Apart from the obvious 1a violation.
Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market. We see this play out in reality.
This doesn't really apply in the same way in social media. Social media platforms organically turn into monopolies.
X and Facebook and Reddit and Hackernews and Whatsapp are all social media, sure, but they are not in direct competition. One does not start or stop using Instagram because they use Reddit. Same with Hackernews and X, etc etc. The product is different.
When you ban an ideology or a group from a piece of social media, they do run to competitors, but "competitors" which can never penetrate the market because they don't have the userbase, which is the main incentive of social media.
So far-right people get banned from Twitter and they run to Gab, but Gab and Twitter aren't really competitors because Twitter can't ever penetrate into Gab's market (they banned that market to begin with) and Gab can't penetrate Twitter's market (because Twitter is the more attractive platform to begin with, having more users)
The better product is better because of its userbase. There is no real competition, and as such, no upholding of freedom of speech due to it.
If the private sector is more susceptible to moral policing than the public sector, then (all things being equal) if public services are transferred to the public sector(ie: smaller government) then the attack area increases.
There are two conditions, and one conclusion. If you don't agree that the premises apply, then the argument doesn't really matter and also doesn't apply.
>That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
Eh, maybe, but don't most of these laws mostly fail to work across international borders anyway?
I mean, I haven't seen many cryptolocker authors appearing before US courts. And wikileaks remains online despite the best efforts of US authorities.
Surely anything that could shut down or block kiwifarms could do the same to wikileaks and pirate bay and sci-hub?
Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.
Then why do people who issue takedown requests get plastered all over the site and harassed?
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.
People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.
And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington)
As does prohibiting people saying unpleasant things about semi-public figures in public.
You should read up on what actually happened, one a unbiased source. Which si not Wikipedia.
The sources that are allowed/disallowed and their respective biases (e.g. what they publish or don't say) are a big factor.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807942
[2]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
[3]https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-world-should-not-ne...
The first link is from Destiny, a well-known (albeit controversial) online figure. It seems to be a factual timeline of events with citations for every claim made, which is far from an opinion piece.
Completely dismissing the content because you believe it must be biased is somewhat ironic.
Would you at least then concede that the Wikipedia article is also unreliable and biased?
> One is bordering on an attack piece.
Which one? If you're referring to the piece published by Destiny, what constitutes an "attack piece" if all the claims made are rigorously cited? Would being an attack piece invalidate the claims even if they're demonstrably true?
[1]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
Moreover, if it's about the situation mentioned earlier this year on HN, it's problematic because of its complexity and gravity. Even with just facts and only facts, the change of the narrative (ie. the order you present the facts in) is enough for the same reasonable person to come to opposite conclusions. And that's before accounting for rhetorical devices that aim to manipulate the reader while still not crossing the line and sticking to facts - happily employed by both sides of the discussion in staggering quantities. (Then, of course, there's the other 90% of sources full of lies and fabrications, but let's leave those alone on HN at least...)
In short - it's not worth the hassle unless you're invested in the matter enough to care a lot, and once you are, odds are you won't post an unbiased source anyway. You'll need to do your own research, wade through a metric crapton of some of the worst humanity has to offer, and form your own opinion based on that. I don't think there's a shortcut here.
Come on, that is the literal fucking purpose of infrastructure. Water/sewage doesn't get to refuse to flush my toilet because the content of my stool doesn't meet their nutritional expectations.
> I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence
It doesn't unless you interpret every instance of adversity as an attempt on your life.
Nobody trying to kill anybody sends a pizza, unless the intent is to induce poisoning or choking.
> [Wikipedia] Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her
"Leaked" sounds so much worse than the truth of the photos being found on a 2257-compliant commercial porn site, which Keffals willingly worked as a onetime model for under a 4-letter pseudonym. To say they were "leaked" is being intentionally dishonest. They were available for sale, by the studio that took them. Users shared the preview images that were publicly posted, because nobody involved felt they were worth paying for.
Don't take my word for it; anyone can see for themselves-- they're helpfully posted in her KF thread, if the site is even up anymore.
Just on this specific point: this is not a particularly weird scenario at all. There are very strong rules about what you can and cannot send in the mail, and these rules are enforced. The most obvious example is the Comstock laws, which regulate "obscene and immoral materials" sent through the mail (including things like information about birth control). They're from the 1800s, but several are still on the books. It's not a strange concept at all in American law to regulate what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
It's amazing to me that some people are so determined to defend KF when it appears that the best defense they have is: "no suicides have been definitively linked to KF." I know their public reason is all about censorship etc, but I'd like to know what their private reason really is.
KF is ultimately an archive site. It "keeps receipts" in their words. If storing someone's posts is bad, is archive.org bad for performing the same function?
If KF supports harassment campaigns then make that case, but they seem not to. I've seen more harassment and threats on Twitter (literally!) than on KF threads.
If suicide is your metric, are you also against storing the words of people you find objectionable in case they commit suicide when discovered? What if a neo-nazi was recorded being a nazi and killed himself, is that bad?
I personally support storing the speech (because it's censorship not to allow it) and I support legal charges for people who go beyond - let the courts sort of the fine lines.
You know what would counter disinformation? Links to analysis of kiwifarms with methodology and citations. E.g. what proportion of threads (from, say, a random sample of 20) contain doxxing on the first page?
> Edit: I've now done this. Looks like about 25%. Damn, that's high.
There's probably a fallacy or term for this, but this is one of those situations where if you catch someone doing one thing, it gives you just enough credibility to exaggerate other features without proof-- and people will believe the whole thing.
Doxxing is the easiest claim to verify, and though unwelcome, it's not a crime. "Harassment" in this context is conflated with "accountability," which is relevant when you consider who exactly their "victims" are and what KF accuses each of them of in turn. None of them are random nobodies minding their own business-- most if not all of Kiwi Farms' "victims" are public e-celebrities or influencers they accuse of being complicit in some form of fraud, abuse, child solicitation or other shenanigans, so it seems clear to me why such "victims" would want evidence of their own criminal behavior erased from the internet.
I've said it elsewhere, but nobody ever accuses KF of being liars. If they're posting defamatory content, there are established legal channels available to address that-- the site and its owner are reside in the most litigious country on earth. Yet there are no channels to suppress publication of truthful information (or opinion)...which I would argue is the real reason for the histrionics of the opposition.
They're still trying to present Chris-chan as some sort of sob story because Kiwi Farms was mean to him or something; the guy raped his own mother. Keffals is no better, crying to the fucking media about being SWATed by Kiwi Farms when their own account sounded more like a search warrant being executed. byuu was caught faking his own death before, but he's totally dead this time and it's totally Kiwi Farms' fault for making him commit suicide again. Attention whores, all of them. Cry me a fucking river.
I imagine the moderators giving the same "No, please, don't do this" with the exact same level of authority as Willy Wonka telling people "no don't":
It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses.
Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc. (aka, "doxxing") is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
If KF truly discouraged harassment, they'd do what every other sane site does and immediately delete the post and ban the user that posted it.
Chris Chan has been a notorious and divisive figure online long before the existence of the Kiwi Farms. They are arguably one of the most well-known Internet personalities.
Merely referring to them as "a trans woman" throws away a massive amount of context why Kiwi Farms (and many other sites) seems so obsessed.
Also, what does labeling the person as trans (or anything else) have to do with harassment?
These threads exist. They're easy to find. I've seen them before and they're absolutely abhorrent.
Another commenter said they checked themselves
> Edit: I have now accessed the site and confirm a culture of doxxing, with 3 of the 10 opening posts proudly having "doxx" sections.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327204
> Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327642
Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else. I really wish I could understand the mentality of thinking otherwise. Are you really so hung up on "thinking for yourself" that you automatically assume anything said by the mainstream media is a lie? Skepticism is great and I highly encourage it, but automatic knee-jerk rejection is not skepticism, it's basically setting you up for falling for reverse psychology. Just because the mainstream media says one thing while fringe reporters say something else does not automatically mean the mainstream is lying.
Two notes:
1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
2. "Does more than zero research" is a very high bar that few meet. The number of people I've found on the internet who cite primary sources, government stats/papers and scientific papers is less than 0% to the nearest tenth of a percent. While its true that sometimes research can take half an hour or more, so often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
Ideally everyone would do research and cite real sources, in practice less than one in a thousand do.
There's a difference between an honest archive of potentially reprehensible things that might motivate someone to harass someone and a site which actively promotes harassment. Example, _Something Awful_ (at least back in the day).
Would KF be better, in your mind, if the threads contained links to archive sites whose archives contained the doxxing information, but they didn't repost it on KF? Separate the comments from the data?
> often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
The claim is that the police/courts/government are actively ignoring sex-trafficking and child sex when they perceive there to be a racial group of perpetrators, so one would expect the stats on prosecutions to be misleading. It's not about which race is more likely to commit a crime in Britain, but which races are potentially being "allowed" to and thus which victims are unlikely to be helped. The claim is not that Muslims or Pakistanis are more rapey than other people, just that they're less likely to be prosecuted in Britain's current legal climate.
There is a comment by a police officer "The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found a chief inspector told a missing child’s father that Rotherham “would erupt” if it knew that multiple Asian gangs were sexually abusing children" which indicates a blindness towards certain groups, and because the issue is police perception of their ability to prosecute without being called racist, that chief inspector's view is relevant to likelihood of investigation and arrest and therefore prosecution.
A UK parliament study on the issue deliberately clouds the issue by saying "The vast majority of convicted child-sex offenders in the UK are single White men", which shouldn't surprising in a country where the majority is white. This misses the claim of unequal police attention though, which is the real issue.
I don't think you researched the actual claims of the people who brought that up and thus haven't disproven it.
That's only your opinion. What OP says about KF is still correct.
No, it really isn't.
> Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for [doxxing] is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
Yes, I acknowledge it's all public, but that doesn't explain why you would want to aggregate that information and post it in a public forum and make it easier to acquire. What purpose does it achieve?
I do not recall seeing those in the threads I looked at (which all have an opening post collecting information about the individual).
Can you confirm what proportion, if any, of main posts had that info? Can you also confirm that KF does not have a policy of removing that info?
I can't access kiwifarms at the moment to check, but I strongly suspect that information is in obscure posts by individuals and their "community" as a whole does not condone it and it is removed where obvious.
Primary sources analysed either a good methodology are by far the best way to learn about a subject.
> Just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one
Problem: a forum full of misanthropes dedicated to saying the worst things allowed under the first amendment.
Bad solution: erode 1A at the case law level
Bad solution: censor the internet at the backbone level
Freedom isn't free. We're lucky to live in country with robust speech protections. The tradeoff is that there will always be some people who get a kick out of going right to edge of what they can get away. My view is that our civil liberties are worth it.
Not exactly. While there are certainly people who espouse anti-free speech views in the big tech, I'm pretty sure the companies themselves are pressured/threatened with increased regulatory scrutiny, anti-thrust action and anything else that is at congress/government's disposal. These congress/senate hearings about misinformation are exactly that.
I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago, at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
In fact recent activism coming from the engineer levels at Big Tech (google, Amazon, FB, etc) has me believe that that administrative layer is not really in control, and the policy changes are a reflection coming from the activism in the engineering layer
We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
For shame. But, things go in cycles. What was once great becomes a ruin, and then rises again. We are now in the heading steadily towards the ruin phase.
Implementation is the guys holding the shovels, not the guys saying where to dig.
And thank fuck for that.
> at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
People are so glib about this and it's such a catastrophic failure to engage in empathy and respect for other human beings that it simply blows my mind that people can say things like this and think they're in the moral correct. "Being bullied to death by the Internet" isn't even that uncommon anymore. Especially for people who will have a hard time finding community in the real spaces in which they live, Internet communities of like-people become a literal lifeline. Entire relationships both communal and intimate are carried out through the lens of online communication. "Words on the internet" indeed.
And if said words can be a lifeline of communication and community to like-minded people and alleviate suffering, you can be damn well assured that works the other way too. Having personally known and helped people through being the subject of online alt-right hate mobs, I assure you, "words on the internet" can absolutely kill people. I have watched in happen in real time and pulled people back from the precipice.
> We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
Yeah I don't particularly want to use software, especially pay to use software, made by people who want to exterminate people I call friends and family. If a developer comes out on their social media and broadcasts about how my friends are some combination of insane/dangerous for being who they are, no, I'm not using their product ever again and I will spread word about it to people I know who feel similarly. This is just how social networks (in the sociology sense, not the technological sense) work and always have.
I guess what I'm saying is if you want maximum capture on your product, tell your team to park their opinions on which groups of people deserve to die on personal, anonymous accounts. I don't think this is a massive ask, personally, but I also don't want anyone dead so I can't really comment on it.
Which one is it? Does your speech have a real world impact? If yes, then you have to acknowledge that it can cause real damage and that private companies have no obligation to accommodate that. If its just meaningless words, then why does it matter that companies ban anyone for any speech?
This is the oddly standard wording used in defense of these newly-fashionable 'everything you've ever done ever can be used against you' contributor codes of conduct and I have to find it very disingenuous.
By and large nobody wants to exterminate anybody. People have legitimate differences of opinion and when they attempt to express them they're being told that even _thinking_ that opinion is tantamount to violence.
If you can't see it as anything other than a transparent attempt to restrict discourse I don't know what to tell you. It isn't like this is the first time this strategy has been used.
Please provide me an example of a code of conduct you find objectionable on these grounds. I have yet to see one that fits the language used both in this and the parent comment I originally replied to of being "orwellian."
Is that hyperbole or do you really believe it?
The concepts of pluralism, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence with people whom we disagree is replaced with forced acceptance, mono-culturalism, speech controls and a rank intolerance of opposing views often supplanted with a rather obtuse perversion of the "paradox of tolerance" where by intolerant people of both political sides justify their actions actions as morally and ethically correct, as being on the "correct side of history" or other such platitudes
Ergo: if you treat everyone around you with the respect and recognition of their personhood, you in turn are 100% entitled to that same respect and recognition. If however you make statements or act in such a way as to diminish the personhood of others, you are no longer entitled to that respect.
I think it's a nice little system and resolves the paradox quite nicely. To promote a tolerant society means being intolerant of intolerance.
The right is most seen on this in the modern era Womens Rights, Schools, Gay Marriage, etc
The left is most seen on this with Speech Codes around "Hate Speech" and Pronouns, in Employment Regulations, in Equity Regulation (enforced by law not market) ,etc
You seem to believe that because 2 cultures exist it is "multicultural" but that is not the reality, "multicultural" would be accepting the other culture as equally as valid as your own, tolerating their existence in a legal and market framework (i.e willing to do business with them, and not use government power to make their culture illegal)
What we have today is 2 cultures attempt each attempting to banish the other both using markets, and using governments.
This notion that "well what's objectionable is subjective and therefore having any standard is having an agenda" is frankly, bullhockety. Yes, it does vary from person to person. Different people will have different tolerances to different things, and part of community building is all of those people coming together and, through trial and error, through difficult conversations, through awkward moments, etc. slowly constructing a line in the sand where upon one side is beyond tolerance, and the other side is not, and that line in itself being subject to change based upon new cultural events, new people joining the community, other people being removed from the community for infraction, etc. etc.
We have been doing this since roughly the taming of fire. The only thing that's changed is the mode of enforcement. Now instead of chucking people out of our tribes and telling them to piss off, we block them on social media and revoke their access rights. Same exact thing. If you want to participate in a community, that participation has always, always been conditional upon agreeing to a mutually agreed upon set of rules, that yes, change over time and that can mean you by virtue of being an imperfect human can stumble over them without meaning harm. The differentiator from that point is how you handle that situation and if your reflex is to post on your own social media about how everyone involved in the community you have transgressed against is censoring you and you have a right to say XYZ, then that community in all likelihood is going to reject you in a more permanent fashion. If your individual liberty to say XYZ is more important to you than membership in that community, then that's the choice you make. I don't judge you inherently for that. I have joined and left many communities over the years as my and those communities' values shifted around. This is just how social organizations work and have always worked.
And you in turn are free to demand access to whatever space but that entitlement needs to be articulated, and I am inherently suspicious of this almost reflexive "well I guess I just had the WRONG OPINIONS" response, which almost universally is presented without the opinions attached. (Including in this comment.) What were the opinions? Why were they "wrong?"
And I will grant: in the digital age, the enforcement of being rejected is much easier with a much lower emotional energy gate than it was previously. Now you don't need to confront people, to have conversations, if you don't want to and that makes a certain kind of person perhaps itchier on the trigger finger than is ideal. And that's unfortunate. But on the flip side of that, sometimes the transgression involved is too extreme. Sometimes the transgression makes the people who would confront an individual feel unsafe to do so. Sometimes there is no path to resolution and there's nothing to do but block and move on.
Regardless, it's not an argument. Your emotion has no direct weight on the correctness of an outcome you're arguing for, and trying to appeal to other's emotions in an attempt to sway them is attempting to bypass their critical analysis.
Argue the facts and let emotions happen. They "are you" but should not drive you.
> "Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting?
No, likely outcomes and consequences for discussing something are rarely aligned. You're discussing hounding people out of work/home/politics because of your emotional take on what they're saying, without any actual analysis of it or how actionable it is.
In my mind, that's incredibly dangerous (and thus, if I chose to use emotional language - disgusting) but I'm not advocating taking away your right to say it.
> Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it.
James Damore is a great example. He didn't broadcast his views - he responded privately to questions in a hiring review panel at Google, discussing how the company could improve its hiring of women by understanding the roles it was offering in the light of modern psychological analysis using the "Big Five" traits model.
Specifically, he did not say that women were worse engineers in any way, either holistically or in individual skills, OR less suited to engineering than males. He argued that Google's roles were less suitable for "traditionally female" interests. Again, this was privately, in the context of a panel trying to evaluate why Google wasn't great at hiring women engineers.
His communications were leaked, with the context stripped, in an edited form without any references to gawker-style media who were prompted with the lead 'white guy says - "Don't hire women"' to prompt them into the "right" emotional headspace to write an attack piece.
To tie this back to emotion, obviously someone read his words and let their emotion at those words (I myself don't like psychobabble) override their analysis of what was said. Their emotions are "valid lived experience" but the attacks they called for, and lies used to do so, are not helpful or justified.
That is a failure of mental health and the direction of psychology in general where by they are teaching people that everyone, everywhere must affirm you, must support you, and everything you do is perfect.
No longer are we teaching people "sticks and stones can break my bones but words should never hurt me" and then also providing people with the mental tools, and fortitude to deal with those words. No instead society and the field of psychology as embraced the "affirm" narrative and supports this idea that people should seek external validation instead of securing their internal framework.
I grew up being physically bullied, in spaces I could not escape from. There was no monitor turn off, browser to close, or computer to pull power from. I dont even want to curb that speech, let alone online speech. Why because I understand the extreme problems that come with embracing censorship at any level.
>>being the subject of online alt-right hate mobs,
So your are partisan, and operate under the belief that only the "right" bullies people, because I can show several cases of far left violence, and bulling, I have a feeling you would not call that bullying thought. I bet you are all in on the "accountability culture" as well.
No bad tactics, only bad targets right. If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
Let me ask, do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying" and that in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves, or banned from society?
>>I'm not using their product ever again and I will spread word about it to people I know who feel similarly.
that is perfectly acceptable, and not at all what I am talking about. Boycotts are fine. There is a big difference between boycotts and cancelations.
Boycotts are you choosing not to engage with a product, group company, and attempting to get like minded people to do so as well.
Cancellation is a form of harassment that involves deep diving to any associations even loosely and attempting to interfere or cancel all relationships the target has with everyone. So for example, Let say Walmart has a bad policy, say Anti-union, and your pro union so you refuse to shop there and tell all of your pro union friends to to either. Perfectly fine.
Now lets say an Employee at Walmart happens to go the Republican National Convention and wears a MAGA hat, you see a photo of this online, then proceed to find their friends, employers, family, and attempt to get them evicted from their apartment, fired from walmart, and when they get a new job at Target attempt to get them fired from that as well, attempt get their mother fired, and attempt get their roommate fired as well just for good measure. (true story form left wing cancellation BTW)
That is no longer OK. But that is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian left which you seem to support
>>made by people who want to exterminate people I call friends and family.
this such hyperbolic virtue signalling non-sense on the level of "words are violence", where by "exterminate" is in reality no "affirming, and accepting everything about my life as wonderful, virtuous, and pure". Certain segments of the population seem to be so fragile that if someone says to them "Your lifestyle is a sin" that means they are being exterminated...
I used to work with this very devote christian, she would pray for me everyday because I was a godless soul doomed to hell or some such thing. She was harmless, and I could care less. Today some people would report her to HR, get her fired, etc... simply because she believed something crazy and different. Of course you are free to be crazy as long as you use the "correct" political dogma in your crazy...
No, it's really not. It's what happens when you live within a society where far too many people in positions of authority either deny that people like you exist entirely, or fully accept you do and want to limit your access to healthcare, to resources, to gather in public, to your rights, what have you.
You cannot therapy or mental health your way out of the fact that a significant portion of society wants you to cease being the person you are.
> No longer are we teaching people "sticks and stones can break my bones but words should never hurt me"
Yeah you know how much I heard this tripe as a kid who was bullied basically continuously from the 4th grade to graduation? I heard it from every manner of school counselor to (vice) principal to teachers, and all of them, every single one, absolutely believed it and wanted to help me, and it doesn't change the fact that being subjected to daily psychological torture for roughly 8 years of my developmental life has taken yet another 8 years of intense therapy to work through the myriad of issues I have developed as a result of it, and even now, I am not free of it and never will be in all likelihood. I will go to my grave with issues around my self worth, my self image, my less-than-stellar social skills, on and on.
I cannot imagine dealing with that all through school, and THEN graduating into a larger society that not only doesn't rebuke that, but actively encourages it. Where your given bully is no longer the high school football captain, but a septuagenarian who has never worked a proper job in his life who is determined to mine support for his public policies on the back of making people who hate you feel good about hating you and encouraging them to continue doing so for literally no reason.
> So your are partisan
Everyone is.
> and operate under the belief that only the "right" bullies people,
I didn't make that claim and I'm not going to litigate it.
> No bad tactics, only bad targets right. If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
"Political dogma" here being that all human beings have an equal right to exist without threats of violence? I mean yeah, I guess if that's the thing people don't agree with I am largely okay with them being bullied.
> Let me ask, do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying" and that in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves, or banned from society?
Personally I don't like neo-pronouns. Like if someone wants to be called that, that's their business, I will probably avoid speaking to them when possible. I think the set of he/she/they covers everyone perfectly effectively and anything beyond that should strictly be an opt-in. However, I also wouldn't purposely go out of my way to not use someone's pronouns in front of them to make some idiotic point. I would just respect it to the degree that anyone is deserving of respect, and probably avoid them in the future.
> that is perfectly acceptable, and not at all what I am talking about. Boycotts are fine. There is a big difference between boycotts and cancelations....That is no longer OK. But that is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian left which you seem to support
I mean, what's the line here? I can tell people I know not to associate with someone or something, and then they tell their friends, that's still okay? At what point does it become not okay? What if down the line of 4 friends happens to be a vendor that supplies that company, and they decide to cancel their contract? Is that cancel culture now because a company is involved? What if enough of my friends are upset enough and publicly talk about it, and of their own volition, a company decides to cancel that contract based on not wanting the bad PR? At one point have I crossed from Boycott to Cancelling? Or is the it determined post-hoc based on the fallout? Because like... in my mind at least, they're the same thing. One is just more associated with a certain type of community.
> this such hyperbolic virtue signalling non-sense on the level of "words are violence", where by "exterminate" is in reality no "affirming, and accepting everything about my life as wonderful, virtuous, and pure". Certain segments of the population seem to be so fragile that if someone says to them "Your lifestyle is a sin" that means they are being exterminated...
Moving past that words absolutely have psychological consequences especially when applied en masse and over time as outlined above: it also matters when the "certain segments of the population" wield much larger institutional power than the others. You say all of this is just "words words harmless words from people who call me a sinner" like we didn't just deal with, here in the US, a massive court decision that granted abortion rights being overturned by judges appointed by theologically minded people to achieve that specific goal. This isn't even theoretical anymore, this is happening. Right now. There are now laws in place that directly contribute to making women's healthcare more dangerous because of the perception of it being "sinful" to receive otherwise, so don't tell me I shouldn't worry and that it's just words, when those same words not even forty years ago were used to condemn victims of the AIDS epidemic to death because it was "God's will" or whatever garbage.
no in fact we did not deal with this, nor was that the decision.
First and foremost Roe did not grant abortion rights, it granted privacy rights in a weird hamfisted way that only applied to abortion... It was a terrible precinct that even many left legal scholars (include Ruth Bader Ginsburg) rejected.
The reversal of Roe also did not remove any abortion or any other rights from anyone, it returned the issue to the proper place, State governments. Of which the vast majority had/have a more expansive view of abortion that the limits under Roe.
Thirdly the left had 30+ years to take the issue out of the hands of the hamfisted Roe by passing an actual law to address it, but chose not do because the democratic party wanted that boogeyman for elections (and still does) so they did not want to resolve the conflict at all, they want the issue not the resolution. They wrongly believe the court "would never" reverse itself... the screwed around, and found out.
The level if wrong information out there around the subject of Roe is crazy to me.
>>There are now laws in place that directly contribute to making women's healthcare more dangerous because of the perception of it being "sinful" to receive otherwise
100% wrong... You are clearly indoctrinated into a political ideology completely removed from reality
>>Everyone is.
I despise political parties. All of them. Political parties are for rich men north of Richmond, who all just wanna have total control of what you think, and what you do...
Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, Constitution, you name the party and I reject it.
"political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." -- George Washington.
An utterly disingenuous and politically motivated misstelling
Your ideas on needing an internal framework for emotional stability is on the spot, but this idea that "they" are teaching people whatever is in itself a partisan cop-out. The onus of failure for not providing adequate mental health tools is on parents who had no idea how to handle the sudden rise of technology & a general failure of leadership figures to step in. There isn't some big leftist boogeyman teaching people that others "must" do anything.
> do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying"
There are a lot of qualifying questions that need answered before this one could be considered. Like what constitutes bullying - your definition is different than everyone else's. Do we frame this under your perception of bullying, or mine? If something is a large part of your internally perceived identity & someone else actively denies that part of your identity, is that okay? Do you have an experiential framework with which to tackle that identity scenario in the first place, to understand in any fashion how they feel about that? Are you willing to employ empathy?
I'm trying to find a moral justification for not simply calling someone what they ask to be called, or walking away from the situation - if you're dredging up old dated phrases, whatever happened to "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all?" If someone wants to be called Xir or whatever, my question is "how the fuck do I say that" not "why should I."
> in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves
No, but they should be made aware that they're being assholes. Outside of this hypothetical vacuum scenario, we know statistically that it's more likely for the person refusing to use pronouns to engage in actual violence than someone requesting to be referred using those pronouns, so things become much muddier after the point of "you're being an asshole" - but in this scenario, that's where it should end.
It shouldn't be surprising or incomprehensible to anyone that folks on one side of this field are suddenly stepping up to the same field that the other side is. It doesn't justify it, but it should be well-understood that attacks from the left are not predicated on nothing.
> or banned from society
No. Rather I'd like to see our mental health systems improve enough that we don't have millions of people that erroneously believe that other humans don't have just as much right to exist as they do. That's why people get "banned from society" or whatever inane scenario you're trying to claim happens.
> If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
The hilarious part of this statement, at least in this specific context, is that it goes both ways. Our monkeys are flinging shit at their monkeys, and for some reason their monkeys are throwing shit back! How dare they.
I agree that 'cancelling' people - in the view that you've provided - is wrong. That said...
> Now lets say an Employee at Walmart happens to go the Republican National Convention and wears a MAGA hat, you see a photo of this online, then proceed to find their friends, employers, family, and attempt to get them evicted from their apartment, fired from walmart, and when they get a new job at Target attempt to get them fired from that as well, attempt get their mother fired, and attempt get their roommate fired as well just for good measure. (true story form left wing cancellation BTW)
You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation? Being bound by chains and dragged behind a truck. Gunning down an entire building full of gay people. Being burned alive in their own home. These events, steeped in alt-right online cultures of stoking fear and hatred towards leftists. Is this not the ultimate form of cancellation, the end-of-the-line of this whole scenario? As you put it, this is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian right. This is the extermination the other person is referring to. Murdering people based on shit they heard online, without actually bothering to interact with those people or build any kind of basis of empathy, to understand the challenges they face in a world where they feel the need to lash out like you've seen.
This is not justification of leftist actions, but you should also keep in mind the cauldron that they've been stewing in for decades upon decades - and the atrocities that the group you're defending have also committed. They are not innocent of wrongdoing, but you seem to casually miss that part.
> I used to work with this very devote christian, she would pray for me everyday [...] Today some people would report her to HR, get her fired, etc...
If they asked her to stop, and she didn't stop, she's in the wrong. Yes, absolutely report her to HR. What was the point of this story?
I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you. I believe, based on the ideas you've expressed here, that you lack the empathy necessary to engage with a very emotional & "human" topic. Have a good one.
You believe there is no violence on the left? Shall I pull video of people being beaten and pulled from their cars during BLM "peaceful" protests? Or of the police captian that was burned alive in a store? Or of the Nashville mass school shotting for which the FBI is still withholding the manifesto that has it been a right wing person would have been on ever news outlet the next day?
>This is not justification of leftist actions,
if not outright justification it is attempt to "but but but look over there they are worse"
>>group you're defending
Not defending anyone, I am pointing it out is not left / Right. it is Authoritarian vs Libertarians.
Authoritarians are violent, that is how they weld authority. Right, left does not matter, In this community (technologists) people tend to want to believe only Right Authoritarians exist, and only Right are violent. That there is a nazi on every corner, and that nazi is a republican...
>>I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you.
then I welcome your non-reply... If you did not intend on discussing this then you should have refrained from reply at all.
ironically I am a very empathetic person. I empathize with people suffering real hardship, like the people that are going to lose everything in the hurricane, not because someone on twitter did not use Xe or Xir correctly....
It also irks me to no end, when people refer to leftists as "liberal" when they are no such thing at this point. I can deal with liberals, and as a libertarian share most of the values. More like Progressive past the point of usefulness to society.
The difference, I feel, is that I know many people whose identity is "leftist" or "progressive" and I don't personally know anyone who identifies as a "rightist". The right is a centuries-old boogeyman of the left, and it encompasses everyone who disagrees with the critical-analysis class-based views of the left.
The worst term the left has is "far-right" which just means very-heretical. The worst thing you can do is let your opinions diverge from the groupthink.
> If they asked her to stop, and she didn't stop, she's in the wrong. Yes, absolutely report her to HR. What was the point of this story?
"I pray for everyone, saints and sinners, to have a better life." - "Fire the witch, she's using hateful spells against me!"
You took something you had no context or scale for, you don't know if she loudly and rudely prayed at her desk, or casually commented that she prays daily for many people of whom the OP is one, and yet you immediately agree that she should be examined for ability and worthiness to have a job for her actions.
> > do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying"
> If something is a large part of your internally perceived identity & someone else actively denies that part of your identity, is that okay?
You've jumped a few steps. Where did not participating in your identity become "actively denying" it? I don't believe you can literally be a furry-kin but I don't follow furs to their place of work to make the case that their belief renders them less useful as engineers.
> Do you have an experiential framework with which to tackle that identity scenario in the first place, to understand in any fashion how they feel about that?
Yes, throughout history people have believed things I do not think are literal truth. Catholics believe that their cracker has a certain god-nature as they eat it, I do not but this doesn't constitute religious oppression - even if I refuse to promote it.
> Are you willing to employ empathy?
Are you? If I agree with your claim that you like movies it costs me nothing, but if you want me to agree with your claim that you have changed sexes and want me to support changing laws to accommodate you, this does. Are you considering the feelings of everyone impacted by the required changes for that worldview to be accepted, or only the person making the claim?
> > in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves
> No, but they should be made aware that they're being assholes.
Are they though? Is Riley Gaines an asshole for protesting men entering women's sports? At what point do you feel it's reasonable to label and other someone for their disbelief and lack of support for someone else's religious beliefs?
Refusing to use misleading terms or labels, to call a man a woman for instance, is required in stating the premise that women's sports, and safe spaces, are being invaded by males - invalidating the point of women's spaces. If you're forced to call a man a woman, or he a she, you aren't allowed to actually speak.
> It doesn't justify it, but it should be well-understood that attacks from the left are not predicated on nothing.
Saying that attacks are based on something is an attempt to justify them.
> The hilarious part of this statement, at least in this specific context, is that it goes both ways. Our monkeys are flinging shit at their monkeys, and for some reason their monkeys are throwing shit back!
> You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation?
You've drawn a simple map, with good people in a group called "the left" and everyone else, including Hitler of course, in a group called "the right".
I'm descended from people who escaped communism, and have some relatives who did not, so I'm very anti communism/socialism/marxism, you could say "anti-left", but "anti-communist" would be more accurate. I'm not "right", let alone "alt" or "far", because those aren't ideologies you can subscribe to, they're merely labels for people who disagree with the academic left.
For instance, my views on sex and gender and thus neo-pronouns don't come from my position on some political compass, they come from being a father and seeing the impact of sex and sex-based actions on my children and then on females in general.
> As you put it, this is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian right.
You were right, up until that last word. Othering and violence is a common tactic of authoritarians. Left/right is not relevant to believing people should be beaten for their words.
> This is the extermination the other person is referring to. Murdering people based on shit they heard online, without actually bothering to interact with those people or build any kind of basis of empathy, to understand the challenges they face in a world where they feel the need to lash out like you've seen.
Riley Gaines was merely speaking about the actual disparate impact to "female women" on her and her teammates. She was screamed at and bullied out of finishing her talk, chased and hit, and unlawfully confined be people who refused to even listen to her, let alone try to empathize with her, before literally calling for her death, her extermination.
Female is a real group you can point to, "males who want to be called women" is not. If you can't empathize with women, how do you expect them to empathize with their attackers?
At what point do you ask "Am I one of the baddies?"
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Preference falsification from engineers, especially after James Damore had his character publicly assassinated. Yelling "shame shame" at him before chopping off his head was a warning to everyone else to keep quiet or echo the correct opinions.
There's a lot of tribal signaling and "don't hurt me I'm one of you".
Then there's a new generation of engineer who are true believers (as well as some old gen who converted) and for who programming is just a lucrative way to participate in late stage capitalism as a wage slave. They are aggressive bullies and codify their beliefs into CoCs. Their passion is the new religion, not programming.
You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.
Only, that's not how it works in our (and pretty much any) society. We, as a society, choose what we think is acceptable. And then we make laws to enforce that people behave in a way consistent with that. A company is not free to deny service to someone that is gay, or black, or married; just because that is their chosen business model.
I’m quite discouraged by this thread not being taken down despite the very obvious brigade of alt-right Nazi sympathizers pretending that being gay is the same as yelling for the genocide of gay people.
I don’t think your problem is with Democrats, or social media companies, really, it’s with objective reality.
And I didn’t say they were traitors, you did.
Maybe don’t have racist genocidal stances then?
Trump wasn’t banned for being a republican. He was banned, ultimately, for Jan 6.
In reality, Trump broke all those platforms rules on several occasions and was given a free pass till he tried to steal an election. He’s actually the poster boy for the fact that republicans get MORE leeway on social platforms, not less.
Sounds like you want special treatment for Republicans, yet are paranoid that others might do the same thing.
Infrastructure providers should not be able to refuse customers engaging in lawful activity. Your phone company can't shut you off because you say, "I wish $POLITICIAN were dead." You don't have to like or agree with everything everyone says, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope.
Personal liberty should be maximalized so as not to infringe on the rights of others. You do not have the right to live a life without risk of being offended.
Such a laughable statement given that Silicon Valley was from the beginning a military project, with social control as an explicit aim. Milquetoast lamentations about a lost libertarian dream are no different than old cries about the closing of the Western frontier or Jeffersonian myths about a pastoralist capitalism corrupted by industry.
> play moral police at the moment
Moral fashion police