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Cancel We The Web? (2020)

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Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#251

Post by etchalon »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #247
etchalon wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making the exact same argument the RMS made, using the same logical construction that I laid down as being the argument RMS made, while arguing that I do not understand RMS's point. I understood his point. I understood your point. I find the point to be pedantic.

You're not the only one here? And pedantry is rather immaterial in the long run. Stallman certainly fits the bill, but when it is time to render a judgement we all need to focus on the details. We need to render a judgement on what actually happened, not what quick-to-outrage folks imagined happened. Details matter here. A few people appear to believe that when something very bad happens we need to expand culpability…

If you would like to make a point that isn't a direct rebuttal to mine, it is possible to start your own thread, and make your point there.

As it stands, you seem to agree that RMS' point was pedantic.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#252

Post by Const-me »

bill_mon wrote: post #242
Const-me wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All available research also points man and women are different physiologically, neurologically and psychologically. Yet if one goes around pointing that out to women for no good reason, some people will view such speech as discriminatory and will act accordingly. I don’t necessarily agree with these people, but that’s how it works in practice in many places. According to US federal laws, religion is a protected class…

This is getting off topic. Stating facts about the world is not discriminating. As an employer, I can choose not to hire stupid people.

That depends on the facts, context, audience and other human-related things.

As an employer or anyone at all really, ideally, you should do the right things, where “the right things” is only vaguely defined.

Some of these things are written in laws, regulations, and court decisions. They help when one doesn’t know how to handle certain citations (like this case about religious beliefs of other people): looking for that stuff and simply doing what’s written there is a good strategy to not screw up human interactions too much.

However, many other of these right things aren’t written anywhere, adult people are supposed to already know them somehow. Probably, that’s what called “cultural context”.

All that stuff is weird and often illogical, but that’s how all modern societies have been working for centuries if not millennia.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#253

Post by tryonenow »

etchalon wrote: post #140
eganist wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given wikipedia's heavy progressive bias. Do you have a robust academic citation for this? None of the sources here ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedi... ) suggest a heavy bias, and overall it seems that bias is attenuated with stronger participation. I haven't been able to find sources other than those linked.

It seems to me that being fact-oriented, especially when preferring facts from authorities and institutions, tends to get a source labeled as liberal-biased.

The trouble is that even if these facts are unambiguously correct, their reporting can be misleading, by interpretation, implication, conjecture, selective reporting, and/or omission. That's how bias is injected even into "factual" reporting, and why reality's "liberal bias" may just be a reflection of the predominant institutional bias in popular media.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#254

Post by chrisco255 »

smt88 wrote: post #22
chrisco255 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nadine's point was that people should not be unduly punished for making intellectual arguments for or against anything. "Being punished for what they say" is precisely what happened to Stallman.

If Nadine means this absolutely, she opens herself up to easy counterpoints in the extreme. Ex: What if I work at a hospital and make an intellectual argument in favor of eugenics? What if I have Jewish coworkers and publish statistics about the percentage of media executives that are Jewish? In these cases, "punishment" may also just mean that you've made people unwilling to collaborate with you, or you've done some…

The point Nadine is making is that society and liberals, in particular, have become hypocritical and extreme in their willingness to "unperson" anyone with an unacceptable viewpoint. Even as they make the argument that criminals should be re-integrated into society over time, they simultaneously will dredge up old tweets or decades old comments and use them to get someone fired from a job. Even in the case of contemporary statements, modern liberals have become almost puritanical or inquisitional in their approach to root out people with unacceptable viewpoints and to shame them until they're forced off a platform, a job, an organization, or sufficiently scarlet lettered to satisfy their bloodlust for all non-compliant thinkers. It is opposite of the classical tradition of liberalism, as Nadine pointed out, and it really doesn't make sense.

Neither of your examples are good ones. Society has become too sensitive and exerts too much energy, counterproductive at this point, into rooting out the impure among us and not allowing colorful personalities like Stallman to 'just be'. Unless Stallman has willful intent to harm someone in particular, and not just that someone has chosen to take offense to his statements, it's a disproportionate response. It's also an impossible slippery slope to satisfy. It's becoming increasingly draconian and regressive and making the world a much more miserable place than just sometimes accepting that some people in the world are going to think differently than you, and that it's generally ok, and you can still get along if you try and if both parties are willing (generally true!).

That's the true meaning of tolerance.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#255

Post by etchalon »

tryonenow wrote: post #253
etchalon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that being fact-oriented, especially when preferring facts from authorities and institutions, tends to get a source labeled as liberal-biased.

The trouble is that even if these facts are unambiguously correct, their reporting can be misleading, by interpretation, implication, conjecture, selective reporting, and/or omission. That's how bias is injected even into "factual" reporting, and why reality's "liberal bias" may just be a reflection of the predominant institutional bias in popular media.

This might be the first time I've read a "liberal bias" take that I didn't immediately disagree with.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#256

Post by strken »

_euac wrote: post #246
strken wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument was explaining why Twitter mobs form and what they're getting out of it, not in favour of RMS. I think the general principle of scepticism towards people who benefit from the stance they hold applies to you and I, to RMS, and to his detractors. That being said, I don't think he expected to benefit socially from the opinions that got him cancelled in general, or from complaining about the term "assaulting…

This seems like a very arbitrary and capricious partition between those doing something for 'clout' and those doing it because they can't help themselves. Do you think the people now being attacked in this thread because they originally called for Richard Stallman to face consequences are being 'canceled'? I see a lot of people claiming nobody should take them seriously ever again, blah blah blah. Sounds like 'cancel…

It's not a partition between the things you said, it's a partition between beliefs that would be held absent any reward vs beliefs that are only held due to a reward. RMS doesn't gain anything from arguing that the age of consent should be lower, since it just makes everyone call him a paedophile, therefore he's probably making it in good faith, therefore he's making a genuine attempt to do the right thing and should be engaged in good faith. His autism is only relevant insofar as it makes him more likely to say things without understanding the social consequences.

Additionally, nobody in this thread has been removed from any boards, fired, barred from attending conferences, or in any way cancelled, to the best of my knowledge. If that happens it will be bad. It hasn't happened. Donglegate got both parties fired, and that was also bad. I don't think cancel culture is used only in one direction, it's just that tech industry workers don't cancel the left very often. Steve Klabnik is allowed to go around calling himself a communist without getting removed from anything, for example.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#257

Post by mindslight »

bitwize wrote: post #222
r3trohack3r wrote: post #6

A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was l…

Who do you think is behind cancel culture? Social justice is like the Anti-Life Equation for bigcorps and other established institutions who are incensed that somewhere nerds are having fun without their official sanction. My eyes were opened when I heard a podcast in which a prominent cancelista put forth the idea that federated protocols were a Bad Thing because by requiring implementations to be protocol compatibl…

Amen! There doesn't even need to be an explicit motive driving the colonization, rather just an influx of people from the bigcorps who can't imagine a world without the bigcorp authoritarianism they've thrived in.

There is an overwhelming number of them due to the profitability of the surveillance industry. They're focused on source availability rather than software freedom, because that matches the business model of their employers. And their coup is couched in the language of progress, so it's easier to just go along with at first.

I don't know how to push back, except for publishing your own projects such that you can't get doxxed, avoiding middlemen like Github, developing technology that isn't interesting to authoritarians, etc. For the greater landscape, Corporate HR seems here to stay.

Personally, RMS bugs me because he seems to miss the forest for the trees on some things. But this doesn't mean I think the organization RMS founded needs a new leader, rather it means I need to do the work of convincing others where he is wrong. And I'd be lucky if I accomplish one tenth of what RMS has.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#258

Post by yarg »

Clewza313 wrote: post #199
b215826 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She spends a considerable fraction of her day turning non-issues (such as the term "domain driven design" [1]) into major issues. I really empathize with her coworkers; it must be really difficult to work with a person like this. [1]: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273

> Last night I posted about the term “domain driven design,” frequently abbreviated “DDD” - which is a common large bra measurement in the US, & often part of dirty movie titles. ...wow. Also, did she just call human sexuality "dirty"? I would have thought that was a cancellable offense these days.

Fuck me, does she know about automatated teller machines?

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#259

Post by _euac »

strken wrote: post #256
_euac wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a very arbitrary and capricious partition between those doing something for 'clout' and those doing it because they can't help themselves. Do you think the people now being attacked in this thread because they originally called for Richard Stallman to face consequences are being 'canceled'? I see a lot of people claiming nobody should take them seriously ever again, blah blah blah. Sounds like 'cancel…

It's not a partition between the things you said, it's a partition between beliefs that would be held absent any reward vs beliefs that are only held due to a reward. RMS doesn't gain anything from arguing that the age of consent should be lower, since it just makes everyone call him a paedophile, therefore he's probably making it in good faith, therefore he's making a genuine attempt to do the right thing and should…

> It's not a partition between the things you said, it's a partition between beliefs that would be held absent any reward vs beliefs that are only held due to a reward.

You keep implying that the only possible reason people would denounce RMS's behavior is because they 'get rewarded' for it. I'm surprised you can be so certain about it, when it's perfectly possible they are doing it because they've suffered abuse themselves or have a genuine concern that certain arguments - even when made in good faith by a supposedly autistic person - might make other people feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Imagine being a young freshman woman at your alma mater and someone starts waxing philosophical about whether a 50 something year old man having sex with a minor is assault or not depending on whether 'they presented themselves as willing'. Would you feel safe? What if the same guy is known around your alma mater as somewhat of a creeper? What if he's defending someone who is associated with a guy who owns an island where people go to have sex with underage girls and is now accused of having had sex with one of them? How safe would you feel then?

> Steve Klabnik is allowed to go around calling himself a communist without getting removed from anything, for example.

Weird that you'd somehow equate being a self-declared Communist (a political ideology) with defending pedophiles (a literal crime).

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#260

Post by strken »

_euac wrote: post #259
strken wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a partition between the things you said, it's a partition between beliefs that would be held absent any reward vs beliefs that are only held due to a reward. RMS doesn't gain anything from arguing that the age of consent should be lower, since it just makes everyone call him a paedophile, therefore he's probably making it in good faith, therefore he's making a genuine attempt to do the right thing and should…

> It's not a partition between the things you said, it's a partition between beliefs that would be held absent any reward vs beliefs that are only held due to a reward. You keep implying that the only possible reason people would denounce RMS's behavior is because they 'get rewarded' for it. I'm surprised you can be so certain about it, when it's perfectly possible they are doing it because they've suffered abuse the…

I don't mean to imply that all criticism of RMS is invalid at all. If that's what you got from my explanation that his detractors fall into two separate camps, then I must not have explained it very well. Let me be absolutely clear, then.

Some people criticise RMS because they don't like the things he said for moral reasons, whether intuitive or explicitly thought through. Those people mostly act in a way that they believe is effective at stopping the thing they don't like. I support these people, even though I don't agree with them all the time.

Some people criticise RMS because they've been trained by the Skinner box that is social media to dogpile onto anyone who's the target of criticism, or because all their friends don't like RMS and they want to fit in, or because they've made a career out of outrage. I don't like these people and view them as pack-hunting predators.

With regards to the rest of the post, I feel like you're fishing for things to be angry at me for, on the basis of a fundamental miscommunication.

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