> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.
<label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
> He watched on. Now that he had changed sides to the SS, he admired the strength of Fritz and the police man even more. He finally had left the camp of those who were wretched enough to let themselves be bludgeoned like that. He was glad to have made his choice. He did no longer have to fear the suspicion of the masters. He was on the side of good. The beatings the men received hardened his consciousness to embody good. One cannot receive beatings and be right, one cannot be dirty, eat garbage and be right.
> The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
-- Hannah Arendt
You don't cease to be come a person responsible for what you say and do, fail to say and do, just because you pretend "you're a company". They don' thave the right to "just make money", and you don't have the right to excuse them.
How you can think you are in any way still connected to intellectual or moral tradition is not beyond me at all, but that being wrong, the fact that you shat on any and all of the greats of the last 100 years, as well as millions of murdered people -- that seems utterly beyond you. You think you know them; they no longer know you.
True, but it's not outright impossible to see some of one's own flaws. At the same time, another person might perceive a flaw "false positive" where they just don't know the full story. So it's a bit of a simplification at least.
But I think the key isn't so much if you fully agree, but rather if it's bullshit or a coherent statement, correct or not.
> Also, smart people tend to have an allergic reaction to the restriction of ideas, and I’m now seeing many of the smartest people I know move elsewhere.
> It is bad for all of us when people can’t say that the world is a sphere, that evolution is real, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system.
Or what totalitarianism is, what sociopathy is, what obedience to and identification with abusers is and how it comes about.
> This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics.
But we absolutely cannot quote any of the greats on whose shoulders we stand on -- and mean it, that is, and actually deconstruct the sophistry that is inevitably replied to that. I've had accounts throttled and shadowbanned which had not a single comment below 0, and many upvotes. None of the comments were off-topic or not substantive, it's just the powers that be didn't like them, but could cite no guidelines and refute no points. Come to think of it, it's like all these comments from mods telling people to "not do that here" are really just to give a pretense of transpareny and good faith. From where I'm sitting, it's mostly silent and mostly hypocritical.
Maybe we have to allow the KKK to speak their mind. But do NOT talk about moderator action in public. Shedding light on the ways discussion is manipulated would degrade the quality of discussion, you see. So send us an email! Do not talk about votes, don't feel strongly about anything, no matter how solid the argument. Sure, a racist or homophobe might cure cancer, or someone who just uses the word "gay" to mean "lame", or someone with an IQ of 170 but also Tourette's. But you won't hear about it on a site where even a comment starting with something like "this is fucking bullshit!" followed by a detailed explanation of why it is, has to be punished or at least chided a bit. Yes, it would be better without that. But no, that doesn't excuse patting each other on the back for form over content. That's even dumber than swearing.
Be that as it may, in the end it'll just eat you whole, spit out nothing, and the people who pretended your shit doesn't stink will turn out to have been your worst enemies all along. Totally apart from being an intelligent or good person, conformity for the sake of conformity and any "hacker spirit" are oil and water, so that really just leaves money and electric toys, with shades of censorship and direct and indirect murder. A little hut of gold on a lot of treacherous sand.
The more you sell out, the more you give in, the more good you also can do, the more whistles you can blow, if you should ever grow your spine back. That is the one silver lining, but I won't hold my breath for it. Good luck though, without sarcasm. You do need it, and everybody deserves to come clean.
> Unreason and anti-intellectualism abominate thought. Thinking implies disagreement; and disagreement implies nonconformity; and nonconformity implies heresy; and heresy implies disloyalty — so, obviously, thinking must be stopped. But shouting is not a substitute for thinking and reason is not the subversion but the salvation of freedom.
-- Adlai Stevenson, "A Call to Greatness" (1954)
> The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
That phrasing I disagree with. As Noam Chomsky said, this generation has to decide whether there will be organized human life on the planet in the future (similar to something we would not find a nightmare, that is) or not. I would claim mere waiting would be making a decision against future human life.
Why does something you imagined that wouldn't really add anything worthwhile not being the case take away from it?
Good on them that their careers cannot be hindered for this; not everybody doing what they feel is right has to "sacrifice" something for it, it's much better when it's all throwing off burdens and reaping rewards.
We cannot know what sacrifices they made or didn't make in those 20 years anyway, and what combination of straws broke the camel's back. Maybe they were sick of it for a while, but decided to stick around until retirement for the good people they enjoyed working with and teaching, and then make their statement. I could not blame them for that. And hey, it would have been even more "convenient" to make no statement at all, so there's that.
IMO what matters is the statement, just like the content of a comment matters, not if someone is writing it while parachuting, or from a couch.
No, fuck totalitarianism. We don't even know what China might be if it weren't for totalitarianism. Just like an individual under such pressures cannot become themselves.
Speaking of things that suck, why is this story "penalized"? Looking at position, age, points and comment count, it's super obvious there's something up when comparing to non-penalized stories.
> we're all supposed to be ashamed of porn and sex outside of marriage in the west
So basically, you're not aware of any of the stuff I'm referring to, and reroute it to what you do know. It isn't the weakest possible interpretation of what I wrote, it's completely out of bounds -- there is no way you honestly think I'm referring to extramarital sex with "horrible, vile stuff" and "excessive dehumanization". And it's pointless and a bit unfair, because I can't show you anything, and even to just describe it in detail would ruin my day.
I don't feel anything I'm "supposed to" either -- including this idea that if someone is into X, and it's legal, you can't say bad things about it, but they can say good things about it all day long. Because "it's a thing", and once it's a thing, it's just there in the world as an item to pick off the shelf and consume, and the cardinal sin is to have any opinions on the choices of other consumers. All that matters is that someone wants something, and that it's legal. People are into things because they are into them, end of discussion, and in many cases also end of reflection.
That's like one "camp", and anyone who has anything to say about that other than "awesome" has be be conservative, religious, whatever. It's like many conflicts, try to talk sense to hawks on either side and they cannot imagine you as anything but a "supporter of the other side". If you can imagine shame and horror only as response to social conditioning, religious upbringing, and so on, you by necessity cannot understand where I'm coming from.
If I had the choice to give an earful to anyone who consumes or makes movies and games and music, as someone who gamed a lot, loves music (but to be honest kinda stopped watching a lot of movies) or to anyone who makes or consumes porn, porn doesn't even enter consideration. But the subject at hand was porn, and while I don't think the person I responded to meant it that way, taken literally they said that any adult site, i.e. all of them, is nothing to be ashamed of. That is the only reason I responded, that's too broad for me to agree.
I generally agree, but in this day and age, there is also real horrid, vile stuff... just follow banner ads on random free porn sites and you'll find a lot that is more an excessive dehumanization arms race than anything to do with sex.
People don't have to be ashamed of it in the sense that they didn't choose to get so damaged to be attracted by it, but abuse and it's consequences is a major elephant on the couch of the porn industry, and I also don't feel a shred of shame for not lumping it all together into one giant bag of "it's all fine", just like I can't lump it together as being all bad.
To each his own also means that I see what I see, and judge it as I judge it.
If you have issues with protecting children from harm by predators, apart from that kind of being a red flag, I would rest assured that any kids ideally will be adults one day, with their potential heavily influenced by what they went through as "mere kids". Think of it as a really cheap way of helping adults.
It's nauseating that an important topic like this one gets headed of with cutesy deflection from someone with a nick that's a homophone of "gas the jews".
It's pre-emptive in that it doesn't address any of it, you just says that "this" has been said about other things, supposedly implying that since this somehow refutes even one sentence in the article, making all discussion of any details in it superfluous.
But you don't even have the courtesy to say that, just leave it implied, and then paper that over with some fluff about the Beatles as if that could distract from that. So you "stand behind" stating a triviality and then not saying what you cannot directly defend.
About "older generations rejecting change", that old, dank chestnut... conveniently ignoring all the changes welcomed with open arms by older generations, too, and all the young people who think this stuff stinks. It's a fake narrative to skirt actual argumentation. More importantly, resistance against these methods, as well as the people who rationalize them, is just as much "progress" as is inventing and employing them.
> Maybe we should be, though? [..] Great. I'm not sure that should top your list of injustices, though. It doesn't top mine, because it's not one thats happening in my back yard.
So do you think we should care, or shouldn't we? If your point ultimately is no, we should not care, then why not be honest and say "but we shouldn't care, and here's why".
And how can you claim "nobody" cares? Are you sure there aren't people in many countries who wish companies wouldn't just deal with their butcherers, but give the oppressed a voice? If you don't care, just say it.
It's not about where it happens, it's about whether my "friends" are involved in it. If Google didn't use this site as a PR platform, too, there'd be no point in talking about it. But since many people here use their products, because they claim a "Hi fellow Kids" kind of humanness, it is relevant. When some total stranger acts horrible to others, but they can handle it themselves, I probably wouldn't bother getting involved. But if that guy was chatting to me 5 minutes prior to that, and considers himself someone on good terms with me, I would absolutely at least say something.
It doesn't matter what's on "top" of the "list of priorites", it only matters that it matters, and that I have a position on it I must make known or be complicit by silence. It's really simple, we understand that intuitively in all sorts of situations, it doesn't get more complicated because the behaviour to have a position on gets worse. Totalitarianism in a country claimed to be on the way to become superpower #1 is on such a vastly different scale than anything else you could bring up. It's threatening the very canvas on which you might otherwise drawn and write and rank things. It's not in your backyard, you are in its backyard.
I'd be perfectly fine with Google doing business in China and otherwise shutting up. But they'll parade their new awesome whatever, and that's not okay. Pick one, make your bed and then lie in it. Just consider the Noam Chomsky talks at Google:
It's not a matter of my priorities. They do not get to decorate themselves with the feathers of Noam Chomsky, they do not get to speak on subjects like discrimination, as important as they are, as long as they play along with builders of concentration camps. My moral compass doesn't even enter into any of that. If the whole "make information accessible" stuff hadn't become a bit of a joke a long time ago, I'd add that, too.
> If you do a commercial, you're off the artistic rolecall - everything you say is suspect. You're a corporate whore. There's a price on your head and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink. End of story.
-- Bill Hicks
Same thing with any sort of ethical or intellectual claims and then dealing with butcherers. Super basic stuff, really.
And that "it's all connected", that hardly anyone isn't somehow involved with something that sucks, knowingly or unknowingly, voluntarily or not, doesn't mean you don't do anything. The first step is to not make excuses when others criticize something. It's not even you doing something, it's you not getting in the way of those who are doing something.
> But what about their record? I don't know, what about ours?
You started your comment with "It doesn't excuse them"...
> War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
> To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
-- Judgement of the International Military Tribunal for Germany
> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.