Live data from Hacker News

Kanye West is buying Parler

theverge.com

881–890 of 939 posts

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#881

This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown. If you haven't been following the news, West has spent the week saying increasingly unhinged things, not just about politics but about Pete Davidson, his wife, and (if I'm remembering right) his kids and the fake actor children that have been installed in his former home to corrupt them. He was interviewed for a show on Fox and a big chun…

Sound very much like the guy who started Zappos - clearly there was evidence he was on a downward spiral but people and so-called friends around him used it scam him.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#882

There's a really concerning trend on HN and elsewhere I'm seeing. Everyone now seems to think free speech is too dangerous to try and promote anymore. It's been a shift over a couple years. I'm not supporting Ye or any of his bullshit, but some of the comments on here are really chillingly authoritarian. Parler isn't going to be able to maintain "free speech" even if they or Kanye want it to, which I seriously doubt…

People (including yourself, even if you don't realize it) argue for limits on speech in order to protect freedom and liberty. That's not an essentially authoritarian position. It's consistent with liberalism. For example, you probably support making incitement to violence illegal. That is an "authoritarian" position that you agree with. You are using the government to force someone to stop saying something that they wish to say. And yet you support it. Because you implicitly realize that there's no pure world where speech can't infringe on other's freedoms. In the real world you have tension between the rights and freedoms of two people. There's no substitute to fairly arbitrary line drawing that balances this tension. People simply disagree on where the line should be drawn in order to maximize overall freedom.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#883

There's a really concerning trend on HN and elsewhere I'm seeing. Everyone now seems to think free speech is too dangerous to try and promote anymore. It's been a shift over a couple years. I'm not supporting Ye or any of his bullshit, but some of the comments on here are really chillingly authoritarian. Parler isn't going to be able to maintain "free speech" even if they or Kanye want it to, which I seriously doubt…

> There's a really concerning trend on HN and elsewhere I'm seeing. Everyone now seems to think free speech is too dangerous to try and promote anymore. It's been a shift over a couple years. this is the result of years of propaganda enacted on an unsuspecting, smartphone-using populace. before the smartphone, the venn diagram of "advocate of free speech" and "Internet user" was a circle—look how far we've fallen sin…

No, it's because the world has drastically changed and people have updated their views given the advent of significant new information. Namely, the invention of social media was the paradigm shifting catalyst.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#884
post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you verify someone's IRL identity without a government issued ID card in a scalable way? I don't mean some idea that could work at some arbitrary point in the future (decentralized whatever...). If a social media platform were to do this, right now, how would they do it without verifying a government issued ID?

Identity doesn't come into existence with the registration with a government, it's something you build over time as you interact with the world around you. Nicknames are an identity and it's pretty much common these days to have nicknamed account on all over the internet. The problem with these is that one can have multiple of those and a behaviour in one place doesn't transfer into other places. So maybe we can have…

The thread started with "real name." The only way to verify that is government identity.

If you want to verify some other, "online" identity, that's fine, but I don't see how that would meaningfully affect anyones behavior. To be clear, I don't think verifying someone's real name will meaningfully improve online behavior either -- plenty of other threads explain why. In which case, what's the point of either?

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> that gives the impression of a deep understanding of the human psyche when in reality it shows at best the ability to memorize the criteria around a few invented categories and give a horoscope based off of them. This is ad hominem. You are ignoring what is said and making a personal attack. That is what ad hominem is, ignoring the argument and attacking the man. > Do you apply this... This is ad hominem. > I don'…

You seem to be confusing disagreements with ad-hominem. Here's an example of real ad-hominem: "You are an obnoxious narcissistic piece of shit that thinks every disagreement is a personal insult because you can't stand not being right". If someone was to use that sentence in an argument, that would be ad-hominem. Asking whether or not you apply same standards of not using logical fallacies (from your original comment…

> You seem to be confusing disagreements with ad-hominem.

Incorrect, and this is ad hominem.

>>>>> impression of a deep understanding of

Who is being referred to? Who is being characterized? Certainly not no one. Thus, ad hominem attack.

> you're free to commit logical fallacies as much as you want, but the moment someone else does, you halt all discussion and just shout "fallacy!"

This is ad hominem. But it is also a straw man masquerading as tu quoque.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#887
post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that similar claims have been made against several members of the Republican party in recent times (by prominent news outlets). What is the threshold of evidence that taints an entire political party?

For the record I think it was wrong then, but there are literal KGB records of people in the working for them, and some were caught and arrested at the time. Again I think the law was wrong, but the concern was real. As for "Russia Gate", I remain in unconvinced. [*edit] if you’re downvoting, kindly share your disagreement, I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.

Not downvoting, in fact I agree with you. The speed at which these old claims were trotted out against Trump and any Republican right of Lindsay Graham has me thinking about their veracity in a new light.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This theoretically would ensure that this person is not exposed to only hate and negativity, and will hopefully make a better decision" .... "and I doubt I'll change my mind on this fact any time soon" You have high hopes of people changing their mind when presented with new information, except for yourself apparently

I will not change my mind about this one thing, but I change my mind all the time about other things when I'm being presented information that challenges my point of view. It's a bit childish to veer into ad-hominem and take my words out of context just to try and keep the upper hand. :P

You set yourself up for that by declaring people to be open minded but then saying you couldn't have your mind changed.

More importantly I don't think most people over a certain age change.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be confusing disagreements with ad-hominem. Here's an example of real ad-hominem: "You are an obnoxious narcissistic piece of shit that thinks every disagreement is a personal insult because you can't stand not being right". If someone was to use that sentence in an argument, that would be ad-hominem. Asking whether or not you apply same standards of not using logical fallacies (from your original comment…

> You seem to be confusing disagreements with ad-hominem. Incorrect, and this is ad hominem. >>>>> impression of a deep understanding of Who is being referred to? Who is being characterized? Certainly not no one. Thus, ad hominem attack. > you're free to commit logical fallacies as much as you want, but the moment someone else does, you halt all discussion and just shout "fallacy!" This is ad hominem. But it is also…

[deleted]

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To borrow from Popehat: > If you block people on Twitter you’re not truly open to different arguments or ideas. Similarly if you were truly open to trying new and different foods, you’d eat this hot dog I found in the gutter. I think in the context of social media the replacement/adjunct rallying cry is "free association", i.e. moderation. I don't have to engage with racist nonsense or the people who produce it. How…

But then we get into the balkanization of our society with increasing polarization and extremism, no?

Before social media did anyone read every book ever published? Did anyone read all the rejected manuscripts to avoid the censorious hand of the publishing houses? Of course not, we accepted that someone (editors) were doing some first pass quality check and even then we pick what areas are interesting.

There's two related but distinct problems: the moderation problem and the village idiots problem[0]. Polarization _can_ come from moderation, but there's also a whole debate to be had about what is driving what. For example: Alex Jones' whole saga has been spun by some as "being punished for conservative beliefs", so yeah, I guess if he's a conservative then him being pushed off social might cause polarization. BUT I think it's important to note that 10 years ago if you said Jones was a conservative, almost _all_ conservatives would have said something "the interdimensional vampire guy? Don't lump us in with that crazy bastard". During the intervening years right wing leaders have increasingly signaled that Jones is one of theirs. That was a top down series of decisions more than social media's impact. In order to believe that "your team" is being punished you already had to believe that Jones was on your team. If the statement "Alex Jones is on my team and I'm on a mainstream political team" is true, then you're _already_ polarized. The moderation might make it worse but something severely fucked up has already happened.

The (potentially violent) extremism, though, is really about the idiots getting together and self reinforcing (for example incel groups periodically spinning out a mass shooter). Moderation isn't really going to impact the second problem since when they get booted from one platform they migrate to a less moderated one or spin up their own.

[0] Borrowing Peter Singer's framing from here: "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."

Post reply on HN