71–80 of 83 posts
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There are plenty of networks that fit this requirement! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10408968
Fair enough, but the entire web doesn't, which makes jsprogrammer's imperative practically impossible if taken at face value, unless one wants to avoid most of modern technological society altogether.
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“ The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. ” — Widely attributed to H. L. Mencken
Would HN be better if personal insults and death threats were allowed, would it improve the exchange of ideas and the expression of opinions?
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That sounds like a pretty standard HR situation. Can't do that shit at work. But your personal life should be different (no matter how inconvenient that is in some cases), and the social justice movement is looking to change that. They're causing people to lose their jobs over something that they did in their personal life; on their own time, separate from work. That's fundamentally different and it isn't justice. It…
I'm not sure it's that they're looking to change it, vs. take advantage of something for their own political ends that already exists (and has for a long time). The traditional "rule" in the US is that you can do whatever you want on your own time, unless it's something that your employer finds out about, and finds sufficiently offensive, embarrassing, or inconvenient. Then, since employment is at-will, they can fire…
"To me the fundamental place to tackle this would be at the mechanism: the problem is that employers can and do fire people who have opinions they either dislike or find embarrassing. That will continue to be true, unless labor laws are changed to make it more difficult."
I couldn't agree more. But I would also argue that this will require a cultural shift. A re-evaluation of the merit of mob-driven "social justice" and the ways in which we build true social progress. Employers don't fire these people because they actually care that they're "bigots". They fire them because they're PR nightmares. They fire them because they're receiving tons of public social pressure and that's bad for business. So the true mechanism is the social pressure itself. In addition to updating laws to deal with the times, we need to curb this behavior and make it unacceptable at a social / cultural level.
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The internet has created a weird environment where repercussions for socially unacceptable speech (even if taken completely out of context) can be dramatically more severe than any harm that was caused by the original speaker. In general, a distasteful tweet or Facebook post shouldn't cost someone their job, make them a target for anonymous threats or make them fear interacting with society at large any more than it…
There has always been repercussions for socially unacceptable speech. What the internet has affected is who can hear or read your speech. If I go into a supermarket and shout, "I hate black people and they shouldn't even be in America!" I am going to suffer the consequences, but probably only from the people who heard me. Everyone else will have heard it second-hand and may due to social circle pressure decide to sev…
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This so true and a major concern. The next wave of highly effective propaganda and thought control could very easily manifest itself through this. Today, people know better than to blindly believe the news media. If information is coming from a single entity, it could be pushing an agenda, so take it with a grain of salt. We all know that. But when it appears to come from a community, that's entirely different. It se…
Germany does not intend to silence anti-refugee posts. Germany wants to stop illegal incitement of hatred. Such as promoting or even threatening to burn down asylum centers, to hurt or even kill refugees and those that help them. Those are not just words, asylum centers are being burned to the ground, refugees are attacked, just recently some were killed on the border the EU, just yesterday someone tried and almost s…
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Germany does not intend to silence anti-refugee posts. Germany wants to stop illegal incitement of hatred. Such as promoting or even threatening to burn down asylum centers, to hurt or even kill refugees and those that help them. Those are not just words, asylum centers are being burned to the ground, refugees are attacked, just recently some were killed on the border the EU, just yesterday someone tried and almost s…
The minister in talks with Facebook called the content "ideological trash" and "right wing nonsense" so it's pretty clear it's not just limited to incitement of violence.
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Would HN be better if personal insults and death threats were allowed, would it improve the exchange of ideas and the expression of opinions?
Yes. Your idea of a personal insult is my idea of spirited debate. I've been warned twice in the past few weeks by HN moderators because I've used similes that they've found offensive. Honestly? I find that offensive. They'd better censor their censorship.
FWIW, I'm not a huge fan of downvotes, and I don't even like things being ranked by upvotes. But the rough spirit of focusing on substance and backing up claims, that I like.
All of you are misinterpreting Twitter's "features" here. Most likely the root cause of this is an internal feature at Twitter called "per-country takedown." If someone from Germany asked (and had a valid court order) that the Tweet be taken down for German users, then Twitter has the ability to disable the Tweet for people coming from German IPs. I don't agree with this, I lobbied heavily against it while I worked t…
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Its all about context. With your bro's after the game, sure. But in Twitter, where the whole world (anybody who cares to look anyway) can see it? Its expected to have a different voice there. Folks who get all chummy on Twitter are forgetting where they are.
"Its expected to have a different voice there." Expected by who? The "expectation" you think everyone has, everyone does not have. In this discussion we're referring to this expectation as "PC" or "political correctness".
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Would HN be better if personal insults and death threats were allowed, would it improve the exchange of ideas and the expression of opinions?
Yes. Your idea of a personal insult is my idea of spirited debate. I've been warned twice in the past few weeks by HN moderators because I've used similes that they've found offensive. Honestly? I find that offensive. They'd better censor their censorship.