I'm kind of split on our current gray area about free speech on the web. It seems like the only way to do good moderation is if it's powered by actual people sitting behind computers and following a well-written policy. But tech companies have proven themselves totally unwilling to pay for that. I'd rather FB just said "we'll never pony up the wages necessary to moderate well so we're just going to make facebook a complete free speech zone."
This seems like a classic catch 22. If they go completely free speech people will complain about all the propaganda on Facebook and some countries will just block it. On the other hand if they do moderation people complain about censorship. There is no actual way for them to win here
If they go completely free speech then nobody will be able to read anything over all the spam, and the servers will be confiscated for possession of child porn in a few days.
Facebook could do the same thing if they wanted. Have the default be heavily censored, have option to disable aspects of it as the user desires. I presume they don't because they don't consider it a catch 22. Having people cry censorship doesn't matter to them, whereas they think hordes would leave or be forced off by governments if they didn't moderate sufficiently.
There's lots of ways for them to win. For the most part people just complain, it's a couple cycles of bad PR and then a very large segment of the internet goes back to enjoying the walled garden.
It has gotten to the point where an American anarchist writing that they want to travel to Yemen to fight imperialism is considered a terrorist and censored, but a white supremacist person saying we should "shoot all those monkeys in St. Lewis" is considered sacred free speech.
Because I find I prefer the places on the web which pay for good moderation to the places on the web which are complete free speech zones (or as close as they can legally be.)
Censoring them doesn't make them go away. It only removes any hope of turning them into not-horrible people, and in the process many controversial but worthwhile ideas are filtered out.
I think individuals should have the tools to disengage from trolls, harassment, spam, etc. (even if it's a catch-all "block everyone that my extended network has blocked" checkbox, or something similar) but I personally want the option to see the dregs of humanity and actively engage with those people.
The pollution analogy might be useful. Specifically: "The solution to pollution is dilution".
Now, that mantra has been mostly rejected for environmental pollution because there's a far better option: Gather the pollutants, process/eliminate them, and work to eliminate the sources.
Back in our context, hopefully the elimination of people with unsavoury viewpoints is not on the table. We must fundamentally agree that humans being what they are, free thought being what it is, these ideas will never be 'gone'. So accepting that, perhaps "the solution to pollution is dilution" applies.
Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage. Obvious example: 4chan/8ch. Less obvious example: People's minds.
By avoiding chasing these things into the shadows they remain open to challenge. While the mind of the person you're challenging might not be changed, when its out in the open all others that come past and read that interaction get to judge it on it's merits and make their own judgement call.
Without that, folks end up in echo chambers. When newcomers get to those places, they are not exposed to a balance of viewpoints and the opinions they themselves form will tend to conform to the leanings of the echo chamber where they spend their time.
> Apply it and we quickly see how censorship will be counter-productive - Those people, viewpoints and opinions don't go away and instead they concentrate in localized 'hot spots' (or cesspools), where they actually do far more intense and immediate damage.
This is an often-repeated theory, but I'm not sure it actually works that way. For example, consider the recent discussion about Reddit's "censorship" of hate subs:
When you openly engage some people, they decide that their idea is now "normal" and then demand the rest of the society to accommodate them. There's a reason why most scientists refrain from debating creationists.
That would be a problem if it wasn't trivially easy to block them. Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them. That's the only way their opinion can get to you. Of course, that training doesn't have to be conscious and a great many people have inadvertently trained themselves to be sensitive to the opinions of horrible people... but no one in the universe can do anything about that except the people themselves. (And no this doesn't remove blame from those hurling insults. I'm talking about how to deal with it yourself. If you're worried about how it reflects on them, and wanting to assign blame, you're still in the wrong mindset. You can control only yourself. Even if you were able to control others, it would make you a horrendously bad person to do so.)
>Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them.
I don't buy this. If an internet forum like FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit, or whatever allows increasingly toxic behavior it eventually spills into the real world. For example, unmoderated forums facilitate doxing and incitement. What happens when an online harasser posts someone's home address, work address, and childrens' schools online with a call to real world violence? Should the victim just not care? What if online trolls set about smearing your professional or personal reputation? What if they decide to out you as gay to your parents or in a country where being gay is illegal?
And don't tell me you can simply avoid going online, that isn't practical. Its precisely places like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc where marginalized people can find a supportive community. Also the internet should be for everyone, not just the most horrible, hard, and callous among us.
I'm talking about three things here, online harassment, how that activity can bleed into the real world, and how it's hard to tell when the second thing is beginning to happen. When does harassment slip into incitement for example? When does brigading by trolls shut down the online spaces of marginalized groups and make them less safe in real life for lack of a digital space to organize? Doxing again, is online harassment that may have nasty effects in the physical world, as does outing people based on their hidden minority status e.g. sexual orientation.
Online and real world harassment aren't two different things is more or less my conclusion. They are different vectors for similar anti-social behavior.
Would you defend someone following another person around every public space they visit screaming in their face as free speech and say the victim should toughen up? I doubt you would, and in fact it probably constitutes several crimes depending upon where you live. You could probably get a restraining order. Blocking online works similarly, but you have to do it site by site, alias by alias which doesn't scale. However, many of the tactics that trolls use scale rather well. So I think platforms have some responsibility here.
Each individual sock-puppet may be easy to block, but in aggregate they can overwhelm any attempts to constrain them individually. If you instead employ a whitelist, you miss out on conversations with people who tried to contact you but couldn't get through because you had no way to distinguish them from trolls.
Offloading contact curation on each individual user doesn't solve the fundamental problem of identifying malicious users, it shoves it where someone else has to deal with it.
If you get hit by thousands of trolls at once it's not trivial to block them. Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.
I find that "thousands of trolls" generally amounts to "thousands of members of the public who responded to the statement I shouted out into public". The character of those responses doesn't even enter into it.
Don't get me wrong, I see why it's a pain in the ass to wind up with a popular comment even if the comments are mostly positive (and especially if they're not not), but I think this is better handled by UI and rate limiting on notifications rather than the alternatives.
>in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.
Pardon my arrogance, but I don't believe it's your place to determine how other people are allowed to talk about you even if you've excused yourself from the conversation. Down that path lay dragons. For a quick example why, sub out "you" and "your" in the previous sentence for the name of any unpopular politician.
Was the reduction to the extreme really necessary? But okay, in that particular case, we have the ToS and laws regarding threatening behavior to fall back on. (And if I've unsubscribed from the conversation, I can't even see it anymore to be threatened by it)
This problem does not require the extreme step of giving the subject of a conversation an unconditional veto on the conversation.
I may have misinterpreted your original comment. You said:
Also, in some cases other people see the trolling about you even after you block it.
..which implies it's a negative that you don't have control over the (valueJudgmentOf: comments) about you after you've blocked the conversation. Was this incorrect?
> Otherwise, people being horrible really isn't your problem unless you train yourself to be very conscious of their opinions and to care deeply about them.
Humans are social animals. We care about what others think by default. Maybe you're an outlier, that's nice for you, but please don't think your experience is normal.
That is true, and it is a problem that each and every single human being has had to deal with since the beginning of time. It was worse in the past, actually, because the people saying mean things to you were right there and could actually DO things to you in addition to simply espousing ideas or opinions you found offensive! That's why people always taught children to respond with "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
That's not an absolution of bullies, and people who interpret it that way are morons. It's a mantra. It is to teach a child that THEY have the control over whether those words hurt them, not the person saying them. By default, yes, we have mirror neurons and we are profoundly social. It evolved to perfectly fit our society of nomads travelling in tribes across a plentiful landscape, where anyone deigning to take control of others would simply be left behind as the tribe walks over the next hill. Wait, we don't LIVE in that type of society any longer. Which makes those evolutionary traits sub-optimal at best and downright dangerous at worst. I'd go with dangerous given the negative impact of cortisol and other stress hormones. Keeping them in check is a burden the modern world puts on us all.
People by default care about what others think. It starts before kindergarten and is normal human psychology. No training is necessary of that.
Neverthess, thinking the issue is just about insults is naive. The actual uncensored (especially anonymous) forum means hardcore bdsm porn posted for fun in the discussion about gardening or child raising. Or very disgusting pic of vivisection of animal. Or calls for another holocaust along with floorplan of your house.
It also means most 'normal' people leave elsewhere due to above. Cause most people dont need above in their lives.
Moreover, insults have meaning and it matters. If you ignore them, you are more likely to become target of bullying or mobbing. Because people parrot what they see and the more you allow it, the more people join on that to look like members of stringet group - to get popular. Or they simply feel it is socially ok.
In the work, it affects your ability to push for ideas, to get leadership position, to get raise, to be trusted and given a bit more autonomy. All of that matters.
>No one has any right to show me whatever they want.
Sure, but you have no right to look my way and then complain that I'm forcing you to view something you consider offensive, in case that's what you're insinuating.
Censorship is one of those really hard social problems. A completely open web will be inundated with spam, pornography and propaganda. A completely gated web will only serve the gatekeepers.
What really solves the problem is a 3rd party gatekeeper composed of "Council of Wise People".(henceforth referred to as gatekeepers). Movie rating board is an example.
This leads to the age old question, "Who will monitor the gatekeepers?"
This leads to democracy, where the gatekeepers only have a 4 year period and new gatekeepers are elected again.
The government should have been the gatekeepers. But turns out, these gatekeepers care more about their own pockets (filled by the same corps they are gatekeeping).
The web is now filled with spam, porn and propaganda...
The problem here is that Facebook seems to be choosing sides.
It worth noting that this might be propaganda to begin with and many of those so called "activists" posts could likely be violating TOS at the least if not actual laws.
What is going on in Burma is terrible but there has been a lot of violence from all factions the Buddhists didn't woke up one day and decided to commit genocide.
Like many current conflicts these aren't black and white and the only truth is that people are dying.
>What is going on in Burma is terrible but there has been a lot of violence from all factions the Buddhists didn't woke up one day and decided to commit genocide.
Like many current conflicts these aren't black and white and the only truth is that people are dying.
This is a pretty ridiculous reading of events in Myanmar. Rakhine buddhists with the help of the military and police have been persecuting Rohingya since as far back as the end of WWII (the Rakhine and Rohingya fought on opposite sides). More recently since the junta took control in 1962 the Rohingya have been denied citizenship and harassed constantly by the junta. The Rohingya in the past 20 years have begun to push back and formed armed defense groups branded by the government as terrorists. Things came to a head in 2012 (after the 2011 transition to "democracy" began) when the government incited sectarian riots in Rakhine state. The government blamed the Rohingya and began driving them out of their villages in recent years to "fight terrorism". Some Rakhine buddhists have
used this as an opportunity to burn those villages and attack fleeing Rohingya.
Yes there are armed Rohingya groups, but they were trapped between an encroaching military and until this year a border with Bangladesh they couldn't cross. The government and Rakhine are absolutely, unquestionably committing genocide. Basically everyone in the world other than the Burmese government and you agrees with this designation.
I live in Myanmar. A regular HN reader and a non-believer. I have never written comments, but there is so much misinformation going on regarding the current crisis. The recent major terror by Islamist group (ARSA) attacks on thirty police outposts left a dozen police dead and a government office and a Buddhist monastery burnt. That was not the first time that happened but the biggest and deadliest we know of in the recent memory. All ethnic groups had to flee, including Rakhine Buddhists, Hindu, Myo, Thet, and Dinet. Very few knew. The international media seems to have slept through that episode and woke up when some Rohingya villages start fleeing once the army arrived to track down the villages where terrorists were sheltered. How many terrorists do you think are needed to attack 30 police outposts at the same time? One instance a Rakhine village was surrounded by hundreds of angry Islamists. Another instance, it is a Hindu village that was brutally attacked.
My parents used to live in the conflict zone. I have been to the region several times. Tensions can be traced back over decades, but there was sectarian violence between Rohingya and Rakhine. Many of the times, the conflict started with initiating attacks by Islamist terrorists in the community. There were major attacks in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. The affairs are far from one-sided bullying. That genocide claim is a stretch by a thousand miles. Two of my relatives, Buddhist Rakhines, who used to live there until a month ago, had to run and fled home due to the increasing threats of militant Islamist groups, and they do not ever want to go back the area. The other side of the story was never been heard in the media.
One blatant lie is that of majority Buddhist persecuting the minority Muslims. I wonder if those journalists writing about the issue ever step a foot on the region. There is too much propaganda going on out there. I cannot believe what is going on. What you have to understand is that a conflict is happening in a remote and very isolated land even from other areas in Rakhine State, Myanmar. The sole mode of transportation is by river boats. The population of Rohingya Muslims outnumbers the combined population of Rakhine Buddhists, Hindu, and other ethnic groups by the ratio of six to one. Rakhine Buddhists were the majority in the region half a decade ago. Muslim population tripled since the 1980s. Islamist terror attacks have been more and more frequent.
I am not here to downplay the plight of Rohingya, but framing the complex issue into a simplistic version to drive an agenda and demonizing the other side is evil. I am in the camp of giving citizenship to people who have legitimately lived there for generations. Leader Aung San Su Kyi has been working along with UN to draft guideline for citizenship and resolve this issue. Everyone is suffering. The rise of know-nothing activists, ivory tower commenters, and increasing radicalization in the region have made life very difficult for everyone in the region. The bottom line is that it is not one-sided bullying and people who have been to the region and studied the issue are very much aware of it.
I have never been more disappointed in the integrity of the news media. If you want to learn nuanced and balanced analysis from an outsider who had actually been there and studied the issue, I recommend this article by Jasmine Chia, a Harvard student who did research in Rakhine State.
http://thediplomat.com/2016/03/the-truth-about-myanmars-rohi...
>wonder if those journalists writing about the issue ever step a foot on the region.
How about your country starts by letting in international observers to witness exactly what is happening? From all accounts they are being prevented by the Myanmar government from doing so. When you prevent this, you look as if you have something to cover up after all.
Let me start by saying that I've had a keen interest in Myanmar for years. I've opposed sanctions and supported open dialogue and normalization of relations. I don't mean to impugn average people of any ethnic, religious, or social group in the country. My criticism is focused on the government and a narrow complicit minority of people in Rakhine State. I also don't mean to downplay the role that ARSA has played in fanning flames in sectarian conflict.
> but there is so much misinformation going on regarding the current crisis.
If it's misinformation, let international observers in to see what's happening. Moreover, are the Rohingya women and children fleeing into Bangladesh with bullet entrance wounds in the backs of their arms and legs misinformation? They got shot by someone, and they say it was the army. Shooting fleeing women and children is very indicative of something like a genocide.
>What you have to understand is that a conflict is happening in a remote and very isolated land even from other areas in Rakhine State, Myanmar
Yes, we've seen maps. Not everyone in the West is totally ignorant of geography.
>One blatant lie is that of majority Buddhist persecuting the minority Muslims.
I didn't say that, and neither does the UN or any news outlet I read. I'd argue that the government is persecuting the Rohingya and some local Rakhine Buddhists appear from numerous reports to be complicit. Self identified Rakhine found at the sites of burning Rohingya villages has been confirmed by the BBC.
>The population of Rohingya Muslims outnumbers the combined population of Rakhine Buddhists, Hindu, and other ethnic groups by the ratio of six to one. Rakhine Buddhists were the majority in the region half a decade ago. Muslim population tripled since the 1980s. Islamist terror attacks have been more and more frequent.
I'm not sure A is necessary and sufficient to prove or lead to B in your argument. As seen elsewhere in the world Muslim population doesn't even correlate with terrorist attack frequency.
> Aung San Su Kyi has been working along with UN to draft guideline for citizenship
Which appears to be bullshit, because it requires documents that displaced Rohingya were long denied, and wouldn't have access to in the event that they fled across the border.
To quote the article you linked: "It is clear that anti-Muslim propaganda has become part of regular nationalist discourse", which is sort of the crux of my criticism. The government leverages anti-muslim propaganda to legitimize the persecution of the Muslim population.
*EDIT: Also, that you for adding your perspective to the discussion. It is rare in the rest of the world to hear perspectives from ordinary people in your country. I hope I haven't come across as too harsh, or combative. I do fundamentally agree that it is a messy complicated situation that is too often painted as a simplistic narrative.
Thank you for your point-to-point rebuttals. That is what I like about HN.
I did not mean to personally accuse you of lying when I wrote the sentence. I meant to point out what many major media (BBC, Guardian, CNN) are insinuating. I apologize that I came across that way.
>One blatant lie is that of majority Buddhist persecuting the minority Muslims.
Also, I am not implying that population of Muslim correlates with the frequency of terror generally everywhere in the world. All I am pointing out is what is happening in troubled Maung Daw region. I am not in the camp that attacks Islam as a whole and formulates a general theory. The issue is more complicated than a simplistic correlation.
I disagree with your following statement.
>The government leverages anti-Muslim propaganda to legitimize the persecution of the Muslim population.
There are many Muslims in the other regions of Myanmar. Even in Rakhine state, there is another minority Muslim group, Ka-Mann, in the middle of the state. Ka-Man Muslims were recognized as an ethnic group by the government, and there was no alleged religious persecution of Ka-Man. If you visit Yangon, the biggest city in the country, you will see that there are several Mosques in downtown, and there are a lot of Muslim communities that are peacefully coexisting with Buddhists, Christians, and Hindu for a very long time. Unlike what media is portraying, the extremist monks, like U Wiyathu who was on the cover of Time magazine as Burmese Bin Laden, are unpopular in the country. This Rohingya issue is being mischaracterized by the media. Those in agenda-driven media who are framing this as one are fanning the flames. There are unverified accusations dumped on Rakhine Buddhists and the army who we do not support. We all are hoping unbiased international investigators to dig the truth out.
I agree 100% with you in letting international journalists and observers in and let them investigate and report without hindrance. That is what many people, including me, have been asking for years. There are several journalists from BBC, NYTimes, and some major news organization in the region. I do though want to point out one thing that many people in the region and the country as a whole are very distrustful of international media. There is resentment among Native Rakhine, and they feel that they have been framed and unfairly demonized for a particular agenda or narrative by these major news organizations. I am one of those people very much bothered by the narratives and very selective coverage of BBC and Guardian. I am all for welcoming international journalists and observers from all political spectrum and ideologies. People can have biases, but they need to be open about it.
I am ignorant of many things in the world. I just happen to know a bit about this particular issue since my grandparents, Rakhine Buddhists, lived their entire lives in the troubled region, and I happened to hear a lot of brutal heartbreaking stories from the other side ignored in the media. It is just a very odd moment in life when you became very cynical about everything in the media. I do not want to live my life that way.
I am aware of my background and bias. All I want to do is to point out that there are a lot more to the story than a very simplistic version painted in the media, just as you mentioned.
Thank you for your engagement. I appreciate your input.
> the Buddhists didn't woke up one day and decided to commit genocide
Germans didn't wake up one day in the 1930s and decide to exterminate the Jews either. That doesn't mean the Jews were at all to blame for their persecution.
>> The problem here is that Facebook seems to be choosing sides.
There is ALWAYS choosing sides. When FB decides to block pornography, they are choosing a side. When FB decides to mark some posts as spam, they are choosing a side.
Could they have a platform with ZERO choosing of sides? Technically, yes!
But, do you know what that would look like? My guess is more and more spam posts.
Moderate the 'spam' per-user rather than globally. The main problem that I and most other users have with the anti-free-speech practices is bad categorization. Give users the tools to moderate their own experience (with defaults, so long as they can be disabled, and heck, disable the ability to change them in more repressive countries) and you basically have the problem solved.
I don't want these companies making the "disappear this" judgment calls anymore. They've shown that making those calls dispassionately and objectively isn't all that important to them.
Well, there's also the problem that it's very difficult to change your 3rd party gatekeeper to one you trust & agree with, and the gatekeeper function is tied up with a lot of unrelated stuff (maybe I like the policing of Dallas, Tx. but the community standards of New York City, the firearms law of Vermont, the health care of Canada, the food policy of France & the speed limits of Germany — there's no way to get all that in one bundle).
Why is it you are alive? I mean, it would be trivially easy for anyone to kill you. You have to work to keep yourself alive. Some random person walking up to you on the street and pushing a little blade into your neck is all it would take to end you. Or start your house on fire while you're asleep. Or a million other things.
But... you're alive. Laws don't stop crime, they can only punish it afterwards. Deterrence doesn't work, there are still plenty of crimes under even the most capricious regimes that hand out death penalties for the slightest infractions. So why are you alive?
Because no one is willing to kill you. They're able. They're ALL able. Every single person, young or old, you have ever met or walked past could have killed you. Every last one of them was able. But not one has been willing. Humans aren't as bad as you might be tempted to think.
The force multiplier arithmetic of the internet changes this. Almost all people are fine, but some are not. It was only last week that we had some idiots put another bomb on a tube train, for example. On the internet, if you can attack once you can attack everywhere. If you could put a bomb on every train at once with ctrl-c ctrl-v, we'd probably all be dead.
America has a mass shooting every week. If the real world was as reprisal-free as the internet, and people could just keep shooting, how many casualties would there be?
Don't use the word 'force' when no force is involved. On the Internet, if you "attack", you send words or pictures. You send ideas. A bomb blows people apart. You do not have to, either intentionally or accidentally, train yourself to respond negatively to a bomb. A bomb blows you apart no matter who you are. An idea does not. Only you can control how you react to any given idea.
And I don't think it's likely that if everyone could cause indiscriminant destruction it would be likely to occur because that is already the case and has been for a very long while. Killing people is NOT hard. Just look at what people do with a car when they want. How many cars are there? How many angry, desperate people with access to them? And how common is it for them to drive it into a crowd and kill and injure people? Run the numbers. You're more likely to die from being hit by a meteor, so concern yourself with that instead.
> Only you can control how you react to any given idea.
this is a bit simplistic. receiving information is a physiological process and not purely a cold and analytical affair. that's why a particularly vicious insult can drive some into a fit of violent irrational rage.
> And how common is it for them to drive it into a crowd and kill and injure people? Run the numbers. You're more likely to die from being hit by a meteor, so concern yourself with that instead.
there is a tremendous amount security work that contributes to this. many billions of dollars (possibly into the trillions, worldwide). a lot of dissuading machinery in legal and social systems.
however you quantify them, the dangers people face are not a simple consequence of unwilling perpetrators.
I'm down with the whole "lets be optimistic and say humans are good" mindset, and of course MOST people are not interested in causing serious harm to there peers. But the mere fact that someone hasn't put themselves at extreme risk to kill you isn't very convincing in the face of societies large scale corruption. Humans, at least when it comes to producing sustainable organizations that behave altruistically, indeed suck.
What extreme risk? I mean, I'm a skinny weakling. I've pretty much always been a skinny weakling. I've had threats, but always been able to talk my way out of things. I don't really base my personal view so much on the fact I've never been in a fight, or that I live in the world with the lowest incidence of violent crime since the advent of agriculture or any of those sorts of things. I base it on neuroscience. We're built to NOT hurt people. We have to be pushed pretty far to be made to hurt people, and even then we usually can't go through with it. Mirror neurons work. They reflect what you do to others on yourself, and it doesn't feel good at all. If you're trained to kill on reflex, as soldiers are, and your body goes ahead and does it before your conscious mind can catch up... once it does, that causes a neurological cataclysm that manifests as PTSD and can take years to recover from.
The 'producing sustainable organizations' changes the topic completely. Human beings, as individuals, are absolutely and fundamentally different from human beings as a group. America went to war with Vietnam in the 1960s. That is a true statement. Even though there were tons of protestors who had no desire to fight Vietnam. Talking about groups and about people as individuals is starkly and completely different. People in groups can be easily driven by 'mob mentality', especially if they have been trained to be especially susceptible to this by things like team-based competitive sports in their formative years. Acting in a group 'disables' a great deal of a persons individual moral code. The same is true of people in a position of subservience. "I was just following orders" makes sense to the person pulling the trigger because they earnestly feel no moral responsibility for their actions - it's how they protect themselves. It's a dangerous defense that needs to be consciously acknowledged and resisted by all people. Failure to do so makes people very dangerous. And it is not an easy thing to do at all.
Organizations also pretty much always form to facilitate some form of control. And control is poison. It is inherently harmful, regardless of either the aim, intention, or end result of it. It is also, I think, cumulative. There's no one law that turns a country into an oppressive regime, it's an accumulation. And it doesn't matter if every single one of the restrictions is "for your own good". Unless the 'good' produced by the restriction outweighs the cumulative damage it does by inflicting the control upon each individual in the society, it is overall harmful. People often ask ridiculous questions like "Why should X be legal?" which pre-supposes that everything ought to be illegal unless there is a 'good reason' to permit it. They ask "Why should you be allowed to X?" as if every action a person takes needs to be justified as beneficial in some meaningful way. It's a very dangerous mindset that has undone many societies in the past. And control poisons not just the people being controlled, but those dishing it out as well. I'm uncertain whether their damage is greater than the damage to those controlled or not. As far as I know it's not been studied and that sort of thing would be hard to quantify. I mean, prison guards are killing themselves in massive numbers and always have for a reason, obviously, but the prisoners are tattooing themselves, joining gangs, and fighting as well, so which is having more harm inflicted? They're both responding in pretty extreme ways (ways identical to how people in oppressive nations, in oppressive cults, in high-control prisons everywhere, and increasingly in American high schools respond).
It's based on the law. They punish crimes after they have been committed. Where is the law that doesn't say "if you murder, you go to jail" but instead sets things up so you physically can not murder?
>not terribly convincing... 'crimes happen' doesn't seem to sufficiently demonstrate that 'deterrence doesn't work
Yeah, the part you cut out is the important bit. Sure you could argue 'oh well people are willing to steal a pair of shoes because they only get punished with 3 days in jail so they make a value judgement' if that's what we were talking about. But it's not. I pointed out the case of extreme punishment, death, not even THAT being capable of preventing the simple stupid crimes like stealing a pair of shoes.
>some aren't. some are much, much worse.
'Some' are individuals. I was speaking of humans overall. They're two very different things. Individually humans are impossible to predict, in groups they're among the most predictable things around. 'America went to war with Vietnam in the 60s' is not false simply because there were a bunch of protestors that opposed it. A statement about a group is not a statement about all of the individuals within it, and language would be incapable of functioning if that was the standard you attempted to apply.
> Where is the law that doesn't say "if you murder, you go to jail" but instead sets things up so you physically can not murder?
is the only way to prevent murder a physical impediment?
does talking an attacker out of their plans count as preventing a murder?
> I pointed out the case of extreme punishment, death, not even THAT being capable of preventing the simple stupid crimes like stealing a pair of shoes.
again, you seem to be suggesting that 'deterrence doesn't real' because crime still exists. it seems you're presenting deterrence as an all-or-nothing dichotomy.
> 'Some' are individuals. I was speaking of humans overall.
indeed, and that's the point. pointing to a vague generalization about humans doesn't keep your kids safe.
Killing other humans. It's not necessary in an abundant society. In a mismanaged/unequal/resource crunched society, like Somalia, it happens routinely.
You give far too much credit to humans following the rule of law. There's a fine balance between humans using their abilities for their own desires.
Reason #37,758 that centralized communication services are, at the very least, suboptimal, and at worst, are a matter of life or death.
More generally, we need to stop supporting client-only systemts. Cell phones, for instance, could have a fallback peer-to-peer mode, if the carriers would allow it. Unfortunately, being a choke point tends to make more money than building resilient systems.
Metafilter remains one of my favorite places on the web and it has strong and serious moderation. I'm not sure how that would translate to Facebook, since I am not sure Metafilter's voice needs to be the same voice everywhere, but moderated discussions seem pretty strictly better than the alternative.
For me this always goes back to the observation that corporations are fairly dictatorial constructions, and that especially when it comes to communication networks the decision makers are quite insulated from the huge number of people actually talking to one another. What would a company that gave representation to its customers look like?
It could be modeled after the US government, as an option. The company of today becomes the executive branch, you add a legislative branch that customers can be a part of. There's where you influence the product, there's where you define the rules of engagement on the network. And a judicial branch can determine if those rules are being followed correctly, etc. This is a rough cut, I'm interested in more refined takes on how a company could escape the dictatorship model that is taken for granted these days.
A big social network is not a single community like a blog or forum. It's a collection of communities that do some of their own moderation (blocking people and deleting off-topic posts), with some moderation outsourced to the larger network.
This is good; each community can have its own standards, to some extent. When there is good local moderation, there's no reason to bring the legal system into it most of the time.
The problem is at the next level where you decide which communities are okay to host at all. And what do you do when people in one community attack another? Then it the dispute gets bumped up to Facebook or Reddit, to employees who don't have much context.
In some ways "share nothing" is a good standard. Each blog or forum is an island with its own membership. (Or its own bubble, you might say.)
But that's not where we are, with overlapping friends lists and follower lists, subreddits with absentee moderators, and lots of resharing. People want to cross the streams. They also want good moderation.
I wonder if there should be an intermediate level between local communities (tens or hundreds of people) versus the social network (hundreds of millions). Maybe it needs to be more hierarchical?
Yeah, I think more hierarchy is probably necessary and at some point people in that hierarchy need to be paid.
Twitter is my main social network, and there the lines are very fuzzy. There aren't distinct subreddits based on topic, there is just your follow list and that is always changing. Harassment is bad on twitter, and I think that's partially because it isn't contained to little communities but is all in the big stream by default.
I don't know what the right solutions are for harassment, but there haven't been any effective ones tried so far.
the big issue with metafilter is that the moderation is both content quality and ideological; that does not really make for an open, neutral site and metafilter is not considered neutral.
That's what I meant by saying that I'm not sure Metafilter's voice is appropriate for everywhere.
And I think that you reveal yourself a bit when you say that it's ideological. I do think that most of the moderators on MF have a similar ideological bent, but my experience with their moderation is not so much that they shut down views that they disagree with but rather that they maintain civility, and stop conversations from repeating previous conversations.
"Muslims are like African Carp. They breed rapidly [... yadda yadda yadda ...] Our entire race has been suffering under the burden of this minority..."
That's grade-A genocidal rhetoric he's deploying. Good for observing that evil can wear any kind of face. Not good for much else.
> That's grade-A genocidal rhetoric he's deploying. Good for observing that evil can wear any kind of face. Not good for much else.
Sounds similar to what Björn Höcke, prominent German neo-Nazi dude, barked (http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/AfD-Hoeckes-Lehre-vo...). Only thing that Höcke did differently was to hide the true meaning behind the layer of science (r/K reproduction theories).
One of the great things of our times, is that bulk of the recorded history is available out there, and accessible for pretty cheap. Almost anything that is being said now, has been told by someone else in the past. To a point- Today you can easily judge the intentions and consequences of what is likely to happen as outcome of the speech.
This is a bad time to aspire to be a dictator or a genocide perpetrator.
There are so many signals you can pick from a person's talk that you can easily flag and classify the speech into what's likely to happen next.
People are not evil simply for disliking aspects of other cultures or populations.
For example, Americans enslaved Africans for hundreds of years. That is a claim of fact. I believe it is true. I believe slavery is bad, it should be stopped in all its forms (including as punishment for a crime), and I'm glad that the 13th Amendment was passed.
Hating what white people did to Africans does not make me evil, in fact it's a morally superior position.
To say that this guy is being evil, is like denying that slavery occurred because you're ignoring his claim of fact. You're effectively saying "No, Muslim populations in Myanmar are not attempting to take over the country by means of rapid reproduction. You are lying to gain support for genocide."
Just because you disagree with someone's proposed solution (assuming that's what he's proposing), doesn't mean there isn't a problem. It would have been one thing to be opposed to the Civil War - maybe the costs were too high - but it would be quite another to claim slavery is moral, or that slavery wasn't going on, or to just ignore the whole issue and pretend that anyone who's encouraging war is evil.
What if what he's saying is true? Would you support genocide? Would you be okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many kids as they can just to affect future demographics? Just because there's no good solutions, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. At some point global warming may be beyond every solution, but that won't undo the facts or absolve humanity for its blame.
>People are not evil simply for disliking aspects of other cultures or populations.
Describing Muslims as being akin to a destructive foreign species that "breeds rapidly" (which is a trait one typically ascribes to vermin, not human beings) is not "simply disliking" another culture.
>Would you be okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many kids as they can just to affect future demographics?
We're not talking about "large groups of people," we're talking about Muslims, exclusively. And yes, I would be okay with it, because I don't see the existence of Muslims or of their children as a "problem" requiring a solution.
> Would you be okay with large groups of people intentionally having as many kids as they can just to affect future demographics?
You are defending the rhetoric of a genocide perpetrator. It's like saying "what if Hitler was right about the Jews? I don't agree with his tactics, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a problem."
To try and be charitable to the poster, I think a better example would be "Would you be okay burning witches if they really did curse people?" than the Nazi example.
I think another way of saying phrasing the same idea. Let us assume that Muslims are intentionally having as many kids as they can to become a demographic majority in the future. How does that affect how we should act?
The above phrasing I count as very different from defending rhetoric of a genocide perpetrator because the answer to the above question is not "Kill all Muslims".
First: yes I am absolutely saying that Muslims in Myanmar are not engaged in a vast conscious conspiracy to change the demographics of the country. Yes, different cultural groups can have different fertility rates, but to say that this is an attempt "to take over the country by means of rapid reproduction" is when one crosses the line from making factual demographic observations to genocide-inciting hate speech.
I regret that I couldn't capture the full quote in which the monk analogises Muslims to African Carp (there was no way to pause or rewind the video, and that's the most I could remember with accuracy). He goes on at length about how they are violent, selfish, attack other species as well as their own kind, pollute the ecosystem, are a foreign invasive species, etc. These kind of analogies are designed to dehumanise their subjects, and to lead to an inevitable conclusion: for the health of the ecosystem, invasive foreign species must be eradicated. Of course culling always feels a bit distasteful, but in the long run it's the best thing to do.
This kind of rhetoric puts my hackles up because I've seen it before. In 2001-2002 I lived in Ahmedabad, India, and I saw at point-blank range how these kind of Islamophobic sentiments culminated in the massacre of thousands of innocent Muslims. So it's something that I take very seriously.
(By the way: this isn't a matter of tribal allegiance. I'm ethnically Jewish and my spiritual practice owes more to Buddhism than anything else -- but somehow it's still not difficult to recognise that the Rohingya are human beings, not African Carp. Anybody who says otherwise can fuck the hell off.)
>Hating what white people did to Africans does not make me evil, in fact it's a morally superior position.
Interesting, specifically, the "morally superior position" part. Are you willing to explain how hating what white people did is a morally superior position? Also, morally superior position to what, not hating it?
I would agree that thinking slavery is bad is better than enslaving people but I think that statement is not very useful because it is like saying x > -(Graham's Number) and is not a very useful statement.
What I am wondering where you stand on a more exact statement. Is "Hating what white people did to Africans" morally superior to "thinking what what people did to Africans immoral"? Why or why not?
I never thought I'd see the day where a Buddhist monk in robes is calling for the genocide of "Muslim vermin". (I don't think he literally said "vermin", but that's basically the analogies he's using.)
From what I've read Rohingya is an invented term used to describe Muslim Bangladeshi migrants, and was deliberately invented as part of a propaganda effort to accompany insurgency. I also note there seemed to be little coverage in the MSM when it was Islamic violence in play, but now the tables are turned it's wall to wall. Why the sudden concern now?
>From what I've read Rohingya is an invented term used to describe Muslim Bangladeshi migrants, and was deliberately invented as part of a propaganda effort to accompany insurgency.
There were Rohingya from Bengal who migrated into what's now Myanmar during the time of British rule, but it's not especially controversial among historians that they have origins there (arguably predating ethnic Burmese, who only arrived in the 10th century CE). What you're describing is the official position of the government of Myanmar, which I'd give a lot more credence if it was corroborated by a free press.
>I also note there seemed to be little coverage in the MSM when it was Islamic violence in play, but now the tables are turned it's wall to wall. Why the sudden concern now?
The 'MSM' published hundreds of stories in print, on the web, on radio and television every day. Did you view all of them? We're talking about half a century of conflict, after all.
I imagine it is the same thing that drove other acts of genocide, or for that matter, what lead to Heather Heyer's death: the politics of dehumanization and weaponized tribalism.
Even if you forget everything else about facebook deciding what can and can't be posted there, I'm still can't believe they have the balls to call it "community standards" with a straight face.
If forced to label myself as a human being, I would probably go to 'Pervert Philosopher'. I am a big believer in the utter critical importance of facing the "ugly" side of our human nature and dealing with it openly. It disgusts me, and I see it as immoral, that so many platforms wish to scrub the primary conduits through which modern human culture is both formed and transmitted of the 'human' element. Humans cuss and spit, they stink and fuck, and they do this alongside those who heal and build, who help and protect. Any attempt to eliminate one side will eliminate both in equal number, because people aren't immutable. They move across and among those groups throughout the course of their day, week, month, year, or life.
Eric Schmidt's book, 'A New Digital Age' is starkly terrifying. He openly says that Google, because its rich, should use its position to actively mold human culture. We've seen individuals or small cabals take outsized roles in culture many times throughout history and the result has always been the same - tragedy. I see no reason why this would be any different.
Internet access should be a public utility like water or electricity. It should be metered. The cost of it should be tied directly to the price of providing the actual service (and its tech so that means the price will rapidly go to zero). It should be regulated by municipalities just like water companies are. The amount of profit they earn should be capped, just like water companies are. And just like water companies aren't allowed to charge restaurants a higher fee just because they make soup from the water and sell it, muni ISPs should never be permitted to charge different rates to people just because they're doing business over it.
I'm not advocating for the idiotic 'muni owns the fiber, private corps get access to the fiber and share' model, I'm advocating for muni ISPs. So that when the feds come knocking on their door, they will get told to pound sand unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. Private companies just bend over, especially ISPs who largely depend upon the government for most of their business existence (how long would they make it if it was legal for anyone else to run a line next to theirs and compete?). Municipal govt employees love telling the feds to get lost. They'll have their neighbors backs.
Thank you for your interesting and raw thoughts :)
I too agree that the internet should be as free as water. Interestingly, there are movements that attempt to do that, but I think that government and corporation forces are quite good at driving a specific type of usage and penalizing another.
So I think that will continue to be a problem. If enough people wanted to rise up, build their own fiber, run their own mesh network, and or build tools like Tor and TPB to work within the system we have, then the free and open net would win.
Multiple times people have tried to do this, and they have been shut down by force, intimidation, expulsion, imprisonment, confiscation of assets, slander, blacklisting from jobs, you name it.
So to advocate for a free and open net these days is pretty much a social cue that 99.999% of people will say "ehhhh I don't want to associate with that guy."
That's why in 2004, TPB was king. Now in 2017, the internets is all walled gardens and censored platforms. And 99.999% of people are there by choice.
It is a complete and total shame. The herd of lambs carrying each other to slaughter.
Each utility fought a real battle when being initially established. It's very interesting history. For awhile I was researching it pretty deeply, interested in whether my ideas were total lunacy or what and possibly considering writing a book about it. I started off with the question: What criteria was used to say 'yes, water should be a utility, natural gas should be a utility, electricity should be a utility, telephone should be a utility', etc? How did that actually come about?
The question weighed for those things in the past turned out to be a fairly simple one, but which can be tricky to approach honestly and fairly for both sides: Would the benefit to society be greater than the damage caused by the elimination of competition in that space? To judge it correctly, one does have to attempt to quantify and judge how much damage would be done by eliminating the competitive aspect, because that would have to happen. Then one lines up the benefits society would garner by having it available ubiquitously and cheaply.
Personally I think the call isn't even close. The Internet meets the requirement of providing more social benefit by being cheap and everywhere by miles, much moreso than some of the other public utilities even do. (First off the bat, you can get rid of the phone utility. And the TV quasi-utility.) You can actually close a gigantic number of government offices and let their employees work from home. You can tell people to 'do it online'. You can't DO that, ever, in law if universal access is not guaranteed and it remains a luxury. Small businesses would get huge with it, no longer chained to a "business class" connection that bleeds them dry and hosting companies that manipulate them, they could just run their servers themselves on their own lines. There are all sorts of other benefits to having a guaranteed-present communications network which is not a luxury but a basic service.
And sure, the companies like Comcast that originally made their money from distributing media and then got into the ISP market to try to stop or destroy or control it to prevent the threat to their cash cow will go nuts about it. Their death warrant was signed the day the Internet came about. Distribution is a solved problem. Sure 50 years ago if I made a video and wanted to show it to 10,000 people I'd HAVE to sign up with a distributor and beg and scrape and HOPE they only skimmed 99% of the value out of that transaction. Distribution was flat-out the single most valuable economic activity and dominated the entire global economy from the advent of factories (it made factories possible) up until the Internet came along (computers helped). Now distribution is something a clever 12 year old can do in their spare time for fun. And most importantly, the 12 year old will do it faster, better, and at a radically lower cost compared to the established gigantic players who feel entitled to still be kings. They love capitalism and the free market until they're stuck holding a huge order of buggy whips and watching everyone driving around in automobiles. Suddenly they wish their lobbyists could get the government to require cars to have a buggy whip installed before they'd start up.
Sadly I am still worried about the "details of implementation", because they will need to occur within our lifetime, and are influenced by very very rich people who hold all the keys.
Do you think ISPs will become public utilities in the next 20 years? 40?
If so, how? It seems to me that corporations, their politicians, and their supporters have a pretty tight grip on everything.
I am not hopeful that any massive or meaningful changes will occur. The Washington Consensus seems to ensure corporate dominance will continue, to our detriment.
It should also be emphasized that Trump administration, so easily labeled as racist by practically everyone on the left, has urged 'strong and swift' U.N. action to end Rohingya Muslims crisis.
United States is literally on the other side of the world. There are places like Malaysia, a very good friend of Rohingya Muslims, China, Thailand, and others that would be perfect places to accommodate. I am not sure why you think that United States should be a deposit box for all sorts of human miseries from across the globe.
Because the U.S. can afford it, being the wealthiest nation on earth, and should therefore take on its share of the burden. Also, because the U.S. can do good, and give these people liberty and safety; if they don't deserve it, why do you?
Do you apply the same standards to your own life? I bet from your presence on this site that your income or potential income is above the median. When a drunk husband across town starts getting abusive towards his wife, do you open your house to the wife? If no, why not? Are you shouldering your share of the burden?
> Do you apply the same standards to your own life?
Yes, absolutely. Most mature people do and most modern societies do. The U.S. has actively supported freedom and democracy around the world since it became a major power, and part of its ethos has been to take in the 'hungry, tired and poor'.
In fact, if you are an American, you are one of the major beneficiaries of this attitude: The entire society, it's freedom, safety, and prosperity, is build on sacrifices of others. Like everyone else alive today, it was given to you by the generations before you. What will we give to others? Recent generations won WWII, gave the nation civil rights for women and minorities, and did so much more. What will we give to the next generation? Hatred and greed?
I have done that, but the implication isn't serious: My giving up part of my home isn't the same as a nation of 320 million people and $18 trillion in income taking in a few thousand or hundreds of thousands of refugees. Nor is the level of sacrifice a serious question - the U.S., beyond any doubt, can easily afford it.
I also give money and food directly to the needy, and also to organizations who provide for them (they have far more expertise and resources than I do). Several of those organizations are governments, and I advocate for higher taxes in order to provide more of these services.
To truly believe that these actions are somehow extraordinary is to be naive about how the world really works. This is the norm of how communities function; if I didn't do my part, I would be looked down on and rightly so - I would be a parasite on everyone else. Who do you think takes care of your needs - food, shelter, education, healthcare, the arts, solving community challenges and problems, and much more? Some of it you pay for, and without a doubt some was paid for and worked hard on by people of good will (and some enlightened self interest). That hospital you went to is funded to a great extent by donations and tax dollars, for example. If you live in a democracy, it's up to the people to provide these things - they won't just happen for you.
Charitable giving is not an unusual or even noteworthy activity; it's done by many, many people throughout the U.S. and the world. Without it - and not just money, but time - society would collapse.
Charity is also provided by government via tax dollars, something else the U.S. has always done and will continue, even under Trump.
You refuse to rent to black folks, you refuse to have black folks count your money, you claim a US citizen and judge is illegitimate because he's hispanic, you might be a racist...
We have a concrete example here, of administration making statements at the UN, issuing more than $30 million to help Rohingya Muslims, and the retort I get is some hearsay about African Americans not counting the money? What does it even mean?
