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Larry Flynt Springs To Mind

From our Swindon Correspondent:

From CNET

Online commerce and payment services have stopped the flow of money to Trump-related accounts in light of Wednesday’s insurrection at the US Capitol. Software maker Shopify removed stores affiliated with President Donald Trump from its platform, and payment processor PayPal shut down an account raising funds for Trump supporters who traveled to Washington, DC.
 
 
Shopify said Thursday that the Trump stores, affiliated with the Trump campaign and Trump Organization, violated its policies prohibiting users from promoting or supporting organizations that foment violence.
Firstly, that seems a wholly inaccurate claim. I’ve seen Trump’s speech and he told the people to go home, that there must be peace. And I’m pretty certain that if Trump had actually told people to go forth and smash up the Capitol, loot it, burn it and murder people within that there would be plenty of lawyers demanding his arrest, with a detailed explanation of his crime, rather than a few commentators blaming him for his supporters.
So this isn’t really a breaking of the rules, it’s arbitrarily kicking Trump off because they don’t want to be associated with them.
Which brings me back to what Larry Flynt once said:-
If the first amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.
Now, this isn’t a 1st Amendment issue. Shopfify are a private company who can have who they want as customers. But the parallel is that both government and companies are in competition for people. An extreme example is all those Jews who left Europe for America, so America gets the atomic bomb and Some Like it Hot.

If you’re building something in software, even with a service platform like Shopify, there’s an investment of time and money. If someone kicks you off arbitrarily, you lose that investment. It’s the problem you get from crying App Store developers, who one day find Apple removing their app, for whatever reason they like, and that’s your income gone. OK, if I build a scented candle shop for someone, Shopify is probably not going to touch it, but who knows? Maybe I should consider my options and find someone who treats providing a service as just that.

And just generally, it’s shitty and I hate it. One of the great things about the web was how open it was to everyone. It was a beacon of free speech and these bastards are ruining it.

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Boganboy
Boganboy
3 years ago

Free speech always means that they are free to say what they want, not you.

Esteban
Esteban
3 years ago

Note that President Trump did not remotely incite violence, but all year long prominent Dems, including Harris, condoned and encouraged rioting. She and her staff donated to a bail fund and encouraged others to do so. Regarding riots in June she said “They’re not going to stop…They’re not gonna let up and they should not”. And for the record, I didn’t skip over anything in the middle there that changes the context, just keeping it brief.

jgh
jgh
3 years ago

Bollocks to Apple Store. If Morrison’s don’t sell the cheese I like, I go to Sainsbury’s. Or Asda. Or Tesco. Or Spa. Or the Co-Op.
If Morrison’s won’t sell my cheese, I’ll sell it through Sainsbury’s. Or Asda. Or Tesco. Or Spa. Or the Co-Op. Or from my farm door. Or online.

Wheels
Wheels
3 years ago
Reply to  jgh

No, you can’t go. You can stay with Apple or you can go to Android and they both have the same anti Trump policies at this time. There is no one else to buy your phone cheese from. Not in a store and not on line.

jgh
jgh
3 years ago
Reply to  Wheels

So I’ll buy from a shop that doesn’t have anti-Trump policies. I’ll sell from my own shop and choose not to have anti-Trump policies.

Wheels
Wheels
3 years ago
Reply to  jgh

You’re missing the point. The article is about big tech kicking a company like Parler off their phones and off their servers. It doesn’t matter what store you get your phone. The phone itself is what is kicking you off. You can only get Android and iOS in the US and Europe and both kicked Parler off. There is no other choice for phone operating systems. There are very few, large, cloud companies with Amazon and Google being 1 and 3. It’s almost impossible to work around them. When you’re a big company like Parler with 10 million users, you… Read more »

jgh
jgh
3 years ago
Reply to  Wheels

I’m not talking about the phone operating system (my car) I’m talking about an application I use on my phone (the shop I drive to). If Vauxhall won’t sell me danish cheese, they can’t stop me driving to Morrison’s to buy danish cheese.

TD
TD
3 years ago

Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. have both the left and right mad at them and wanting them dismantled. They’ve made a not completely irrational choice to favor the left (Trump is a busted flush and the Republicans are on the outs for at least 2 years), but I am reminded of Churchill’s quote about appeasing the crocodile in the hopes of being eaten last.

Spike
Spike
3 years ago
Reply to  TD

#GetWokeGoBroke. Even a small-town owner of a ball club or a hardware store knows not to gratuitously give about half of your clientele a reason not to do business with you.

And to your point, we have seen notions, as the left has flexed its social muscles, that it is not above purging parts of the left too.

TD
TD
3 years ago
Reply to  Spike

No many people want to close down the local ball club or hardware store (unless they are blaming it for its complicity in gentrification), so a better analogy might be a small town rowdy bar. If a significant portion of the town wants you shut down you have figure out how to maneuver, and that may entail 86ing the rowdier elements whether they buy your product or not.

Spike
Spike
3 years ago
Reply to  TD

I think the current analogy is loss of patrons, not having one’s business get shut down.

But even the rowdiest at this bar – Lin Wood (now sanctioned even on Parler) proposing a firing squad for Mike Pence – will cause neither a firing squad nor anyone else to act against Mike Pence for upholding the electoral will of the states.

We can tolerate this free speech; our nation was founded to tolerate such free speech. The First Amendment’s value is not to protect speech that everyone thinks is nice.

TD
TD
3 years ago
Reply to  Spike

Free speech means the government can’t prevent you from speaking or prosecute you for what you say. It doesn’t protect you from possible consequences such as getting tossed out of a bar or even punched in the nose, which then allows you to avail yourself of other legal remedies.

Spike
Spike
3 years ago
Reply to  TD

Absolutely right. I departed from the analogy entirely by bringing up the First Amendment, as my point is not that you could be arrested for such private speech (though let’s see what innovations the Democrats propose; I hear that some protestors the police did not see fit to arrest are now on the No-Fly List), but that it is suicidal for a business to discard patrons on the basis of their speech.

TD
TD
3 years ago
Reply to  Spike

I believe Nancy is studying medieval history with an eye toward reviving heresy laws.

Spike
Spike
3 years ago
Reply to  TD

Cheers, seems more like leechcraft to me

Charles
Charles
3 years ago

You’re watching the wrong speech. The “go home” one was after the rioting started. The one you need is the earlier one where he says “So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” almost at the end. Of course, he’s the his usual rambling, incoherent self, so it’s quite possible that different people understood it differently, but his followers went and rioted so they presumably took it to mean that he wanted them to do so. However, you won’t find many sensible lawyers seeking to have him arrested due to the risk of him pardoning himself (which it’s not clear that he… Read more »

Bloke on M4
Bloke on M4
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles

What’s the full text? If you want to get into “his followers took it to mean”, then that’s Islam banned from these stores, because a few people interpret that in certain ways.

Spike
Spike
3 years ago
Reply to  Bloke on M4

The impeachment debate will indeed not find Trump saying, “So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and then crack some skulls” but it won’t matter. Back to Charlottesville and before, the left has always judged Trump’s utterances based on a preconceived psychological diagnosis. What he said is racist, because here is what a racist would have meant.

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