negidius

I love night trains. It's really convenient to be able to go to sleep in one place and wake up at my destination in the morning. Train stations tend to be in much more central locations compared to airports, and it's nice to not have to go through security.

Which means that someone who forgets their passcode because of the stress of being arrested and threatened with years in prison could easily be wrongfully convicted. It's a horrible law, even for those who don't care about privacy.

> It would be more equivalent to refusing to let the police search one room in your house after they’ve established a reason to believe that you might be hiding bodies in it.

No, it isn't. The police searching a room in my house doesn't require me to do anything. They can even do it while I'm in a coma or dead. It's nothing like forcing me to tell them my passwords or any other information.

The stress of being arrested and threatened with years in prison if you don't remember your passcode could very well cause someone to forget it.

I think Twitter's distinction between "state-affiliated media", "government-funded media", and "publicly-funded media" is confusing and unnecessary. It would make more sense to use the broader category of "state-affiliated media" for all media affiliated to a state, whether it's because the state funds them directly, empowers them to fund themselves by coercive means, or simply appoints the leadership.

CBC would be state-affiliated even if they received no government funding because the government appoints their board (and can remove board members at any time). It was created by the state to serve the state's interests. It makes no sense to consider such organisations independent, regardless of how day-to-day editorial decisions are made.

The title is inaccurate. It was an unsigned order with two dissents.

> Two members of the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented from the decision to not hear the appeal, with Gorsuch saying that the Constitution "does not tolerate what happened here."

> "However much the district court may have thought Mr. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution in this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our liberty," Gorsuch wrote.

Calling things you disagree with "really dumb" is not an effective way to change minds.

Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people.

Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well off, and lobbyists will rarely fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective.

Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.

It seems a bit facetious to compare the collapse of the US government with an extinction event. There will almost certainly be a world after the US government, and that world will probably still include ancient banks like Lloyds and Barclays, and large gold vaults under the Swiss Alps.

If you round the risk of the US government collapsing (or refusing to honour its obligations) down to zero, you should probably do the same for many private banks.

That would still be subject to risk. It's impossible to completely eliminate risk.

The FDIC is not an absolute guarantee. The government could decide that it doesn't want to honour it, or could itself collapse. Both scenarios are very unlikely to happen in the near term, but the same is true for the largest and most stable banks.

Even if you don't value free speech per se, you should recognize the danger of allowing the most powerful to decide what is true or acceptable. You could well find yourself on the opposite side of state censorship. There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same. Normalizing such deference to the state is inherently dangerous, and a gift to whoever aspires to take control of it in the future.

It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.

Sorry for misunderstanding you.

I'm not sure if it's really inevitable, but if it is, I think tolerance should be their most important virtue. I think that's also what sets western rulers apart as generally higher quality. They are usually more tolerant of dissent and individual differences, compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world.

It sounds like you believe those in power are more astute or intelligent than those they exercise power over. I disagree. I don't think there is a positive correlation between a person's ability to impose their preferences on others and the quality of their preferences. If anything, I would guess there may be a negative correlation, considering the kind of person who is likely to become a successful politician. Thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor is not exactly reward in politics.

I would also bet that those who are the most interested in imposing their preferences on others probably are way less likely to listen to or attempt to understand different perspectives, leading to not even understand the views and practices they seek to ban.

I think it's the opposite. It's the people who are at the greatest risk of violence who have the most to fear from censorship. If you are anywhere near powerful enough to commit genocide, you are also powerful enough to ensure that it's your opponents and not you who are censored.

Consider what kind of books are being banned from American libraries. It's books portraying trans and gender-nonconforming people in a positive or neutral light, not books calling them "groomer pedophiles". It's books telling American history from the perspective of America's exploited minorities, not books calling for ethnic genocide or pretending the US actually upheld the principles of freedom and equality it was allegedly founded on.

To support censorship, especially state censorship, is to support the powerful in imposing their version of the truth on everyone else.

That's ridiculous. The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack is 100% the fault of the terrorists who carried out the attack. They are the only ones who got people killed. The victims did not get anyone killed. Saying or publishing something that someone else finds offensive is not in the same category as violence. It cannot be meaningfully compared. Any violence is infinitely worse than even the most offensive speech.

They may need the user's details to look into it and determine if it's an actual issue. When they have done that, it makes sense to fix it for that user at the same time. They should definitely come back and tell us that they have fixed it and why it happened as soon as possible afterwards, but I would understand if it takes a few weeks given normal levels of corporate bureaucracy.

That said, it's bad that this happened in the first place, and it makes me a little anxious about using Cloudflare's services.

It seems like the obvious solution would be to replace words that refer to specific races, nationalities, genders, religions, etc. with symbols that only indicate the category so if someone ranks "the Danes are rude" as hateful that is translated to "the [nationality] are rude" and is applied equally to a comment that says "the Swedes are rude". That way they can continue using the same system while eliminating the most obvious sources of discrimination.

That's not an accurate representation of the problem. It's more like:

    Comment A: Muslims are evil.
    Comment B: Christians are evil.

It's a terrible idea to treat Comment A and B differently. The same applies whether they are talking about religion, gender, race, nationality, or anything else. You have thoroughly failed when you have built in discrimination into your content moderation system.