Charlottesville

EFF is speaking out against the censoring of sites like Daily Stormer.

See video.



That first 30 seconds is funny at first, but some might be alarmed by the last one he mentions - the removal of "hate" rock from Spotify. That the 1st Amendment protects musical expression may be a sacrosanct concept to some.

This new trend of tech companies shutting down these kinds of sites and accounts, and how it should be addressed, may be worthy of its own thread in the FOI section.

If my post is used to start that thread, I would simply ask that this video be reposted in this Charlottesville thread, since it is topical here as well.

Here's is the alt/right part of the protest in Boston

Trump Says Sun Equally to Blame for Blocking Moon

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

Quote:

Attacking the media for its “very unfair” coverage of Monday’s solar eclipse, Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that the sun was equally to blame for blocking the moon.

“The fake news is covering the eclipse from the sun’s side instead of the moon’s side, but if you look at it from the moon’s side the sun is blocking the moon’s side,” he said. “There are so many sides you can’t count all the sides.”

Additionally, Trump tore into the sun itself, calling it a “showboat” for its role in the solar eclipse.

“The sun thinks the world revolves around it,” Trump said. “Sad.”

Trump said the sun was a “big problem” that his predecessor, Barack Obama, did nothing to solve, but that that situation was about to change.

“It will be handled — we handle everything,” Trump said, adding that a preëmptive military strike on the sun was “very much on the table.”

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-says-sun-equally-to-blame-for-blocking-moon

Two elderly Nazis are attacked by Anti-fa while standing in the road in front of the Charlottesville PD. The first was hit on the back of the head by a club which made a strangely loud thwack! The second was pulled to the ground by a female Anti-fa. She hits him several times but appears to pull her punches. Other Nazis were right there but did not fight off the attackers. Notably no marks on the victims. I suspect theatrics but I can't be sure.

Original here:

I found a guy who looks a lot like white beard Nazi (WBN) above. This was taken at Emancipation Park just before the cops made everyone leave. So maybe 45-60 min before the anti-fa attack above.

Interestingly WBN is standing very close to yellow framed sunglasses (YFS) anti-fa chick. He's still wearing a dark polo shirt but no Vanguard insignia over the left breast.

Outstanding job, The Internet! Firstly, for finding the frustratingly difficult to interpret footage, then interpreting it as far as is possible from the angle it was shot, given the fact that bodies obscured what was happening at the start of the incident.

After five viewings, I still could not have said whether there were one or two antifas involved, or if there were one or two, as you say, 'elderly Nazis'. Neither could I see the use of any weapon on first viewing (or the second or third!).

I did see a weapon- something - eventually. It might have been a stick. It might have been a cardboard tube, to have made the thwacking sound, but who knows. Again there is, as you say, no visible evidence of any wounds or marks on the victims of the assault. It is clear that the 'punches' (or slaps) were pulled, or delivered without any real force.

What is entirely unclear is if any provocation was involved. There is simply nothing to go on, from what was captured. The police obviously did not see it as anything more than a minor altercation, which was quickly and calmly defused.

Should be on the cover of Newsweek.

- Dixie

Jeremy Wein‏ @thismyshow 3 hours ago
Jeremy Wein Retweeted James Woods
Washed up crackpot cokehead retweets photo from 2 years ago as if it's from #Boston

James Woods‏ @RealJamesWoods 13 hours ago
#Antifa The nails in the ends of their weapons are for stabbing police horses as well as anybody they remotely disagree with.
#HateGroup

So...it was 2 years ago? Where?

Is there a +- independent confirmation of this view of NeoNazi / AR / WSup? It totally is in line with what I witnessed at protests in my country.
Police declaring "this is danger and therefore unlawful assembly" as they please. What is not mentioned of course, is the weapons they had with them. Could it be they were told not to be armed before? If so, police action would be justified, otherwise the usual b.s. they use against protests of any kind.

I find a comment claiming the AR started earlier than planned.

http://www.nbc29.com/story/36115819...ve-unite-the-right-rally-at-emancipation-park

Is there a way of getting some more complete facts on what happened?

Some Liberty University Grads Returning Diplomas To Protest Trump | NPR

Quote:

A group of alumni from one of the country's most influential evangelical Christian universities is condemning their school's president for his continued alignment with President Trump.

A small but growing number of Liberty University graduates are preparing to return diplomas to their school. The graduates are protesting university President Jerry Falwell Jr.'s ongoing support for Trump. They began organizing after Trump's divisive remarks about the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va.

Chris Gaumer, a former Student Government Association president and 2006 graduate, said it was a simple decision.

"I'm sending my diploma back because the president of the United States is defending Nazis and white supremacists," Gaumer said. "And in defending the president's comments, Jerry Falwell Jr. is making himself and, it seems to me, the university he represents, complicit."

Continued at http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/54477...are-returning-their-diplomas-to-protest-trump

Useful:

From the alt right forum that was leaked:



What the fuck targeting Quakers! Quakers are pacifists who believe in kindness and helping others regardless of their beliefs. They are just about the coolest Christians that we have in this country.

How cowardly do you have to be to go after people who absolutely won't fight back?

"Unlimited tolerance" would be a problem, as long as this means "no laws at all".
Question is if existing laws and transparency is enough.
Considering the still existing Co$ in the USA this could be doubted, but all in all I'd say: Yes.

Ordinary Americans tend to think of "free speech" as nearly absolute. They understand that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not protected, nor is fraud. But ugly opinions are protected. So Americans need help resolving the contradiction between "free speech" and wanting to tell Nazis to stfu.

Karl Popper's tolerance paradox is a solution. If we allow Nazis to spread propaganda they will gain power and we will lose our freedom of speech.

Your question about Scientology is interesting because Scientologists hide their fascist political ambitions behind a religious cloak. I think we will have to wait for evidence of Scientologists suddenly gaining numbers before we take action to suppress their freedom of speech.

The alt right guys will say, "what about the commies?" Historically communist societies like the USSR and China have not allowed free political dissent. But small collectives formed on communist principles like the early Christian communities and Israeli kibbutzim do not seem so bad. Public ownership, public service, "the public good" --these collectivist ideas are necessary to civilization.

The covert fascism that came with communism --the organized crime syndicate wielding power over the masses-- gave the political ideology its bad rep. Predictably the fascists want to blame commie caring and sharing for ruining everything rather than the self-serving mob boss at the top. But their heads are not screwed on properly.

Thank's for bringing in Popper - but I don't think this is what he means.
He describes suppression of intolerance as ultima ratio, and prefers it as a threat. I read his suggestion as a call for constant discussion, if the intolerant group is defeatable by rational arguments and which actions are within or outside the law. This is the case anyway, e.g. being gay or living together without being married was once prosecuted.
In the end, he gives arguments for both, absolute tolerance and suppression of non-rational intolerant groups. So I interpret his ambivalence as a call for discussion.

White House officials absent from Sunday shows | TheHill

Quote:

White House officials were notably absent from the morning news show lineups on Sunday, as President Trump capped off a turbulent week in his presidency.

"To give you a sense of how reluctant Republicans are to talk about President Trump this week, not one member of the current Republican leadership in Congress agreed to come on the broadcast this morning," Chuck Todd, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," said.

"In fact, even the White House was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide a guest, right down to the White House press secretary."

ABC's Martha Raddatz, who filled in for George Stephanopoulos on "This Week," said that the White House had similarly declined to provide an official to appear on the show.

Instead, she said, the White House referred the show to Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University and an ardent Trump ally outside the White House.

"When we asked the White House for an official who could appear on this program today to speak on behalf of the president, they pointed us to our next guest," Raddatz said, introducing Falwell.

It was not clear if White House officials turned down offers to appear on the shows.

Trump has faced a week of near-constant tumult that began last weekend when he came under fire for his equivocal comments on the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Continued at http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/347282-white-house-officials-absent-from-sunday-shows

I think I understand what you and Popper are saying. You are saying that we should fight intolerant ideologies using reason. If that doesn't work, public opinion aka social shaming. If that doesn't work then, "we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal."

Sounds good to me.

To avoid becoming like the monsters we hate, we need to proceed step-wise. The first step is to attempt rational argument with our adversaries. The next step is the soft or informal suppression of bad ideas via public expressions of moral disgust. Once we document the failure of these two approaches we reach for a legal means of suppression.

In the US we don't have a legal means to suppress intolerant ideologies. I'm not sure how we would do that but maybe we can borrow something from European laws before we get more violence in our streets.

I am feeling a need to temper our devotion to free speech with some effort to suppress bad ideas. A percentage of our population is mentally unstable and can be tempted into violent political activism with signifiers of social support and approval from a large enough subculture. The recent popularity of things like Alex Jones and the alt-right is pretty frightening.

Is this message, "Kill all Nazis," a good way to suppress white nationalists?



If we are defending civilization from barbarian attacks, I believe that a call to kill Nazis is dangerous. There is a time and a place for warfare but only after a period of deliberation and legal due process. Any effort to bypass legality on our side is a victory for the barbarians.

These laws are far from perfect, but there are examples US might analyse. It won't happen in the near future, IMHO.
Related topics (already mentioned by others):

• Freedom of religion: Almost everything is accepted in the US. At some stage, the church of Hitler might be the solution for some of these guys.
• Freedom of carrying arms: so 19th century...

Almost all nazis are dead now. Neo-nazis are a different breed. Even them should not be killed, alas.

As I suspected, the alt-right guys are creating fake anti-fa accounts and IRL happenings to make their enemies seem scary and offensive. Here's a list of fake anti-fa twitter accounts that are either trolls or false flags:

https://blocktogether.org/show-blocks/UQ_ZPDyCHCygI-EUU_6xLY23sewTWFbPA8k7cCdz

Jon Cooper @joncoopertweets 3 hours ago
BREAKING: After alt-right organizers saw huge counter-protests in Boston, they've canceled 67 "America First Rallies" scheduled in 36 states.

I thought this might be relevant to "Popper's Paradox," specifically ways to create a legal argument restricting racial supremacy aka "Nazi" speech.

Skin color was largely a function of latitude prior to modern travel. You need more vitamin D near the poles so your skin is paler. You need more folate near the equator so your skin is darker (UV destroys folate). Now that we travel and have vitamins when we need them, we should wish that our white descendants here in the US have a bit more melanin, due to fucked up ozone layer.

tl;dr: Racists are as wrong and dangerous as anti-vaxxers.

I've been looking into this. Some dox:

Turns out the city was correct about the size of the alt-right protest. About a thousand people showed up --more than double the estimation of 400. But how did they know? And why was the city so shy about divulging the source of their info?

My guess is the info was obtained by someone who gained unlawful access to discordapp.com where the alt right was planning its demonstration (https://whyweprotest.net/threads/charlottesville.133255/page-4#post-2614967). Something the hacker/spy saw shortly before August 7th set off alarm bells. That's why the decision was made to move the alt right protest to the larger park out of the downtown area. City officials might have promised not to out the leaker and that's why they couldn't tell the judge where they were getting their info. Thus they lost their case.

After the August 11th surprise tiki torch Nazi slogan march at the University, I bet the governor was on board with the state of emergency idea. I noted that the National Guard were immediately visible in the streets once the call was made. Once the gathering at Emancipation Park was deemed illegal, the alt right were asked to move their rally to Mcintire Park, which they started to do. But then the murder happened.

A state of emergency costs taxpayers millions of dollars so cops can't make that call. Only the governor can do that.

Councilors vote to shroud Confederate statues at meeting overwhelmed by anger | The Daily Progress

Quote:

The Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously early Tuesday morning to cover the city’s statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in black fabric, which will represent the city's mourning of Heather Heyer.

<snipped>

The council voted on other resolutions after a tumultuous council meeting Monday evening. Activists and residents took over the meeting to express their anger and frustration about how the city and police officials handled the rally.

In addition to seeking the removal of the city’s Lee statue, councilors voted to direct the Board of Architectural Review to make a decision on removing the nearby Jackson statue.

<snipped>

Mayor Mike Signer and Councilor Kathy Galvin are now supporting the removal of Charlottesville’s statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park, but the change did not spare them from criticism Monday.

Last week, Signer asked for the state General Assembly to hold an emergency session to consider amending the state’s law regarding statues. A lawsuit citing that law is preventing the city from removing the statue as planned because of a court injunction.

A spokesperson for Gov. Terry McAuliffe intimated last week that a special session was unlikely.

Galvin held a news conference Monday to announce her change of mind, and she called for the removal of the statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, too.

“It is time for the Jackson and Lee statues to be relocated to a battlefield park or a museum where they will neither be reviled or revered,” she said, adding that she’d prefer the statues there so they can be “preserved and explained” more fully.

She said the state legislature would need to play a role in their removal.

“We’ve been told that if we take them down tonight, we’re going to be personally sued,” Councilor Wes Bellamy said Monday night. “We will personally be held liable and charged with a class-six felony.”

Councilor Kristin Szakos encouraged the protesters to challenge the state’s legislators.

“You can’t just show up to City Council meetings,” Szakos told the protesters. “You have to go to the state legislature. Virginia has laws that restrict what we can do.”

Signer and Galvin’s change of heart, however, failed to placate those who accosted their local elected officials almost immediately at the start of the meeting.

It then became an urban-populist coup.

“Someone needs to be held accountable,” said Don Gathers, the former chairman of the blue ribbon commission that recommended relocating the Lee statue.

“Something is going to happen … by any means necessary,” he added. “People are tired and they’re fed up … it’s going down, for real.”

More at http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/l...cle_5a42f7a8-86d0-11e7-87a5-23ba81576181.html

Why wasn't the whole event declared unlawful after the 11th surprise march ?

It's okay to blow off a little steam but Charlottesville needs to keep a cool head and think strategically. There's at least one billionaire playing 3D chess with his hired minions right in their back yard. Not sure why that city is getting so much sustained focus but there must be a reason. I would hate to see that lovely town and fine university bankrupted by lawsuits.

I'm reminded of stories about 1975 when the United Churches of Florida showed up in Clearwater. Smells like fishy business. Government officials should beware journalists or documentary makers from unknown outfits showing up to conduct interviews. Because Bannon.

The good people of Charlottesville need to believe in each other. They need to keep faith in their own government even if it fucks up a bit. Nobody do illegal stuff right now, srs.

It wasn't free speech, they were fully armed. They were also carrying toarches ( old KKK standard) and shouting racist and antisemetic slogans. I believe in the right to bear arms, and free speech, but not that combination. Then, after discussing how ramming protesters with cars is funny, one of them rams protesters with car. It's not free speech.

IMHO, this presentation is misleading. The reporter was clearly only with the organizers up to the kill. After that, she felt compelled to speak with the other sides.

Dunno exactly but some guesses:
- Universities have spontaneous and pseudo-spontaneous gatherings fairly frequently.
- Security may have found the language used by the marchers ambiguous ("blood and soil," and "you/jew will not replace us").
- The fall semester hadn't started yet so the place was probably pretty empty.
- UVA is state property so the mayor has no jurisdiction there.
- Just one hour prior to the march a federal judge gave the Charlottesville mayor a big spanking. He said the city's attempt to move the alt-right protest from one park to another violated the protester's civil rights. When cities violate someone's civil rights there are lawsuits with big damages paid. Cities can go bankrupt from things like this.
- City officials posted on social media various complaints about the racist things the alt right people wanted to say at their rally. Footbullet! Because 1st amendment. And the alt right were clever enough to collect those comments and put them in front of the judge.

Almost checkmate, I would say.

Interesting, but the marchers had to walk on city ground to access the university. Or, the state could have said it was unlawful (if you are right). Thus, my question remains, IMHO.

The marchers probably parked at the university so they didn't walk on city grounds. And I can't imagine the argument the government would make to call off the Saturday rally. "We were disgusted by that tiki torch march yesterday so your rally today is unlawful" does not sound like a winning argument.

• I am quite sure that an American judge would make this difference. I am not sure it would be the case everywhere else in the world.
• If the organizers are the same, calling off the Saturday is not a big issue IMHO.

We can't discriminate on the basis of the content of someone's speech but we can discriminate on the basis of behavior and I think there was a little bad behavior at the tiki torch march so it might have been possible to get a court order in the middle of the night on Friday to block the Saturday rally. But city officials were probably still recovering from the Federal spanking.

Already mentioned my sayon this.

From the outside, this spanking is not understandable. AFAIK, the change of venue was announced a couple of days in advance and the new place was suitable for the purpose*. In many countries, the authority has some room for such changes with the limits mentioned.

Next time, people will be free to pile up...

*Except perhaps for the car extraction, but authorities are not supposed to care for that, AFAIK.

Read the judge's arguments and see if you can counter them.
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.tow...-11e7-b8d5-63980138e955/598dc106b7cef.pdf.pdf