illuminerdy

That's complete and utter nonsense.

Being "intolerant of the intolerant"? Does that include your own intolerance?

People are completely within their rights to be intolerant. Nothing gives you or the government the right to decide who/what I should like or want to associate with. Nothing gives you the right to persecute me for wrongthink.

> "Some political organizations should be prohibited."

And who gets to decide which ones are prohibited and the standards used? Because some people think Antifa should be prohibited while others think it's a necessary organization that is fighting the good fight. Some people think Christian organizations that reject homosexuality and gay marriage should be banned while others think they are doing God's work.

Thats why it's necessary to protect all viewpoints when talking about speech. Because your opinion is not the only valid one.

You don't get it.

The stuff you find abhorrent is THE WHOLE POINT of protecting freedom of speech. Things that nobody finds objectionable (if there is such a thing) don't need to be protected.

> "Together with the fundamental liberties of speech, association, and religion, the Basic Law confers a general right to “personal freedom” as well as a more specific right to “life and physical integrity."

Germany has too many curbs on freedom of speech for me to consider it a real liberty. Holocaust denial laws are a particularly obvious infringement of speech rights.

Most of Europe is the same way. I just watched a video of police in England telling a reporter who was having a conversation with a LGBT activist that they would arrest him if he continued to insult the activist.

That's not free speech.

Self-driving cars will definitely happen. It won't happen next year, but it will absolutely happen. That's the way humans are. If they can do something and make some money, they will do it.

I agree that suppression isn't good. But there still needed to be thorough investigations. It being "obvious" isn't enough.

That being said, the corporate media and the politicians (mostly Democrats) who called this theory "preposterous" and a conspiracy deserve to be thrown out on their asses. Because those were talking points that had nothing to back them up. But when you're dealing with the "pandemic", what else is new?

> What happened to Hu Jintao?

The same thing that I'm sure happened to many Chinese people when he was in power.

> Musk Said to Begin Firing Twitter’s Top Executives

And nothing of value was lost.

I look forward to seeing what Musk has in store for Twitter. It's been a biased cesspool for a long time now. Maybe he can at least make it a less biased cesspool.

And who says it needs to be compatible? Companies design what they feel are the best/better components for their products. If consumers want to have a "standard" connector that works with multiple devices, they have that with the many Android OEMs that choose to use USB.

But I don't see why the government should be forcing companies to use a standard when it has no clear connection to safety of the product.

All the more reason to not dismiss them as for "people with nowhere else to go" and simply make sure that they are well maintained and people aren't using them as their personal poop graffiti space.

> "Meh, I don't have to countenance the opinions of selfish people"

And the rest of us don't have to inject untested, unproven chemicals into OUR bodies just so YOU can have a false sense of security and virtue signal.

Freedom all around.

> "If there is a liberty to expose innocent people to potentially deadly diseases I don't want it for myself or others."

But you don't get to make that decision for OTHERS. If you are worried about COVID, stay home and wrap yourself in a bubble. There's a certain amount of risk that comes with living with people.

I used to live in the South Bay and go up to San Francisco and Oakland every other weekend. It was bad, but it seems to have completely gone to hell in the last decade.

I would not set foot there unless all of human existence depended on it.

That doesn't make any sense. Public toilets are for the public. Anyone who finds themselves in a situation where they need a toilet. A tourist, for example. Or maybe just someone who finds nature calling at an inopportune time. I'm sure we've all been there.

Also, even if it WAS for people who have nowhere else, that doesn't mean that it should be covered with shit.

And what, exactly, do you believe he means when he says that? Because I have a hard time seeing how any rational person would think that that's an actual threat towards Jewish people.

And absent it being an actual threat (which it's clearly not), I don't see what your issue is. Kanye West is well within his rights to criticize Jewish people the same way that literally every woke person is within their rights to criticize, nay, demonize white people these days on every social media, corporate media platform, and news outlet these days.

If his purpose truly is promoting, advocating for and protecting the free and open exchange of ideas in an open society, then I fully support his purchase of Parler.

I don't care what he's said in the past. I don't have to agree with him on the issues to agree with him that the trend towards social media companies censoring people (sometimes in collusion with the government) is terrible for everyone except the globalist elites.

Censorship anywhere is bad. Especially when it is purely for political reasons.

Most European nations have very strict Holocaust denial laws. And as much as I personally think people who deny the Holocaust happened are idiots, that's clearly "thoughtcrime" type of censorship. What someone thinks or believes about history is none of the government's (or anyone else's) business.

If Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist that most rational people don't take seriously, which is how the media portrays him, how could what he have said possibly had such an effect on the public to warrant almost a billion dollars in compensation?

This monetary verdict doesn't make sense in any way.

So your focus is on what "camp" someone falls into, not whether their arguments have merit or their statements are factual?

No wonder you think there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia. As long as your "side" controls the narrative, you'll nod your head and clap like a trained seal no matter what lies and "misinformation" they spread.

> "The whole point of no-platforming individuals is to make a statement that their views are seen as reprehensible..."

Uh...reprehensible by whom?

You do realize that what's "reprehensible" is extremely subjective, right? And the same tactics and standards that you are using to silence opinions you don't like can therefore just as easily be used against you and yours by people who find your opinions reprehensible.

That's the whole point of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas, it protects everyone's ability to speak freely. And then individuals can make up their own minds about what is "reprehensible" and choose whether THEY want to listen to it or not. In other words, people don't need you to be an arbiter of what is reprehensible for other adults.

> "Wikipedia doesn't have a left-leaning bias, reality does."

It's impossible to take you seriously when you say things like this.

Given the trend we've seen towards dictionaries rewriting definitions of words and sites like Wikipedia scrubbing long-existing content in the name of combating "misinformation", I'd like to have a set of older hardcopies of encyclopedias and dictionaries so things that are being erased are still preserved somewhere.

An interesting article from Intellectual Takeout on how being "traditional" is the new "counter-culture". And I could not agree more.

I myself am black/African-American who grew up without a father because he died when I was about 3 years old. And I didn't know what was missing from my life not having a father there. But now, looking back, I can see the hole that was left. I see the struggle that my mother had to go through to raise a male child (one of six children) in that environment and keep me away from the negative forces that could easily have landed me in prison or in a grave. I still "made it" in the sense that I avoided becoming a statistic, but in retrospect, a two-parent household with a father there to teach, guide, and discipline would probably have changed my life for the better. I feel strongly that many of the issues in the various black communities around the country cannot be adequately addressed without reversing the trend of single-motherhood and absentee fathers.

In addition, the author's point about extended family also rings true to me. I never met any of my grandparents except for one grandmother who I met twice. But I remember distinctly the very first time she came to visit us, I had come home with a letter from school (elementary) saying that I had been acting up. She read the letter and, without hesitation, called me to her and talked to me seriously about how disappointed she was to hear that I had been acting that way. She was already probably 80 years old at the time and, again, I had never met her before. But I felt so ashamed to have made her feel that way. And there's nothing like a healthy dose of shame to make you reevaluate yourself and possibly come away with a clearer image of who you want to be. I would dearly have loved to have her in my life more than she was.

The article made me think of these things.

I can't get the page to load for some reason, but I don't think whois is obsolete. I used it via command line to search for available domains when I was creating my blog. It was simple and effective for that purpose.

This brings back memories of my old iBook G3 and PowerBook G4.

I miss that weird smiley face logo-thingy.

I understand what you're saying. There are different ways to implement any social or economic system. Capitalism doesn't always look the same, neither does communism.

But there has to be a core definition, and as long as that core definition is met, then the method of implementation doesn't much matter. But none of the examples you posted are examples of real communism.

For example, you talk about the Portuguese government owning many major businesses. Well, one of the core tenets of communism is the abolishment of private property in favor of communal property. Private property and business exists in Portugal, so it's not an actual communist country.

> "Companies have the right to handle this issue however they wish."

But that's precisely the problem these days. We have seen recently that the government has been colluding with the tech companies to censor content that they deem "misinformation" and individuals whom they deem "problematic". It's no longer just about a private company deciding what they will or will not allow on their platform.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/01/white-house-big-tech-colluded-...

> "Do you think the public on the first count, and the marketplace on the second count are doing a particularly admirable job here?"

It's not about whether the "group" is coming to the decision or conclusion that you or I would like them to reach. It's about whether we, as individuals, have the right to view the totality of the evidence and arguments and then make up our own minds.

Some people see through the bullshit and some don't. That's the nature of humanity. And, to be fair, what you and I might think is bullshit might turn out to actually be completely the opposite. We're not infallible. But the fact that any of us might make mistakes in judgement or analysis is not a valid reason to prevent unpopular or unverified (or however you want to label it) information from being disseminated or accessed.

Interesting discussions can happen on pretty much any forum/platform.

It's not the 'where' that matters, it's the 'who'. It's the people having the conversation. I've had meaningful conversations on Disqus more than once, which normally you would not think would be a place you could have such conversations.

> " There was one forum I was a part of where none of us knew each other in real life and yet we had long, intense, good-faith discussions..."

I'm curious what happened to that forum?

> "...it purported to be a sober view of history, well cited and no name calling. Literally none of the references were to anything real; it was all fabricated bullshit trying to push the reader to a particular conclusion (Jews are bad)."

But the problem is that censorship assumes that you are too stupid to come to that conclusion yourself and must be protected from the "misinformation".

It also robs the marketplace of the ability to hear the legitimate criticisms and the opportunities to expose said bullshit.