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Protect me from what I want

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Re: Protect me from what I want

#31

Post by wallfacer120 »

californiadreem wrote: post #27

Ah, the halcyon days of thrusting off the shackles of capitalism to have freedom in a decentralized digital environment where a new Social Contract is being negotiated! There's no way our idealism will feed a new class of nouveau riche that will sacrifice community ideals for profit. Or to be more clear, Google ("Don't Be Evil") was founded in the same year that John Perry Barlow published A Declaration of the Indepe…

i wonder if there's a single ill in the world that you don't lay at the feet of "corporations."

Re: Protect me from what I want

#32

Post by googlryas »

HPsquared wrote: post #26
trillic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a paradox, but a tolerant society does not tolerate intolerance.

It's a logical contradiction. There seems to be some overloading of the word "tolerance".

It's not, it is just a term in common usage taken to the extreme in an attempt to be clever, in contravention of all conversational norms. I don't think there is any definition of tolerance that is mathematically sound and absolute.

It would be like saying "a peaceful person would never punch someone in the nose". But what if you needed to punch someone in the nose because they were trying to kill you for no reason? That doesn't mean peaceful people don't exist, or that peaceful people need to let random people murder them. It just means that the determination of peacefulness is contextual.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#33

Post by wallfacer120 »

ska wrote: post #21
nostromo wrote: post #8

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…

> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality. "quality" here meaning accurac…

If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#34

Post by californiadreem »

wallfacer120 wrote: post #31
californiadreem wrote: post #27

Ah, the halcyon days of thrusting off the shackles of capitalism to have freedom in a decentralized digital environment where a new Social Contract is being negotiated! There's no way our idealism will feed a new class of nouveau riche that will sacrifice community ideals for profit. Or to be more clear, Google ("Don't Be Evil") was founded in the same year that John Perry Barlow published A Declaration of the Indepe…

i wonder if there's a single ill in the world that you don't lay at the feet of "corporations."

Commenting on the naïveté of Mastodon users endlessly repeating the history of modernity is a strange way to affirm any position regarding corporations, but your unsolicited reply is pretty clear that you like them.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#35

Post by bitwize »

ska wrote: post #22
nostromo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact logic used by Joseph McCarthy, and I think it's safe to say that was a failed experiment. > Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted. This is actually how you get Nazis. You know, the real ones that existed before the internet. Not 4chan weebs trolling boomers online, but the ones that would jail or kill you for having…

That seems a-historical. The way you get the real nazis is by not acting soon enough when they target/vilify/'other' marginalized groups, or attempting to get a foothold in political institutions.

It is ahistorical. Germany outlawed Nazi ideology and went 80 years without renazifying; the danger of such was very real after WWII. Marcuse, a German Jew, was considering the real, immediate, terrifying problem of how to prevent another Holocaust.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#36

Post by wallfacer120 »

bitwize wrote: post #15
nostromo wrote: post #8

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…

Read Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" to see why this is the case: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speec…

No post body was provided.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#37

Post by jshen »

wallfacer120 wrote: post #33
ska wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality. "quality" here meaning accurac…

If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.

Or maybe we’re all in filter bubbles, including you.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#38

Post by wallfacer120 »

compiskey wrote: post #16

What criteria are being used to determine this is what we want? People also want heroin and we use literal impact on society to curtail use. Freedom of reach is what we’re talking about limiting; right and left seem to both demand they have access to my beliefs, and leverage big corp as a tool to hide their political agenda to that effect as government social programs are accountable to public oversight. I mean I’m p…

> What criteria are being used to determine this is what we want?

The fact that it's what people choose. This isn't difficult.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#39

Post by eatonphil »

Even if Mastodon doesn't want to implement or play with "algorithms" (ignoring as is correctly pointed out that everything is/has an algorithm), all Mastodon content is ActivityPub content, right? So someone can put together a Mastodon alternative that supports pluggable algorithms, no? No need to convince the Mastodon devs who don't want this sort of thing.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#40

Post by nostromo »

bitwize wrote: post #35
ska wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a-historical. The way you get the real nazis is by not acting soon enough when they target/vilify/'other' marginalized groups, or attempting to get a foothold in political institutions.

It is ahistorical. Germany outlawed Nazi ideology and went 80 years without renazifying; the danger of such was very real after WWII. Marcuse, a German Jew, was considering the real, immediate, terrifying problem of how to prevent another Holocaust.

You're cherry picking.

Look at Joseph McCarthy and see a counter-example. He used the exact same logic: to prevent a Soviet-style totalitarian government in the US, we had to be intolerant of everyone left of mainstream Democrats.

It destroyed many peoples' lives, most of who were not at all sympathetic to Soviet-style communism.

Similar to your example, we could also argue that McCarthy was indeed effective at preventing Soviet-style communism in America (since the US still has free speech and there has not been another holocaust). But in both cases we don't have convincing evidence that suppressing speech was actually helpful.

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