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Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @02:38PM (#33410510)
> explanations of the truth

Purveyors of disinformation are thieves of the time of the rest of us, and should be treated accordingly.

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by unknownaccount on Monday October 31, 2022 @02:46PM (#33410679)
Should we persecute every author of fiction novels too for wasting peoples time with their disinformation?
Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:30PM (#33411469)
> Should we persecute every author of fiction novels too for wasting peoples time with their disinformation?

People read fiction novels voluntarily, and the authors don't lie about their work being fact.

(Also: You mean "prosecute," I think.)

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by EarlKing on Monday October 31, 2022 @02:55PM (#33410847)
God forbid anyone should have their time wasted. Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights and should be treated accordingly.
Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:35PM (#33411539)
> Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights

1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by EarlKing on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:46PM (#33411778)
1. My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose.

2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:58PM (#33411981)
> Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil.

That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by EarlKing on Monday October 31, 2022 @04:33PM (#33412592)
...and that act remained wrong despite it not being stopped. 1 + 1 != 3 just because you want it to.
Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @04:53PM (#33412928)
1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right.

Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers.

It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by EarlKing on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:37PM (#33413598)
> 1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right.

You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:48PM (#33413731)
(Replying to my own comment because I can't reply to the one below)

If right and wrong are not matters of opinion, then what objective test does one use to discern which is which? For example, is contraception right or wrong — and why? How about same-sex marriage? How about interracial marriage?

As to rape: You and I certainly agree that it's wrong, but that hasn't been true in all times and circumstances (are you familiar with droit du seigneur and its variations?). And the Russian soldiers who raped their way through Eastern and Central Europe in 1944-45 were told by many of their superiors that it was their right to do so.

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by bluescrn on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @06:48AM (#33419395)
1+1 can be made to equal 3. You just need enough powerful people to declare 1+1=2 as 'misinformation' (or 'hate speech')
Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:51PM (#33411874)
> My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose.

If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by EarlKing on Monday October 31, 2022 @04:35PM (#33412618)
> spread lies at scale

Which lies would those be? The ones where we were told that developing a vaccine in record time under Trump was a disaster, or the one where when it rolled out under Biden it was totally safe and all reports of adverse reactions were disinformation?

Unless someone is expressly telling you that you are not eligible to vote or lying about where you need to go to vote you have absolutely no leg to stand on.

Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @04:48PM (#33412831)
Ah, I see you've emerged from cover.
Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by andirk on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:12PM (#33411161)
Freedom of speech has its downsides, yes. My only point is to _add_ to the discussion, not _delete_ discussions. We have laws in place for defamatory speech and plenty of other exceptions. Saying false things about climate change or how "democracy" works can often be countered with basic facts. People will often still choose to believe fallacies at will and that is their right as an American.
Re:Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinforma... by dctoedt on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:49PM (#33411820)
> countered with basic facts

You're disregarding the key distinction: Malevolent actors are (in Steve Bannon's words) flooding the zone with shit. The rest of us shouldn't have to put up with that, forced to spend our time digging through the piles of shit dumped by fuckwads who want to sabotage our societal decision-making processes.