billy_beef

so why engage the platform at all? seems like the courts could easily be tasked with dealing with this.

strong agree. I don't exactly want to been seen as defending parler here. I think what amazon is doing is creating a dangerous precedent, regardless of whether parler is as odious as I've been led to believe it is.

I'm not exactly disagreeing that maybe parler should be taken to task, but amazon should not be the ones to do it. although, the historical application of the insurrection act has been incredibly political and inconsistent (the pullman strikes), so citing it as the primary reason for booting parler seems a little suspect to me.

these are explicitly illegal activities with clearly argued jurisprudence. perhaps what parler hosted was illegal, but that should be up to a court to decide, not amazon.

which part? " may be harmful to others" ? This is a clause so broad as to cover nearly all speech.

there is first amendment precedent for shutting down speech that incites violence. why is that not enough here?

Unions come with consistent skills trainings, legal counsel, and representatives to intercede when management is treating employees poorly. This seems like a very helpful stable of support to be able to call on in situation like this one.

My ISP TOS, to my knowledge, do not contain language about preventing me from retrieving otherwise legal to obtain content, do yours?

I'm not writing him off, certainly. But I also don't see how this labels him as a wrong thinker? It demonstrates that he's missed the mark a lot as a result of his over-reliance on intuition. His technique for finding truth seems amiss. I don't think anyone is deplatforming him either. He's still able to write his blog and use all of his internet accounts. This article is compelling his audience to be more critical of the technique he's using to figure things out.

Your assertion was largely that an article like this didn’t have value. I explained why it does. You are free debate the points of pg here, but that’s not how our disagreement began and you are asking me to defend a different point than the one I commented initially to defend. Do you still believe the article is just a way to label pg as bad, or do you see why a discussion of issues of his credibility is important?

we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc. I don't feel like sharing the specific motivations, that is what the piece you're commenting on is doing.

I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.

I have to disagree here. The article is criticizing his work, his history of participation in a field, and his current commentary on politics. Yes, it discusses him as a subject, but not as a piece of gossip and strung-together ad hominem's. It is definitely critical of him, but mostly in his capacity as a commentor and his history of being incorrect. It's not second-rate tabloid stuff because of what dimension of him it's mostly considering.

> The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.

You're pretty much spot on with this line. Most people are terrible public intellectuals, and of the people who identify as such, many are profoundly unserious and completely useless. This article is asserting that Paul Graham does not belong in the vanishingly small set of people one should consider as a serious public intellectual.

Credibility and authority is incredibly important. How much time can anyone devote to dissecting the words of each living person in case they contain a potentially great idea? I'm happy to examine arguments on merit, but perhaps we should spend more time examining other arguments and not use so much time on his.

I fail to see how one article being posted signals the decline of this website into a gossip column

Austerity measures are passed all the time under guises of a balanced budget or trimming fat. When govts cut food stamps people die, I think govts cutting hot showers might be doable.

> Companies have every right to ask employees to focus on work at work.

I’m responding to this claim, maybe we’re talking about different things? My point is really: What if the “work” is running trains to death camps? Shouldn’t employees object? If you believe climate change is as big a threat as scientists claim, I think workers building tools to help fossil fuel extraction have a duty by this historical argument to not “run the trains” or not just “focus on work at work”.

This quickly begins to sound like a 21st century “we were only following orders” argument, no?

I think it’s more likely that smart people understand that speaking out or appearing to be in open dissent to the way amazon works is not a wise career move. Seems like a perfectly reasonable place to expect widespread preference falsification.

It comes up at work consistently in "future of the industry" kinds of discussions or when I get drinks with old coworkers and we talk about parts of our jobs we don't like. I've worked at pretty major companies, but also not saying my experience is universal here.

Perhaps, but someone still has to build and maintain the automation, no?

Can you cite a source on this or explain your reasoning here, I'm a little unclear on the implication

What are you talking about? It comes out like often in my world?

This is hardly a legitimate measure of power compared to actually having a worker with a seat at the table.

> I don't think the brief colonial episode simply explains the wealth of my country (or many others) - especially as in between it had been completely destroyed.

The fact that your nation lost stolen wealth does not absolve it of the crime of theft friend.

> But the theory that wealth is only a result of exploitation is completely wrong. Our wealth in the modern world is mostly the result of technological progress, not of exploitation.

I did not say that, you are straw manning my argument. I am saying that THAT wealth creation, incontrovertibly, was exploitative.

My point here was to demonstrate the way in which your nation's present day wealth was bolstered by its historical oppression. The labor value that European nations were able to extract from their colonies was extremely high. The nation you currently live in benefitted materially from this. You benefitted from this. That probably doesn't feel good to hear but it is not a fact you can choose to accept or not.

It's also important to remember that when comparing the magnitude of atrocities, both things were still atrocities.

If you don't think your nation had a moral duty to apologize for the genocide of millions of Jews, black ppl, disabled ppl and queer people, then I don't think we are going to find common ground. The contingent nature of history seems to largely escape you.

> If you really want to go down that route - you are aware that the USA was taken away from native Americans, who died by the millions?

Of course and I believe those people are owed reparations both for their historically poor treatment and for the continuing violence they face (see standing rock)

> And my country (Germany) was not even involved in the slave trade, or much of colonization. Yes, if you look down far enough in history, you will find violence and all sorts of ugly things.

Your nation quite literally carried out a genocidal project against non-white people so at this point I'm not even sure what you're arguing.

> If you want to go down that route, consider that many people in Africa also benefited from slavery (black tribes selling their enemies as slaves).

Yeah, that's gonna be a yikes from me dawg.

You should perhaps begin by educating yourself to the actual role that Germany did play in the colonization of the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire . I would not call this particularly far in history since it only ended in the 1910s.