Banned journalism housed in virtual Minecraft architecture (2022)
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
> “As the Russian government has de facto suppressed its national press and blocked access to foreign media, Counter-Strike has remained as one of the rare channels that allows us to communicate independent information to Russians about real events from the war” https://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-global-offensive/csg...
Also, there's nothing Ukraine could have done that would have made Russia's actions justified.
Finally, when you follow the Russian statements for a while, you notice that they are self-contradictory. This lets you disregard their arguments as pure lies - the truth is not self-contradictory.
I thought this was an insightful podcast: [0]
> The United States is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and that's not Putin's propaganda; it's just history
Which is obviously incorrect on its face, Putin claimed to invade Ukraine because Ukraine wanted to be liberated and is part of the Russian Empire, wrongly let go of by prior rulers of Russia. It is disgusting propaganda to lie and say the US or the west caused this war - Putin caused it, fullstop, that's it.
Sure, Putin started the war, and that was the whole point, poke and prod until they start a war. Lend money until they can't repay. Keep a country rubbelized so they won't unite against resource extraction. Replace democratically elected leaders with religious nutcases so you can have your way. It's the way of the empire. Ask Iranians, ask Panamanians, ask the people of East Timor.
"The US and its allies “simulated supporting the UN Security Council resolution” which endorsed the roadmap to peace while pumping weapons into Ukraine and “ignored all crimes committed by the Kiev regime … for the sake of a decisive strike against Russia,” she explained in a social media post on Thursday [1].
Also John Mearsheimer, an American, laid out the case for Ukraine as a massive NATO threat in a public talk many years ago. Available on youtube.
Would the United States welcome Chinese and Russian nuclear capable installations in Mexico or Cuba?
How are you attempting to balance your point of view against the intense western government propaganda that you're exposed to?
[1]: https://www.globalresearch.ca/merkel-acknowledges-that-2014-...
Here the article debating the interpretation of what she said. https://web.archive.org/web/20230103062022/https://www.zeit....
> Merkel sagte der ZEIT: "Das Minsker Abkommen 2014 war der Versuch, der Ukraine Zeit zu geben. Sie hat diese Zeit auch genutzt, um stärker zu werden, wie man heute sieht."
Russia is the aggressor here. It is quite simple.
All the eastern European countries wanted to join NATO because they are afraid of Russian invasion. Turns out they were right.
After that the oligarchs started arming extremists (Azov et. al.) to put the brakes on the inevitable retaliation by Russia.
Contrary to what your genocide supporting sources say, Ukrainians are actually able to protest with that being engineered by CIA.
A full-fledged war with Russia will begin in a couple of years - Alexei Arestovich (Mar 18, 2019)
Russia may feel aggrieved that their goal of re-subsuming the independent former Soviet republics has been somewhat thwarted, but clearly that has been and still is their policy.
There are already NATO counties extremely close to Russia, Poland shares a border
And there are no nuclear weapons installations in Ukraine.
Russia has also been vocal about this for decades. The CIA director summarized it rather well during his time as Ambassador in his "Nyet means Nyet" cable.
Personally, it's none of my business what Mexico or Cuba do on their territory, but are you saying the US has nuclear installations in Ukraine?
No she didn't. That is Russian propaganda. Show me the Zeit article. All your sources are astroturfed Russian propaganda.
Your globalresearch.ca link gives you away. Anyone doubting it can go to the globalresearch front page and draw their own conclusions. Its a conspiracy theory site.
I list a few articles to give a flavor of globalresearch's conspiracy bent:
The “Great Zero Carbon” Conspiracy and the WEF’s “Great Reset”
Towards a Failed State under Kiev Nazi Regime
The Asinine Insanity of the ‘Climate Change’/C02 Hoax:
Here - https://archive.is/c4ZVK
You would have more creditability if you took 2 mins to have found it.
> globalresearch.ca
Is certainly not a good source, linking people the original quotes to read for themselves would show some evidence you are not a conspiracy theory also, I hear there are a few going around.
Still, you dug up the relevant article so, vouched.
Puin was flying nuclear bombers down the California coast in 2014, 50 miles offshore.... nobody overreacted.
If you are referring to the Romanian ABM site, Putin could have just put an ABM site in Cuba, or in international waters off the coast of the USA...
The Romanian site doesn't have nuclear weapons....
Heh, to protect South America?
NATO is not a threat to Russia by any objective measure. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, NATO countries in Europe were unilaterally diarming themselves. Just compare the size and composition of UK, French or (West-)German military in 1980s and 2010s - reduction in everything by a factor of 5-10x with a continuing downward trend. This is why NATO is struggling to support Ukraine, former powerhouses like Germany have very little left to share. Over the past two years, Russia has lost 20 TIMES more (visually confirmed) tanks than the whole German army fields. And yet we're somehow supposed to believe that such tiny force could pose a credible threat against Russia.
A person with "cognitive empathy" might actually feel that the truth is exactly the opposite: NATO became so weak over time that Russia stopped fearing it, and became increasingly brazen in pursuing its imperialist goals.
We have by far the most destructive war in Europe since the WWII, whole cities wiped from the earth, civilians executed in mass graves, daily terror attacks on cities where millions live - and to this day NATO's response is what exactly? Sending obsolete tanks and wasting months discussing whether Ukraine deserves modern air defense systems to stop terror raids against civilians? Is this the power you consider an existential threat to Russia? Who's the victim of propaganda here, really?
You are, evidentially. Since your solution to this problem is WWIII.
You're simultaneously claiming that Russia has last 20x the tank inventory of Germany, and also that Russia is somehow also capable of "pursuing its imperialist goals", which I guess still include capturing Berlin.
Which is it?
There is a reason why the relation today is much worse than it was 30 years ago.
Imho high probability its who ever is reacting to your post. Cognitive warfare today means its highly advantageous to exploit propaganda blind spots by dialing them up to 11 to create dysfunction and make your opponent look bad. Your post has all the hallmarks of being a caricature aimed at creating a reaction.
I am sorry if its your actual opinion, in that case you should consider that giving up on a functioning reality model in favor of narratives is a deeply counterproductive idea. Distortions and pollution of the information environment are ambivalent to the intention of its creation. Its just creating blindspots that get exploited by hostile entities.
The attitude is largely that, "our government may suck, but it is ours", and when foreign countries are perceived as strangling their development, you'll turn even the most raging regime critic into a reluctant supporter. And of course they don't view NATO or the rules based order or what have you as some benevolent thing, but tools of power.
For a recent emigre from a regime like Russia or Cuba, the mindset often is "things are real bad in the homeland in matters that I can see with my own eyes, but on what I can not see, I tend to believe the official narrative, because it's the only one I had access to." It can take years for a person to do all the necessary reading and research to adjust their worldview.
That is flaming you for not rotating fast enough.
To be clear this is commentary on your average counter strike player, not necessarily Russian cs players.
The younger generation understands. But I don't buy that Russians, esp the older, simply know the level of control and propaganda that they've been subjected to over the years. Otherwise they would have done something about it by now.
They could start with, I dunno, maybe not voting disproportionately for more of the same?
How is this hard if, as you suggested, they are aware of the propaganda lol?
I don't buy it.
This seems really, really stupid. (Except for the actual Minecraft building, which seems quite nice)
> It's worth noting that this project will likely not benefit the people of China. A somewhat obscure fact is that China has its own edition of Minecraft which cannot connect to servers of the mainstream edition. https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China
> Censorship also applies to any text in the launcher, such as community posts, comments on contents, and private messages. Rental servers and virtual LAN games are not allowed to have names altogether, instead being referred to by a numerical ID
I guess you don't need any obscure packet inspection if you can just censor the clients and servers directly instead. This feels like the censorship equivalent of the wrench XKCD.
'Different from rental server, the owner has full permission Usually adopt third-party server application'
So there is a way around?
Edit: and tbh in China they're more likely to play a pirated java edition.
If the server operators wanted to make that even more of a challenge they could render the books as maps.
> “In many countries, websites, social media and blogs are controlled by oppressive leaders. Young people, in particular, are forced to grow up in systems where their opinion is heavily manipulated by governmental disinformation campaigns. But even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world’s most successful computer game is still accessible. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses this loophole to bypass internet censorship to bring back the truth – within Minecraft.”
Second thought: since it's Minecraft, a secondary purpose can be that it signals the values not just the supposed target demography, but to all people interested in Minecraft.
Again, you're not wrong, and I'm not even saying these comments are bad or anything. I'm guessing hackernews commentors tend to be skeptics and are tuned to poke holes? But clearly it was posted based on some apparent merit. Other reactions would be totally normal too, like "oh wow, that's really impressive. I didn't know this existed." Or how so much of the real world has been modeled in minecraft (archival libraries, computers using redstone, etc.). Or noting what works they consider worthy of entry in the library.
It's a mindset where nothing good happens in the world, and no cloud has a silver lining. Skepticism is a default, and earnestness or cleverness makes you naive or a sucker who will get their deserved reality check soon enough.
It must be a horrendous headspace to constantly be in.
Is this project useful as a way of circumventing censorship? Nah, almost certainly not. So consider it a thought experiment. An art piece. A way of illustrating the importance of free speech to a younger generation that maybe hasn't thought that hard about it yet. A browsable museum of censorship, the likes of which no government would build. Maybe an inspiration for people to build better tools.
Or just a neat project for people to spend some time working on, that's more interesting than making a copy of Big Ben in Minecraft.
I too never understood how is this project better than a website and thanks to the dismissive comment and the subthread it spawned I now had a chance to read some reasonable explanations.
What survives, is true.
Basically it's more of an art installation than it is a serious censorship circumvention tool. Still neat for what it is I guess.
Why cant it be both?
Very nice way of putting it.
Whenever I see a project like this, I have to ask: what kinds of true things are censored from the "uncensored library"?
> But even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world’s most successful computer game is still accessible. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses this loophole to bypass internet censorship to bring back the truth – within Minecraft.”
For how long? They used to say the same thing about the internet itself.
I was curious about this as well.
The "criteria for inclusion" link takes you to a page on "weeding:" https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/weeding-is-fundamenta...
It describes the process (a few different ones, MUSTY, green/yellow/red) but not a lot of concrete facts (what books were "weeded" or which books were suggested but not purchased.)
i think it's fairly common knowledge that preventing the publishing of a book in the first place probably counts as censorship, but considering the nature of this library it becomes pretty fuzzy
So if the State of Florida sets a criteria for inclusion for it's library collections of "not gay," then it's not censorship in your mind?
"Criteria for inclusion" and "censorship" are the exact same thing, the only difference between them is how the speaker feels about it.
> "Criteria for inclusion" and "censorship" are the exact same thing, the only difference between them is how the speaker feels about it.
yes, this is very important, which is exactly why a library like this selecting which works to include is not censorship. now if people intentionally submitted their own works and the library tried to hide or deny the existence of those requests, now that would be censorship
i think state libraries are in a slightly different situation. it is definitely fuzzy though
Yes, because that's an irrelevant activity to this topic.
> yes, this is very important, which is exactly why a library like this selecting which works to include is not censorship.
At least in contemporary liberal culture, words like "censorship" and "ban" are frequently used to label "criteria for inclusion" that the speaker disagrees with.
> now if people intentionally submitted their own works and the library tried to hide or deny the existence of those requests, now that would be censorship
That's one kind of censorship, but not the only kind (see above).
Why wouldn't that be good enough?
How is something that has a wikipedia page censored in any way?
If that isn't enough, nothing will be.
If you are ok with general, the cases of Monkeypox not that long ago are an evident example. The reality of the matter is that it affected almost exclusively homosexual men, yet since that would have hurt LGBT sensitivities, it was often omitted and even campaigned against.
It's a illness coming from a virus.
Don't understand why homosexuals are related in any way to censorship here....
(Edit: for anyone interested : https://glaad.org/mpox/
The censoring is nowhere to be seen
Edit2:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/gay-men-mpox.html
Like what do you even mean? What was censored? )
Maybe find a solid example?
Even supposed objective measurements such as "Is this factually true?" can fail because we aren't omniscient, we learn new things and realize what was "true" yesterday is actually false, and sometimes an authority keeps telling us something is "true" and anyone who dissents is "moderated" and "curated" into effective silence.
I would trust Reporters Without Borders more than most, but maybe that's because their biases align with mine and I don't object to their censorship.
Without bias and interpretation omniscients is required. A human mind does not have the luxury of knowing everything. We have limited compute power, and limited time. Furthermore our systems only have capabilities for limited data. We have to filter against junk or our systems get overwhelmed, but deciding what is junk is also a bias.
The best we can do is state our biases, and design our systems to reflect or biases properly. If others don't like those biases they are free to create their own systems that reflect their biases.
> If others don't like those biases they are free to create their own systems that reflect their biases.
Those who create alternatives are attacked, chased, banned, deplatformed. Even if a webhost is happy to work with you, the credit card network may not be or their bank may ban them.
Not that the signal doesn't find a way - the good work of Anna's archive and all that - but it's not just "go build your own platform". It becomes "fight at every turn for your basic existence".
What is happening when a bank refuses to do business with someone, when App stores ban a twitter clone and prevent sideloading, is not Capitalism. It's ideological. It's about service to an end outside just capital.
Capitalism is the only system that freedom of speech can exist under. No Communist or Socialist author has ever entertained a freedom of speech concept - it is contrary to a centralized government. Such systems can not even handle mild political dissent and must (both in the theoretical and practical) literally kill or exile anyone pushing against the central authority.
Capitalism can always tolerate disagreement because disagreement is profitable.
Maybe you have heard of Animal Farm or 1984, written by George Orwell?
Or do you think, he wrote those books to endorse the concept?
Eh, that depends. The US in particular like to 'two party' problems. Capitalism loves two sides in problems, but that is very problematic if a problem is multi-polar and not bi-polar.
You're also confusing socialist/communist with authoritarian. Capitalist systems are completely fine with being authoritarian if its profitable.
You will find that it is impossible to create a society that does not exist in this manner. Since a society that accepts everybody also means it accepts people that don't accept everyone by means of violence, hence destroying a society that accepts everyone.
Yes every society will resort to vigilantism to protect itself in the absence of a policing power.
But death threats to someone because they made a tweet you disagree with or abusing your power as a bank to control speech isn't about protecting yourself from violence - though that excuse is often used.
It's a form of denial, of shutting down uncomfortable debate. It's an ideological sort of end, like a dictator who has a pathological need to execute his critics. The "inner ring" of acceptable opinions grows ever smaller - it has to. It's not about making the world better, it's about attacking outsiders and the beast always needs new outsiders.
It's about causing violence. It's no different than "You happened to say something against our religious book, don't do it again or you'll get hurt".
Outsiders are a useful target because sometimes they are also the monster. This is the effect of existing in a reality with uncertainty. Accept everyone uncritically and you may be attacked by those you accept, this leads to fear, that fear is then manipulated by those that want power. There is no solution here, there is only the attempt to balance between malicious outsiders and malicious insiders.
There's only one reality.
> We have limited compute power, and limited time.
Simplified models of reality don't need to be biased. Unless you consider every viewpoint to be a kind of bias, which is really stretching the term.
You're almost, but not quite there....
That one reality is what I call thermodynamic truth. Now any time someone brings up thermodynamics other statements like arrow of time show up and other issues with informational incompleteness become problems.
Simplified models of reality can quickly collapse in uncertainty in complex situations. Lets say an explosion and subsequent fire at a factory. The people working on the device that exploded where killed, so we only have second hand information on what they where doing. The fire was especially intense so the device expected of causing the explosion was melted completely and only mixed slag remains. The machine was made in the 1950s so other forms of entropy have been involved on information on the metals used in the machine.
There is no simple model of reality that can tell you what occurred with certainty in situations like this. The additional entropy from the fire creates a situation where many possible input situations lead to the same output situation.
We see this kind of entropy in social situations. The game of telephone is a good example of this. You start with "X5W1" and end up with "EXU1" after a few steps and everyone along the way would tell you thats exactly what they heard.
>Unless you consider every viewpoint to be a kind of bias, which is really stretching the term
Not stretching the term at all. Biases exist at all levels, physical processes and mental processes, human and inhuman.
If I cover an apple with a cup before you have time to look at it, the apple does not disappear nor is there any alternate reality with pear under the cup. It's just a blank space in your knowledge, which you are free to fill with any bias-free probabilistic model.
But even in your example you couldn't even give me an example of a complex system, and instead had to give a simple system that works deterministically and still makes lots of assumptions. Like, how long did you cover the apple with a cup for? If it's a moment the apple will be there. If it's a much longer time maybe when you remove the cup the dessicated rotten remains of an apple come out. Or maybe there was a bug in the apple so when you remove the cup you no longer have an apple, but a bunch of bugs and a pile of feces.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against determinism. If you knew all states of the matter that went into the cup (well and of the universe) you could most likely accurately predict what was going to be in the cup regardless of what time you look in the cup again. Unfortunately for us humans we're stuck in a universe governed by the uncertainty principle. We can't know at the quantum level, and at the macro level there are enough chaotic actions that predictions of complex systems quickly fall apart. There is only the most probable outcome, with the random chance a less likely outcome could occur.
You are overthinking it. In case of quantum effects, the whole quantum system, including all its parallel states and uncertainties, is part of the single shared reality.
Likewise. I would guess this to be an issue with vocabulary. So more of a "Yes, but ..." then a "No!" I would argue that reality isnt influenced by the existence or absence of an accurate human-friendly reality model. Thats only relevant for human interaction with reality (which you are talking about), the bias doesnt actually influence reality itself.
While you wont archive a complete model, there is a baseline reality that is indifferent to human bias and understanding. You could simplify the argument as gravity neither being being a social construct nor requiring a complete unbiased reality model to screw with you.
edit: Unless its an actual disagreement, in which case we are arguing Solipsism? So the biased perception actually creating reality. In which case we got to an impasse, if you are creating reality through biased perception, there is no reason to assume you arent also creating me the same way.
I believe there is an objective causality based reality at the lowest levels of existence. The arrow of time moves forward. And over the entire system entropy increases.
But as you put systems on top of systems, especially in life, subjective thinking can modify local reality at a macro level. That is the subjective experience of a human can lead them to an idea, that they then manufacture into an object becoming objective reality that object then modifies the experienced reality of those around them both subjectively and objectively. The fundamental structure of the universe does not change in this scenario, but human knowledge is expanded and we have a better view all possible states the universe can be objectively manipulated into.
However, any greater impact of perspective or intention on reality then through your actions gets you to magic and probability lines. https://www.specularium.org/wizardry
Which still dont disregard the existence of one reality in the moment, just the ability to act in a way to navigate the possible futures.
I only mention it because the existence of one reality unrelated to perspective comes with safety concerns unrelated to intention. Misunderstanding how you influence reality carries risks. Its how the worse in "better or worse results for your reality model" can also look. Your reality model deteriorating too far by overvaluing your perspective due to cognitive bias.
Yes.
> which is really stretching the term.
No.
There is an objective reality which we can only perceive subjective. We then get together as groups and agree upon what we're going to call "true", building upon what we've previously agreed was "true". This is bias.
But not all agreed "true" are equally accurate! Not all biases are as subjective as others.
So we can (and IMO should) recognize that we're all biased and we're all subjectively interpreting the objective reality, without embracing some kind of fatalism or post-modern idea that all subjective interpretations are equally valid.
Observation is not inherently subjective though. The defining quality of objective reality is that it leads to shared, repeatable observations.
For example, if you take someone in the medical sciences when it comes to pharmaceutical treatment if they don't tell you there are wide ranging statistical truths that are difficult to apply to individuals, then they are a bad scientist.
Systems complexity leads to subjectivity due to feedback loops inside the system itself. Think of deeply nested IF statements customized for a particular application, but no one bothers to give you the source code.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is the number of future potential states is maximized by living and more so by thinking creatures then the future potential state dictated by purely physical interactions such as gravity or chemical bonding. Life can selectively spend energy in one place to reduce the entropy in another place.
Lets look at this in a past/present view. In the past if you got a bad cut, you could die, and maybe if you prayed just the right way or put the right plant you'd avoid the infection and you might not die. Now, we know if you use clean water on wounds and use antibiotics that you and drastically reduce, but not eliminate the risk of infection.
Our view of the problem and solution space massively increased thereby changing how we measured what we thought was true.
Because you are a human, the 'facts' you acknowledge are anthropomorphic. We align our filtering of facts to the scales at which humans and society operates. When we change the scale of what we consider to be fact, then quite often what we consider to be a fact is really just an interpretation of events based on the perspective of the observer. Reality exists in a state of thermodynamic truth, that is if we could reverse the arrow of time you arrive at exactly one state at whichever slice of time.
"Facts" as told by humans do not work this way the vast majority of the time. They are incomplete observations of a system using incomplete information. Time reversal of human facts can lead to situations where multiple starting states can lead to the same factual finding. Causality is uncertain without searching for even more facts, those facts which have been lost to thermodynamic scattering, leading us back to interpretation.
Bias is absolutely necessary to operate on a human scale.
I'm gonna assume you're taking a hard science approach to bias, then:
It is statistically non-plausible to observe all facts in the universe, so the facts you can observe suffer from the selection bias fact sampling error.
Bias is required in any useful model of the universe to explain the difference between the expected and the observed.
Even assuming a non-plausible, accurate model with no biases whatsoever, such model is very likely to require high variance to encompass all fact observations and models with too much variance are useless.
However, you don't need "many angles". Those are too few. You need all the angles.
Reaching conclusions without observing all the interactions, from all angles, in the entirety of the universe existence is, by definition, biased, so, almost all conclusions reached before the universe ends are biased.
They don't have authority to 'censor' anything, so what they choose to include is their choice as curators.
If I have a bookshelf in my office that is full of banned books, then any banned book not on my bookshelf isn't banned by me.
I remember when publicity stunts like this would ship in Second Life. The more things change...
i don't use the term 'scare-quotes' to mean "to scare people", but rather because that's actually what the practice is called
But the article isn't trying to imply skepticism or disclaim particular words, it's just trying to distinguish what is in-game for people who don't know what minecraft is.
it's entirely likely this was just a formatting mistake, but it still feels "off" enough for me to get uncomfortable and stop reading
however, something being a data structure or not doesn't really matter when 'items' means exactly what you would expect it to mean within minecraft, especially when said item is a book!