Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.
I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.
The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.
My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.
So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.
Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”
You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.
Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.
Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
But what's intelligence good for, if it doesn't equip you to see reality for what it is?
As humans we are quite fallible, but as long as mass media and "social" media don't hamper the process of eventual re calibration towards reality, we can come back from our mistakes. That imho also answers why autocrats immediately start a war on academia, they instinctively know where the danger lurks for them.
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.
In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.
I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.
This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.
Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.
My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.
"At least 895 children aged 5 and under have managed to find a gun and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else from 2015 to 2022"[0] (over 100 per year on average)
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-fire-guns-toddlers-uni...
Wasn't that long ago an article about Mark Zuckerberg claiming someone in the Biden admin made some vague request about state-sponsored disinformation brought every so-called 1A defender out of the woodwork, but apparently the actual regulator of news orgs publicly threatening their business is shrug worthy by comparison.
I've been on HN since 2010 (different account) and honestly used to take the libertarian/right-leaning types at their word about being free speech advocates and not simply partisans using it as a rhetorical weapon.
But, lesson learned...
The early crypto and tax victories were presumably the impetus for many, and that's already been realized. There's not much incentive to stick around and be a bad faith advocate for incompetence and graft when you've already got yours.
Likely because once you've seen your opponent mask off there is no longer a point trying to maintain a facade of politeness. You are in full adversarial waters. Either those people weren't actually for it and were talking a game until they got into power, or there's no longer a point in talking about it until we can get the current numb nuts out of the picture. One shouldn't tip their hand in an enemy controlled medium on their current plans for activism. That's how you go from unrestrained, to controlled opposition. Savvy? Here on HN, you damn well know you're in the SV types territory, and you know to whom'st they've aligned by their actions. Only conversations left to be had is needling those remaining until either they out themselves as part of the opposition, or as part of the sympathetic group. Turns out there's a lot of HN'ers more than happy with how things are going.
Game theory/low trust environs are a bitch like that.
The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.
Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.
That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.
I was responding to someone who is claiming that the org is some infringement on free speech. This is an ignorant position, in that the FCC has had the power to regulate airwaves for quite some time. So if it is some free speech infringment now, then it was infringement a long time ago, especially with things like the fairness doctrine.
But you can have either position. Either you think it is all some huge infringement of free speech or you don't and you cant really complain about the stuff happening now. Your choice.
> The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly
So... Imagine for the sake of argument that you were capable of steel manning my position.
When someone brought speech related stuff regarding the FCC and I responded to it, did you actually believe I was talking about laws related to airplane communications?
Or.... was it possible that I was only referring to other speech related stuff that the FCC does? Just steelman it for a second if you are capable of doing so.