to impose such an odious status quo. If not for the German ideology, Eugenics would have done the same thing - it can't not, and the eugenic creed is far more ultraviolent than Germanism. But, the two feed off each other. The conditions of Eugenics are a totally Satanic, fascist society where there can be no condition we would call "freedom" or even a condition compatible with life.

It is a sign of the poison of Germanism and the eugenic creed that a completely false concept of reality is normal, and we are made to argue against that as the "default". Humanity is a failed project of course, and it is pointless now to speak of "rights" or "freedom". We've moved past that. But, not now and not then and not ever has there been a "right to say whatever you like", and in practice speech is constrained by laws, customs, and institutional authority. By and large though, anything like free speech always implied that there were decencies that didn't need to be relitigated by the state. It is the Germanic way of life which insists on waging incessant culture war, which the eugenic creed desired and exported here. The state, let alone the feds, have no role in that. You can see that the Nazi eugenist faction in the US is making everything, even minor things, a federal case, to create the total Germanic culture war to destroy all law and replace it with the eugenic creed as the sole, sacrosanct law. Satanic race, failed race.

> when it comes to what powerful people do, yes absolutely people have a right to the truth
What are you even going to do with the truth? Did everything I write about "the public interest" exist for you? I think the ocncept is inadmissible in your world-system, which I expect in this sad, Satanic nation.
In any event, the real truth is that the slaves of the human race have no rights, and the thrill of torture must be maximized to create eugenic slavery. Far from the truth, eugenic slavery implies a right of the masters for absolute lying, and it is implied illegal for slaves to "think". This isn't just a policy, but an absolute. If slaves think, it must be abolished. Eugenics knows no other way.

The moment eugenics was the law of the land, was the end of "freedom", and so speaking of any legal rights to do anything is a farce. Moral rights, maybe, but that has nothing to do with looking to the state to protect anything; and to this day, the law (so far as it still exists) doesn't really protect much speech. Every condition of a genuinely free society relied on the willingness of people and officers of the state to recognize that torturing people and making them utter lies is Satanic, retarded, and will lead to an obvious outcome. But, that's what eugenics imposed on us. Failed race.

>>477436
In any event, the freedom of the press in the United States was abrogated early when President Adams didn't like the press reporting on a scandal that was, you know, illegal. He got the law anyway, and while it was struck down and there was a pinky promise not to do things like that again, it has long been understood what lines the press can and cannot cross.

If you think the state has an implied regulatory power over speech - and the "lack of power" of the state to enforce speech implies really the opposite, that in principle the state's power is absolute if the state obfuscates and works through private interests - then nothing like a free press is possible. You can use endless reductio ad absurdums to say that "there is no such thing" or "freedom isn't free", and begin ridiculing the concept. Originally, the crowns of the conservative order could smash anyone's press, make it illegal to publish anything the crown didn't like, break up any assembly, and basically mandate what you are and what you will be. It is that sort of thing that the bill of rights and the concept of rights is intended to resolve - what the state can and can't do, and to whom the law applies. I've said before the real target of this is the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause - the part that doesn't allow broadly defined classes of persons to be designated as "possessing no rights" without due process. That was already effectively abrogated completely by eugenics - they can say anyone is insane without standards of comparison - so there's not really an argument to make about freedom. Without the dominance of eugenics, none of this discourse would be tolerated.

As for the original post about investigative journalism - the control of the press today doesn't take the form of legal punishments or smashing the press, which is what the legal rights originally referred to. People are allowed to investigate. The government will just refuse any inquiries and say "national security" on anything that is remotely real, and seed a bunch of bogus reports. The MO of the US has always been to leak through familiar channels bits and pieces of what actually happens, much like a secret society or a new religious movement gives away little bits as initiates climb the ranks in the organization. This method of disseminating information is very effective at controlling what anyone is going to read and what they think they know about the situation, and to an extent, this is done to damage control since people will obviously speak to each other and share notes. The new development is that Germanic philosophy and its institutions have invaded private life so far that it is possible for the first time to create true controlled insanity, and humanity has no defense against it. So, you can stop pretending there will ever be anything like "rights" again, and if any concept of a free society ever exists again, it would be founded on entirely different premises.