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froasty

351 karma · joined April 23, 2018

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froasty··on Stop Firing the Innocent
From two years ago:

"O Lord, this zealotry to punish the heretics could easily escape from the control of God's chosen and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform un-Christlike deeds that the Church shall repent of for all eternity!"

"Let's inquisit that heresy when we get to it."

SOME TIME LATER

"Truly, monsigneur, this escalation of the Crusade to extirpate the Lutherans could spiral out of our grasp and trigger a continental conflagration that would disturb the harmony of the Catholic Church and cause us to finalize the fracture in Christendom in its entirety!"

"Let us rupture that schism when we come to it."

SOME TIME LATER

"O Puritan Lawyers! I cannot abide this constant seeking of devilry amongst the burghers; for though thy use the Devil chained and cowed, if the Devil escapeth thine chains placyd upon hym, might he wreck also thine own soul's of pleasant Albion forevermore?"

"Let us burn that witch when we come to it."

SOME TIME LATER

"Je dis, this never-ending mission to purify France of the Anciens Regime could easily escape the control of the Bourgeosie and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform inhumane deeds against the Third Estate that we will regret in the Eye of Providence for all recorded history!"

"Let's get a-head of that when the time arrives."

SOME TIME LATER

"I say, these attempts to civilize the Savages of the outer colonies could easily escape the oversight of the Provincial Governments and not only jeopardize our economic interests, but enable the performance by Europeans of barbarisms that would surely be worse than the practices of the Savages in the first place!"

"Let us lift the White Man's burden when we reach it."

SOME TIME LATER

"I don't know Comrade, this ten-year-old five-year plan to purify Russia of the Bourgeosie could easily escape control of the Central Committee and not only jeopardize the Revolution, but also cause us to engage in the same Tsarist evils of terror that the Revolution was launched to eliminate!"

"Let's rehabilitate that kulak when we get to it."

SOME TIME LATER

> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish.

Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.

froasty··on Text-Only Websites
I wish more people would hop on board the info train, which is what the "up / next / previous" style of hypertext comes from (thanks again, Richard Stallman).

People love to shit on info because its default viewer uses emacs keybindings and the documentation "isn't geared for professionals" which is another way of saying providing minimum-viable knowledge (AKA non-OpenBSD man pages).

I happen to love info for those very reasons. Software freedom and usability used to mean that non-developers could understand how to use software. Want to learn how to code in Emacs Lisp? An info book on it comes with Emacs. Want to learn the ins and outs of the coreutils? Bash? gawk? Documentation the size of a book comes with all of them as well, formatted and designed to be friendly to people who have no idea what they're doing.

froasty··on FFFG: Freedom from Facebook and Google
It's an election year. Breaking up tech monopolies polled well among millennials. This is a phishing net for contact information.
froasty··on Does computing make the world better?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
froasty··on Does computing make the world better?
> The concept of "surrogate activity" breaks down once you understand human action. Whether in pre-historic African savanna or in modern-day NYC, people always act to improve their present conditions.

Have you read Jacques Ellul (i.e. the ur-"Kaczynski-style" argument)? Ellul defines technique as "[..] the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." I don't think you can reasonably state that Ellul nor Kaczynski fail to "understand human action".

In this case, the problem isn't that people are maximizing their own self-interest. The problem is that they aren't. Yes, they're making a "voluntary" "choice" to use an addictive technology and a liberal, market-based society is providing individuals with what they actually "want" rather than what they think they want. What those people without antibodies "want" are Skinner Boxes and the market is happily providing them, all up and down the line. This does not seem to be resulting in a functional civic society.

> Humans are different from animals in that we can initiate voluntary conscious action. Kaczynski doesn't differentiate between involuntary (animal) action in response to stimuli, and purposeful human action, which is not and never was about mere "biological needs."

Where is the evidence that there is such a thing as "voluntary conscious" or "purposeful" action" and not "mere biological needs"? If there were a difference in principle between the two, how exactly does that invalidate the argument that "voluntary conscious action" is not triggered when people aren't bored and have meaningful hurdles to overcome in their own lives?

> Because humans prefer wealth to poverty, much of human action is about creating wealth. You can create wealth without "looting" others. In fact, it's a lot easier to corporate with others, trade, and help each other build wealth than it is to steal.

I'm sure that some members of every society that reached an equilibrium with their environment that was later disrupted by the intrusions of foreign markets would disagree. "Staying competitive" is a more compelling explanation for as to why "humans" "prefer" "wealth" rather than that all humans are naturally materialistic and acquisitive. If you don't run faster than the slowest member, you will be eaten. If you don't think faster than the slowest member of the tribe, you will be sacrificed. If you don't adopt, you will be enslaved by those who do. That's a great way to optimally allocate resources, but once again, this dynamic and addictive technology does not seem to be creating a functional civic society.

froasty··on Does computing make the world better?
Would you be any more charitable or engaging with the entire argument if I replaced "don't know how to", an implicitly ambiguous phrase that entertains both forgetting and lack of mastery, with an explicitly cumbersome variant? "My parents and siblings have forgotten how to cook, how to learn, how to grow as humans, where my nieces and nephews never learned"?
froasty··on Does computing make the world better?
"In moderation and with self-awareness" is the same argument typically used for the licitness of drugs, alcohol, nutritionally devoid food, and dozens of other externality-generating vices.

Yes, they frequently replace deficits in an individual's life with something that would otherwise cause them to disrupt the status quo. The question remains, at what cost? Is it sustainable? Are these activities robbing some humans at the expense of others?

Consider a YouTube video: Water Bottle Flip 2. It's about five minutes long and has been nominally viewed 300 million times, plus change.

That's approaching 3000 years of human time spent for a single video on a single service. The audience was probably entertained for that period but at what cost? What could have been in that lacunae? What else could have been accomplished or learned with that 3,000 years? What was the opportunity cost? For the countless children who watch it, what part of the pre-Internet childhood shared by all human history is being sacrificed for it? What part was sacrificed for the 23,000 years spent on Baby Shark?

I don't disagree that there is a place for moderation and art, but what we're seeing on a grand scale is that the ascendancy of cultural forms that enable moderation are themselves being consumed or otherwise blanketed out with dopamine levers that are the first thing many people touch in the morning and the last thing they touch at night. That's not playing guitar, restoring vintage computers, or collecting Magic cards. That's a massive undiagnosed public health crisis.

froasty··on Does computing make the world better?
Ted Kaczynski got the bulk of his ideas from Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society. Ellul was emphatically a pacifist, an anarchist, and a well-respected intellectual.
froasty··on Does computing make the world better?
If you're making useless things, you have a surrogate activity. We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal.

Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity.

Computing is a surrogate activity factory. Social media makes people's lives more hollow, less connected, less human, but in exchange, gives them the illusion that they are living principled, meaningful lives, living in caves, like brains in a jar.

At root, it's not about "making the world better", it's about professionals looting the commons to live in fancy bubbles where the only competition is staying ahead of others in the bubble. Hacker News is not the place to say this, as it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Here's the situation on the ground for the working class and the supposed social good of the Internet: Every single one of my family members, parents included, is both a precariat and on Facebook all day, every day. They don't have social lives. They don't have stable employment. They don't have careers. They don't know how to cook, how to learn, how to grow as humans. They don't know how to think for themselves, let alone interpret what they read, see, or watch. They hate what the screen tells them to hate; they like what the screen tells them to like. They've been singularly paralyzed in development, despite every effort to free them from their bondage from people outside the process.

Every day, the memory of being a living, breathing human becomes more and more remote to them, and there's no stopping it, because the entire process is autocephalous.

Don't forget to click to subscribe! If you want more content like this, don't forget to check out my podcast! Premium articles if you donate to my Patreon! Check me out on Twitch. Join my Discord! #firstworldproblems #ihavenomouthandimustscream

froasty··on Quit whining about Apple and just stop using them
Every time someone says "I have no choice but to go against the dictates of my conscience" it translates to "I have a choice to have my own will free of coercion, but I don't want to pay the entry fee of having integrity."

No one is forcing anyone to use Apple or Google products. Anyone that wants the nominal "benefits" that they provide, continues to make the moment-by-moment choice of using them. You can throw your iPhone or Android phone away (or sell it and give the proceeds to the poor, e.g. child cobalt miners or Foxconn workers). You can get a dumb phone. You can live (shockingly!) without having a cellphone at all. Your job requires you to have a MacBook? Get a different job. The lifestyle you choose may require you to have these things, but that's because you choose the lifestyle over personal integrity.

No one can actually follow their own morality and someone else's. You either prove a hypocrite to yourself or a hypocrite to others. You can't serve both justice and the marketplace.

You could take no thought for your career, nor how you would make your living, nor where you would live; nor even the clothes you would wear in the morning. Is living not more than jobs, money, and clothing?

froasty··on Speaking Up on Racism
Oh, certainly. The United States (and every other country with a hawkish foreign policy) uses atrocity propaganda to justify their wars to their citizens. The difference between Nayirah, the Gulf of Tonkin, the RMS Lusitania, et. al and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq is that American citizens and international observers knew the pretense was fabricated at the time. These same citizens and international observers protested the fabrication, the ensuring invasion, the total capture of the media by the administration, etc. The only people to whom it was an actual surprise that Iraq did not have WMDs were Bush's low-information voting constituents.
froasty··on Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017)
Let's consider two academics. Academic A is constrained to traditional rational discourse and Academic B is constrained to post-modernism. Which of these two is going to publish more articles? The person that must meticulously build on prior research, or the person who can publish non-falsifiable articles with no chance of collision with prior work? Which of these two is going to get more grants for their institutions? Which of these two is going to get promoted and get tenure? Which of these is going to be in charge of advising the next generation of graduate students?

Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0

Or consider this scene from Mad Men:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39

Different industry, same phenomenon. Pursuit of truth and a notion of objective reality constrains discourse to a very limited band of possible outcomes, let alone actual outcomes. If you remove those constraints, the floodgates open and the signal will immediately be drowned by intentional noise. And if you don't play ball, your institutions will inevitably replace you with someone who will.

froasty··on Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
froasty··on Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017)
The quote isn't real. It's from a Cambridge dissertation in 1907 attributing these attitudes to the ancients. With that said, let's assume that Socrates did say something like this. What exactly happened to Athenian democracy in the generations after the death of Socrates?

"Athens, 404 BC. The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighbouring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, less than 100 years later, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch, a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: 'megas alexandros', Alexander the Great."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://phys.org/news/2009-10-athenians-history.html

froasty··on Speaking Up on Racism
I understand that Apple is a brand first and foremost, so it's no surprise that they're going to release token PR efforts and publicize their tax shelter non-profits.

I also understand that activists, if they actually knew of the severity of working conditions in the Foxconn factories in Shenzen or the child slaves working in illegal cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to power their smartphones and laptops, they'd stop buying Apple products immediately, full stop.

It's a tragedy to me that a video taken by a smartphone, the privileged end product of the slavery, dehumanization, and political repression of hundreds of thousands outside the West takes precedence over those same anonymous sacrificial lives--anonymous only because they don't live in the West where recording and spreading evidence of violence is trivial.

Here's a tangential fact that should chill every human alive to the bone: George Bush, his administration, and the instruments of his war machine still walk free, without charges, after launching a foreign war of aggression that killed directly and indirectly hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, legitimated torture, indefinite detentions, and drone strikes.

The Patriot Act and the lead-up to the War in Iraq led directly to ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the militarization of the police, the rejection of the sacrosanctness of civil rights, and the total unaccountability of public officials to the media. Alternate Facts and Fake News began in 2002 with the lies of WMDs in Iraq.

Where is the rioting, the UN pressure, the international protests for charges to be brought against George Bush, the single most responsible individual outside of Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers for the death of George Floyd and hundreds of thousands of others?

froasty··on The Culture War in Open Source Is On
>Richard Stallman, originator of the first free-and-open license, resigned from the Free Software Foundation last year over comments sympathetic to the late billionaire and molester Jeffrey Epstein.

This is patently false character assassination. This should read instead "Richard Stallman, known high-functioning autist with a broken, abusive childhood, defends Marvin Minsky, the only father figure he's ever had, from posthumous accusations of rape and pedophilia on semi-private mailing list. He was then forced to resign and made homeless after lifelong struggle for freedom and justice at the expense of everything else in his life." But that's certainly not a news story--that's just a tragic inquisition and miscarriage of justice.

I'm sure a bunch of blue herrings (i.e. rabid twitter users) will show up and respond with one or more variation of the following (but with zero facts):

"As a woman in tech, I feel personally threatened by the fact that creepy Stallman is alive and walking around freely, creepily. He should have a muzzle put on him and be defenestrated off the Cliffs of Dover. Otherwise we're still alienating potential contributors."

"Stallman is not the squeaky-clean corporate skinsuit we needed to further our sociopathic power grabs. Even if he was innocent (which he wasn't, he's literally Hitler), he should have been removed years before because he's not the right fit for the position of bootlicking for FAANG and champagne socialists."

"Do you even know how society works? Stallman is the problem. He is literally the personification of everything that is wrong with men and software. Period. How anyone can believe that his behavior is acceptable in 2020 is beyond me. You literally need to see a therapist. This Karl Popper quote taken out of context means I don't have to introspect about stomping on your face. #stallmanisliterallyhitler"

Or, they'll just downvote this comment silently, which shows that they've read this comment, know it's true, and want the public to know that they acknowledge that, but >:(

froasty··on Carcinogens Have Infiltrated the Generic Drug Supply in the U.S.
Really? It's 2019, there is no argument to be had over this.

Impurity problems have occasionally come up over the years, but they have largely been addressed quickly by existing regulations. And at no point have they ever approached the level of risk posed by the illnesses they are prescribed to treat.

While the risk of impurities in the generic drug supply certainly warrant research, the percentage of issues again doesn't approach significance with comparison to these pervasive illnesses.

Nothing is risk-free. Eating food has risk, taking paracetamol has risk, getting blood drawn has risk.

Saying something has risk without talking about the amount of risk and the context of the risks it mitigates is pointless.

Drug impurities in generics introduce negligible amounts of risk. Eating peanuts in public or going for a drive is much riskier, and we almost all do those things without a second thought. By contrast, access to affordable drugs mitigate huge risks: the illnesses we medicate can, did and do cause horrific harm up to and including death, and do so very well.

The pharmaceutical industry is not immune to criticism, it is just they have weathered all the reasonable criticism leveled at them. If you are willing to drive in a car, taking generics that could should be a complete non-issue for you.

In an era of fake news and increasing doubt in the medical establishment, publishing reports like this is not only irresponsible, but unethical. This only adds fuel to the fire of unwarranted skepticism towards our medical system.

froasty··on A Founder's Farewell
And yet here you are, voluntarily, in a thread about Curtis Yarvin. What exactly does that make you?
froasty··on Technorealism, Alvin Toffler, and the Forgotten Third Wave
>Ah yes, a nation pouring an immense amount of resources into propaganda targeting a specific subsection of american society and having close contact with the currently elected administration definitely wasn't the reason they got elected.

Here are a few questions for you: Why did Russian ad-buys during the 2016 campaign fund both extremist sides of the political spectrum? For an example, why did they try to simultaneously organize pro- and anti-gay rallies in Kansas?^1 And just who is Vladislav Surkov?^2

>The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be. Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.

Okay, now where is the threshhold to qualify for consideration in the Fairness Doctrine, particular in a society with manifold subcultures? Is it party members? Is it adherents? Is it hashtags? Who gets to be on the Fairness Board? How are violations handled? Who gets to determine what speech is acceptable (because clearly revolutionary parties exist)? When is a platform accountable? Are foreign platforms accountable? Are personal servers broadcasting or narrowcasting?

>It's not so much as a new wave, but a new class of citizens who desperately need to become actively engaged in the political process. And understanding that the systems they're creating has lead to new power structures and information conduits, and with power comes responsibility. A responsibility to ensure the consumers of their platform are not unduly influenced by incorrect, false, and misleading information (Facebook tried doing this but was lambasted by the right, can't imagine why). A responsibility to support good governance and to support policies that provide a continued foundation for a functioning, healthy, productive, peaceful society.

In so many words, you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to just make stronger and faster horses.

>The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.

The notion that it's a monocausal issue of social policy has been addressed thoroughly for decades by luminaries such as Marhsall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul. The Medium is the Message. For a more up to date take, I strongly recommend that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.

---

[1] https://www.advocate.com/media/2017/11/03/why-did-russia-pro...

[2] https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg?t=126

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg#Definition

froasty··on Ask HN: Should/How to join CIA?
If you're okay operating in an organization that can't help but play a Molochian game of necessary evils, then you should consider it.

Otherwise, you're probably going to get burned out by the constant braying of naive idealists that believe foreign policy exists in a vacuum that conscience moves rather than context.

froasty··on Stop Datamining Me
The anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. They're very bright to do that.
froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
How are those not synonymous in this day and age? The point of freedom of expression is not inhibiting the right to an audience or explicitly interferring in the marketplace of ideas in civil society. Saying that Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, et. al face any actual injury or diminution in service as a result of hosting pernicious speech is absurd, especially in light of the role of Chapter 47 in the history of the freedom of the Internet.^1

And let's be clear, this isn't a case of the use of a service depriving other more worthy parties of using said service. It is Shaw's comparison between apples and ideas.^2 And it is attempting to tear down a universal principle to make it accountable to shifting tastes and moral fads which makes everyone guilty eventually.

---

1 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

2 - “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
If you're not willing or able to see parallels between Judaism and Nazism or any other ethnically separatist ideology that are quasi-religious in nature, then there's no point in continuing any discussion because you've already drawn a line that doesn't include some humans.

As a parting, however, you've not only proven my point, but re-iterated it by repeating another appeal to authority by citing Marcuse, which is literally advocating for tyranny of the majority (which, ironically, is yet another expression of the reactive ur-fascism that this brand of censorship is a symptom of).

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
I'd love to see your equivalent ancestor in the 1640s when Milton published the Areopagitica.^1

> Reading this polemic is liketh watching someone did beat the ocean with a stick. What wouldst behold liketh for an initiative contra-contra-press-freedom to succeedeth? All ideas havest equal access to all presses? Just the large enou ones? The objective is so po'rly formed, t's not coequal wrong.

> A Land's identity and ability to attracteth God's Grace art determin'd by the activities those gents accepteth & cultivateth, not vice versa. The Papists did want to print on Protestant English Presses because it madeth it easier to selleth thy grandparents heresies & indulgences, but Protestant English Presses hath felt leaving those folk on maketh it a lodging families (and yon grandparents) willst not visiteth. The abbots of Shrewsbury wouldst liketh to useth the Bank of England because those gents art trust'd payment provid'rs, but those bankers hath felt those servicing said monastery would halt their intellection of being said trust payment provid'rs if it be true that those gents allow'd Papists to stayeth on.

> And there be plenty of reasoneth to bethink those gents're right: permissive Lands existeth and work (the Savages in the colonies et. al), those gents just attracteth not the same Salvation as Proper English Lands. At which hour people complaineth about being censored, those gents're just declaring "the Lands that accepteth me aren't popular enow". I'm fain our World is enow of a Terra Incognita that many Lands art broadly accessible -- but nobody owes thee an audience on English soils.

---

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areopagitica

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
And once again, the quote in broader context:

"How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is "open"; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension.

But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to want the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what be has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning‐like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last for a whole lifetime.

The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."

Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since theyseek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious. He has chosen also to be terrifying. People are afraid of irritating him. No one knows to what lengths the aberrations of his passion will carry him — but be knows, for this passion is not provoked by something external. He has it well in hand; it is obedient to his will: now he lets goof the reins and now he pulls back on them. He is not afraid of himself, but he sees in the eyes of others a disquieting image‐his own‐and he makes his words and gestures conform to it. Having this external model, he is under no necessity to look for his personality within himself. He has chosen to find his being entirely outside himself, never to look within, to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others."

The issue is that by utilizing partial quotes from Popper and Sartre in order to justify presumptive bad-faith censorship, proponents are literally "loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past" solely through an argument from authority.

If I said, without citation, that "Our opponents can only argue in bad faith. Our self-righteousness is infallible because we're sincere and they are not. Never challenge their arguments or sincerity directly, because they will use your generosity against you without ever changing their minds." but without citation of a famous name, how would people evaluate this position?

Outside of who said it, I'd wager that most people would say that it presumes bad-faith and can only serve to ratchet-up and escalate any division already present. If any genuine attempt to understand or be understood was present, the proponent has shut it down from the outset.

Now when you attach a name to it, suddenly that same argument, given different verbiage, suddenly garners either knowing nods of self-righteousness or visceral renunciation, despite the content being quite identical.

Compare your selective Sartre quote with the following:

"The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The [category] had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day." -- [famous person]

Ignoring if people recognized the actual provenance, if I put anti-Semite and Sartre, it'd be upvoted, and if I put Jew / Hitler, it'd be flagged within minutes, yet it says exactly the same thing. And leads to exactly the same dehumanizing attitudes towards living, breathing, fallible human beings.

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
> The problem with free speech on the Internet is that our human minds have not sufficiently evolved to even remotely begin to understand just how fundamentally the Internet changes our perception of our fellow humans. Dunbar's number shows that we're only able to keep track of a very small number of ongoing human relationships relative to the Internet-connected population of the planet, and at a societal level we're used to only hearing ideas from people around us, and those in published works or in mass media such as radio and television. Yet now anyone, literally anyone, can go online and proclaim whatever they want in certain online public spaces.

Another fundamental issue is that The News is all about reporting abberational events. When non-local awareness is ubiquitous (via the Internet and social media) literally any statistically improbable event can be reported upon anywhere and treated unconsciously as a statistical constant by its audience.

In other words, people in California get to hear all the improbable dirty laundry about Texas and vice-versa, but we don't get to see the banal, quotidian existence of these places that allows us to relate to them as fellow humans, fellow Americans, etc.

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
> Nazi also got comparably lower sentences then radical communists or left wing for same offenses. Right wing in Germany was treated with more lenience then left wing in Germany during that period. Hitler could be sent to jail for long, till forgotten, but was not. He could be kept there and his jail could be less of holiday then it actually was. Nazi got plenty of support and benefit of doubt on all kinds of levels which along with fear of communism and wish to build a military imperium again played more role then office sacking. It is not like only Nazi were censored at the time or that specially strict rules were applied to them.

The precipitating issue in Weimar Germany was that a very clear social and cultural divide existed between those engaged in culture production and those involved in maintaining law and order. The former, generally, were the cosmopolitan worldly types and the latter, generally, were the Prussian law and order types.

I would say, like today in America, that there was not a homogenous treatment by society at large. I would argue instead that there was a layering of reactions by different parts of society, each of which had different reactions and frames of reference. You can make sweeping assertions about what "the media" or "the police" said, did, or thought in Weimar Germany, but that's already reducing extremely diverse portions of society to nothing more than singular unthinking mobs.

Yes, Freikorps members and National Socialists frequently received more lenient sentences in the Weimar Republic. This was because of a panoply of factors, not the least of which was that the accused were almost universally veterans of the war. Combined with the aforementioned Prussian law-and-order types that were democratized unwillingly, it's almost a guarantee that, on the whole, judges would view militant reactionaryism as less severe a crime (if a crime at all) than further perceived attempts to Sovietize the Weimar Republic. Conversely, the media tended to excoriate the judicial sectors for being too lenient against reactionaries and too harsh on communists for similar but opposite reasons.

> Somehow, nazi openly trying to silence Jews (even before they got power) or democratic politicians did not caused Streissand effect making Jews or democrats more heard. I also remember that their opposition was targeted by Nazi strongly and successfully.

The Streisand effect is when an already ubiquitous public figure accidentally enlarges the scope of a minority issue by publicizing it. The Nazis could not have created a Streisand effect when they were a disempowered minority party in the same way that the KPD couldn't have created a Streisand effect pre-1933. However, the Weimar authorities and media did create Streisand effects constantly for both the KPD and the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic by patrolling and outlawing various activities of both parties, which definitely contributed to their overall growth and popularity.

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
"O Lord, this zealotry to punish the heretics could easily escape from the control of God's chosen and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform un-Christlike deeds that the Church shall repent of for all eternity!"

"Let's inquisit that heresy when we get to it."

SOME TIME LATER

"Truly, monsigneur, this escalation of the Crusade to extirpate the Lutherans could spiral out of our grasp and trigger a continental conflagration that would disturb the harmony of the Catholic Church and cause us to finalize the fracture in Christendom in its entirety!"

"Let us rupture that schism when we come to it."

SOME TIME LATER

"O Puritan Lawyers! I cannot abide this constant seeking of devilry amongst the burghers; for though thy use the Devil chained and cowed, if the Devil escapeth thine chains placyd upon hym, might he wreck also thine own soul's of pleasant Albion forevermore?"

"Let us burn that witch when we come to it."

SOME TIME LATER

"Je dis, this never-ending mission to purify France of the Anciens Regime could easily escape the control of the Bourgeosie and not only destabilize society but also cause us to perform inhumane deeds against the Third Estate that we will regret in the Eye of Providence for all recorded history!"

"Let's get a-head of that when the time arrives."

SOME TIME LATER

"I say, these attempts to civilize the Savages of the outer colonies could easily escape the oversight of the Provincial Governments and not only jeopardize our economic interests, but enable the performance by Europeans of barbarisms that would surely be worse than the practices of the Savages in the first place!"

"Let us lift the White Man's burden when we reach it."

SOME TIME LATER

"I don't know Comrade, this ten-year-old five-year plan to purify Russia of the Bourgeosie could easily escape control of the Central Committee and not only jeopardize the Revolution, but also cause us to engage in the same Tsarist evils of terror that the Revolution was launched to eliminate!"

"Let's rehabilitate that kulak when we get to it."

SOME TIME LATER

> We run the risk that the act of deplatforming can become as extreme as the hate speech it seeks to banish.

Let us cross that bridge when we get to it.

froasty··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society:

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).

I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.

All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"

froasty··on Anti-social Punishment
My only complaint about this presentation is the lack of forgetfulness and recovery of old strategies. In a word, it ignores context.

A world with only tit-for-tats effectively becomes a world of always-cooperate once the knowledge that defectors are a thing disappears from visceral collective memory.

And as an inevitable aftermath of that, the world of always-cooperate invites the return of always-cheat. Which invites the arrival of tit-for-tats.

However, the presentation's conclusion remains the same: viable actions in the world we inhabit are largely--but not totally--defined by the contexts that everyone brings to the table. And in most contexts, it pay out more to forgive than to retribute in the long run.

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