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Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

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Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was indeed a slippery slope from "2 weeks to flatten the curve" to extended lockdowns. I don't think those policies necessarily were a net benefit, either, particularly in the case of mask mandates for children, which weren't shown as effective enough to warrant damaging the mental health of children. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Something taking longer than expected doesn't mean it's a slippery slope. Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.

> Something taking longer than expected doesn't mean it's a slippery slope.

> Whether they were effective or not is orthogonal to whether the slippery slope argument is a fallacy.

That is wrong.

What you mentioned is the very definition of a slippery slope, where the conditional relationships of the hypothetical syllogism do not hold.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of the existence of China's social credit system, but that's not exactly a system I'm keen on holding up as a something to strive for. This being in the UK, I feel we should look at UK historical norms, not China's.

I get it’s UK and may be the most influential western country in the last 200-300 years. But time goes on, countries evolve and often they do so in unexpected ways. My argument is that, at some point we must detach a country from its past (whatever that means) and accept the direction its constituents are now wanting to take. Even if we personally don’t approve of said direction.

I don't think "we" must do anything of the sort. It's important to continue to disagree with things, and articulate the reasons why, even if a majority of some other group supports them.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#203
post #200

Stop using Twitter. Build open decentralized alternatives that won't cooperate with speech police. Defund the useless bureaucrats who exist only to police speech. Fire them. Let them compete for their bread and wine like all of us who work for a living.

Fancy new crypto and system design does not and cannot solve societal and cultural problems.

But they will solve speech-policing issues where some UK nanny politicians feel empowered to try to send people to prison over things like this.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with first claim. We clearly disagree on the second so can you elaborate? I believe formal legal censorship of an expression GIVES it oxygen and will subsequently increase it.

My understanding is that studies show deplatforming actually works if the goal is to remove the broader cultural influence of a group. That is to say, if there is a group on platform A who are then group-banned from platform A, when they move to platform B the group is actually smaller in size and has less influence. If this happens from platform B to platform C the group continues to become smaller and have less inf…

Or you know, occasionally you accidentally create a new front in the culture war which is far more expansive and destructive than the side effects of the original problem.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#205
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why "slippery slope" was listed among other logical fallacies. It is exactly the opposite.

Slippery slope isn’t automatically a fallacy. It’s a fallacy if you don’t articulate why A would lead to B. The government using an anti-CSAM filter to further restrict, say, copyright infringements has precedent, so could be a valid slippery slope. The idea people pushed that marriage equality would lead to people being able to legally marry their animals was fallacious because nobody could articulate a logical jump…

Your last sentence seems to itself refute the point it is trying to make.

You refer to "marriage equality", not "same-sex marriage". So you presumably think that the justification for allowing same-sex marriage is not some consideration of whether recognizing same-sex marriages in particular is beneficial, but rather that the justification is that they must be allowed for "equality". That justification easily generalizes to any other case where someone wants to enter into a "marriage" that is not currently recognized.

[ Note: Personally, I think the state should have nothing whatever to do with marriage, obviating the entire issue. ]

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think white people who lived during the time of segregation or redlining had white privilege Whites were 80-90% of the population during that time, assigning a vague notion of "privilege" to an entire race of people as a basis for reverse racism is not only useless, but misleading, because these "privileged" people were still in competition with other whites (and non-redlined minorities). The implication is t…

> Whites were 80-90% of the population during that time, assigning a vague notion of "privilege" to an entire race of people as a basis for reverse racism is not only useless, but misleading, because these "privileged" people were still in competition with other whites (and non-redlined minorities). The implication is that they collectively derived benefit from unfair rules against blacks, but frankly this is a disho…

How much "benefit" do you think the average white person received from segregation and redlining less than 10% of the population? How would you even quantify it? Marginally lower property prices/rents in a small subset of neighborhoods? Slightly smaller class sizes in pre-modern schools? Slightly less competition for unskilled labor?

This is rhetorical sleight of hand, sophistry which conflates mistreatment with collective benefit to justify racial wealth transfer and power mongering, all on behalf of the so called anti-racists.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#207

I feel like I must have been corrupted by the internet or something if the tweet in question is considered "grossly offensive". It certainly isn't nice , but 18 months supervision and 150 hours of community service? I don't even know how to put my bafflement into words here.

At first glance it may seem baffling, but if you see it from the “different culture different values” framework, you realize it’s just how people there want their society to conduct itself. It’s no different, from this perspective, to how baffling may seem cultures where burping loudly in the dinner table is not frowned upon, where people really value their personal space or not, and on and on.

In the US, I may get kicked out of a dinner for aggressive burping, and Twitter may ban me (and has banned me lol) for whatever reason they want. But nobody's facing legal penalties for it.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#208
There's something I find loathesome about this "Send a message" sentencing. What the judge has done is send a clear message, that he won't sentence you on the merits of the case but will sentence you to serve his own agenda. The only message this sends is that justice has failed. It's always completely transparent who exactly gets made an example of, and who gets off with a slap on the wrist. We'll spend months hunting down every rioter in the London riots throwing the book at them and putting up massive billboards in city centres trying to identify them, but when a prominent tory steal millions from the tax payer in dodgy PPE contracts? Well let's just write that off shall we. Because as we know, stealing some shoes from JD sports is much worse than stealing millions in the middle of a pandemic.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#209
post #147

I feel like I must have been corrupted by the internet or something if the tweet in question is considered "grossly offensive". It certainly isn't nice , but 18 months supervision and 150 hours of community service? I don't even know how to put my bafflement into words here.

It's just standard 'edgy' anti-english diatribe from a Scot. It's really nothing I don't hear regularly either out in public or from friend-adjacent people here. It's bad taste and trashy but that's kind of it. The problem is exactly that it's not an unusual attitude to hear. The difference is who it was aimed at. So for me the real issue is that we're cherry picking when we apply a very vague and loosely applied law…

The problem is exactly that the law shouldn't exist in the first place. Such laws violate the fundamental human right of free expression. Repeal the law and then you won't have to worry about uneven application.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was he dead then?

Yes? From the article: >The day after his death, Kelly, 36, tweeted “the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn.” Very crude, but he was celebrating his death, not calling for it.

> I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

--- Clarence Darrow (not, sadly, Mark Twain)

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