541–550 of 868 posts
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.
With all of the tools available today I would have thought this kind of attack would be pretty uncommon.
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.
- data driven manipulation by platforms reaching the majority of the population. Pushing the spiciest posts to the top to increase emotional interaction
- the emergence of new fascists under the guise of free speech. With the downfall of traditional gatekeepers in media, new gatekeepers have emerged - and they are not the benevolent kind.
So I guess this means Mastodon has an SQL injection vulnerability?
EDIT: Plus this:
> Just to reiterate in relation to Gab getting hacked, I’m not aware of any vulnerabilities in Mastodon at the moment and based on what I have seen in their code modifications the vulnerabilities they have are the ones they themselves introduced (along with never porting security patches from us)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the people there are far right. When you go to a website and the first thing you see is calls to murder jewish people and the n-word repeated ad nauseam, all but the far right decide to just leave. The end result is that gab/parler/etc don't become places where all speech exists but instead places where extreme racism, homophobia, and sexism suck the oxygen away from everything else.
This is a false depiction. I haven’t used Parler much but checked it out a few times and did not encounter a single piece of content advocating violence, talking about Jewish people, using the n word, or partaking in any kind of racism. Your claim that these are repeated ad nauseum suggests you never actually visited any of these sites and are just criticizing them without basis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you look at actual policy Bernie, AOC, Warren, etc push (i.e. not the twitter crap they pile on to for virtue points) much less authoritarians stuff despite being "further" left because they all cut their teeth serving the interests of different demographics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people disagree with that attempt to redefine words. This whole thread is about the right to have that disagreement in a civil fashion, or whether to shut down the thought process with phrases like “period”.
> Some people disagree with that attempt to redefine words. A trans person's identity isn't up for debate. You are insinuating that trans people are not human, which is abhorrent. > This whole thread is about the right to have that disagreement in a civil fashion We already fought a war over this idea. Your side lost. Get over it.
How? There is a biological reality which we can't erase even with the medical miracles we can nowadays do to ease gender dysphoria, and there is self-identification. Neither even remotely relates to whether transpeople are human. At most they relate to mental health.
At Ars Technica, few of the commenters are concerned about the erosion of privacy and freedom of speech of Gab users.
First they came for the fascists, and I was happy. Then it ended, because slippery slope is a fallacy.
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Anyone who is genuinely left wing will easily recognize that neither party in the US represents their interests.
> genuinely left wing What does that even mean ? Any one with half a brain will find good ideas from the far left to the far right. This "left vs right" is the dumbest thing we ever came up with. Vote and fight for ideas, not sport teams... keep the fanatism for football
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Because the only defense they constantly employ for saying atrocious things is that it's not literally illegal to say them. It's not literally illegal to be racist, it's not literally illegal to be xenophobic, it's not literally illegal to be transphobic. So they think they should be all those things, although they don't call themselves those names. Things should be said based on the inherent merit of what they say,…
It's also possible that their defenses sound like that to the people making the "not literally illegal to say them" crowd. As a stereotypical example, grab a random Christian, they say they believe gay marriage is wrong on Biblical grounds, this gets interpreted as "I want to hate gay people". If we look at racist hate speech, people literally lecture that people who happen to look like me are "born into not being hu…
> How about gender affirming treatment for kids who cannot physically know what sexuality properly is because they haven't been through puberty? Someone's a bit off their gender role? Tomboy, nah, they're a boy, time to stuff them full of hormones. Concerns that this just might be insane are again, labeled hate.
Trans girls have horrible anxiety about going through puberty. It's not them being "a little off their gender role". It's a fundamental dread about being given an irreversible treatment of hormones that will change their voice and secondary sexual characteristics.
Puberty is far more irreversible than HRT. The percentage of people who detransition is tiny; far more people who transition are much happier for doing so. It is also incredibly difficult to actually get HRT. The therapy is beyond the reach of most children. It's a total boogieman that this is happening left and right and all of the children are getting stuffed full of synthetic hormones.
Please educate yourself more.
Anti-trans positions are up there with "gay people are going to sexually assault my children" or "being gay is disgusting 'cause I don't like thinking about anal sex". Complete and utter bullshit based on unfounded fears.