Live data from Hacker News

Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

arstechnica.com

551–560 of 598 posts

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when I was in first grade my teacher got married, showed us pictures of the wedding, and changed her last name.

Teachers are service providers. They should have no deeper emotional bond with their students than the cashier at McDonald's has with their regular customers. Students are not friends. While the isolated story of your teacher sharing her wedding pictures is not a big ordeal, it shows an underlying problem of poor boundaries. We have a pervasive problem, at least in the US, of teacher with poor mental health and poor…

You've got to be the most unhinged person I've ever seen write on these forums. Congratulations.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was relatively common in school to discuss what happened over breaks, weekends, etc. to build conversation skills. Also, almost every k12 teacher I had would prepare a slideshow about themselves to present on the first day of class along with the syllabus. After all, you're spending a lot of time in that classroom as a k12 student. Many teachers also have pictures of their family on their desks, as one might in th…

> Also, almost every k12 teacher I had would prepare a slideshow about themselves to present on the first day of class along with the syllabus This is pretty different from coming to school and telling 7yos about the sex party you went to this weekend and which gender you were identifying as when you went. This is the reality some parents are trying to prevent when they say some American teachers are taking their fre…

> This is pretty different from coming to school and telling 7yos about the sex party you went to this weekend and which gender you were identifying as when you went.

That sounds extremely specific. Do you have a source? Because I tend to agree, if somebody told my kid shit like that I'd also want them fired too.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#553
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am wondering what the fuck happened to freedom. Both the right and left have become supremely prescriptive in their own ways. I want stronger local government. I have no way of trusting any of these assholes at the federal and state level. Why do they get to set standards for schools, infrastructure funding, or social policy? We have grid lock in part because there are different opinions on what's best. So…

Reading NextDoor completely disabused me of any notion that smaller government is better. It seems like everyone involved in local politics is an absolute crank. You can see this clearly in New Hampshire were the goofy libertarians who moved from other states gang up to defund public schools. At least with the Feds they are under a constant microscope. The most heinous corrupt shit in America almost always happens at…

And yet I find that what triggers the worst attitudes on Nextdoor is any discussion related to national politics.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#554
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am wondering what the fuck happened to freedom. Both the right and left have become supremely prescriptive in their own ways. I want stronger local government. I have no way of trusting any of these assholes at the federal and state level. Why do they get to set standards for schools, infrastructure funding, or social policy? We have grid lock in part because there are different opinions on what's best. So…

> I want stronger local government. Please, no. I get the rationale. It's the local knowledge problem, combined with state/federal being more likely to be populists. But local government irrecoverably sucks for systemic reasons that I've just started to notice. With local governance there is no way to resolve dilemma like incentives that cause negative sum decision making, i.e. locally good but globally bad policies.…

I would argue that "good federal governance" is outright impossible in a country where, at any given point, ~half of the population will hate whatever that government does.

Now you can argue that it's not actually half, and so long as it's less than that, a functioning democracy would allow you to steamroll over them. However, once enough people in a democracy consider it illegitimate, it stops functioning really fast.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#555
post #294
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am wondering what the fuck happened to freedom. Both the right and left have become supremely prescriptive in their own ways. I want stronger local government. I have no way of trusting any of these assholes at the federal and state level. Why do they get to set standards for schools, infrastructure funding, or social policy? We have grid lock in part because there are different opinions on what's best. So…

No. Just go attend a school board meeting, and even run for school board. If you think only half your local citizens are kooks, consider yourself lucky. When standards are left up to them you get things the Lost Cause myth taught in school for 75 years. County school boards have the ability to strip history books from content they simply don't want taught, because it's politically inconvenient knowledge. How else are…

Those "local citizens" are not some kind of different species from Americans at large - they also vote in state and national elections. So what makes the governments produced by the latter better?

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pro book banning in libraries I've seen tons of recent support for censorship from ideas and speech the (left? I wouldn't consider it actually left) doesn't like. Then you have conservatives moving against these books that promote woke religion and suddenly these same people are very pro free speech.

>I've seen tons of recent support for censorship from ideas and speech the (left? I wouldn't consider it actually left) doesn't like. The left has always been pro-censorship: Stalin and Mao, for instance, set up societies with lots of censorship. The right is also pro-censorship: think Hitler, or any religious conservatives for that matter.

Authoritarians have always been pro-censorship. Libertarians have always been anti-censorship.

Both exist on either end of the ideological spectrum. Right-wing authoritarianism is a thing, and so is left-wing libertarianism.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems to be centered on politics/candidates, which IMO is the wrong motivation. Because political censorship is the worst censorship (you might argue that all censorship is political.) It's like how political prisoners are the easiest sign a place is a dictatorship. If the powerful are censoring the political process, there are no means to make any of the powerful less powerful. It becomes self-perpetuating.

There is absolutely nothing stopping conservatives from establishing their own social media platform. Conservatives love “the free market” as long as it is working for them. Whose fault is it that Truth Social is an abysmal failure?

I don't care if conservatives are hypocrites on this. What really matters is that if they can get steamrolled by private actors operating as a censorship cartel, then so can everyone else.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ones which 1. Are complained about by a parent and 2. Are obscene Note that 2 is open to interpretation, so this justification has been used to ban classics like beloved and the kite runner, as school librarians can face criminal penalties if they don't do what (a single) parent asks.

>> Note that 2 is open to interpretation The same is true for federal law. From https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/obscenity : "Federal law strictly prohibits the distribution of obscene matter to minors. Any transfer or attempt to transfer such material to a minor under the age of 16, including over the Internet, is punishable under federal law." Is that book banning? Do you think federal laws against providing p…

The important thing is how the law is interpreted. In Florida, "Obscene" is being interpreted (and in some cases written into statute) as far more than just pornagraphic, with the express intent that people like you can motte-bailey like this and claim that it's "just" banning pornography, when it isn't.

For example, the graphic novel "Gender Queer" has been banned under the broad brush of "pornography" in Florida, when it's educational and certainly not intended to grant anyone sexual satisfaction. The key thing is that cis- and hetero-normative "obscenity", like an anatomy textbook is likely acceptable, but the same images in a book that described queerness would not be.

Specifically, to use your source, none of the books banned in Florida would pass the Miller test as all of them taken as a whole, posses "serious artistic, political, or scientific value", and few are "prurient" in nature, nor do they describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way.

To use the examples from above, Kite Runner and Beloved are both critically acclaimed, award-winning novels, to claim they have no artistic merit is...simply wrong.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want stronger local government. Please, no. I get the rationale. It's the local knowledge problem, combined with state/federal being more likely to be populists. But local government irrecoverably sucks for systemic reasons that I've just started to notice. With local governance there is no way to resolve dilemma like incentives that cause negative sum decision making, i.e. locally good but globally bad policies.…

I would argue that "good federal governance" is outright impossible in a country where, at any given point, ~half of the population will hate whatever that government does. Now you can argue that it's not actually half, and so long as it's less than that, a functioning democracy would allow you to steamroll over them. However, once enough people in a democracy consider it illegitimate, it stops functioning really fas…

You don't avoid this by reducing federal scope and giving it to local. Say you achieve that goal, and then a populist gets in anyway. What happens then? Obviously they increase the scope, as all populists have done once they achieved power. The way you avoid this altogether is by creating good material conditions for people. One way you create good material conditions is by removing corrupt, vampiric local governments that contribute the opposite. Local governments are creating the conditions for populism by causing negative sum policies to add up to global tragedy.

Also, goodness isn't a binary switch, and goodness needs to be compared with the alternative.

I'd add that reducing local government doesn't mean that federal government has to be large and bloated. I still want a lean federal government.

I can also never pin down exactly what advocates of larger local government actually want. What powers and capabilities, specifically, should be removed from federal and done by local?

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#560
post #516
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, that doesn't seem to run counter to the grandparents comments?

I’m talking about this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948728

Those two seem unrelated? You can have lynching of blacks as a method of control while also having lynching being extrajudicial punishment for whites?
Post reply on HN