Rotten Dot Com • Hacker News Board

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#131

Post by noduerme » Tue, May 12, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

like_any_other wrote: post #113

noduerme wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's quite true, either. Parent poster said it was amazing they were still sane. Other people might not be sane, depending on what they were exposed to at an early age. And watching something on video is different than seeing it happen in front of you, which is also different from having it happen to you ...and I understand the impulse to say that we're not a victim of anything just because we saw som…

This kind of lukewarm attitude is why every Western country is speedrunning to become China. There are powerful interests turning your country into a panopticon cage, and the best you can do is "well as long as they give a good excuse, I guess it's okay"??

I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, democratic society, choosing to enforce social norms at times through contested law and legal wrangling in courts is remotely the same thing as a totalitarian state issuing a dictat. And I also don't think that the primary way to distinguish our system of governance from a dictatorahip would be to legalize everything imaginable.

This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#132

Post by like_any_other » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #131

like_any_other wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of lukewarm attitude is why every Western country is speedrunning to become China. There are powerful interests turning your country into a panopticon cage, and the best you can do is "well as long as they give a good excuse, I guess it's okay"??

I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, d…

Your proposal was red-flag laws for visiting the wrong website, or just censoring them entirely [0]. That's not "as close to maximum freedom without being anarchy". That's the opposite.

[0] "Some things should be hard to access. Accessing some things should also be taken as a red flag that you are not OK. The rest of the people around you have a right to their security as much as, or more than, you have a right to your freedom to view illicit information."

Re: Rotten Dot Com

#133

Post by lostmsu » Tue, May 12, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

virgildotcodes wrote: post #82

lostmsu wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter. And not just "correlates".

lol You want evidence that rises to the level of establishing "causality" in consideration of a natural experiment that is being run across all of humanity simultaneously? What populations are protected from violent media? How would you even disentangle all the countless confounding factors? The arguments here are well-worn by the industries that peddle in these types of media, with obvious incentives, and obvious in…

Water flows, until it's ice. I imagine it was very hard to get freezing temperatures in Singapore.

Your argument has no strong data to back it up.