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Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

taibbi.substack.com

531–540 of 596 posts

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#531
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hunter Biden left his laptop at the repair shop and never paid for the repairs. After waiting the legally required 90 days, the repair shop became the rightful owner of the laptop and its contents. Once they owned those photos, they had every right to publish them or do whatever they wanted. The least the press could ask VP Biden would be, "will you pledge that your son will not be involved in any sensitive discussio…

So if I sell my laptop that still has some photos on it, the buyer would own the copyright over those photos because they own the laptop? If I deleted the photos from the laptop, but they used a recovery tool to restore them from the disk, would they still own the copyright then? What if I have the same photo on two different USB drives, and I sell those to two different people, who owns the copyright then? That does…

> So if I sell my laptop that still has some photos on it, the buyer would own the copyright over those photos because they own the laptop?

No, since you made an agreement to sell the laptop, and only the laptop.

> Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium.

That's correct. But it can be transferred to satisfy a lein; depends on the fine print the repair shop has in their contract.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#532
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy

It would be if I was presenting an argument. However, I was asking out of curiosity. Their response seemed to be a criticism and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt by giving a valid alternative interpretation.

Criticism is not dismissal

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interpret the constitution as it was written Does this mean she'll be ruling that owning people is ok, removing the vote from women, and striking down the 2nd Amendment?

The 13th, 19th and 2nd amendments exist in the constitution, as written: 13th: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. 19th: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on acco…

> "interpret the constitution as it was written" > amendments

"was written" would not include "amendments".

Perhaps it was meant to be "is written" and that would definitely include the amendments but then you absolutely do not get to call yourself an "Originalist" because, e.g., the 19th was passed 130 years after the Constitution was written and for damn sure none of the framers were still alive then.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interpret the constitution as it was written Does this mean she'll be ruling that owning people is ok, removing the vote from women, and striking down the 2nd Amendment?

The constitution as it was written allows for amendments. The 13th and 19th Amendments outlawed slavery and gave women the right to vote, respectively.

But those amendments didn't exist when it "was written" - if you're an Originalist claiming to interpret the Constitution "as it was written", that excludes amendments. If you change it to "as it is written", sure, that includes them but you lose the claim to be an Originalist given the timestamps on everything after the 12th Amendment since that's 76 years later and I'm reasonably sure none of the framers were alive then.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that DNI Ratcliffe is the most unqualified DNI to be appointed (and only managed to get appointed on his second try by a minority), is a Trump loyalist, lied in his bio (disqualifying, I'd say) and appears to follow QAnon (but that could be for work purposes.) The zerohedge URL is truncated and consequently doesn't work. > And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included: Show us the DKIM headers…

...DKIM... My understanding is that the purported emails were sent to Biden. He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him, so verifying that these emails were sent doesn't really prove anything. If he had forwarded the emails in a way that indicated his agreement, or if they had been sent by someone else connected to the candidate, that would be a situation in which DKIM would be relevant.

> He can't really do anything to control what is sent to him

In which case the whole situation is nonsense and moot.

But it appears that some of them are from Biden - "The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire" - in which case the DKIM headers would be a simple check on authenticity, no?

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#536
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still not a crime.

Ok then. You might very well be right. But what is the rule then? Manipulating social media in front of an election is only illegal if you are a foreigner?

Sometimes, election meddling can be seen as an in-kind campaign contribution and thus illegal if it is not within campaign finance rules.

For example, cohen paying off Trump's mistresses was prosecuted as an illegal campaign contribution.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are alarmed by these moves because they represent a wider trend in which the left increasingly does not recognise the right as politically legitimate, i.e. they do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist. Tech firm activist censorship is merely one visible (or not so visible) aspect of this. But it's not the only aspect. The very same sorts of people with the very same views are also in government…

> People are alarmed by these moves because they represent a wider trend in which the left increasingly does not recognise the right as politically legitimate, i.e. they do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist. Those two things aren't remotely the same. The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question when they participate in direct voter suppression, gerrymandering, continually lose popular…

>>>But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."

At least one very recent example: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/12/keith-olber...

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#538
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for vouching, that was the thread I linked in the GP post dang was replying to. Constructive ideation on fixing a community problem of censorship is now "metadrama", Orwellian. I'm open to it not being a problem, but we can't even have that discussion. Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and…

You're talking as if there's some new development here but HN has operated this way for many years. People are prone to interpret normal fluctuation as catastrophic decline. They were saying similar things about HN over a decade ago. It reminds me of what Voltaire said when told that he drank too much coffee and that it was a slow poison: "It must be very slow". [1] Taibbi pieces have had more significant threads her…

So many strawmen! Dang maybe you’re just burnt out or something, because you’re not replying to anything I said.

I would never and didn’t at all ask for privilege. I set out suggestions to avoid majoritarianism, systemically. One - make flags “cost”, for less brigades. Two, make vouches cost more, but also have more weight, as vouching can protect a minority view.

I never said disallow flags on articles “like that”? I’m not even a big fan of Taibbi, I’m just a bit disgusted by people who would flag away things they just don’t like politically. It’s a problem, but my guess is it suits your politics and your bosses, so it’s not very pressing.

What’s Orwellian is that you can’t seem to grapple with anything I’m saying and instead or twisting it all to totally different arguments, while using quite creative yet generic words to hide behind authority. Read your initial reply: The reason you give for why it’s valid to dismiss an article on simple suggestions to fix flagging was... “it was flagged”, it was “Metadrama”, and it would (in your psychic wisdom) lead to a “generic hodgepodge” discussion. Could literally apply to any HN submission about the site itself, and in this reply you seem to had misread it as some beg for privilege for myself or something weird like that.

I’ve also been on HN for over a decade. I’ve seen a ton of controversies, I never waded in really. I’ve held my tongue for years on the suppression one, it’s been obvious for years. I’ve seen many claiming it went downhill. In fact at my first job a decade ago I remember multiple co-workers warning me how it’s gone downhill. I know it’s always been that way.

But the reasons it was going downhill before and now are categorically different. Before it was due to incessant flame wars, bad faith pedantry, lack of openness to new ideas (but within discussion).

Now - it’s literal flag brigading.

To be honest, this happened near the election last time. People lose sanity, and then they see abuse of power as “popular” and therefore justified, and then after the election the tide will naturally turn and you’ll forget the problem for a bit.

Censorship, majority rule, there aren’t the same as the critiques I’ve seen many many times over the years. Before it was about quality of discussion, now it’s about banning discussion entirely.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#539
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be if I was presenting an argument. However, I was asking out of curiosity. Their response seemed to be a criticism and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt by giving a valid alternative interpretation.

Criticism is not dismissal

Stay on topic, please.

Re: Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting banned by Google/Facebook and losing all your data in the cloud is just the modern equivalent of losing everything when your hard drive dies. The way to mitigate this danger is the same. No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups. With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you…

> No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups. Exactly. Back up your cloud data. > With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over. I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obvi…

> I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement.

It is not absurd, it is reality. With emails you at least can manually walk through the hundreds of sites you have stored in your password manager, hope that the password still works and you did not encounter a site that got hacked and reset all the passwords, and change the email address... but with "sign in with Facebook/Apple ID/..." you are at the mercy of the target site having a fallback login mechanism. (Hint: many don't or it's buggy because never tested)

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