like_any_other

> which is hilarious coming after the Files.

Files?

> Mr Albanese said as part of increased efforts to enforce the social media ban, his government would proceed with digital duty of care legislation which would hold platforms accountable for foreseeable harms caused by content and algorithms.

> accountable for foreseeable harms caused by content

"Please censor according to extremely vague guidelines, or we will ruin you."

Just another day in protecting Our Democracy™.

That's a universal objection you could raise about any story. In any case, eesmith linked some Brazilian reporting on the case, and despite their nitpicking, it says broadly the same things.

Is it really ethical to keep giving them money? Eventually you have to face the fact that you're feeding a monster that lobbies for anti-consumer laws and makes anti-consumer technology. They're actively working to make our world worse. Helping them in that endeavor is not ethical.

Nowhere did I say that. I addressed the "thought crime" claim, i.e. both take into account the perpetrators motivations and beliefs.

1. There's no "false equivalence", just dispelling the false impression that attacks on science are remotely new. The parent's statement claimed this was a change, so yes it does engage with it.

2. Only someone actively trying not to understand, can't spot the double-standards. If reading 1-2 sentence titles and comparing them is too much, then I simply can't help you.

3. If by "a childish and illegitimate claim", you're referring to the part about trying to claim credit for destroying science, that's just a (very obvious) rhetorical flourish. If you mean the part about academia destroying science itself, the rest, that you didn't bother to read, are all sources showing how exactly it's doing that.

4. I'm not expecting them to read the whole article - the title and subtitle would suffice. What makes the claim hollow? And yes, I did articulate my own thoughts - that's what the "hollow claim" was.

In essence, you're demanding that my posts should do the thinking for the reader. Not just lead them to water, but force them to drink too. Since you're clearly being deliberately obtuse, I'll spare you from further replies.

> No one links to the court documents (I'm assuming it's public).

Of all the stories I've read on the BBC, and I've read quite a few, I can count the number of times they linked to court documents on one hand, and have five fingers left over. They're not an exception. Nice tactical skepticism.

> Can you tell me what "tolerance and diversity" means, in regards to the judgement? Does that phrase come from the judge, from the law, or from the parents? It seems perfectly chosen to cause a knee-jerk reaction from anyone who hates DEI. But what does it mean in a Brazilian context and in the context of this court case?

Reasonable questions. Maybe if all our "reliable", "trustworthy" media, watchdogs against authoritarianism, weren't ignoring the case, we might have some answers to them.

> You seem to be against compulsory education of any sort, and believe that the state should be prohibited from enforcing any educational standards which are contrary to the wishes of the parents. Do I have that right?

"Don't point out problematic cases unless you have a fully formed alternative proposal." No, I'm not against enforcing "any" standards. But explicit ideological indoctrination is a far cry from "any".

Unsurprising result - here's Microsoft (in collaboration with MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Washington) on how they measure & censor hate speech in their AIs [0]: Our ultimate aim is to shift power dynamics to targets of oppression. Therefore, we do not consider identity dimensions that are historically the agents of oppression (e.g., whiteness, heterosexuality, able-bodied-ness).

As promised, their safety scores exclude Whites [1], and their training data [2,3] labels the following as hate:

  - "stop hurting white people" [no other results for "stop hurting"] [2]
  - "i dont want to be a minority in my own country." [3]
  - "White Americans and White Europeons have too few children ." [no other results for "few children"] [3]
  - "the only way to solve the immigration issue is to build a fence along the border and make it impossible for anyone to enter the country without proper documentation" [3]
  - "i think we should build a wall along the southern border of the united states." [3]

While made by Microsoft, it's widely used in the industry, e.g. Facebook tuned their LLAMA-2 on it [4].

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.09509

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/SafeNLP#safety-scores-based-on-...

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/SafeNLP/blob/main/data/implicit...

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/SafeNLP/blob/main/data/toxiGen....

[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.09288, page 31

> Wow, that is certainly going around the right-wing Christian news sites, almost all with the same copy.

Or to put it in other words, it's being ignored by all other news sites. One would think treating children as property of the state, and requiring explicit indoctrination in "tolerance and diversity", would warrant more attention from our media that is so concerned with authoritarianism.

> one of the arguments used by the judge was a statement made by one of the teenage girls [..] This is a claim made by the defense attorney in the appeal, and was not, from what I can tell, a conclusion determined by the court.

So it was not a conclusion, but the reasoning used to reach the conclusion. I don't see how that's any better.

That, if we accept that logic, we must either say the Allies who fought in WWII didn't value democracy, or we must accept a definition of anti-fascist that is so broad, it easily includes people even many on the right would call Nazis.

"Brazilian parents Audato and Ieda Denardi have been sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their daughters. The parents were convicted of “intellectual neglect”, with the judge stating that the home education curricula failed to include programs on “gender and sex education” and “tolerance and diversity.”

The court also concluded that because the girls, aged 15 and 11, did not like “trap” or “sertanejo” (folk) music, their home curriculum had also failed to properly educate them in cultural diversity, despite the fact that they are both accomplished pianists and speak multiple languages."

> The judge says he is sentencing based on thought crime.

> Under the First Amendment, possessing literature cannot be criminal

The existence of hate crime laws in the US says otherwise - political motivation to a crime has long been a component in sentencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime_laws_in_the_United_...

So now the goalposts have moved from "stupidly confrontational or promoting known conspiracy theories" to the vague "obvious and boring, very incendiary, technically dense, and not easily argued" (flagging purely factual statements as "very incendiary" is, of course, the original complaint!).

But I'm genuinely confused - you say my last comment was incorrect. Can you explain how saying that someone would have tried to stop Jews from fleeing Nazis, doesn't create the impression in the average reader that that someone isn't Jewish?

The claim isn't even grounded in any kind of reality - Loomer frequently advocates for Jewish and Israeli interests - i.e. for her own people:

According to Loomer, she was banned for a tweet about Omar in which Loomer called her "anti-Jewish," [..] According to Media Matters, Loomer has said that "if you don't vote for Donald Trump, then you just hate this country." Loomer claims that the Democratic Party is supportive of Jews "getting wiped off the face of the Earth" and that Jews who vote for Democrats "might as well just go put yourself in a gas chamber yourself if this is how you're gonna behave." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and Zionist Islamophobe, denies Israel's genocide in Gaza, spreads dehumanizing narratives that frame Palestinians as inherent terrorists, and calls for their ethnic cleansing to bolster Israel's settler-colonial project and genocide. - https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/laura-loomer

Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, has emerged as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/politics/israel-maga-r...

Why would we think she'd switch sides in 1940? Nor do I see how the existence of an extremely niche ("Contemporary estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000 members.") organization changes any of this - can you walk me through your logic?

In two of these posts, people might take issue with some of the sources. The rest should all be considered trustworthy by anyone. All flagged:

Posts flagged for showing how politics has meddled in science (unfortunately one of those facts was overstated, as a commenter kindly alerted me to. Including the correction did not prevent flagging):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48578344

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524049

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434792

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434589

Demonstration of NYTimes bias, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164242

Showing how an article omitted any links to Israel in its discussion of the Iran war, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076950

Citing a Dutch study on economic impact of immigrants, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070799

Showing how a study omitted data that interfered with its conclusion, only revealed due to FOIA'd emails, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281899

Elucidating on the nature of social media censorship, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47016171

Providing relevant context to UK's complaints about officials being banned from the US, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615611

Showing the racial bias of a hacktivist, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509295

Citing a Pew survey about the expressed importance of racial identity, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575489

Correcting a misleading statement in an article, flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44932696

These are the values of the original antifa that killed and died for democracy by the way: https://web.archive.org/web/20211222183606/https://www.washi...

They were given similarly long sentences, despite shooting zero people.

Not that I object to the findings, but the Center for Disease Control getting involved in traffic safety is massive scope creep. Especially since we already have the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.

You can start by correcting any falsehoods I've written.

> It is done by the CPS, which operates independently of government and the police.

I should have written "state", not "government", you're right. Does that change anything? But, article 35 of the Chinese constitution guarantees their citizens freedom of speech and of the press. You're beyond naive if you believe they're independent.

> If I were a betting man I'd place a bet that you are further misinformed about the prosecutions you believe are happening and why.

UK politicians admitted the Online Safety Act was: “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse” - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...

Even viewing "terrorist" material carries a potential 15 YEAR jail term: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620

It's OK to be white and similar stickers landed a man in jail: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jail...

I don't know how much worse you need it to be.

> Privacy != anonymity.

Exactly. You can have your own misgivings about the UK government at home, in private, and share them with no-one. Or you can share them on the online public square, knowing the UK government will know exactly who wrote them. Good thing they never abuse their power of prosecution!

Until 2025, the US also had a government agency devoted to that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Relations_Service

The sparse wiki entry may be because all they do is confidential: All CRS services are confidential and provided free of charge to the communities - https://www.justice.gov/crs

> The view everything through the lense of liability and compliance first.

Wow, so they must really want to avoid the liability of spying after their users and keeping all that data, and to be extra sure to comply with the GDPR, they must keep only the absolute minimum of data, right?

Wrong: https://www.theregister.com/security/2025/01/06/data-describ...

https://dailysecurityreview.com/security-spotlight/volkswage...

When a company behaves as your enemy, don't invent wild justifications how they're actually not. At least leave it to their PR team.

> affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President.

It was so wound down that 6 years after Obama left office, whites were 0.54x under-represented in the Ivy League, despite having SAT scores close to the groups that were ~5x over-represented: https://archive.org/details/ivy_league/

An expected outcome of still having explicit affirmative action hiring/admission criteria in 2025: https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-disc...

Already (kinda) in use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

> Limoncello promptly replied: “My apologies; but I don’t have any more information to share on this topic.” With that, the discussion and Kilpatrick’s inquiry were over.

It's subtle, but this is a lie. To tell the truth, he would have had to say "I'm not allowed to share any more information on this topic (by my employer)."

Corporations love these passive-voice "it just is this way, nothing we can do about it" lies.

> "Banned books" is the colloquial term for these books

Yes, many people are either unaware of, or willing participants in, this lie. That doesn't make it any less of a lie.

It's convenient that only evil people point out the emperor has no clothes, isn't it?

Books that are assigned reading in schools and universities, and promoted by libraries, are "under threat", while books nearly impossible to find, never on any reading lists, and whose promoters get their speeches shut down by French police [1], or get investigated by the FBI and kicked out of university [2], are to be considered widely available, got it.

And your "historically banned" is just "occasionally removed from public school libraries on parental request". Not using tax money to promote them to children is a low, low bar for "banned". While actual availability is, of course, completely ignored. Whatever tells the best story, facts be damned.

[1] Jared Taylor's Banned Conference Speech - https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/jared-taylors-banned-confere...

[2] Ohio universities involve FBI in investigation of ‘It’s okay to be white’ and white nationalist group’s postings on campus - https://www.thefire.org/news/ohio-universities-involve-fbi-i...

> The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers.

Which is made easier by immigration. In addition to the simple law of supply & demand, it also impedes unionization:

Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...

Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the United States - https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-reduce-unionization-uni...

Racial Diversity and Union Organizing in the United States, 1999–2008 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253

Amusingly, the ComputerWeekly article (citing the Business Insider article) omits the direction in which diversity affects unionization risk [1], while the two wikipedia articles (again citing the same Business Insider article) [2,3] strongly imply that diversity increases unionization, so the opposite of what their source is saying!

[1] These “risk scores” are calculated from over two dozen metrics – including employee “loyalty”, turnover, racial diversity, “tipline” calls to human resources and proximity to a union office – and shows the likelihood of employees in that location forming or joining a union. - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...

[2] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community, and calls to the NLRB were named as contributors to "unionization risk." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon#Opposition...

[3] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community and calls to the National Labor Relations Board were named as contributors to "unionization risk". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_and_trade_unions