You could say the same of knowledge also as it is a power and one applied and accrued by relationship; by what material one reads, by whom and from which source it is linked from and to. Academics of various groups tend to have their own sort of tribalism. I think the mods came to the correct conclusion that politics, although annoying as hell sometimes, is a fabric of society which is nigh impossible to shed when discussing just about anything.
Hulu has some educational documentaries as well as Netflix. There's also curiositystream if you want all docs and even some on youtube. There's tons of educational streaming online, it's about all I watch.
>The unifying principle of conservatism is: survival of the fittest
This isn't just a principle of a party but a natural law. This is displayed in liberal politics also. Life is a fight using powers as a utility, hard and soft powers. Liberals tend to bank on using the powers of certain ideologies, many as vague as conservative ideologies, in order for those ideologies to survive. Some use the soft power of love which may prove sometimes to be fittest when that power gathers enough political support, some use the hard powers of war and competition which may seem fittest in some occasions. And of course, love and warfare is seen and used in both/all parties even when they don't seem to realize it, sometimes hypocritically on the surface but often when you look deep enough, you see the forces of natural law shining through and it's not just love and war against each other, it's just organisms which may be ideological, biological, etc competing in what some would view as a thermodynamic machine racing towards entropic neutrality.
But to say only conservatives employ 'survival of the fittest' is such a vast simplification.
If everyday human life must echo the eons-long process of evolution, can we say the same for other natural laws? Gravity is a natural law; so people inevitably bow to their superiors? People bowing to each other is gravity shining through! But capillary action is another natural law, so it means people inevitably rise up to best their superiors...
When my cat cuddles up to me on the bed, this natural 'life is a fight' law falls to pieces. Beings are capable of generosity without a gaining idea, and most of us have encountered this as part of our lives. I have found that lovingkindness and compassion are boundless in every sentient being's heart.
I think self-identified 'liberals' generally don't have any concrete principles about power itself. As long as it is illegal to not treat all people equally, liberals seem to think government power should increase to the extent that it can relieve suffering and foster generosity. Parts of the left, with its civil libertarians and Proudhon anarchists, think about power in a deeper and more heterodox way...
> When my cat cuddles up to me on the bed, this natural 'life is a fight' law falls to pieces. Beings are capable of generosity without a gaining idea, and most of us have encountered this as part of our lives.
devil's advocate: your cat does this so that you continue to feed/protect/pay attention to it.
you may not like that negative point of view, but it seems like a reasonable strategy for survival in a really tough world pre-modern era (still is tough for many).
Research shows domestic animals build a bond with those that feed and shelter them. Sorry dude, but your cat doesnt love or care about you beyond its basic need fulfillment. And you care for it because it makes you feel needed and wanted. Altruism is not a real construct imho.
They host and indirectly disseminate media, just like a news network. Do you expect Fox or CNN to host views they don't find acceptable? If we're going to accept that biased media is legal (news networks) then biased media is legal (Cloudflare), although you'd have a harder time making a case of bias against Cloudflare in comparison to the former.
Fox and CNN are indeed liable for what they display because they are publishers. They control the content.
That's kind of the point.
Cloudflare and social media co's naturally want to be protected as a platform. If they start controlling the content in an ad hoc it's a lot harder for them to claim that.
Do you complain when liberal writers don't get hosted on Fox News? Or when liberal guests don't get as much air time as conservatives? Do you want congress to clamp down and make all sides get equal air time and newspaper time? This 'everyone should host my political agenda and his agenda....ad infinitum, all equally in time and space', is not just ridiculous but impossible. They're a private company doing the same as CNN or Fox, deciding not to host what they don't agree with.
"Absolute free speech" is like anarchism. I've yet to meet someone who fully practices them both yet they will preach it and condemn others with their self-righteous hypocrisy. Would you want me to come up to your kid and cuss him out for no reason? Your mom? I wouldn't even have to use foul language to bother them. Any number of reasons I could really annoy you or your loved ones with free speech and in some cases really make them fear for their life, legal or not, especially if I was famous and had an internet army to "play" with them.
Free speech is the equivalent of "utopia". It doesn't exist because even the most ardent endorsers have shown kinks in their armor where they don't want people to use it against them at certain times and certain ways. You argue against the selective suppression of ideas yet you may reply to me and tell me this idea needs suppressed. Most people already see the kinks of hypocrisy in it and have long realized it, like all other freedoms, are best used moderately so as not to infringe on the freedoms of others.
Free speech is a hard requirement for democracy, and a hard requirement of free speech is accepting the freedom of speech you find objectionable. Your nation was founded upon this principle as a cornerstone, and yet you have regressed back to ochlocracy. It wasn't even 100 years ago that any discussions of LGBT welfare were censored the same way by people with the same mindset.
> Would you want me to come up to your kid and cuss him out for no reason? Your mom?
We're talking about an online discussion group that discusses things that some, including myself, find objectionable. We're talking about whether such groups should be allowed to exist, and by extension whether those ideas should be allowed to exist. You're talking about harassment with an example that doesn't even intersect freedom of speech. Terrible strawman.
When I emigrated from the former Soviet Union, freedom of speech was one of the bigger changes in everyday life. It was also something that people were proud of and supported. They understood that it's what allows democracy to function, they understood that by definition it means supporting objectionable speech. Now I'm watching the tide turn and the same people actually supporting censorship in their own nations.
I always thought the censorship and thought-policing started with the oppressive government in the Soviet Union, I didn't believe that people initially welcomed it. But here we are, the cycle is repeating again.
We're not talking about a government shutting down 8chan. We're talking about one (of many) providers being unwilling to rebroadcast 8chan's content. (Rebroadcast, not host. Their hosting provider is still hosting them.)
I understand people's dislike for any kind of censorship, because it's immensely difficult (impossible, perhaps) to trust the people doing the censoring to be free of bias and to always do the right thing. And I agree with that!
But let's not pretend that all ideas are equal and great. That's just a flat-out falsehood. Some ideas don't deserve to see the light of day. And sure, it's difficult to trust any group to make that judgment. But doing nothing isn't a great option, either.
Don't get me wrong: I don't want to see a government making things like 8chan illegal. But I also don't want to see a government requiring that companies like Cloudflare rebroadcast 8chan's content against their will.
That's a separate discussion. How big does a corporation have to get before the government must intervene? Imagine there was only Cloudflare and nothing else. Should they still be allowed to arbitrarily de-platform ideas and individuals?
Should Visa and Mastercard be allowed to arbitrarily de-platform a business and therefore guarantee it can't operate?
Cloudflare et al are particularly heinous because they'll claim to be a dumb common carrier to protect themselves from legal action for re-hosting illegal material, and then turn around and cherry-pick exactly the kind of content they want to re-host. Can't have it both ways.
Most democracies have limits on freedom of speech. Do you think Germany is not a democracy for disallowing some references to Nazism? Do you think Finland is not a democracy since we can and have fined persons for "inciting against groups of people"? Let alone for slander and such.
We are talking about legal speech which is being de-platformed because it's unpopular. And not just a particular kind of speech, but the entire platform on which speech in general takes place.
If it were prohibited speech or if the platform was illegal, this article would not exist and neither would this discussion.
A pretty distinct contrast to the prohibited speech in your examples.
Then I guess the president of the united states[1], the president of the philippines[2], the president of china[3], and all respective news corporations that broadcast their direct calls to violence should be de-platformed as well, if we're being impartial. Right?
And since we're being impartial, we should just ban entire television channels because they have broadcast these direct calls to violence. Just like 8chan is being de-platformed for a handful of posts that were submitted by users. Right?
Perhaps let's talk about the fact that the individual that precipitated this action also shared his views on twitter and facebook. And they were not removed until he became a figure of media attention. He also used facebook livestream. Time to de-platform those too, yes?
You'll never have a search engine without bias. A search engine's job is just that, to bias various data, not soak up any and all data on the internet. That's why humans or anyone or anything in this universe is biased, because we can only soak up so much info from so many proverbial directories in a lifetime.
The web may be biased. But a search engine that reflects that bias is just doing its job correctly.
One inevitable and useful bias a search engine has is the bias against spam. It's aligned with the interests of the user.
There can be (and are) biases that are against the users' interests but are aligned with operator's: promotion of some content, censorship of other content. This bias I would rather see gone.
Did Gödel even prove step 1?. In Gödel's argument, it's relying on very arbitrary definitions of what many have defined as a god and that their god is "great". OP defined what is "great" to him, it's not necessarily what's great to you or me.
I think OP here is meaning "great" in some intellectual capacity, that you are just as powerful or great if you can make up your lack of greatness in one area with another form of greatness, something I don't see as greater but equally great. Is it greater to be successful by bootstrapping off the success of your forebearer or greater to be as successful when starting from nothing? It's a classical argument but to me it stands on just as rational ground as Gödel's argument.
> A clown is not "that for which no greater horror can be conceived"
I don't know, some people are really scared of clowns.
Also as a reminder, your "proof" is something made up throughout history along with thousands of other denominations of thousands of other religions of thousands of other gods people have conceived through thousands of years. I can imagine many great things and it doesn't mean it exists, that's where this "proof" fails. Calling this "proof" is, if not a lie, but a big detriment to the notion of proofs already tested and held dear.
As an addendum, if you follow your logic then you're still left with the old 'who created God' argument because although you might imagine some great entity, any entity that god can imagine should surely be greater than the god you imagine so their god must be true. You still have the infinite egress problem diluting your "proof".
I read that and assumed there'd be a followup investigation of attempted mass murder but nothing. Was justice served, or even half-heartedly attempted and the article didn't mention it? The story lacks or justice lacks, hopefully the former.
