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Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

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Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#71

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Maybe they'll do a report on the Free Liberty USA passing a law to put Tiktok censoring in their hands.

I wonder if people realize they've been conditioned into nationalists or if the technology facilitating propaganda is so effective that they don't recognize the rewards and punishments to the amplified talking points they encounter online for what they are.

How often does anyone say, "I support censoring China to protect big tech interests and out of fear of what they will learn using methods of data collection that we pioneered and use, but here is why I think that's necessary..." in any discourse on TikTok? And why would they verbalize that when they can just do what worked on them - downvoting until you learn to adopt the right patterns or go away?

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you lying or misinformed? He didn't get 3 years in prison for telling people to go out and protest, he told people to “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”. Setting fire to a building full of people isn't a protest, it's attempted murder. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/northampton-bbc-...

They always try to be vague when the truth is difficult to defend.

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#73
post #64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A liberal prohibition on violent speech is an aspirational privilege of a people who have solved all their social problems to such a degree that the credible threat of violence is never necessary for justice or progress. Or an aspirational privilege of an aristocracy who have solved all of their material problems at the expense of everybody else, and demand militant proactive protection of their hoard and their perso…

I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). Whether it was suffrage or labor rights, the greatest power for violence was always with the status quo and not with those protesting. Often violence has brought about change in perception opposite to its intent. This was true in civil rights, gay rights, antiwar, and labor moveme…

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Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas. The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas. But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread o…

The new war makes it so you can post anything you want but the algorithm will make sure nobody ever sees it. They give you a megaphone but they also put you in digital Antarctica without a soul around. I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then…

I agree. But to answer your question

> Why do we need platforms?

I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms.

The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#75
post #54

I've been thinking a lot recently about where I would personally draw the line on what sorts of speech should be criminal. If someone publicly called for specific violence (ex: "let's all meet at Joe's house to burn it down—I'll bring the lighter") that feels to me like the sort of thing that would be useful to do something about instead of waiting for the actual crime to be committed. But publicly stating that you s…

A liberal prohibition on violent speech is an aspirational privilege of a people who have solved all their social problems to such a degree that the credible threat of violence is never necessary for justice or progress. Or an aspirational privilege of an aristocracy who have solved all of their material problems at the expense of everybody else, and demand militant proactive protection of their hoard and their perso…

>In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress

Even in very similar Anglosphere cultures like Britain, a liberal constitutional monarchy, all of that had been achieved, even earlier in many cases, without the overt glorification of violence as a normal part of the political process.

In fact liberal monarchies, even before they were democratic had done a pretty good job of delivering steady progress without being dogmatic on speech or even justifying violent revolution. Just assuming for a second we agree on a broad notion of progress if you draw the US on a graph next to her a little bit less rebellious peers I don't think it's that clear that the violence was necessary.

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#77
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you visit a Pro North Korea/ISIS/Iran website? You are kind of paying/circumventing sanctions with potential ad revenue.

>Can you visit a Pro North Korea/ISIS/Iran website? How about the website for Iran's supreme leader[1], with headlines like "ZIONIST REGIME FACES SEVERE CONSEQUENCES FOR ITS ACTIONS"? It's not blocked in the US. [1] https://www.leader.ir/en

The only thing sensationalist about that headline is "severe consequences"- it is absolutely a Zionist regime though, not even a debatable point.

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#78
post #2

And if you dare to use Twitter in Brazil, you will be fined a year's salary. ... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse

Yet there is bipartisan action to ban TikTok in the US. We have effectively banned the import of Chinese electric vehicles. Does that make us authoritarian?

I'm always surprised why I constantly see messages downvoted (not only here), just because they feel unconvenient for the bubble?!

Imho you should all stop that. It's too simple. It doesn't really increase credibility.

Why not start dealing with actual discussions there, and maybe have a little less "everything was already said; just not yet by everyone" discussions in other places?!

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#79
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on an organisation that does anti-corruption reporting. We have some software for that and the search box has "Vladimir Putin, TeliaSonera" as a placeholder example. Few months back a new hire quit on his second day when he saw that, because he was afraid he might get into trouble since he has to regularly travel to Russia (he was from, eh, somewhere in Eastern Europe or the Balkans or some such – I forgot). W…

Unfortunately his concerns are all too reasonable. Here's a recent case where Putin's people had a dual Russian-American citizen arrested while visiting her family, and then slapped with a 12-year jail term for the crime of donating $51 to a humanitarian charity (from within the US): https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2024/08/15/us-russ... While small, the chance of getting caught up in these shenanigans is fa…

"Humanitarian" charity is not exactly a fitting description of the organization she donated to (though I agree that the sentence is out of proportion). To flip this around: imagine that someone was going through US customs and border clearance, and it became known that they donated money towards Russian FPV drones that hit Ukraine. Would you support giving this person a jail term or not? Now imagine that this person is a US citizen. Does that change your answer?

Re: Iranian writer is sentenced to 12 years after tweeting a dot at supreme leader

#80
I am sure Persia is not a great place to live. But I just cant trust sources like this to not twist and contort things.

And I mean at the end of the day they murder a lot less children than other regimes in the area, so it's quantifiably less evil than some middle eastern countries.

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