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US bars friends over Twitter joke

thesun.co.uk

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Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#151

Post by narag »

koningrobot wrote: post #110
drostie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the nice facts about history is that you will never see any group trash "liberty" and "freedom." Just about every dictatorial, authoritarian, or megalomaniacal political movement thinks it's pro-freedom. Communists? "The bourgeois have enslaved the proletariat, and we lock them up in the name of liberating the people." Nazis? "The actions of the Jewish Conspiracy at the end of the Great War have enslaved the G…

This is because of the nature of freedom. Freedom is to constraints as silence is to sound. Constraints are the things that positively exist, freedom only exists as the negative space. This is also why the concept of free will is so problematic: how free does will have to be to be called free will? Does it have to be free from the laws of physics? Does it have to be free from coercion? I think there are more concepts…

Freedom is indeed absence of coercion by others. What's wrong with that?

Edit: thanks for the clarification, koningrobot,

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#153

Post by mikeash »

buro9 wrote: post #120

Those guys are screwed now. Refusal of access means that they'll never get in on the visa waiver program and any employment in the future that might be with a multi-national will be limited by their ability to travel. They just won't be able to enter the USA without going through an arduously long process every time. I've been telling my friends for the longest time to moderate everything that they say on the interne…

After an experience like that, I doubt I'd ever want to return to the US. Makes me terribly ashamed of my country, for sure.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#154

Post by koningrobot »

narag wrote: post #151
koningrobot wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because of the nature of freedom. Freedom is to constraints as silence is to sound. Constraints are the things that positively exist, freedom only exists as the negative space. This is also why the concept of free will is so problematic: how free does will have to be to be called free will? Does it have to be free from the laws of physics? Does it have to be free from coercion? I think there are more concepts…

Freedom is indeed absence of coercion by others. What's wrong with that? Edit: thanks for the clarification, koningrobot,

Nothing, the problem is not with reality (of course :-). The problem is that most people seem to think about freedom as something positive. You can only create freedom for Joe by coercing Jane to not violate it. This enables the kind of scenario that the parent to my original comment describes.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#156

Post by antidaily »

drats wrote: post #26

Has anyone done a study of how much this is damaging the tourism industry in the USA? I have 1001 places I want to go, but all those in the USA shifted down a lot lower on the list after they started a lot of the airport security/TSA measures. Airport security stuff annoys me to no end in other places too because half of them, or more than half, seem to literally be standing around doing nothing and the other half do…

It's bad everywhere I've been. Europe has basically the same security measures. I was just through Schipul and Zurich.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#157

Post by Splines »

buro9 wrote: post #137
mintplant wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/137/

Someone downvoted you, so have an upvote. I wholeheartedly agree with that XKCD comic. However the thing is... speaking openly and care free, accepting the consequences of your actions into the future.... those are things that you need to know you're doing. That is: If you put your foot in it because you hold beliefs about the freedom of expression, then you do so knowingly. If you put your foot in it because you bel…

This debate brings to mind this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/372/defecting_by_accident_a_flaw_com...

Interesting read, thanks for that.

Brings to mind forum flamewars and the like. I wonder how a community would evolve if the default post were a private reply, instead of a public one, or if public replies were throttled in some manner?

Also, sometimes I feel that working in a stack-ranked group encourages defecting behaviour.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#158

Post by jordan0day »

koningrobot wrote: post #110
drostie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the nice facts about history is that you will never see any group trash "liberty" and "freedom." Just about every dictatorial, authoritarian, or megalomaniacal political movement thinks it's pro-freedom. Communists? "The bourgeois have enslaved the proletariat, and we lock them up in the name of liberating the people." Nazis? "The actions of the Jewish Conspiracy at the end of the Great War have enslaved the G…

This is because of the nature of freedom. Freedom is to constraints as silence is to sound. Constraints are the things that positively exist, freedom only exists as the negative space. This is also why the concept of free will is so problematic: how free does will have to be to be called free will? Does it have to be free from the laws of physics? Does it have to be free from coercion? I think there are more concepts…

I think your first sentence is really interesting & insightful, kind of treating "true" freedom as a sort of absolute zero -- that is, a never-actually-reachable ideal.

I feel like free will doesn't have much to do with the kind of freedom we're talking about, though. If some other human being (or group) has the ability to make you do something you don't want to do, that's a problem of freedom, not free will. (After all, you could decide not to do that thing and suffer the consequences).

Free will is much more about things that you have no ability whatsoever to actually make that decision in the first place, whether because of the manipulative hand of some supernatural force, or via some radical rationalist explanation of decision making.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#159

Post by maaku »

eneveu wrote: post #130
Vivtek wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say that from the inside, we don't look all that attractive any more, either. Do us a favor and boycott us loudly - money's the only thing our government actually understands.

If this gives you any solace, I'm planning to boycott the US for the near future. Being French, I've always wanted to visit the US, and I'd love to come work / build a startup in the Silicon Valley. I'm really interested in American culture: I read mostly american books, and hang out on various English communities (reddit, HN, ...). But, over the last few years, I've been following closely the various US policies (TS…

Yeah don't pay too much attention to everything you read online. I mean it's all true--as well as annoying and frightening--but such politics and invasions of privacy are confined to a small aspect of a much, much larger, diverse, and interesting society. It's not like TSA agents are raiding our private homes, or quizzing us on the way to and from work (well, unless your work is of the traveling variety).

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#160

Post by sambeau »

tomelders wrote: post #28
babarock wrote: post #18

I am not really familiar with the Sun, but people here on HN seem to dismiss the story as a hoax because it's featured on the this website/newspaper. Can anyone please clarify what's its reputation and why should it be mistrusted? Thanks.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the Sun makes stuff up... but they certainly don't question a "good story" as much as they should and seem to print almost everything at face value. It's the kind of paper that has sensationalist headlines about pederasts on the front page, topless pics of barely legal girls on page 3 and no sense of irony. This particular article falls into the Jingoism style articles that the Sun…

"I wouldn't go as far as to say that the Sun makes stuff up…"

The Leveson enquiry has already shown that they have done, regularly.

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