Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
What a rube. Marco running on the”we need stupid people to run the country” platform. Except his stupid people had 4 years and fucked it all up. I guess he loves the uneducated, or is it educated, too? I’m embarrassed for FloRida.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
So some GOP senators don't want to confirm Neera Tanden, the proposed head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) because of some mean tweets??? Sounds kind of hypocritical, eh? I can think of other words but I'll go high.
So some GOP senators don't want to confirm Neera Tanden, the proposed head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) because of some mean tweets??? Sounds kind of hypocritical, eh? I can think of other words but I'll go high.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
It’s almost funny to watch GQP members like Nikki Haley decide that it’s time to get really selective in terms of cabinet pics given some of the people that they approved during the Trump administration. You voted for people like DeVos and DeJoy and now it’s time to care?
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
It’s almost funny to watch GQP members like Nikki Haley decide that it’s time to get really selective in terms of cabinet pics given some of the people that they approved during the Trump administration. You voted for people like DeVos and DeJoy and now it’s time to care?
Ricky's Baby Perry? Sexy Rexy Tillerson? Pompepous Ass? Ben "Don't Wake Me" Carson? What, if anything, did any of these cabinet members accomplish? Oh, right.
I love it when the repubs try to play like the cool kids. And we all know what they really think and do behind closed doors, they're not fooling anyone with their faux morality. Now, that's a sewer I want to swim in.
Parler’s got a porn problem: Adult businesses target pro-Trump social network
Hashtags like #keepamericasexy proliferate alongside conspiracy theories and conservative politics
Dec. 2, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EST
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Anyone following the #sexytrumpgirl hashtag on Parler, a social media site increasingly popular with conservatives, got an eyeful one recent Thursday evening as images of topless women and links to hardcore pornography websites appeared at a rapid-fire rate, often more than one per minute.
The surge of #sexytrumpgirl posts highlighted a broader dilemma for Parler: The site’s lax moderation policies, in keeping with its claims to being a bastion of free speech, have helped it become a magnet for pornographers, escort services and online sex merchants using hashtags targeting conservatives, such as #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020.
The pornography threatens to intrude on users not seeking sexual material and has the potential to complicate hopes the site may have to expand advertising, which is now limited. Experts on the impact of pornography say major companies typically avoid having their sales pitches appear alongside controversial imagery.
Purveyors of sexually explicit material have thrived online since the early days of the Internet, and determining what to allow — and how to block what’s not allowed — has been a challenge for most social media sites. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, for example, prohibit sexually explicit images and videos, while Twitter generally allows them so long as they show the images or actions of consenting adults.
Parler once banned all pornography but in recent months revised its terms of service to permit essentially anything that’s legal, making its policy close to Twitter’s, if slightly more permissive. Twitter, however, also has automated systems that prevent excessively rapid posting, as well as other spammy behavior, and employs human moderators to enforce its policies.
Parler, by contrast, outsources moderation to volunteers who judge potentially objectionable content after it has been flagged by other users. Its systems and policies have given wide latitude for images of adult nudity and sexual behavior, a Washington Post review in recent weeks found. A variety of pornography is easy to find on the site, using both search terms that are explicitly pornographic and others that are not.
These included #trump2020 and #wwg1wga, a slogan for the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, with its baseless claims that leading Democrats and Hollywood celebrities are Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Searches of another hashtag popular with QAnon adherents, #sextrafficking, also yielded numerous pornographic images the same week that they appeared on #sexytrumpgirl, The Post’s review found. An account responsible for many of the pornographic images on those hashtags is now restricted as “private.”
Officials at Parler, including Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Wernick and Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on its handling of pornography.
Peikoff defended the company’s approach to content moderation in response to questions for a previous Post story about Parler. “Broadly, our whole guiding principle is that we want to allow everything that the First Amendment protects as speech, and nothing that it doesn’t,” she said.
The U.S. Supreme Court has declared pornographic images of adults to be constitutionally protected speech.
The Post’s review found that searches for sexually explicit terms surfaced extensive troves of graphic content, including videos of sex acts that began playing automatically without any label or warning. Terms such as #porn, #naked and #sex each had hundreds or thousands of posts on Parler, many of them graphic. Some pornographic images and videos had been viewed tens of thousands of times on the platform, according to totals listed on the Parler posts.
“When you say, ‘We don’t moderate content,’ you are inviting this content,” said Hany Farid, a University of California at Berkeley computer science professor who has helped develop image-detection technology used by social media sites. “My prediction is they will be overrun with this stuff.”
Much of the pornographic imagery appeared in posts offering links to adult websites, including those featuring women who offer to perform sex acts online for money or gifts, as well as other websites claiming to facilitate in-person sexual encounters with strangers — something that, experts say, often serves as a front for prostitution.
Some of these outside links featured text in Romanian, suggesting foreign operators for those adult websites.
“All of these adult sites, it’s a shell game. … It’s just monetization,” said Danielle Citron, a Boston University law professor who has studied the pornography industry and fought to remove sexual images of people that are uploaded against their will, typically by former romantic partners.
Citron said it’s unlikely that Parler would face any legal ramifications for hosting images of naked adults in apparently consensual encounters, even if some of those links lead to sites that may offer prostitution. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law undergirding much of the modern Internet economy, offers broad immunity for content uploaded by third parties onto social platforms. Laws against sex trafficking would implicate platforms only if they knowingly promoted such content, as opposed to merely hosting links to other sites, Citron said.
Parler, which was founded in 2018 in Henderson, Nev., with the backing of conservative financier Rebekah Mercer, has been touted by prominent Republicans as an alternative to mainstream platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that they have repeatedly claimed — without offering systematic evidence — are biased against conservative voices.
Independent researchers, meanwhile, have warned that Parler also has become a haven for hate speech, conspiracy theories and disinformation, including a Russian political influence operation that research firm Graphika publicly identified in October but Parler declined to remove. The operation remains active on the site after the company said it would consider acting if the researchers or law enforcement specifically requested removal through its complaint portal. In recent days, the reportedly Russian account, which claims to be an “independent platform,” has questioned the safety of coronavirus vaccine candidates, called the U.S. presidential election “rigged” and warned that Philadelphia was becoming a “white-minority ruin.”
Eric Feinberg, vice president for content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web, a nonprofit group that advocates for technologies and policies to remove extreme content from social media, last month started tracking the rise of pornography on Parler, including links that lead users to third-party sites that offer a range of sexually oriented businesses.
“It’s becoming a Wild West for right-wing customers,” said Marc Ginsberg, the coalition’s president, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco.
Sexually explicit content has surged as Parler has gained popularity in recent weeks, briefly becoming the top app on Apple’s App Store while generating more than 4 million downloads in just the first two weeks of November, according to tracking by Sensor Tower, an analytics service. Parler’s executives have claimed the site now has 10 million accounts.
The image-detection technology that Farid, the UC-Berkeley computer scientist, helped develop allows social media sites to find images of child sexual exploitation, also known as child pornography, so they can be removed before being viewed by users or human moderators. He said Parler’s approach may make the site vulnerable to those who upload child pornography, which, despite being illegal, infiltrates social media platforms unless measures are put in place to detect and remove it.
Facebook, for example, removed more than 30 million images of child nudity and sexual exploitation in the first nine months of this year, according to the company’s quarterly transparency reports. (It also removed nearly 112 million images of adult nudity and sexual activity in that same time period.)
Peikoff said Parler would not “knowingly allow it to be used for any criminal content.”
Parler’s terms of service describe a system in which users must first report content that violates company policies before the company takes action. “Sometimes the law requires us to exclude content from our platform, once it is reported to our Community Jury. Obvious examples: content posted by or on behalf of terrorist organizations, child pornography, and copyright violations.”
These rules are more permissive than those published just a few months earlier. In community guidelines posted in July, Parler said users should not “use language/visuals that describe or show sexual organs or activity.” Chief executive John Matze told NPR earlier this year that the app took “a hard line against pornography and nudity.”
The most recent iteration of Parler’s community guidelines allows for adult pornography, though Parler has settings to block material deemed “sensitive” or “Not Safe for Work” from appearing automatically on users’ screens.
The Post’s review found that a portion of the pornographic posts on Parler had their explicit imagery covered by red warning labels that required an extra click to bypass, but in some cases, the same pornographic images were blocked on some posts but not others. Relatively mild imagery — a woman in lingerie, for example — got blocked in some instances while some graphic, up-close videos of sex acts did not.
Parler says it does not allow users under 18 to use the site without explicit parental permission, and users under 13 are forbidden entirely from Parler. But the site has no system for detecting or verifying a user’s age.
Not all of the images of naked people on Parler are obviously commercial, though many intentionally seek the attention of Trump supporters, as one woman did last week by placing a “Trump 2020” hat across her stomach as she lay naked on her back for a photo posted to Parler. The text read, “Just promoting our president!”
Another account showed a nude woman with a black handgun covering her genitals, along with the text “Naked and real” and hashtags including #freedom, #secondamendment and #girlswithguns. Another post using the #girlswithguns hashtag urged anyone “interested in seeing a young, hot, conservative girl” to send her a direct message.
These users and others posting such content did not reply to requests for comment.
Some Parler users, meanwhile, posted pornographic images and videos of other people, including some that appeared to be professionally produced.
Overall, The Post’s review found a wide range of imagery and explicitness. Searching the #girlswithguns hashtag, for example, surfaced many images of women in bikinis or revealing clothing as they brandished large rifles, but outright nudity appeared rarely in the images or videos affiliated with that hashtag.
Parler makes no public mention of an automated system trained to identify posts that may violate its policies. Instead, it has a “community jury” of Parler users who review potential violations after users have reported them.
“No user shall be stripped of his parleys or comments, nor shall he be suspended, banned, or deprived of his standing in any other way, except by the conscientious judgment of his equals,” the jury’s official Parler page reads.
Jury members vote on reported posts or comments to decide if the post in question violates Parler’s guidelines. A post must receive four or five votes to be considered in violation of Parler policies. If the post includes illegal content, it gets taken down, according to Parler’s jury guidelines. Posters might also receive “points” for offending posts, which can eventually get them banned if they rack up too many.
Parler’s jury members get regular training on the company guidelines, said Peikoff. The jury had nearly 200 members this summer, and recently put out a call for more volunteers, saying participants would be compensated.
“As I am sure you are aware, we are experiencing a substantial influx of new people on our platform — and with that an increase in the amount of violation reports,” said a Parler post on Nov. 21.
Anyone remember purple thumbs? After WMD and ties to 9/11? How about those Afghans that stayed home but then came out? To vote. Guess who’s going all Saddam and Taliban on on our asses? The Republibans, that’s who. Going all jihadi on our asses. Mother of all battles coming up. Can drone strikes be far behind?
Good luck with this. All they're going to do is rebrand and put forth a more "reasonable" and "palatable" candidate, one who truly knows how to abuse the levers of power, who knows instinctively where to go and how to get it. They're core philosophy will not change. It'll just be more dangerous and wrapped in prettier language. Think Darth Cheney 4.0. Team Trump Treason Tax Cheat made it possible to get away with it. And it'll be too late.
Dec. 6, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. EST
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The shameful complicity of Republican leaders in President Trump’s torrent of deceit about our election tells us there is little hope for a more reasonable post-Trump GOP. But what about conservatism as a philosophy? Is it equally discredited?
Yes, many progressives have been uneasy with these unusual allies. They insist that Trump was not some alien imposition on conservatism but rather the product of long-standing trends in Republican politics. Trafficking in racial division and racism, nativism, extremism, conspiracy theories and voter suppression did not start with Trump.
Progressives are entirely right about this. But the Never Trumpers deserve our respect precisely because so many of them stood against these tendencies and, in more cases than not, undertook a deeper critique of their own side.
This applies to many of my conservative Post Opinion colleagues; the folks over at the Bulwark, the online journal that owes its existence to the right-of-center rebellion against Trump; and many of those ad-makers at the Lincoln Project.
For those of us arrayed from the center to the left, the awfulness of Trump is so obvious — it was brought home again on Saturday night by his 100-minute ranting ode to victimhood in Georgia — that we can underestimate how hard it is to walk away from the people who were your comrades for so long. In journals progressives don’t pay much attention to, television networks we don’t watch and Twitter feeds we don’t follow, the Never Trumpers were denounced as renegades and traitors — and also saddled with far uglier, unprintable monikers.
True, these rebels-with-a-good-cause were a minority in their camp, but they were far from alone. Exit polls are imperfect, but the Edison survey suggests that perhaps 8 million of President-elect Joe Biden’s more than 81 million votes came from self-described conservatives, and 3 million from Republicans (which doesn’t include those who left the party because of Trump).
But what happens now? Some of the anti-Trump conservatives never lost their old faith and were simply repelled by Trump’s odiousness. For them, there is no temptation to join the other side. They are unlikely to give much support to Biden and will go off in search of a more conventional Republican to champion in 2024.
For a significant part of the anti-Trump Right, however, the moral corruption of the conservative movement over the past four years is a source of genuine anguish and has prompted a crisis of belief.
As it should have. Conservatism has its attractive sides. But it is often a creed that devotes itself simply to the preservation of the power, wealth and privilege of existing elites. This view was outlined brilliantly by the scholar Corey Robin. He argued in his 2011 book “The Reactionary Mind” that when you dig down, conservatism ends up being about keeping the “subordinate classes” subordinate.
The pro-Trump conservatives offered a lot of evidence for Robin’s point by rallying to a man entirely unsuited to power in a democracy because he gave them what they wanted. Trump consistently served the interests of the best-off and sought to lock in their gains by tilting the judiciary rightward.
A more humane conservatism can suit the elites, too, but its central purpose is to call our attention to those aspects of an existing order that are worth preserving because they serve not just the fortunate but all of us.
The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott was one of the most formidable exponents of what you might call gratitude-based conservatism. “To be conservative,” he wrote, is “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss.”
Even this lovely set of commitments can lead to complacency about a society’s injustices and resistance to needed reforms and adjustments. These are among the reasons I am not myself a conservative.
But with a humane Oakeshottian conservatism, progressives can either make common cause at times of crisis (after all, we on the left and center-left are preservationists in our own way when it comes to protecting liberal democracy) or engage in good-faith debate (the “actual” often isn’t good enough, and what is “sufficient” for some is often insufficient for the many who are left out).
Of course, I’d like the anti-Trump conservatives to admit the error of their ways and fully join my side of politics. But failing that, I still appreciate what they did. And I hope at least they can now champion a brand of conservatism that is about more than making the rich richer and the powerful more powerful.
From the Comments Section:
10 minutes ago
I rather think that except for the half-dozen Lincoln-Project-associated names, old school republicans have been shamefully silent. Where were the leaders of the Bush years, even the odious ones? Where have Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, James Baker, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and others been? Apparently sealed into chambers of gutless silence.
No, progressives, liberals, Democrats and Independents do not owe a debt of gratitude to the very people who ushered in this nightmare, then said or did nothing to put out the flames they fanned into existence.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Obviously the person who wrote that tweet would not die for Trump. But some dummies would. Either way, the GOP has nothing of substance any more; just for "sOcIaLiSm" and lame references to civil war. If there was a clearer line like there was in the previous civil war, I'd be all for a clean break at this point.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Obviously the person who wrote that tweet would not die for Trump. But some dummies would. Either way, the GOP has nothing of substance any more; just for "sOcIaLiSm" and lame references to civil war. If there was a clearer line like there was in the previous civil war, I'd be all for a clean break at this point.
i don't believe anyone, not even his cultists, would be dying for trump. they'd be dying for what they think is liberty.
"Oh Canada...you're beautiful when you're drunk" -EV 8/14/93
Obviously the person who wrote that tweet would not die for Trump. But some dummies would. Either way, the GOP has nothing of substance any more; just for "sOcIaLiSm" and lame references to civil war. If there was a clearer line like there was in the previous civil war, I'd be all for a clean break at this point.
i don't believe anyone, not even his cultists, would be dying for trump. they'd be dying for what they think is liberty.
The rich aren't just getting richer. They're getting there faster than the rest of America’s workers.
During the last economic expansion, from 2009 to 2019, average yearly wages for the bottom 90% of workers rose 8.7% after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis of Social Security Administration data by the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Meanwhile, pay for most of the top 10% rose 13.2% – while earnings for the top 1% jumped 20.4%.
"It's a clear story of disempowerment of workers," said Lawrence Mishel, co-author of the study and a distinguished fellow at EPI.
Executives at hedge funds and other top finance companies have benefited from outsized leaps in compensation, often tied to stock prices, while the vast majority of workers, including both blue- and white-collar workers, have seen their pay stagnate or climb slowly, Mishel says. He cited myriad reasons, including outdated overtime pay rules and the misclassification of many full-time employees as contractors.
The disparity in wage growth largely continued last year, with the bottom 90% seeing gains of 1.7% while most of the top 10% notched a 3.1% advance. The top 1%, however, lagged in terms of growth: Their wages edged up just 1%.
Average salary for bottom 90% shy of $39k
In 2019, salaries averaged $38,923 for the bottom 90%; $320,096 for the top 5%; $758,434 for the top 1%; and $2,858,981 for the top 0.1%.
Over a longer time period, the gap between the highest-paid workers and other Americans is even starker. From 1979 to 2019, average pay increased 26% for the bottom 90%, 64.1% for most of the top 10%, 160.3% for the top 1%, and 345.2% for the top 0.1%, according to EPI.
As a result, the bottom 90% earned 69.8% of all wages in 1979, but that share fell to 60.9% last year. Meanwhile, the top 5% saw their share of total wages rise from 19.4% to 27.8%, while the top 1% nearly doubled their share, from 7.3% to 13.2%.
There is a caveat: Low-wage workers in the bottom 10% have outpaced other groups in pay gains in recent years before this year’s pandemic-induced recession because of state minimum wage increases and low unemployment in food services and other low-paid industries, Mishel said. But those advances haven’t narrowed the gap between the highest-paid workers and the rest of the country.
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,320
Democrat wants to use Civil War law about traitors to ban 126 Republicans from being seated in Congress
Only one-third of the Republicans elected to Congress in 2020 will be
seated in Congress come January if one New Jersey Democrat has his way.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) argued on Friday that the 126
Republicans seeking to overturn election results should not be seated in
Congress.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday joined the group seeking to overturn the election results in four states.
Rep. Pascrell believes Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should be invoked to keep the Republicans from holding office.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or
elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or
military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having
previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of
the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an
executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution
of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion
against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” the
14th Amendment reads.
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Comments
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Ethics
Morals
Common sense
Rule of law
The Constitution
Etc
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Opinion
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
you're no fun....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Parler’s got a porn problem: Adult businesses target pro-Trump social network
Hashtags like #keepamericasexy proliferate alongside conspiracy theories and conservative politics
Anyone following the #sexytrumpgirl hashtag on Parler, a social media site increasingly popular with conservatives, got an eyeful one recent Thursday evening as images of topless women and links to hardcore pornography websites appeared at a rapid-fire rate, often more than one per minute.
The surge of #sexytrumpgirl posts highlighted a broader dilemma for Parler: The site’s lax moderation policies, in keeping with its claims to being a bastion of free speech, have helped it become a magnet for pornographers, escort services and online sex merchants using hashtags targeting conservatives, such as #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020.
The pornography threatens to intrude on users not seeking sexual material and has the potential to complicate hopes the site may have to expand advertising, which is now limited. Experts on the impact of pornography say major companies typically avoid having their sales pitches appear alongside controversial imagery.
Purveyors of sexually explicit material have thrived online since the early days of the Internet, and determining what to allow — and how to block what’s not allowed — has been a challenge for most social media sites. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, for example, prohibit sexually explicit images and videos, while Twitter generally allows them so long as they show the images or actions of consenting adults.
Parler once banned all pornography but in recent months revised its terms of service to permit essentially anything that’s legal, making its policy close to Twitter’s, if slightly more permissive. Twitter, however, also has automated systems that prevent excessively rapid posting, as well as other spammy behavior, and employs human moderators to enforce its policies.
Parler, by contrast, outsources moderation to volunteers who judge potentially objectionable content after it has been flagged by other users. Its systems and policies have given wide latitude for images of adult nudity and sexual behavior, a Washington Post review in recent weeks found. A variety of pornography is easy to find on the site, using both search terms that are explicitly pornographic and others that are not.
These included #trump2020 and #wwg1wga, a slogan for the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, with its baseless claims that leading Democrats and Hollywood celebrities are Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Searches of another hashtag popular with QAnon adherents, #sextrafficking, also yielded numerous pornographic images the same week that they appeared on #sexytrumpgirl, The Post’s review found. An account responsible for many of the pornographic images on those hashtags is now restricted as “private.”
Officials at Parler, including Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Wernick and Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on its handling of pornography.
Peikoff defended the company’s approach to content moderation in response to questions for a previous Post story about Parler. “Broadly, our whole guiding principle is that we want to allow everything that the First Amendment protects as speech, and nothing that it doesn’t,” she said.
The U.S. Supreme Court has declared pornographic images of adults to be constitutionally protected speech.
Conservatives grumbling about censorship say they’re flocking to Parler. They told us so on Twitter.
The Post’s review found that searches for sexually explicit terms surfaced extensive troves of graphic content, including videos of sex acts that began playing automatically without any label or warning. Terms such as #porn, #naked and #sex each had hundreds or thousands of posts on Parler, many of them graphic. Some pornographic images and videos had been viewed tens of thousands of times on the platform, according to totals listed on the Parler posts.
“When you say, ‘We don’t moderate content,’ you are inviting this content,” said Hany Farid, a University of California at Berkeley computer science professor who has helped develop image-detection technology used by social media sites. “My prediction is they will be overrun with this stuff.”
Much of the pornographic imagery appeared in posts offering links to adult websites, including those featuring women who offer to perform sex acts online for money or gifts, as well as other websites claiming to facilitate in-person sexual encounters with strangers — something that, experts say, often serves as a front for prostitution.
Some of these outside links featured text in Romanian, suggesting foreign operators for those adult websites.
“All of these adult sites, it’s a shell game. … It’s just monetization,” said Danielle Citron, a Boston University law professor who has studied the pornography industry and fought to remove sexual images of people that are uploaded against their will, typically by former romantic partners.
Citron said it’s unlikely that Parler would face any legal ramifications for hosting images of naked adults in apparently consensual encounters, even if some of those links lead to sites that may offer prostitution. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 federal law undergirding much of the modern Internet economy, offers broad immunity for content uploaded by third parties onto social platforms. Laws against sex trafficking would implicate platforms only if they knowingly promoted such content, as opposed to merely hosting links to other sites, Citron said.
Parler, which was founded in 2018 in Henderson, Nev., with the backing of conservative financier Rebekah Mercer, has been touted by prominent Republicans as an alternative to mainstream platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that they have repeatedly claimed — without offering systematic evidence — are biased against conservative voices.
Independent researchers, meanwhile, have warned that Parler also has become a haven for hate speech, conspiracy theories and disinformation, including a Russian political influence operation that research firm Graphika publicly identified in October but Parler declined to remove. The operation remains active on the site after the company said it would consider acting if the researchers or law enforcement specifically requested removal through its complaint portal. In recent days, the reportedly Russian account, which claims to be an “independent platform,” has questioned the safety of coronavirus vaccine candidates, called the U.S. presidential election “rigged” and warned that Philadelphia was becoming a “white-minority ruin.”
Eric Feinberg, vice president for content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web, a nonprofit group that advocates for technologies and policies to remove extreme content from social media, last month started tracking the rise of pornography on Parler, including links that lead users to third-party sites that offer a range of sexually oriented businesses.
“It’s becoming a Wild West for right-wing customers,” said Marc Ginsberg, the coalition’s president, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco.
Sexually explicit content has surged as Parler has gained popularity in recent weeks, briefly becoming the top app on Apple’s App Store while generating more than 4 million downloads in just the first two weeks of November, according to tracking by Sensor Tower, an analytics service. Parler’s executives have claimed the site now has 10 million accounts.
The image-detection technology that Farid, the UC-Berkeley computer scientist, helped develop allows social media sites to find images of child sexual exploitation, also known as child pornography, so they can be removed before being viewed by users or human moderators. He said Parler’s approach may make the site vulnerable to those who upload child pornography, which, despite being illegal, infiltrates social media platforms unless measures are put in place to detect and remove it.
Facebook, for example, removed more than 30 million images of child nudity and sexual exploitation in the first nine months of this year, according to the company’s quarterly transparency reports. (It also removed nearly 112 million images of adult nudity and sexual activity in that same time period.)
Peikoff said Parler would not “knowingly allow it to be used for any criminal content.”
Parler’s terms of service describe a system in which users must first report content that violates company policies before the company takes action. “Sometimes the law requires us to exclude content from our platform, once it is reported to our Community Jury. Obvious examples: content posted by or on behalf of terrorist organizations, child pornography, and copyright violations.”
These rules are more permissive than those published just a few months earlier. In community guidelines posted in July, Parler said users should not “use language/visuals that describe or show sexual organs or activity.” Chief executive John Matze told NPR earlier this year that the app took “a hard line against pornography and nudity.”
The most recent iteration of Parler’s community guidelines allows for adult pornography, though Parler has settings to block material deemed “sensitive” or “Not Safe for Work” from appearing automatically on users’ screens.
The Post’s review found that a portion of the pornographic posts on Parler had their explicit imagery covered by red warning labels that required an extra click to bypass, but in some cases, the same pornographic images were blocked on some posts but not others. Relatively mild imagery — a woman in lingerie, for example — got blocked in some instances while some graphic, up-close videos of sex acts did not.
Parler says it does not allow users under 18 to use the site without explicit parental permission, and users under 13 are forbidden entirely from Parler. But the site has no system for detecting or verifying a user’s age.
Parler and Gab, two conservative social media sites, keep alleged Russian disinformation up, despite report
Not all of the images of naked people on Parler are obviously commercial, though many intentionally seek the attention of Trump supporters, as one woman did last week by placing a “Trump 2020” hat across her stomach as she lay naked on her back for a photo posted to Parler. The text read, “Just promoting our president!”
Another account showed a nude woman with a black handgun covering her genitals, along with the text “Naked and real” and hashtags including #freedom, #secondamendment and #girlswithguns. Another post using the #girlswithguns hashtag urged anyone “interested in seeing a young, hot, conservative girl” to send her a direct message.
These users and others posting such content did not reply to requests for comment.
Some Parler users, meanwhile, posted pornographic images and videos of other people, including some that appeared to be professionally produced.
Overall, The Post’s review found a wide range of imagery and explicitness. Searching the #girlswithguns hashtag, for example, surfaced many images of women in bikinis or revealing clothing as they brandished large rifles, but outright nudity appeared rarely in the images or videos affiliated with that hashtag.
Parler makes no public mention of an automated system trained to identify posts that may violate its policies. Instead, it has a “community jury” of Parler users who review potential violations after users have reported them.
“No user shall be stripped of his parleys or comments, nor shall he be suspended, banned, or deprived of his standing in any other way, except by the conscientious judgment of his equals,” the jury’s official Parler page reads.
Jury members vote on reported posts or comments to decide if the post in question violates Parler’s guidelines. A post must receive four or five votes to be considered in violation of Parler policies. If the post includes illegal content, it gets taken down, according to Parler’s jury guidelines. Posters might also receive “points” for offending posts, which can eventually get them banned if they rack up too many.
Parler’s jury members get regular training on the company guidelines, said Peikoff. The jury had nearly 200 members this summer, and recently put out a call for more volunteers, saying participants would be compensated.
“As I am sure you are aware, we are experiencing a substantial influx of new people on our platform — and with that an increase in the amount of violation reports,” said a Parler post on Nov. 21.
Parler’s weak moderation attracts pornography - The Washington Post
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
The shameful complicity of Republican leaders in President Trump’s torrent of deceit about our election tells us there is little hope for a more reasonable post-Trump GOP. But what about conservatism as a philosophy? Is it equally discredited?
Let’s begin by just saying it: The country owes the Never Trump conservatives a debt.
Yes, many progressives have been uneasy with these unusual allies. They insist that Trump was not some alien imposition on conservatism but rather the product of long-standing trends in Republican politics. Trafficking in racial division and racism, nativism, extremism, conspiracy theories and voter suppression did not start with Trump.
Progressives are entirely right about this. But the Never Trumpers deserve our respect precisely because so many of them stood against these tendencies and, in more cases than not, undertook a deeper critique of their own side.
This applies to many of my conservative Post Opinion colleagues; the folks over at the Bulwark, the online journal that owes its existence to the right-of-center rebellion against Trump; and many of those ad-makers at the Lincoln Project.
For those of us arrayed from the center to the left, the awfulness of Trump is so obvious — it was brought home again on Saturday night by his 100-minute ranting ode to victimhood in Georgia — that we can underestimate how hard it is to walk away from the people who were your comrades for so long. In journals progressives don’t pay much attention to, television networks we don’t watch and Twitter feeds we don’t follow, the Never Trumpers were denounced as renegades and traitors — and also saddled with far uglier, unprintable monikers.
True, these rebels-with-a-good-cause were a minority in their camp, but they were far from alone. Exit polls are imperfect, but the Edison survey suggests that perhaps 8 million of President-elect Joe Biden’s more than 81 million votes came from self-described conservatives, and 3 million from Republicans (which doesn’t include those who left the party because of Trump).
But what happens now? Some of the anti-Trump conservatives never lost their old faith and were simply repelled by Trump’s odiousness. For them, there is no temptation to join the other side. They are unlikely to give much support to Biden and will go off in search of a more conventional Republican to champion in 2024.
For a significant part of the anti-Trump Right, however, the moral corruption of the conservative movement over the past four years is a source of genuine anguish and has prompted a crisis of belief.
As it should have. Conservatism has its attractive sides. But it is often a creed that devotes itself simply to the preservation of the power, wealth and privilege of existing elites. This view was outlined brilliantly by the scholar Corey Robin. He argued in his 2011 book “The Reactionary Mind” that when you dig down, conservatism ends up being about keeping the “subordinate classes” subordinate.
The pro-Trump conservatives offered a lot of evidence for Robin’s point by rallying to a man entirely unsuited to power in a democracy because he gave them what they wanted. Trump consistently served the interests of the best-off and sought to lock in their gains by tilting the judiciary rightward.
A more humane conservatism can suit the elites, too, but its central purpose is to call our attention to those aspects of an existing order that are worth preserving because they serve not just the fortunate but all of us.
The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott was one of the most formidable exponents of what you might call gratitude-based conservatism. “To be conservative,” he wrote, is “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss.”
Even this lovely set of commitments can lead to complacency about a society’s injustices and resistance to needed reforms and adjustments. These are among the reasons I am not myself a conservative.
But with a humane Oakeshottian conservatism, progressives can either make common cause at times of crisis (after all, we on the left and center-left are preservationists in our own way when it comes to protecting liberal democracy) or engage in good-faith debate (the “actual” often isn’t good enough, and what is “sufficient” for some is often insufficient for the many who are left out).
Of course, I’d like the anti-Trump conservatives to admit the error of their ways and fully join my side of politics. But failing that, I still appreciate what they did. And I hope at least they can now champion a brand of conservatism that is about more than making the rich richer and the powerful more powerful.
From the Comments Section:
No, progressives, liberals, Democrats and Independents do not owe a debt of gratitude to the very people who ushered in this nightmare, then said or did nothing to put out the flames they fanned into existence.
Opinion | Two cheers for the Never Trump conservatives - The Washington Post
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https://mobile.twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336065787900145665
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
-EV 8/14/93
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
-EV 8/14/93
Obviously the person who wrote that tweet would not die for Trump. But some dummies would. Either way, the GOP has nothing of substance any more; just for "sOcIaLiSm" and lame references to civil war. If there was a clearer line like there was in the previous civil war, I'd be all for a clean break at this point.
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
-EV 8/14/93
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/12/05/cashing-in-disinformation-voter-fraud-stop-the-steal-griffin-ebof-pkg-vpx.cnn
yeah me neither.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
The rich aren't just getting richer. They're getting there faster than the rest of America’s workers.
During the last economic expansion, from 2009 to 2019, average yearly wages for the bottom 90% of workers rose 8.7% after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis of Social Security Administration data by the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Meanwhile, pay for most of the top 10% rose 13.2% – while earnings for the top 1% jumped 20.4%.
"It's a clear story of disempowerment of workers," said Lawrence Mishel, co-author of the study and a distinguished fellow at EPI.
Executives at hedge funds and other top finance companies have benefited from outsized leaps in compensation, often tied to stock prices, while the vast majority of workers, including both blue- and white-collar workers, have seen their pay stagnate or climb slowly, Mishel says. He cited myriad reasons, including outdated overtime pay rules and the misclassification of many full-time employees as contractors.
Taking it day by day:Over 68% of Americans had financial setbacks in 2020 amid the pandemic
The disparity in wage growth largely continued last year, with the bottom 90% seeing gains of 1.7% while most of the top 10% notched a 3.1% advance. The top 1%, however, lagged in terms of growth: Their wages edged up just 1%.
Average salary for bottom 90% shy of $39k
In 2019, salaries averaged $38,923 for the bottom 90%; $320,096 for the top 5%; $758,434 for the top 1%; and $2,858,981 for the top 0.1%.
Over a longer time period, the gap between the highest-paid workers and other Americans is even starker. From 1979 to 2019, average pay increased 26% for the bottom 90%, 64.1% for most of the top 10%, 160.3% for the top 1%, and 345.2% for the top 0.1%, according to EPI.
Aid for struggling Americans:No stimulus checks, but it offers an extra $300 in federal unemployment benefits
As a result, the bottom 90% earned 69.8% of all wages in 1979, but that share fell to 60.9% last year. Meanwhile, the top 5% saw their share of total wages rise from 19.4% to 27.8%, while the top 1% nearly doubled their share, from 7.3% to 13.2%.
There is a caveat: Low-wage workers in the bottom 10% have outpaced other groups in pay gains in recent years before this year’s pandemic-induced recession because of state minimum wage increases and low unemployment in food services and other low-paid industries, Mishel said. But those advances haven’t narrowed the gap between the highest-paid workers and the rest of the country.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/12/09/wage-gap-income-workers-pay-rise/6498322002/
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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https://www.newsweek.com/pro-trump-rally-chants-destroy-gop-boos-georgia-rinos-loeffler-perdue-1554354?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0C25m3BrdkqO9psw1GOXD3UnBw4JIBztvOEnhNOZwvCFRd6Ud_N71ZC2Y#Echobox=1607808690
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Democrat wants to use Civil War law about traitors to ban 126 Republicans from being seated in Congress
Only one-third of the Republicans elected to Congress in 2020 will be seated in Congress come January if one New Jersey Democrat has his way.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) argued on Friday that the 126 Republicans seeking to overturn election results should not be seated in Congress.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday joined the group seeking to overturn the election results in four states.
Rep. Pascrell believes Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should be invoked to keep the Republicans from holding office.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” the 14th Amendment reads.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"