nhchris

I don't think it's fair to characterize the belief that the people living in a country have a large influence on how that country turns out, as thinking that outside forces have no effect.

Self derogation means agreement with statements such as "I feel I do not have much to be proud of" and "sometimes I think I am no good at all"

I found it strikingly similar to psychological abuse and manipulation tactics - to prevent a victim from defending themselves, convince them they're not worth defending.

I linked to the tweet because I found that chart the most notable part of https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g...

> 23. Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?

> 24. The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other “anti-disinformation” labs are receiving huge public awards.

> 25. Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded Newsguard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective “risk” or “reliability” scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role?

On one hand, as more organized actors (governments or corporations) enter information warfare (I won't call it disinformation, since it is trivial to manipulate the masses by cherry-picking what gets more exposure. Something traditional media is also guilty of.), I can't help but see such censorship roles as simply necessary - without them, "platforms" will be flooded by propaganda masquerading as organic content by ordinary people.

On the other, it is beyond laughable to think these shadowy censors won't be corrupted (or even more probably, be founded on corruption) [1,2], and whether the US government has a hand in them makes little difference. At a minimum, their censorship should be made acutely, plainly obvious, and the censoring organizations themselves should be made known. It is simply dishonest to hide it, to deceive people into thinking only spam and harassment are censored, while doing far more under that cover. But it is more likely social media itself will have to be abandoned, treated no different than a cocaine habit, as manipulation eclipses organic interactions.

Presenting the role of the US govt. as key may be relevant from a 1st amendment point of view, if legality is what you care about. But it's really only the difference between a state-corporate censorship/propaganda machine, and a purely corporate one.

[1] Covid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic Vaccine - https://theintercept.com/2023/01/16/twitter-covid-vaccine-ph...

[2] Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army 'psyops' soldier - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...

There's nothing wrong with immigrants. What's wrong is the old population will disappear, or be put in the perilous position of being a minority in the only territory they can call their own. Look at Ukraine while it was part of the Soviet union for how dangerous that can be - or the Rohingya, or Uyghurs, or countless other examples.

Not to mention it is in the interest of any organism, any living being, to produce descendants, so any policy that promises long-term sub-replacement fertility is dangerous from that point of view alone. It frankly boggles the mind this is something I have to explain.

Whether it's policy, technology, or medicine (I don't quite understand why medicine would reduce the metric we care about, number of surviving children) doesn't matter. There may be a solution a nation could take, but immigration enables it (or rather, its economy) to persist, without addressing the falling birth rates, at the price of slowly giving way to a new, immigrant population.

> but they should have to compete for their own at the very least.

That I agree with. While it is entirely up to a country's discretion whether they permit immigration, leaving a country must not be prevented.

If by "any other consumer product" you mean a magic 8-ball, then I agree.

Ethiopia is an interesting example, but not of scarcity. While my country's population grew by a mere 40% since 1950 (and has been stagnant the last few decades), Ethiopia's grew by 534%, and shows no signs of slowing: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ethiopia-popu...

Had we grown at their pace, we'd also be experiencing famines.

As for why they couldn't leave - you can ask their neighbors. The West is not the only destination.

> If Section 230 or some new law shielded LLMs, it would mean that others, including society as a whole, would bear the costs of their new and barely tested technology, while tech companies reap the benefits.

This is such a disingenuous argument. Trying to frame it as if LLMs were a toxic mine, where the company profits while contaminating the water supply.

What the author is really doing is treating people like children, as if they needed to be protected from the possibly mean and false statements of the LLM, even after they are warned that it can be mean and dishonest. That unless the companies can guarantee it never lies or returns private information (that was on the open internet..) or produces bias or discrimination (what a long and vague list of harms), they should just not deploy it.

Basically, we shouldn't have LLMs until they can be completely baby-proofed. I.e. never.

I was not aware so many people were trying to get into Nazi Germany that they needed strict measures to keep them out.

"Systems" as in those countries' social and economical systems. I don't know exactly what about those systems kills birthrates, but they are doubtless to blame, as other countries, and even those same countries some time in the past, had higher birthrates. Those systems caused that change.

Successful mass immigration will allow them to persist in the systems that are causing those falling birthrates, ensuring their people dwindle towards nothing. Stopping immigration would force them to change to something sustainable.

It is not "coincidence" that Chinese are born in China and Polish in Poland. It is their inheritance, their birthright, the fruit of their ancestors' labors. To tear out all connection to one's history by calling it "coincidence" is, frankly, sickening.

Governments don't come from the geography, but the people. Living in a small country myself, a place such as China, India, Indonesia, or Nigeria could send (and they would gladly come) enough people to outvote us on any issue 3x over, without even noticing they're missing anyone. We would simply cease to exist first as a sovereign people, and soon after as a distinct people at all, without any territory to call our own.

Because this was so rare that the destination countries didn't see it as a problem. And when it did happen en masse, it was usually war.

> its ugly history

Let me guess - denying minorities access to white people?

> borders artificially keep people apart

GPS data shows how wolf packs carve out territory - https://bigthink.com/hard-science/wolf-gps/

The article is valid in speaking specifically about US states competing, but otherwise I find the idea of treating governments, and countries, as mere economic platforms, that compete like a business would, disturbing.

They are representatives of their nations, and their duty is to their people, to whom they are guardians, of said people and their homelands. They should not be 'competing' for more residents just as families shouldn't compete to attract other's children.

> Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so that labor cannot effectively organise.

This is backwards, and I'm having trouble understanding how a more diverse, more transient population would find it easier to find common interests and unite. Suppose a factory unionizes - without borders, the owner will find it easier to import non-union workers. While moving a factory is challenging regardless of borders - it's a big, heavy thing, tied into local infrastructure and supply chains. It's even reflected in the rhetoric - "immigrants will do the jobs Americans won't".

It's also reflected empirically: Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat... (unpaywalled: http://archive.is/1khJw)

And in the strong Danish unions as far back as 1981 (https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...) when Denmark had only 3.02% of immigrants and their descendants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark#Modern...)

When that change is predicated upon lying about our past, I suspect it is not to our benefit.

> Translation requires editorial discretion and necessarily changes the meaning from the original language.

This is exactly the kind of excuse I was talking about. An honest translator tries to preserve meaning as much as possible. A dishonest one uses translation as an excuse to tweak meaning to their liking, and accuses objectors that it's either that, or a "nonsensical, word-for-word literal translation".

> I’m simply not convinced that a few edits to pop culture novels will lead to the downfall of free human society.

Of course not. This is just one nudge, one of many, not towards downfall, but towards change, in whatever average direction those in positions that create or edit culture push. It's just your history, slightly altered, one little lie at a time. So slowly you won't even notice. They used to make new works for this purpose, but now they've moved on to editing old ones. The slippery slope is a fallacy only until a trend line emerges from the data.

[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’” - https://www.themarysue.com/steven-moffat-on-doctor-who-diver...

> What about non-sensitivity revisions, wouldn’t those also be Orwellian erasures of history?

In as much as they change more than minor spelling or punctuation mistakes, absolutely yes. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union...

> Is someone taking all the old copies from the used book store and destroying them?

"We haven't yet falsified everything, and there are still non-falsified copies remaining, so why worry?" - original versions in some dusty corner of an old book store are no good if the great majority of people is only exposed to fakes, and one in ten people who read those fakes eventually, possibly years later, learns their version was altered in unspecified ways.

> haven't books been changing forever though?

Let's not use the wiggle room for correcting typos or translating from middle to modern English as an excuse to change the meaning of the written words while passing it off as the same book by the same author (and hiding behind "Nth edition" to deceive readers that the changes are insignificant).

And in as much as that falsification has been happening forever, it was just as wrong then as what is happening now.

> Source: am deeply involved in the writing and publishing community, and have had many friends go through the sensitivity reading process.

What happens if an author disagrees with some or all of the sensitivity readers' corrections?

To me, it's not about ruining or enhancing books. It's about falsifying them. They should remain artifacts of their time, so we may have perspective on changing attitudes, and not be gaslit that the sensitivity readers' sensibilities were shared by every author, from every time and place.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Thanks to ongoing consolidation of large manufacturing firms, this kind of attitude quickly leads to having nothing to buy. The only solution is collective bargaining in the form of regulation.

> it's unsurprising a criminal defense attorney might argue that it does.

You misinterpreted my post - I have never heard of a defense attorney arguing this, and much less of a judge or jury accepting it as a valid defense. The example was to illustrate the gap between reality and the "rape culture" some assert we live in.

"Boys will be boys" has been deliberately conflated with a permissive attitude towards sexual abuse. Your use of what you thought was an innocent phrase describing rowdy behavior will be abused by activists as evidence of misogyny or rape culture. Together with "toxic masculinity", it's one of the ways male-associated behavior, or masculinity itself, is problematized, or in plain language, attacked.

It's second nature to walk home before the sun goes down; And put your keys between your knuckles when there's boys around - Boys will be boys, Dua Lipa - https://genius.com/Dua-lipa-boys-will-be-boys-lyrics

* The Danger of “Boys Will Be Boys” - Why this phrase should be banned from our vocabulary.* - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/gender-and-schooling...

Why ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ Is an Excuse for Bad Behavior - The time for a culture of accountability is now [..] It validates male entitlement, often excusing discriminatory and even criminal actions against girls and women. - [See many examples of criminal defense attorneys using "boys will be boys" to defend rapists? Part of the fiction these movements want us to believe is that, despite the scarlet mark that sex offenders carry, and the near-universal disdain society shows them, actually, sexual assault is tolerated and excused by our deeply misogynist society.] https://www.inhersight.com/blog/diversity/boys-will-be-boys

> ads are a failed monetization approach

If it's worth paying for a giant un-targeted poster next to a highway, it's worth paying for embedded (i.e. unblockable, equivalent to other site content) ads based solely on website content, not viewer tracking.

It's just that most sites/ad vendors don't want to, and are trying to gaslight us into thinking surveillance advertising is the only option.