mariodiana

Here's the exact quote:

"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.

That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."

"Misinformation" should not be combatted by anything other than better, more persuasive information.

I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices. I'm subscribed to the channel of an M.D. on YouTube who discusses COVID-19, vaccines, etc. He is very careful to (repeatedly) point out that he is vaccinated, he has personally vaccinated hundreds of patients, he encourages everyone to speak to their doctor and follow their recommendations, believing that the vaccine is beneficial for the overwhelming majority of people. But, for all that, he has had videos taken down, and worries that it will happen again.

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

So, then, YouTube is a publisher, not a platform?

I'm by no means an OOP guru, but if anything is passed through a dozen source files, I start to feel a bit queasy.

"U.S. tech firms rely on Taiwanese contract manufacturers to produce up to 90% of their chips […]"

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/semiconductor-shortage-us-te...

Okay, the U.S. destroys the Taiwanese fabs to keep them from communist China. Then what?

I think it's also important to point out that the 1918 pandemic, in contrast to the present one, overwhelmingly killed people in the prime of their lives. According to this study of deaths in Canada and the United States, mortality peaked at age 28:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/

A graph is included, which drives the point home:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/figure/...

Eh, whom am I kidding. I read it as soon as I clicked to see it.

Thank you! (I'm the OP of this thread.) I'm putting that on my re-read list.

I forget what magazine carried this essay, and it was from maybe about 10 years ago, but a journalist decided to take up smoking (temporarily) at the age of 30-something or 40-something, with the idea of writing a story about it. One of his takeaways was the sociability of it, especially since everyone nowadays is forced to exit the office building to have a smoke.

Do you want to read a really entertaining book?

The Great Pianists, by Harold C. Shonberg

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Pianists-Mozart-Present/dp/0671...

You don't have to worry about reading the whole thing. Read through Bach and Mozart (and maybe Beethoven) to begin with. You'll get a feel for the historical background, and mention of their major pieces. Then, you go listen to the pieces.

I know these are pianists, but a good number of the great composers were some of the foremost pianists of their time.

Supplement a composer you've read about with a YouTube video or two, and their entry in Wikipedia, and you're off to a great start.

Anyway, that's one approach.

My understanding is that medieval warfare, among the noble class, had similarities to this: specifically, nobles didn't necessarily fight to the death. Capture and ransom was a big thing. The term "parole" comes from the idea of giving one's word, after capture, that you would not return to fighting if you were released. The nobles of Europe, too, had an extended network of kin, some of whom might be on the "other side."

I don't recall learning about switching sides with fluidity (as in Afghanistan), but I do recall learning that this little game got broken up once the common people were enlisted.

Yes, and I think when people claim to be describing what a "rational actor" would do, what they often leave out are the normative assumptions inherent in their rational analysis. Moreover, I suspect the omission at times is not accidental.

I taught high school for a hot second. I think the approach you suggest would be terrifically engaging for students. Teach them the tricks and make a game of trying to fool one another by setting up two competing teams of "news media," print and talking heads. Essentially, you're teaching them informal fallacies.

Ah, thank you! Yes, I see. Users of cryptocurrency are monsters who, because of the carbon footprint of mining, threaten the very planet. Why, that goes beyond mere hatred for humanity—you have to include the entirety of the Five Kingdoms.

https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/animal/animal_3.htm

How could anybody be against criminalizing it!

Apple should do nothing. Child pornography is a problem for law enforcement. It should not involve blanket and universal surveillance of personal devices.

Today it's child pornography. What about tomorrow? Let me make a case. First, let me make something clear at the outset. I am 100 percent against child pornography. For all I care, castrate all the adults involved, when you catch them.

Now, with that made clear, let's take a look at how bad, comparatively, pornographic photos of underage individuals on a person's phone is—and my apologies to those who cannot stomach the following discussion.

The photos have already been taken. The harm here is indirect. The harm is that possession of photos means that you have become part of the market for child pornography, and provide incentive for the production of future materials. The direct harm occurs when the materials are being produced, and the direct harm is categorically worse than dissemination and possession of the photos.

Compare that to something like terrorism. Recruiting terrorists and planning terrorist activities is, I would argue, a greater and more direct harm than mere possession of child pornography. (Leave aside the production.) So, how can someone accept that this is okay for child pornography and not terrorism? And once we've accepted it's okay for terrorism, who is the "potential" terrorist? What is terrorist contraband?

And now that we've accepted sniffing for terrorists, what's next? Election "manipulation" that "threatens" our democracy? Public health "misinformation"?

This is the Panopticon.

The problem with Rawls's philosophy is simple. His veil of ignorance and original position have the trappings of the state of nature and social contract theory, but his approach is radically different. He is not claiming anything fundamental about human nature or human existence.

Rawls is proposing a small set of principles to use to build a model that we can use for moral reasoning. But the key difference is that the model's legitimacy (and usefulness) comes from the fact that the conclusions arrived at from using it seem to conform to our moral intuitions.

By our moral intuitions he means, the sense of right and wrong that he and other elites share. Rawls never claimed universality. He argued that different societies would have different conceptions of justice. The purpose of his model was to act as a heuristic device for reasoning about the "hard" questions. In other words, if the model conforms to 99.9 percent of our moral sense, then when we get to the margins and have trouble deciding, the model becomes our guide.

The important thing to keep in mind is that he and his likeminded sophisticates have already made up their minds about what "decent" people think, and use that to make the model. But most people don't realize that that's what's going on, because on the surface—meaning, before you wrestle with his impenetrable prose—his method seems to resemble the Enlightenment approach of Hobbes and Locke (and, arguably, Rousseau).

Rawls says nothing about right and wrong, or even justice. Instead, he says what the "smartest people in the room" have already decided.

NASA could put the song on the next probe and promise to pay based on the number of times the song was streamed.

I saw a doctor on YouTube (just a private guy with his own channel) apply this same reasoning to Florida. Right now is Florida's "winter": meaning, people tend to stay indoors with the windows closed (to avoid the oppressive heat of the July and August).

Anyone who thinks that government and Big Tech are going to setup a platform just for this one disease and just for the duration of the pandemic are simply not fit to vote in a free country. This is the beginnings of a social credit system, à la China/Gattaca.

I remember reading that the deaths in countries corresponded pretty tightly with obesity levels in the population. If that's true, that throws lots of "evidence" right out the window.

Edit:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-obesit...

I emphatically do not accept your definition. Politics is the mechanism for controlling and administering force used to preserve the peaceful cooperation of human society. My whole point is that the political and the social has been conflated.

Number 9, "Poor Validation," links to a discussion that encourages a fad that I can't get behind: namely, don't disable the submit button. As a long time Mac user, my understanding has always been that you should not allow the user to do anything you're going to flag an error for.

In the discussion linked to, the example given falls apart in my mind because every one of the fields pictured omits placeholder text, and the placeholder text could easily say "Required." (That's just one solution.)

https://twitter.com/vponamariov/status/1400388907401977857

I could maybe see a counter-argument in the event of a long form. But I would say that long forms may, in most cases, be a bad idea in the first place.

The lament in this essay is that we're not open to persuasion in our politics. How about considering that politics itself is the problem.

A person of a more libertarian bent, like myself, would assert that it's the conflation of government and society, the political and the social, that's the problem. They are separate spheres of human activity. That same sort of person would tell you that politics is a method for conflict resolution, given the inescapable fact of force in human relations.

Politics is about force. The social, by contrast precludes the use of force. Society is about cooperation.

If you accept the above view, you try to reign in what politics applies to. But that is not at all what our politics is like today. Today, we try to do all sorts of things through the power of government. We inject force into aspects of society that should instead be left to cooperation. In fact, we go beyond that. We consider that use of force moral, since it's in the service of the pursuit of "utopia."

I don't expect non-libertarians to agree. I just want to point out that no one should be shocked at all the fighting in the political sphere. Moreover, I would further assert that no one should kid himself or herself that "openness" or "persuasion" is the solution. Lastly, I would point out that when the question "how should government accomplish such-and-such" is posed to someone of libertarian bent, no amount of persuasion is possible, one way or the other. All arguments are superficial. At the bottom, they ignore the point that government shouldn't.

This is an old article, but it came to mind when I saw this. A software testing company discovered that high-functioning people with autism make good testers.

https://blogthinkbig.com/autistic-people-software-testers

Her résumé states she was a National Merit finalist in 2019, a scholarship competition for high school students.

#EMDW

https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&...

If I remember correctly, from reading the original story that broke this news, location data at the rectory he was living in correlated with location data at various conferences he attended. That was sufficient to identify the anonymized data as his phone.

Thank you. But I guess my real point is that Section 230 gives social media companies a status closer to the print shop, in my example, than it does to the nut standing out on the corner. But the new law will now pick and choose, and the government will be doing the picking and choosing. That's why I put "misinformation" in scare quotes. The government is setting itself up as the arbiter.

This won't stop with the current pandemic. You're familiar with the recent "X is infrastructure" fad? "Public health emergency" is setting itself up as the next trick. That's the real issue.

> The proposed exception would only kick in during a declared national public health crisis […]

Imagine a future presidential administration with a majority in Congress declaring that the current pronounced uptick in young people declaring themselves "non-binary" (or something similar) and seeking hormone replacement therapy is evidence of a mass hysteria and, as such, represents a public health emergency; and then using this Section 230 exception as a stick to bully social media companies to take down media hosted on their platforms that allegedly encourages this recent phenomenon.

"Misinformation" is in the eye of the beholder. That's why our Constitution declares that "Congress shall make no law."

If a person stands on a street corner handing out pamphlets falsely claiming that some individual, let's say a public figure, is a child molester, I understand the libel and liability. If, instead, that person handed out pamphlets saying that the Pfizer vaccine was experimental "gene therapy" that will result in "infertility," what happens then? I ask because the second seems closer to the liability you allege than cases of libel.

In practical terms, the effect of this bill would be the government flagging "misinformation," the social media companies rushing to take it down (and likely being proactive to take down "misinformation"), and then the person or group allegedly wronged by the take-down having to fight it all out in court. The first amendment is fundamentally about protecting political speech. Curbing speech because of "public health emergencies" is — I will assert — a sly attempt at getting around that. What we're talking about is political speech by another name. Isn't this the "chilling effect" we hear so much about?