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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

#431

Post by MattRix »

travisgriggs wrote: post #358
MattRix wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is quite different from most of other social networks out there. It’s much more immediate, which has a lot of benefits but also a lot of drawbacks. You might not like it yourself, but surely you can see the appeal?

Nope. 12 years ago, College Humor pretty much pegged it for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTN9We8unmU I still think it applies.

Oh come on, that video doesn’t capture it at all. First of all the people who follow you actually choose to follow you, AND they choose when to read twitter, which already changes the dynamic completely from the video.

On top of that, that video (and your view of Twitter) is based on what Twitter was like 12 years ago. These days it’s used by world leaders to make important declarations. It’s used by war correspondents. There are two-way discussions and twitter threads by experts in every field. Twitter has substance and importance now.

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

#432

Post by Serenacula »

thethimble wrote: post #417
bruhvinston wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't attribute it to fascism, because the concept works in any social group and was used throughout history. Even Mao said something like "Punish one, educate millions." I think the true conflict is about the dignity of the individual. Is it permissible to do a disproportionate amount of harm to one person to bring about consequences that further the goal? I'd say no. And that also includes bringing less than a…

I think the whole purpose of punishment is to discourage others from committing the same crime - not to punish an individual for the sake of retribution. If you think about it, retribution is pretty petty. It doesn’t accomplish anything and a civilized society should do away with it. The only reasonable basis for punishment then is the “educate millions” rationale above. To the extent that it is effective in establis…

If it actually worked, then maybe this would make sense, (though I believe the negative social effects of that approach FAR outweigh the dubious positive). But in a case like this, where it was precisely a LACK of thought that marked it as a crime, it honestly seems absurd to me. It's like prosecuting someone for tripping over their shoelaces in a supermarket.

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

#433

Post by rglover »

Beldin wrote: post #272
rglover wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why "hate speech" laws are so dangerous. It gives carte blanche to the government to go after anyone who says anything any one person (or the government itself) might find offensive.

> This is exactly why "hate speech" laws are so dangerous. If you think any single example of a law being applied in a manner that is technically defensible but (arguably) morally wrong should rule out an entire category of laws - you'd have no laws left. My guess is that most laws are occasionally abused. The trick is to distinguish between those laws that invite it and those that don't.

This one is a special case because it's 100% subjective (and ripe for political misuse). Laws are (and should be) objective.

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

#434

Post by dane-pgp »

vba616 wrote: post #429
dane-pgp wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nothing about being LGBT is "closer" to polygamy than existing marriage. Well, except that a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other. If the law still said that a man can only marry a woman, and a woman can only marry a man, then polygamy would be impossible without defining the number of people in a marriage. (I suppose that technically marriage could be def…

>a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other I never heard of that idea before, but I didn't really know anything about how it is in fact defined where it is legal and customary. I found something that describes the "Law of Marriage Act of 1971" of Tanzania: "Under Section 10(1) of the Act, a marriage is defined as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman, inten…

Thanks for researching that. I agree that, in practice, societies which allow polygamy probably have non-transitive marriages, and they could theoretically allow women to have two husbands so as not to give men more rights than women.

In an alternate reality where the US constitution happened to define marriage as between "a man and a woman", I could imagine activists pushing for states to allow polygamy so that two men or two women could "indirectly" marry, and pressuring the government to avoid the issues experienced in Tanzania by writing laws and policies which effectively treat the connection between the leaf nodes as equal to their connection to the root node when considering questions of divorce, taxation, inheritance, parenthood, etc.

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

#435

Post by Nasrudith »

teawrecks wrote: post #337
standardUser wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire concept of "setting an example" seems like a bit of fascism that has snuck its way into liberal democracy.

IANAL but it seems like "setting an example" is synonymous with "setting a precedent", which is a concept that seems fundamental to any legal system, even for civil cases. Companies press charges against every slight infringement on their trademarks because if they don't, they're implicitly setting a precedent that the behavior is ok. If you aren't actively setting precedents, then legally it's the same as saying, "w…

It doesn't set a precedent though, it is just arbitrary beating of a scapegoat. So called "tough on crime" laws are a bad kneejerk idea but at least they are relatively consistent compared to "fuck this person in particular because I feel like it" of arbitrary example setting. The whole point of precedent being seen as a positive in law is because it makes legal outcomes more predictable.

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

#436

Post by Nasrudith »

dane-pgp wrote: post #381
sofixa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emergencies happen every 2-3 years. The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago. True, with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on. And yes, the restrictions worked against that type of emergency - an airborne virus of pandemic proportions. It's a fallacy to claim that now that we know all that and the…

> with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on Shouldn't the null hypothesis be that a lack of animal habitats means fewer animals and less chance of zoonotic diseases emerging? I know it's tempting to blame all the world's problems on climate change, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate things and give climate change d…

It isn't so much the destruction of habitats in itself as human encroachment of rising density increasing the odds of both contact and exposure as well as transmission to larger human society. Ebola is a horrifying and contagious disease but it is limited in its spread to rural areas where it quickly burns itself out by being too lethal.

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

#437

Post by Nasrudith »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #328
mlindner wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well "white privledge" IS racist. So that's already the case. Just some people don't consider it that way.

Only if you're defining both terms to mean something different than in the contexts in which they normally are used. Privilege is concept that certain attributes a person has confer relative advantages in the ways they interact with the world and the outcomes thereof. Acknowledging that is not and cannot be bigotry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege Unless you're saying that white privilege is a conseque…

It is used as a racist rhetorical cudgel however, a "shut up your opinion doesn't matter because of your race" to mark someone as wrong without addressing their point at all.

Related the concept is so terribly named it seems meant to raise conflict. Privledge implies that it should be optional. It invites the previously mentioned abuse.

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

#438

Post by f7ebc20c97 »

krapp wrote: post #372
f7ebc20c97 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, buddy, we have this thing called the Internet now. It's a magical place where you can be anonymous and say whatever the fuck you want. The cat has left the bag. All restrictive speech laws do now is push dissidents underground into radicalizing echochambers like 4chan, while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that wha…

It's odd that you seem to find restricting speech and pushing dissidents underground into radicalizing echo chambers to be a problem, while not being at all concerned about those dissidents' capacity to radicalize orders of magnitude more people and form even bigger echo chambers when given free rein on the biggest platforms the internet has to offer. The entire point is to slow the ability of dissidents to spread th…

I find your views so illogical that I can only conclude that you're trolling.

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

#439

Post by LordDragonfang »

Nasrudith wrote: post #437
LordDragonfang wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you're defining both terms to mean something different than in the contexts in which they normally are used. Privilege is concept that certain attributes a person has confer relative advantages in the ways they interact with the world and the outcomes thereof. Acknowledging that is not and cannot be bigotry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege Unless you're saying that white privilege is a conseque…

It is used as a racist rhetorical cudgel however, a "shut up your opinion doesn't matter because of your race" to mark someone as wrong without addressing their point at all. Related the concept is so terribly named it seems meant to raise conflict. Privledge implies that it should be optional. It invites the previously mentioned abuse.

priv·i·lege

noun

a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

It's named perfectly fine, it's just people willfully misinterpret it.

As far as being a "racist rhetorical cudgel", I'm sorry if you've felt that way, but the majority of times I've seen it used, it's to point out that a person's privilege does work to invalidate their opinion on a matter.

Most often, this is when someone is claiming that some form of discrimination doesn't exist, or isn't that bad, or that it happens the same to everyone and the people complaining should just get over it.

Privilege affects one's lived experience in ways that it's difficult to notice, because you have only your own lived experience to rely on. As a man, I was privileged not to experience harassment, and like many men I thought my female friends were exaggerating how bad it was. Then I took a series of subway rides with a friend who was harassed every time, and later got personally harassed by a creepy coworker. My privilege blinded me to the reality of the situation.

The same thing applies to race. I see a lot of white people who never personally witness racism making these broad statements about how, for example, you should just do what the police say and you'll be fine, when they've never had a cop drag them out of a car for no reason because they look like someone who might deal drugs. Because of their differences in societal privilege, their lived experience of dealing with cops has been wildly different, and the people with privilege shouldn't be talking over the people pointing out issues.

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

#440

Post by Radim »

clejack wrote: post #401
Radim wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I explained my position and explicitly said I'm trying to understand yours – claiming a textbook example of evolution is not evolution is just weird. You come back with ad-hominems. And then add new wrong assumptions into the mix – why should I abhore religion? You can do better.

If the original comment said 'it would not be language evolving [normally]...' As opposed to 'organically' would you still have an issue understanding? Assume here that normal is a linguistic approximation to the mathematical idea of arithmetic mean. It could also be replaced with the word typically. In this context, your notion of a top down demand that blue means red or vice versa, is not 'organic' evolution, it's…

No, the original comment talks about people taking advantage of other people through "concerted, top-down effort to manipulate and coerce", calling that "outside of evolution".

I claim it is textbook evolution. An almost trivial observation.

Note that mine is not a moral judgement. I said nothing about whether I like such coercion or not, whether I think it benefits humanity in the long run or not, etc. Just that it's completely in line with natural evolution – not outside of it.

Typical, normal, organic… whatever you want to call it. Not necessarily desirable because such vocabulary is alien to evolutionary processes.

The only way you could call organisms taking advantage of other organisms to gain preferential access to resources "atypical", is if you consider humans outside of the natural world. Then statements like "top down" and "unnatural" would have substance.

I called that view theist (mystical may have been better), which decremental took strong umbrage to, for some reason. But again, a rather trivial observation IMO.

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