Yeah, I agree. Let's rescind all protected classes ASAP.
Protected classes were supposed to be about things that are innate, like skin color or ancestry, not about your ideas or speech. Obviously religion is sort of borderline here.
Religion is not any more borderline than gender. Neither is strictly innate, but we're not OK with people being forced to change their gender for the sake of some abstract social equality. And gender, like religious values, is something that's deeply felt as one's personal expression. But this is also true wrt. many political stances.
I think you're being down voted but you speak the truth. The current division, strife, and lack of unity in western society is in large part due to misinformation, propaganda, and psyops from adversaries. The primary goal is to make personal identity politics more important than national allegiances so that we rot from the inside out. We're not in the cold war anymore. We are in the Ice War.
> due to misinformation, propaganda, and psyops from adversaries. Not really. The psyops is run by insiders. Trump was undermined by Democrats, FBI and American media. The “lab leak” theory was censored by big tech and ridiculed by US media. Russia and other “adversaries” are mainly just a convenient scapegoat.
Perhaps but recall that the source of the Russian Collision hoax was a Russian spy. Everyone just wanted to believe it so badly and facts be dammed.
I don't understand HN's problem with this. It's a freemarket of ideas, no one is being forced to follow Americans on Twitter or subscribe to American content producers on Youtube. What even is the alternative being proposed here? Segmenting the internet so people from different countries _can't_ interact with one another? Is that preferable?
Just brainstorming here: What if social media algorithms were biased heavily towards local content? I don't subscribe to any channels at all on YouTube, and yet when I watch a video the sidebar recommendations are often filled with only marginally related videos on US politics and other specially American content. On Facebook, I don't follow any American news outlets, and again, my newsfeed gets a disproportionate am…
Not in my experience. Obviously such people exist, but the generalization is just an ad hominem.
Such people do exist, like the governor of Florida, who just passed a rule that appears to ban teaching that Florida had slavery and said it was to stop "critical race theory" and the 1619 Project.
Your response is a non-sequitur. Even if it was true, it doesn’t change anything about the ad-hominem I pointed out.
> that appears to ban teaching that Florida had slavery
Does it? Can you quote the part that bans teaching that Florida had slavery?
What's a bit ironic to me is that this extension of US cultural hegemony used to be derided as cultural imperialism back a few decades ago before other cultural exports became vogue (Anime, K-Pop, etc.) when it was the US vs everyone else. But now, many of the people who would have decried this kind of hegemonic influence delight in it. They delight in the fact we can establish norms for communication and discourse n…
It is clearly imperialism pure and simple. The US uses its financial stronghold on internet companies to essentially dictate what is allowed or not in public discuss. You don't need to be very smart to see that Google, FB, Twitter are bound to US norms and regulations (and its surveillance state) and give very little thought to what other countries need/want. If you think this is normal, just think again.
The US government once made a microblogging service called ZunZuneo [1] for Cuba in an attempt to encourage political change there. It failed to achieve its intended outcomes, but is nevertheless quite interesting because the it shows that the US government is well aware of how electronic media has great potential for exerting political influence.
It’s long past time to start thinking about social media systems as publishing platforms, not communication platforms. You post things there and the companies decide whether or not they want to publish them. As much as we may want them to be neutral pipes like telephones, they are not, and complaining about it is just pissing in the wind. If you want a neutral pipe, use the telephone or email, not social media.
So it’s okay for a handful of companies to control most of the commutation in the country? Perhaps home / auto loans should he decided on how “truthful” these companies decide you are. Surely no sane country “cough China” would do such a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Not saying it is okay, but that it is this way, and we shouldn’t be surprised when publishers exercise editorial control or moderation on their platforms.
If I wrote the N-word here on HN, it would be downvoted until it disappeared, and if not, the mods would disappear it. Is this surprising to anyone? They don’t want that crap here. Facebook doesn’t want its definition of crap there. Twitter doesn’t want it’s definition of crap there. If you want to communicate without a filter, use a communication system without editorial filters.
> Unsubstantiated claim YouTube among others censored so much content surrounding SARS-CoV-2 (rightly or wrongly, I’ll remain neutral here), Apple and Google’s app stores straight up rejected apps for unofficial COVID info, including quite absurd cases like xscreensaver being rejected for including 3D renderings of the virus, or maybe just the word covid.[1] You really didn’t pay much attention if you’re unaware of t…
So your evidence that joebiden.info was censored is to point to something completely different that was censored? That undermines the original claim in 2 ways. First it shows that you don’t have evidence for your original claim. Additionally, it also shows that it’s possible to present evidence for the kind of claim you’re making.
I did not make any “original claim”. You need to start checking who you’re responding to and what arguments they were responding to, not somehow assuming there’s exactly one person on each “side” arguing about only one thing. The “unsubstantiated claim” part I was responding to was clearly about COVID discussions outside the U.S. censored by U.S. corporations.
Nice baiting there Jcowell, well played. No country in the world is perfect. Canada is still near the top of the list when it comes to safety and quality of life. It's true that many first nations people struggle. Canada is taking steps to help them (see accelerated vaccination of native communities) and I sincerely wish them all the best. However, dismantling the police probably isn't going to undo things that happe…
No, they're right. And it's not just first nations people. Being a person-of-color in Canada is definitely no picnic as soon as you get out of the larger towns. I've seen quite a bit of this first hand and up close while living there. Consider that your viewport is small enough that the rougher parts of Canadian life for minorities are invisible to you.
I believe you, and I would rather live in a larger town myself. However, I think that on this front, Canada compares very well to the US, France, the UK, Brazil, China, and Japan (known for its xenophobic culture), to name a few places. No place is perfect, but we have it better here than a lot of other places, on many fronts.
Had first hand experience of this. I maintain an opensource project which is popular on NPM. An issue was raised in our github about we should have a statement of support for BLM in our readme. I said no as politely and diplomatically as possible. I would rather the project remains non-political, they said that made me complicit. The thing is I am from Europe. I think BLM is a very worthy policial movement, as do I a…
You're not the only one. I've seen this behavior in other projects. The patter was also similar as you described.
In my company we had some people trying to get this stuff into our corporate mail, thankfully there was enough pushback to keep the corporate mail corporate.
Also, I'd rather worry about stuff in my country than american internal affairs.
The rest of the world should be aggressively promoting their culture, values and language, just like the US. Japan is doing a very good job of that with the proliferation of weebs, but others are not. Europe barely exports any culture or media - especially in their own languages. Most things EU are regionally locked and if they aren't, they are behind paywalls or accessible through American networks. Were I to try an…
Spain does export culture and media, and is not that difficult to watch, and if you don't want to use Netflix or Amazon you'll be fine.
The thing is that english is lingua franca, and there's quite a lot of people in the anglosphere who's aware of this fact and actively tries to influence foreign countries. In the past it was mostly leaning towards free-market ideas, nowadays is mostly this american social-liberalism brand.
There's intellectual feedback between Latin-America and Spain for example, but it's nowhere near in volume nor intentions.