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Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

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Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#431

Post by ethanbond »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #392
ethanbond wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares who does it? Well, ermmm, the entire legal construct of free speech cares? The government requiring Person A to platform Person B’s speech is a violation of person A’s rights.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v.... It's not that simple.

Did you read what the actual ruling held? This wasn't a 1st Amendment case.

---

In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:

* under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers

* under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights

This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.

(Emphasis mine)

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#432

Post by Karunamon »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #300
sejje wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say for free, I don't think anything is or should be free. We have "the phone company" equivalent on the internet (registrars and hosts) denying access to ideologies they don't approve of. If you don't think that's denying speech, then let's just agree to disagree.

the equivalent is an IP address. having said that, in 2022 with a fiber connection and a 200$ NAS (with a very user friendly web interface) you can host a DNS, a web server, a WordPress instance, a mail server, a mastodon instance and serve a lot of content. that's what decentralized internet is all about.

…and anybody who dislikes that speech can order a botnet to make your connection unusable, and it is very unlikely that the perpetrators will ever be caught.

Going back to the Cloudflare example, the organizers of that campaign did not want Cloudflare to withdraw service because they thought that this would take the site down, they wanted them to withdraw service because this would make them vulnerable to criminal activity (DDOS). And, sure enough, that is exactly what has happened.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#433

Post by causality0 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #402
causality0 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punishing people for "free speech" is a complex topic not a binary decision. Plenty of hateful speech that threatens or harasses could already be deemed a crime if its specific enough. Certainly, which is why I used the specific example of "saying racist things on the internet". It isn't a threat or harassment to tweet about how "those filthy stinking Norwegians keep sneaking into our country on reindeer-back and we…

If they aren't actually sneaking into your country on reindeer-back and you are just trying to stir up hate for blonds I have no problem with you being punished for inciting hate.

See? You are the answer to Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?

I said a significant fraction of the HN user base shares your opinion and user D23 said he didn't understand how anyone could think that was true. Well, Q.E.D.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#434

Post by salawat »

gonehome wrote: post #209
cies wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance. Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you? If your expression is promoting violence, especially violence against a vulnerable group (children, minorities, I'd say even animals), I'm okay with drawing up laws against such things. Thereby reducing freedom of expression. Advertising for instance. If every building/land owner or municipality could…

The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals. People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position. The free speech principle is about setting the bar such that everyone agrees on the…

>Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech.

Damnit, companies should have no recognized "right to speech". Citizen's United is a bloody scourge. A corporation is a vehicle for risk distribution, and should have never been allowed to become anything more. Theoment we started inferring rights to legal fictions we started going stark raving mad.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#435

Post by eyelidlessness »

WalterBright wrote: post #354
benreesman wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I take your point but I think it’s at least debatable. Bell Labs via sanctioned, de-facto subsidized monopoly gave us everything from the transistor to the laser to Unix (you know the list, some readers might not). DoD/ARPA/DARPA funding was responsible for countless innovations, notable to this readership TCP/IP etc. (again, you know the list probably better than I do). Public funding for innovation demonstrably…

> Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot. > arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth The only way that wealth would have grown is if that investment paid off in providing goods and services that the rest of the country preferred to buy, and…

> Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot.

Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust. To the extent the raised standard of living has been anything remotely like equitable, anyway. To wit:

> For example, people like to rag on Amazon, but Amazon's products and services has personally benefited me greatly. Shopping online saves me a ton of time, and wear and tear on my car.

That’s great, for you. And the conditions their warehouse workers experience more closely resemble the conditions of workers in similar jobs a century ago, than the conditions of equivalent jobs which no longer exist many places Amazon operates warehouses.

In the same time that this more-free market has been allowed to grow such behemoths, wealth and income disparity have ballooned incredibly. To that point, if I said something like this to many family members and several friends:

> As for equity portfolios, anyone in America can invest in equities. Etrade, Robinhood, etc., have done a great job democratizing investing. Want a piece of the action? Buy some equities.

They’d either laugh out loud or stop speaking to me. Buy some equities with… what? They’re struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Given the circumstances, where I’ve taken over mortgage payments for my parents so they can have a home and where there’s hospital bills much larger than the value of the house, I suspect some of them would disown me for being so callous.

I sincerely am glad that you’re enjoying the benefits of the free market such as it is. But you shouldn’t be under the illusion that it’s anywhere near as available to others as you seem to think.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#436

Post by peoplefromibiza »

Karunamon wrote: post #432
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the equivalent is an IP address. having said that, in 2022 with a fiber connection and a 200$ NAS (with a very user friendly web interface) you can host a DNS, a web server, a WordPress instance, a mail server, a mastodon instance and serve a lot of content. that's what decentralized internet is all about.

…and anybody who dislikes that speech can order a botnet to make your connection unusable, and it is very unlikely that the perpetrators will ever be caught. Going back to the Cloudflare example, the organizers of that campaign did not want Cloudflare to withdraw service because they thought that this would take the site down, they wanted them to withdraw service because this would make them vulnerable to criminal ac…

I mean, if people hate your speech so much that they are willing to spend resources to silent you, you have to consider how much you value your freedom of speech.

because a private company surely don't value it as much as you do and won't protect you especially if what you say ends up in a DDOS attempt for them.

mainly because they don't have to.

your freedoms are your responsibility.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#437

Post by abathur »

sejje wrote: post #289
abathur wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a substitution, here. The GP's statement is still roughly correct: approximately anyone can use the internet to communicate. Everyone using other people's infrastructure to communicate on the internet is to some degree subject to content restrictions.

"The internet" has "other people's infrastructure" built in to its very fabric. You cannot have the internet without other people's infrastructure, whether in 1995 or 2022.

Fiddling with semantics in order to ignore the point:

Approximately everyone can use it to communicate--they just can't use it to communicate every thing.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#438

Post by peoplefromibiza »

sejje wrote: post #407
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the equivalent is an IP address. having said that, in 2022 with a fiber connection and a 200$ NAS (with a very user friendly web interface) you can host a DNS, a web server, a WordPress instance, a mail server, a mastodon instance and serve a lot of content. that's what decentralized internet is all about.

I agree in theory an IP address is the equivalent, but I still think registrars denying domains to particular groups based on ideologies is a freedom of speech issue. Way off on a tangent here, but do you happen to recommend a particular NAS? I'm in the market.

whatever hardware you can find and Freenas (Truenas core now).

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#439

Post by salawat »

pstuart wrote: post #309
cies wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance. Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you? If your expression is promoting violence, especially violence against a vulnerable group (children, minorities, I'd say even animals), I'm okay with drawing up laws against such things. Thereby reducing freedom of expression. Advertising for instance. If every building/land owner or municipality could…

I'm kind of with you, specifically on the intolerance of intolerance. But actually making it illegal is worrisome -- because that goes both ways (cue "religious freedom"). The best compromise today seems to be deplatforming, which in a sense is nothing new as we've long had the saying "power of the press belongs to those that own it". The rabid hate speech of the right has done serious damage to the fabric of this co…

>power of the press belongs to those that own it

The problem is, you're advocating for essentially the weaponization of the middle box. Networking works, because everyone in the middle cooperates to get messages from A to B. No one is wealthy enough to individually backbone their own network connection beyond much more than a local municipality.

To hell with that in short. The General Purpose computer combined with desktop publishing and internetworking puts the power of the press in everyone's hands. The problem is, some groups don't agree with other group's use of it, and want to pressure everyone else to cut off unpopular group's access to the technologically facilitated medium.

These people are nothing short than the most brazen tyrants of our age, and should be resisted at every turn. We need nothing new to deal with horrible people than for our currently equipped LE edifice to do their damned jobs. We have process. It should be followed. This short circuiting through mob pressure to deplatform is nothing more than pulling the plug on the fundaments of the civilization that bore us to the point we're at.

Re: Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

#440

Post by wyager »

timdev2 wrote: post #426
wyager wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> limitations on state censorship That's still what we're talking about. The state has just gotten better at outsourcing the work, so people who aren't paying close attention don't even recognize it as such. Hence my invocation of "the cathedral", as opposed to narrowly "the government".

I read "cathedral" as being exclusive of the state. Reading it as inclusive confuses me even more, I think. If the state outsourcing censorship, then the state alone is culpable. I think we can have some legitimate and interesting arguments about where the line ought to be drawn. For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance about content moderation, is it (or ought it be) legal for the state to provi…

"Cathedral" is cf "The Cathedral and The Bazaar".

> For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance

This is not how it happens. There are many mechanisms for the cathedral to e.g. influence discourse on twitter. None of them involve Twitter overtly and formally asking the government for advice.

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