yew

It certainly makes following the conversation more difficult, but you needn't feel obligated. I don't mind watching the total go up and down with the tide...

Edit: but as my answer (including quote!) below has been flagged, I think I'll just leave this to stand on its own.

If the ideology that produced these books survives to take power, we will have failed as a society. But I'm not worried - we're better positioned than ever to hunt error to the farthest corners of the world, if need be.

Exactly! Children are very vulnerable to unsound ideas - this thread is full of proof of that fact. Allowing them to be exposed to just any content while they're still developing their own perspective is simply inhumane.

We mustn't forget the history that resulted in these racist books. At the same time, it's important to ensure that children aren't exposed to such material.

Removing them from public spaces is a good first step - eventually we'll need to give thought to rummage sales and private libraries (parents often try to pass their erroneous ideas on without the consent of society, of course, and accidents happen).

Given the volume of literature in modern society and the workforce needed to police physical (not just virtual) material, cooperation between all involved interests, public and private, might perhaps be warranted.

> No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart.

> [...]

> Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.

> Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.

"We the people" have never possessed that quality, and direct democracy is a terrible idea for precisely that reason.

Our democratic norms are intended to filter that irrationality into something more functional - though the election of a certain someone I don't feel like naming at the moment shows those norms aren't perfect. I expect quite a few people are thinking very hard about how to make sure none of this ever happens again.

Nevertheless, the ideal of representative democracy relies on experts.

> Like the experts who said the virus wasn’t a problem and also that masks are useless?

This being a wonderful example of the right-wing propaganda so prominent (though I won't say universal) in this mess. Cause a problem, then blame others for it.

We've all had more than enough of correcting it at every turn. Why not do something about that?

Experts are usually vetted by regulators and other experts, not random members of the public. As anyone is presently free to say whatever they please, I see no reason to share my personal information with the world.

It's simply irresponsible for so-called "independent journalists" to cover material that neither they nor their audiences are in a position to understand.

We've seen what several decades of totally unregulated broadcasting have done, to the detriment of our society - without well-funded expert guidance, conspiracy theories and extremism run rampant. Platforms must be restricted to those who prove they can use them appropriately.

Breaking up monopolies sounds good in the abstract. (At least, it does to me. Presumably that doesn't go without saying around here.) But these particular monopolies have the potential to make a serious positive impression on the world, now that they've finally chosen to act. Given the state of things we shouldn't rush to abandon that opportunity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-is-b...

I haven't seen too much consideration of the potential (more the usual scaremongering) but here's something that popped up earlier along those lines. Social media is a lever for politicians. Why not take the chance to deny that to extremism around the world?

There's quite a lot of this kind of admiration for authoritarianism tucked away in nooks and crannies of the tech community. It survived mostly off the rationale that people should always be free to express their conscience, even in the case of extreme ideologies - which was rather common in spaces populated by "outsiders" a few decades back, of course.

I have to imagine that idea made its contribution to recent events, attracting the wrong sort of people and delaying a response.

It's all very much worth reconsidering from our new perspective.

A few years ago Silicon Valley was populated with (and run by) people like Brendan Eich. We've spent the intervening time replacing those people - now it's time to finish the job. I wouldn't call it unfocused.

The no-fly list is an important element of suppressing terrorism, foreign and domestic. It exists to prevent precisely this sort of situation - very few of these people were from within driving distance of Washington (or each other).

Whether it could do with more oversight is an independent question, with no shortage of people to ask it.

There's no need to ban email. It's unencrypted plain text, with a small number of majority providers. Filtering extremist content at that level should be easy enough.

Anyone using the place is a fascist by definition. If they haven't been involved in politics until now, their perspective doesn't deserve to be heard.

Correct. You can't falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater, you can't obstruct an existential war, you can't spread anti-vaccine propaganda during a pandemic.

These are all legal arguments with a well-established history.

Don't they get most of their hardware off eBay these days? (Not that I'm incredibly familiar with that space - I'm more interested in serious redundancy for small important files.)

Anyway, the government has plenty of experience handling terrorists dealing in cash. It doesn't need to be perfect.

All forms of extremism, regardless of political valence, should be deprived of air. Is that consistent enough for you?

Not if we know their names and shame anyone who sells them hardware, they won't be.

If you have family members who use the site, you have family members who are fascists. I'd recommend cutting ties before that catches up with you.

Government agencies are, if not precisely incapable of sedition, at least going to have trouble engaging in it.

Precisely. The question is misconceived. Formalizing the authority of the government to suppress domestic terrorism would be, not "Orwellian," but necessary in the face of a threat that only failed due to the incompetence of its executors.

To disagree in this moment is to demonstrate that necessity, really.

No one is being censored. Deplatforming isn't censorship. They've merely shown a disagreeable customer out the door.

It's hard not to notice that reporting always treats the dangers of swatting as a kind of force of nature, in which hackers are the only party with agency. Given the difficulty of stopping people from making fake phone calls compared to other solutions one might think of...

Both this and the previous article

https://adalytics.io/blog/tens-of-thousands-of-news-articles...

are more interesting than the domain and page design would imply. They seem to be developing a browser extension for "personal ad analytics."

It's interesting that both the left and the right are abandoning the ACLU, for much the same reasons. Though of course members of both groups also join the ACLU to (attempt to) influence it. Contrast with the days when "freedom of expression" was relevant (of conversations about gay rights, abortion, uncomfortable fiction, outsider ideas) and "right" meant "moral majority" is very educational.

(Of course the left proper has never cared much for actual communists and anarchists either, except as linguistic props. I suppose deciding to fully embrace that shouldn't be surprising.)

I see no hope of rights-oriented politics surviving except as some side's puppet - we have reached our stop, and must get off - so which dynamic will win out?

(Though I doubt the idea that the ACLU isn't intentionally fascist will persist. "If three people sit down at the table with a Nazi, you have four Nazis sitting at the table" after all.)

> Assuming that I understood that what I was taking was yours, and that I was not acting under some kind of duress [...] my theft indicates that I see the world in value-terms opposed to yours. Your "bad" is my "good." If you are to hold me accountable for this, instead of letting me off the hook, you will make this (accidental, adventitious) opposition a principle and rule for our interactions.

> Revenge allows you to turn the principle of my action into a rule for your conduct toward me: you make my bad your good. This is the opposite of trying to undo or reverse my action. You hold me accountable by holding onto my theft, refusing to forget it, turning its one-off opposition between our interests into a rule to which I am now subject. [...] Angry people sometimes describe their vengeance as "teaching someone a lesson," and this is quite literally true: you make my wronging of you into a general principle and then "educate" me by imposing it on me.

This is an important lesson for those more naturally inclined toward forgiveness (though I would say it's important because it says something about what successful rehabilitation or education more often look like, or at least involve, in real life).

Speaking personally, it's a principle that it took me quite a lot of experience to understand.

> Educating me in this way is not easy on you: making my evil your good has psychological costs, among them the fact that you divert yourself away from what would otherwise be good for you. You must remodel your psychological landscape into one devoted to regulating mine. [...] I've colonized your fantasy life.

> As I wrote earlier this year, I long viewed the Japanese fondness for sanitary masks as evidence of some deep-seated cultural defect. [...]

Speaking as an American who didn't vote for Trump, either time, you've certainly alienated me. You'd (collectively) best hope you're making more friends than enemies.

Hope's all any of us have at this point.

You certainly don't.