811–820 of 933 posts
The truth is, ideas are less like market goods than they are like viruses. And dangerous ideas, like viruses, need to be suppressed before they can spread.
I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…
Our common, absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment dates only to the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling in 1969. If we didn't have conservative presidents unbalancing the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative justices, we might have a Supreme Court willing to re-evaluate the First Amendment's applicability in light of widespread hate speech. But alas, this Is Trump's America...
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> Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free speech alone. Why do people think this? A few selected anecdotes and some tiny numbers (1000 people liking a post talking about covid causing 5G? Tiny numbers)? What is the end-game that is so feared? If the people as a whole can't be trusted to make sensible decisi…
The end game that is feared is the fall of civilization mirroring the collapse of the western roman empire, and it’s quite possible in a thousand years people will peg the collapse of our civilization as having started around 1950 or so. With global climate disasters and large chunks of the population prone to tribal superstition looming, nearly everyone being spoonfed technology they don’t begin to understand much l…
The pessimist (or realist) in me tends to agree, that a fundamental shift occurred after the second world war. What exactly is the nature of this change is hard to say - something about the dominant ideology of the ruling class, the relationship of wealth, business, politics and governance - maybe.
At the same time, this period has been one of the greatest maturing and flowering of our collective global civilization. Not to go all Pinker ¹, but the optimist side of me wants to believe that the cultural and technological advances we've made have enough momentum to overcome the negative tendencies that are possibly bringing us to the brink of collapse.
¹ https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/international-poverty-line-ip...
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For curating videos for one's own children, if the catalog isn't changing too often, you might be able to `youtube-dl` the videos, and put the files on kids' devices or your home media device/appliance. I've been using `youtube-dl` successfully for lecture videos on my TV appliance (supposedly to watch while using the stationary bike). An example command line is in a script that grabs the videos from a conference: ht…
That doesn't work. My kids are literally being assigned to watch specific YouTube videos on their Chromebooks and then answer questions as part of the ridiculous "distance learning" nonsense that the school district came up with. I can't review and approve each video. And downloaded videos won't be available on Chromebooks.
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The large amounts of misinformation also threatens debate, does it not? Most misinformation and conspiracy theories are not looking for proper debate and often times result to logical fallacies and falsehoods to prove their point. Thus, proper debate is drowned out. By and large I don't think debate is threatened. We have to draw a pragmatic line somewhere, otherwise we will waste time debating if the earth is flat a…
I don't know if conspiracies do that much harm to debate. They're quite the fringe topic. Misinformation, yes, but classifying misinformation (in its not-so-obvious forms) is a hard problem. So while I agree there needs to be a line, I also think that in enforcing a ban on misinformation we will necessarily end up limiting debate. The line should stay at something like inciting violence.
> The line should stay at something like inciting violence.
The government line should definitely stay there. But private corporations should be free to push any agenda that they like.
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The first global body was the League of Nations, if you exclude entities like the British Empire from the perspective of their colonies. When exactly did following the UN or any other body result in desaster?
The topic was masks. So following that advice caused many lives lost. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-world... UN specifically Israeli occupation (1948-Now) Kashmir dispute (1948-Now) Cambodia violence (1975-1979) Somali civil war (1991-Now) Rwandan civil war (1994) Srebrenica Massacre (1995) Darfur conflict in Sudan (2003-Now) Iraq invasion (2003-2011) Rohingya Crisis, Myanmar (2017-Now)
There were UN troops in Srebrenica, and their failure is a well covered topic. There are multiple resolutions against Israel, the first from the Suez crisis. Most just get ignored, not the least due to US vetos. The Iraq invasion was a purely US thing that had nothing to do with the UN, some NATO members supported it but not all.
There is a difference between causing disaster, which the UN didn't, and failing to prevent it, which the UN does. Expecting perfect results from one side and no results at all, or close to jone, from the other is just disengnious.
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You've never understood why parents protect children from things that they will eventually be exposed to as adults? If your goal is to give your children unfiltered access to "reality," parents are entirely unnecessary after birth.
>You've never understood why parents protect children from things that they will eventually be exposed to as adults? If your goal is to give your children unfiltered access to "reality," parents are entirely unnecessary after birth. Hey I have a different opinion than you. I think you should respect that rather than say parents are unnecessary after birth. That's rude. First off think about it logically. Why indeed d…
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COVID-19 is a novel virus. All information is misinformation until it isn't. I could say that the reason that some people are asymptomatic is that the virus is lying dormant in them like herpes. Can anyone credibly refute that? Logic would dictate that a novel virus -- novel in that we don't know everything about it -- is a threat to the survival of our species as a whole until disproven otherwise and that we should…
Why do you want to curb the infection rate? What’s the end goal? I’m strongly on the Swedish/Trump side here. We know that the virus is practically harmless for youth and young adults. If immunity persists, we should let them get infected ASAP while protecting the old/vulnerable. If immunity fades, then waiting for the vaccine is pointless anyways. As a young person, I won’t be taking the vaccine anytime soon anyways…
Seeing the downvotes, I suppose the majority here disagree with the statement. But at least the comment is still readable/visible. I think it's healthier for public discourse to have differing sides and points of view expressed, to argue in a good sense of the term, by logic and evidence, to hopefully arrive at some common understanding.
"Fact checking" and judgements of "misinformation" are necessary, I can see, but a question remains - who checks the fact-checkers, and judges the censors?
I don't trust Google to be a neutral party in such decisions - maybe in this particular case they're right, but we shouldn't depend on a for-profit corporation to be a trustworthy judge of anything in general.
Do they have the right to ban whatever they see unfit on their platforms? Yes, I think so.
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I apologize if this is presumptuous of me, but I get the impression that you don't live here, haven't followed this topic in much detail and probably haven't read anything at all in local media from that time frame. Here's more background: Dr. Li Wenliang's email warning colleagues about the outbreak was sent on December 30th. Multiple Taiwanese doctors were working in Wuhan at that time. Taiwan's very early and very…
I hope we can agree to argue about spilled milk doesn't help anyone. Especially when this spilled milk is used now to basically discredit very relevant organizations in the midst of a pandemic. But maybe you can share some recent fuck ups from the side of the WHO, real fuck ups and not opinions that changed over time as they learned more and more about COVID-19.
The WHO is a politically captured organization lead by a man who covered up three separate cholera outbreaks in his own country. I have little respect for or interest in them.
I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…
To be blunt, the only time I noticed people complaining about it was when Trump got elected. Barack Obama if I remember was actually praised for his usage of social media and targeting. A lot of this anti-social media is a reaction more against him than anything and the left is trying to lock things down to prevent a Trump from ever happening again.