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Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#531

Post by williamdclt »

thu2111 wrote: post #436
arethuza wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is not how politics work in the rest of the world." A lot of the debate around Brexit in the UK worked exactly that way - on both sides.

I feel that's disingenuous. It wasn't the same way on both sides. This kind of false equivalence crops up in a lot of places but it needs to be called out. Many high profile Remainers claimed Leavers were/are racist, ignorant, far-right, small minded, hated all foreigners, didn't know what they were voting for, were old and thus should have their vote be ignored, and worse. Leavers claimed Remainers were ... what? Af…

Taking the example of France, which I know better (caution: right/left in Europe does not mean quite the same as for Americans).

The left (in particular the lefter parties) accuse the right to be racists, islamophobes, antisemites, sexists, at the heel of the bourgeoisie & capitalists, hostile to the working class, and guilty of ecological inaction.

The right (not just the far right, even centre-right like the current party in power) accuses the left to be at the heel of muslims ("islamo-leftist" is thrown around a lot), traitors/threats to their own national identity/culture, weak, slowing down progress, utopists. I might be missing some, I'm biased.

The left's attacks are more personal, more violent. I have an overly-simplified theory of why that is, the left's values are much more centered around the human, and the right's values are much more centered around the economy. That means that everything for the left is personal, it's cutting deep, violation of these values trigger empathy: sadness, anger, feelings of injustice and outrage. Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.

Of course, being biased I also think that the left's argument are more violent because they're _more true_, the right mostly getting its way. We do live in a liberal world which is very right-wing (despite americans liberal being called "leftists", that always confused me, or even "communists" when communism is so radically opposed to the neoliberalism we have today)

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#532

Post by evgen »

trentlott wrote: post #526
evgen wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is radically incorrect regarding where US parties would fit on a global scale. There is actually a lot of good research out available in political science papers based on large-scale surveys conducted over decades that show the US parties to be close to the middle of the right and left respectively. If you removed health care from the equation (given how messed up this is in the US) then the two parties would actu…

> If you removed health care from the equation Removing a defining characteristic to force data to fit your model surely isn't good science

The US is a clear outlier compared to other western democracies in regards to public health policy. It makes little sense to try to map US healthcare debates to non-US political positions because it is almost unique. It is not about trying to fit a model, it is about removing things that add no useful information when it comes to points of comparison. And yes, it is good science.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#533

Post by shrimpx »

kstenerud wrote: post #381

I spent a number of years living in America in the past, and made friends with people across the political spectrum there. And what has always stood out to me is how much hatred and animosity the American right and left have for each other. Talk with someone over beers long enough and they really open up about it, probably because I'm an outsider. As far as political orientation goes, by worldwide standards America a…

This type of anti-American sentiment is boring and old-hat. I often hear it made by Europeans who still insist EU countries like France and Germany are so much better. In reality EU is a polarized racist political swamp.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#534

Post by iSnow »

Proziam wrote: post #521
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by worldwide standards America actually ranges from center-right (Democrats) to far-right (Republicans) OhBoyHereWeGo.jpg It's stupid to try and condense the political ideology of the US (or almost any nation) down to one spectrum and then try and map that onto the rest of the world when we (and the rest of the world) have a lot of ideology based on "well party X took position Y because party V had position W back…

From my point of view as an American who has lived in Europe (Sweden, later Germany, and the UK) my framing of the US political situation is as follows: Democrats tend to be authoritarian and pro-centralization of power. Republicans tend to be anti-authoritarian and pro-decentralization. Both major parties have a long history of deep corruption. They've essentially colluded to rob the American people blind. Unfortuna…

IDK man, the last POTUS didn't seem so anti-authoritarian to me, but that might again be an outside position.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#535

Post by msla »

kstenerud wrote: post #381

I spent a number of years living in America in the past, and made friends with people across the political spectrum there. And what has always stood out to me is how much hatred and animosity the American right and left have for each other. Talk with someone over beers long enough and they really open up about it, probably because I'm an outsider. As far as political orientation goes, by worldwide standards America a…

Based on the party's position on immigration, the Democrats are far to the left of the European mainstream.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#536

Post by naniwaduni »

GVIrish wrote: post #180
naniwaduni wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before taking "constitutional" free speech for a concept, we have to understand that free speech is a prescriptive social norm . It happens to have a constitutional instantiation. That instantiation happens to be expressed as a restriction on the government's chartered power; this is an artifact of the process by which it was drafted, i.e. as part of a collection of proposed restraints on the powers federal governmen…

Is it really a social norm though? Before social media were people angry that publications chose to selectively print letters to the editor? Or that a business could kick you out for being verbally abusive? Or that if you wrote a nasty gram to your superiors that you could be fired? It's only now that social media has come along and has democratized publication of text, images, and video that free speech as it relate…

There are at least three fairly distinct ideas being conflated, I think:

- Was the "free speech" norm ever widely followed? This is the one I think you're objecting to, and indeed society as a whole has never exactly been accepting of all speech. On the other hand, there are plenty of social norms that people generally believe in but frequently don't quite live up to, like presumption of innocence, or "honour your father and your mother". I don't really think this criterion invalidates conduct prescriptions as social norms.

- Was the "free speech" ideal ever widely accepted? This one seems kind of tricky if you just look at the current state of affairs, but then if you look just a few years back at the way people danced around the "hate speech dilemma" even up through 2016, I think it's pretty clear that people generally did, or at least expected others to, accept free speech as an ideal.

- What kind of social obligation is the "free speech" rule conceived as? And this is one I wanted to make a point on, specifically that the constitutional instantiation of it is not primary.

It is not the understanding that, given that the constitutional guarantee exists, there is only a restriction on Congress and e.g. everything is all peachy with a president instructing the IRS to engage in punitive auditing against Vietnam War dissidents.

It is dangerously disingenuous to frame the constitutional protection on freedom of speech as the full extent of Americans' understanding of free speech.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#537

Post by KDJohnBrown »

goatinaboat wrote: post #423
vkou wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White vs Black was something that was ripping the United States apart since the arrival of the first slave on the continent, so I'd have a hard time crediting the KGB for it.

White vs Black was something that was ripping the United States apart since the arrival of the first slave on the continent That isn't true, since the first black slaves were brought over by the ethnic group we now call Latinx.

This is simultaneously a fair point (the Portugeuse were the first slavers) and a miscategorization (puritans/white european invaders were quite racist and violent from the moment they landed on Plymouth rock and began stealing from / killing Natives).

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#538

Post by shrimpx »

timsayshey wrote: post #527

I've been following Hacker News for over a decade and my sense of the community is that it has always been overwhelmingly pro free speech at any cost (even in the cases where it would protect something outright illegal). Now I'm hearing from many in the same community that free speech has been "weaponized" and must be controlled for the greater good. What happened? Seriously.

Traditional unamplified speech is ok in all shapes, but I think the amplification power of social media has shown the damage hate speech can do at scale, and people have become more cautious about what’s ok to amplify.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#539

Post by throwaway19937 »

threatofrain wrote: post #474
kstenerud wrote: post #381

I spent a number of years living in America in the past, and made friends with people across the political spectrum there. And what has always stood out to me is how much hatred and animosity the American right and left have for each other. Talk with someone over beers long enough and they really open up about it, probably because I'm an outsider. As far as political orientation goes, by worldwide standards America a…

In the US, a majority of GOP voters believe that Democrats stole the election, and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Here is a pollster that is respected by US conservatives: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ele... Many also believe that patriotic violence is acceptable to protect the legitimacy of democracy. What kind of conversation do you have when people believe their democracy…

Claims about electoral fraud are a regular occurrence in American politics.

Democrats made similar claims about at least the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections.

Trump's claims about election fraud and the sheer number of lawsuits are an escalation but it isn't a difference in kind.

Edited to add the following.

The child post correctly points out that I should have mentioned Trump's inciting a violent attempt to overthrow the government. This wasn't a deliberate omission.

Re: Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked

#540

Post by goatinaboat »

KDJohnBrown wrote: post #537
goatinaboat wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White vs Black was something that was ripping the United States apart since the arrival of the first slave on the continent That isn't true, since the first black slaves were brought over by the ethnic group we now call Latinx.

This is simultaneously a fair point (the Portugeuse were the first slavers) and a miscategorization (puritans/white european invaders were quite racist and violent from the moment they landed on Plymouth rock and began stealing from / killing Natives).

puritans/white european invaders were quite racist and violent from the moment they landed on Plymouth rock and began stealing from / killing Natives

I guess I can't keep up with the shifting terminology, are natives considered blacks now then? Isn't that supposed to be BIPOCS?

Actually if we are talking about slaves, then native Americans had been enslaving each other for centuries before Whites or Latinx arrived.

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