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Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.

Me suppressing my personal information is protecting my physical safety. You suppressing your personal information is an unacceptable breach of free expression.

Me revealing your personal information is transparency in the public interest. You revealing my personal information is doxxing and puts my life in danger.

@pmarca

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> My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.

Let's not group mean tweets and mass shootings under the same umbrella

I didn’t read it like that. I read “attacks” in the “verbal attacks” sense as opposed to physical.

The idea that verbal attacks can be somehow synonymous to physical attacks is nonsensical.

Like the term "verbal violence" - what a way to conflate meanings to a misleading extent.

In other words you’re just repeating that sticks and stones may break bones but words will never hurt. Hardly a well established / obvious statement, and one that’s covered in early grade school discourse

You should tell that to people who invented the phrase "stochastic terrorism."

Hard to tell if this comment is left-wing rhetoric or right-wing satire.

Perhaps left-wing satire of right-wing hypocrisy?

Usually the comment history will tell you.

Being canceled =/= being terrorized irl.

Why does this even need to be said?

In this particular case, there was an attempt at terrorizing Elon IRL. So why shouldn't attacks on him therefore count as "stochastic terrorism", insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept?

as others are indicating, at least some of the problems here are:

- he recognizes that it’s reasonable to take actions if an account *might* influence his real life.

— he mocks others and declares they’re unreasonable when they ask twitter for help.

- sometimes he even escalates the threats towards others, portrays them as hysterical and starts ranting about town-squares and woke cancel culture.

I agree that insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept, Elon has probably also engaged in it.

That's a terrible premise to start a conversation on HN. Let's not use extreme concepts invented by ideologues + controversial figures being petty as the basis for thought experiments.

Stochastic terrorism may be an extreme concept invented by ideologues, but the fact remains that if you have a big platform and you criticize someone harshly, that might cause crazies in your audience to go after them. So as a society we should figure out what is and isn't acceptable behavior here, and invent rules to apply universally and impartially.

You can't censor your way out of this problem regardless. People will still post Elon's flights details elsewhere.

Censorship is almost always counter-productive and every time it fails it just escalates. Eventually we'll be doing night raids on people's homes over tweets like the UK.

The costs are far too high for very little benefit. Just look at the moral and cultural compromises taken by the US/Canada/UK in Afghanistan/Iraq/globally to crush Islamic terrorism by force. It generated as many problems as it helped, at a very high cost of tons of freedoms for the western public (not just people in the middle east). Now we're on Part 2 of "compromise freedoms for the greater good". No thanks.

Often that's exactly what it is. People coming to your (or your relatives) homes, people physically attacking others at workplaces and restaurants. People setting up fires and behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them. We have seen many examples. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen.

...can you give some examples?

No they can’t. They’re hoping if they beg enough they might get some trickle down economics. We all know this is not a discussion of facts or reason.

You certainly seem to know that.

Tim Pool is swatted regularly for example. Tucker Carlson had to move after his home was attacked. There was an attack on Brett Kavanaugh. There’s a lot of such stories.

They don't count, apparently. None of this is based on principles.

> behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them

Such as the wave of attacks on drag events.

Like this: https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/nypd-says-3-people-attacked-wi... ?

some people's personal information, if broadcast, puts them in danger like Salman Rushdie, while with most people nobody cares about them. what's your snappy hypocrisy koan for that? Salman Rushdie's exercise of free speech but not revealing where he was made him some kind of huge hypocrite?

some people's personal information is in the public interest, like Al Gore's electric bill or how often he and John Kerry fly to climate conferences, and POTUS's also, yet the secret service keeps his travel plans obscure to protect him.

many attacks may be consequent, and many are not; much of life is stochastic.

so I don't get your point. I think Musk is sincerely trying to make twitter more free speechy than the previous administration, and I think he's sincerely grappling with issues at the margins. I don't think this silly twitter bot's POV is no longer being heard.

The counterargument is that elonjet is only tweeting information that is already very public.

Elons Jet, by law, must openly broadcast, over the radio waves, location and route while operating. There is a legal right to publish that information. If he doesn’t want people to know his location, he can avoid traveling on the one private jet linked to him. But that’s not what he’s doing.

His child being followed by someone wanting to meet him has literally nothing to do with the location of his jet.

This is an emotional reaction to a situation that only affects him.

And given the massive negative PR some of his decisions have garnered lately, and his thin skin about them (just today he claimed that the booing at the Dave Chappelle show is because "people weren't letting him speak"), I take this vague claim which has only tangential relevance to the stalking with a grain of salt.

"Pursuing legal action against Sweeney"? Not criminal action against the stalker?

No video, not with all the cameras?

Proof that alleged stalker got the information from that Twitter account, and not FlightRadar24, or even the FAA?

Yeah, I would be unsurprised if it turned out that this was all just horse manure to try to provide cover for his decision.

He may not know yet who the stalker is. Which would be a pre-requisite to pursue a legal action.

Perhaps his security guys called 911, but so far LAPD says they have no record of the event. I'm wary of trying to draw any conclusions about the event absent some independent confirmation.

I'm not sure police would be eager to investigate "some guy followed me" type of complaint. Of course, if the complainer knows the right people, they would. But Musk is squarely in the "wrong people" corner with the powers that run LA now, I think, so not sure he'll get a lot of help from LAPD on this.

I think police take calls from pro security guards at least somewhat seriously, not least because a lot of cops do private security work on the side.

The guy was obviously a process server trying to serve papers. Billionaires get served papers all the time.

For all the drama Elon is creating he has refused to register a complaint with the police. He is going after everyone but the process server.

>while with most people nobody cares about them

It only takes one lunatic to care about "nobody" and you can have a fatal outcome. The criminal registry is filled with lunatics such as domestic violence perpetrators or stalkers that found out personal information about a nobody and acted violently on it.

You might be star stuck and a deep believer of Elon the new Saint, but the original comment is pointing out the hypocrisy and danger of one person deciding on whose information we can spread based on augmenting it in the framework of "free speech"; but then essentially boggling it down to naive notion like you stated:

"nobodies" - who cares about them? It's about popularity and favoritism (free speech is the rhetoric)

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