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Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

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81–90 of 119 posts

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#81

Is there an action I can take?

Yeah, you can stop supporting censorship.

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al are modern censorship platforms. I know that saying that violates liberal dogma, but it's true. You could probably even go so far as to say cancel culture is a censorship platform, particularly when it's misused.

The problem with censorship is that it stifles intellectualism. Intellectuals have always cut against the grain and said crazy shit in essays, much like I'm saying now. It's the sort of crazy shit that challenges your worldview, and it's natural to want to downvote, report, and have that content removed from your platform of choice.

But intellectualism is the only thing that can create a revolution.

And politically-correct censorship is getting all the intellectuals silenced (along with all the actual idiots).

Now, what's it mean to "stop supporting censorship?" Everybody agrees that, as private platforms, these companies have the right to moderate and remove any speech that they choose. The problem is that they're also seeking protections under Section 230, which says "Internet companies that don't moderate their content can't be responsible for their content." This creates a dilemma, especially when these companies have created an oligopoly surrounding online speech.

We need legislation that establishes the public forums and discussion areas on these providers as public utilities so that their users receive first amendment protections under the Constitution. This still allows them to remove content that violates the first amendment - like incitement - but would otherwise reclaim the internet as the world's largest mass free speech zone.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#83
post #81

Is there an action I can take?

Yeah, you can stop supporting censorship. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al are modern censorship platforms. I know that saying that violates liberal dogma, but it's true. You could probably even go so far as to say cancel culture is a censorship platform, particularly when it's misused. The problem with censorship is that it stifles intellectualism. Intellectuals have always cut against the grain and said crazy shit i…

>"Hate speech can't exist on the internet, because words on a computer screen cannot physically threaten you."

If this is an example of the "intellectualism" you're championing, then honestly nothing of value was lost.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#84

Before making an appeal to save foreign hackers, how about that one guy who exposed the total corruption of our western elite and is still rotting in prison for no moral wrongdoing. Where's my Free Julian Assange topic? HN is truly disgusting/compromised.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#85
post #73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I recommend to replace news surfing by perusing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events daily. I'm not quite there yet myself, I sometimes fall in the bad habit of news surfing for fun, but I found the wiki portal to be sufficient to keep reasonably informed.

While Wikipedia is great, that link is more like news “trivia” rather than anything substantially informative. There is absolutely no value to knowing every single accident, disaster, political incident, etc happening in every country around the world today.

But it does let you decide for yourself which have any importance to you without enticing you with clickbait headlines and images, or pre-filtering for what the particular company's editors or owners want you to see/think you want to see.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#86

I'm following the protests. I'm not sure why a cruel and sadistic minority can run a country, but it happens. I'm inclined to wonder why the US military, pulling out, didn't arm every woman and intellectual in the country. I won't forget his name.

because it wasn't a minority. The Iranian revolution had wide backing, the Shah was an absolute monarch who came to power in a coup. Women and students featured pretty prominently as well. Lots of the tactics today like women opposing the military directly were used back then too.

The revolution had a wide backing, but - importantly! - it was a revolution against the Shah, not in favour of Islamic fundamentalism. The hard-liners were merely the most prepared to step into the power vacuum that followed.

Calling it the "Islamic Revolution", as state-sponsored history books do, is crass revisionism.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did the US pull out of Iran?

1979 The prior government was installed by the US because the government before that wanted to audit BP - the oil company - and cant have that! The only citizens extreme enough to correct this happened to also be religious extremists and now they run the country ever since

> The only citizens extreme enough to correct this happened to also be religious extremists

That's not what happens; it's that in these neo-colonialist situations, all secular dissidents can be imprisoned and murdered (with US help), but religious dissidents can't safely be. So when the revolution succeeds, the religious take over. Same thing happened with Morsi in Egypt.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#88
post #77

I feel for these individuals who are suffering but let’s be clear. This attempt at overthrowing the regime in Iran with the help of the western media is probably not going to work. This is not the first time that it’s been attempted. If you’re willing to stand against your own government then you’re definitely brave but you will likely deal with the consequences no matter where you’re from. And that’s not something a…

We can't light the spark for them, but we can help fan the flames.

The last thing we should be doing is fanning flames in matters of life and death. Especially from the couch.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#89
post #83
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you can stop supporting censorship. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al are modern censorship platforms. I know that saying that violates liberal dogma, but it's true. You could probably even go so far as to say cancel culture is a censorship platform, particularly when it's misused. The problem with censorship is that it stifles intellectualism. Intellectuals have always cut against the grain and said crazy shit i…

>"Hate speech can't exist on the internet, because words on a computer screen cannot physically threaten you." If this is an example of the "intellectualism" you're championing, then honestly nothing of value was lost.

I edited to remove this, because it detracts from the point, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has specifically ruled that ALL hate speech legislation in the U.S. is unconstitutional.

Whether or not "nothing of value was lost" depends on how much you value the freedom of Iranians.

Personally, I only downvote content that violates the rules or is spam. Since a downvote is the first step to having content hidden, downvoting things just because you disagree with them makes you a censor. That's not a good thing to be, yet the companies offering downvotes know about and encourage this behavior. Don't you ever wonder why? State actors routinely use these tools to silence their critics, and yet you play ball.

Re: Tell HN: A hacker's life is in danger, your awareness may be life saving

#90
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add: 4. Don't talk only to "influencers" — also talk to your co-workers, your neighbours, your internet community. Raise awareness. 5. Don't just "talk to". Ask. Ask (exiled) Iranians what they think about the situation. I was traveling around in Iran for some months, and one big takeway for me was that there is a huge gap between the highly educated, incredibly friendly and open-minded population and their c…

> I still don't really understand the historical situation in which the mullahs were able to come to power. Easy. There was US sponsored coup against democratically elected government. It strengthened monarchy which was then seen as illegitimate by large parts of population. It also made the same parts of population dislike and distrust Americans. So when there was yet another coup, many people supported it. A lot of…

The problem is that the majority of people in Iran seem to support the islamists, that was the case since and before 1979.

I'm not trying to justify the coup but there is no way most people would consider the elections in 1952 to be democratic by modern standards. Mossadegh ignored half of the votes (primarily in rural areas), all the MPs elected in Kurdish areas were barred from taking their seats. They actually simply stopped counting when the government got a favorable result. It wasn't that different from the elections in Poland in 1947 or in any Eastern European country where socialist/communist parties 'won' the elections

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