cjslep

Your absolutist statements ("based on nothing but emotion and ideology") do nothing but betray your own ignorance.

As an American living in Switzerland, a "good policy" (whatever that means) here has resulted in: 1) no capital gains tax, nor any capital losses and certainly no carryover loss shenanigans but 2) using a wealth tax in lieu of capital gains tax to collect any sort of tax on those who have presumably been using their capital to beget more capital.

Switzerland does not have any flight of capital, still actively is sought after for parking wealth (which is actually an economy-distorting problem as foreign investors seek to buy stable assets in the Swiss market), and definitely still has an ultra-rich class residing here or moving here.

So, if you thought wealth tax alone was bad policy, how does wealth tax plus removing everything-capital-gains (especially the carryover losses which the current US President likes to excessively utilize) sound as effective policy?

When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer.

For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps.

It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary.

However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.

It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up.

We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.

Of Rousseau? ISBN: 9781981974566. Translated with an introduction by G. D. H. Cole.

I did not do much research into different translations of this work nor the translator themselves, before purchasing this book.

I think you've simply found the "able-to-have-these-convos conservatives" to have these discussions with and haven't found the "able-to-have-these-convos liberals". Note that I hate using these categories. Anyway, in my personal experience almost all the people I can think of that I have deep political discussions with who may fall into the latter camp almost never discuss politics online, for various reasons.

I just finished Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourses, and I really recommend reading the Discourses as they paint a harrowing picture of how any government -- including democracies -- can become bent to a particular will and therefore lose its Sovereign mandate: it will sound very much like the modern USA. Whether that is true is best left for another time.

I'm currently reading the book's predecessor, John Locke's works Second Treatise and On Toleration.

I think one thing that is very important to these books on liberties that is missed is finding one with a good introduction that can put it in it's historical (read: dated) place. It is too easy to otherwise miss that Locke is not exactly anti-slavery, for example. Or that the "family debate" and role of the patriarchal family, that left the suffrage of women in doubt, was not addressed. Or that the whole struggle for their times was really a question of how to morally justify rule by people versus rule by monarch (and your suggestion of Hobbes' Leviathan is actually arguing for the monarchy, on the other side of the debate). And this debate was otherwise taken within the cultural context of "Wealthy, Man, Head of household", which may be wrong on all 4 counts today (the culture itself is changing, the discussion is no longer limited to the wealthy, men, nor head-of-household family units).

The "monarchy vs people" debate of their time is not an argument we are exactly having in real life. And what I've found by reading the works of this area is: just as fans of this kind of liberty love to out the onus on the "other side" that they need to consider these points, the fans of this kind of liberty really have an onus on them to need to continue the discussion and update it for the modern world: as I move from Plato to Locke to Rousseau their writing really do faithfully build off one another and so it should be possible today in 2020, and modern writers like Haidt (whose works I have also spent time reading) do not meet this bar, I feel.

Without this, simply reading these authors and saying "see, America, read this and be convinced" keeps giving everyone the burden of catching up on the 300-ish years of criticism of these works and discards those intraveneing years' political philosophy debates. A major setback, in my opinion, as I may have the time and willpower to earnestly become a read person of political philosophy, but that is certainly a luxury of a wealthy individual like me (and the founding fathers of the time) and not everyone can afford that (and economic disparity is also a key factor addressed by people such as Rousseau).

We can skip the formalities then!

Please state your full legal name, date of birth, current address of residence, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses, passwords, your favorite type of pornography, and your mother's maiden name.

Thanks in advance!

I am not arguing that one has to be technical in order to benefit from those freedoms. I like FLOSS and agree users in general benefit.

I am saying that your example, for instance, stills falls under the "how does a non-technical user simply verify the software they just downloaded respects their freedoms?" which is an very real educational and cultural problem. For example, see the massive money and numerous gun ranges, gun stores, gun clubs, and other gun-associated organizations in the US that work to educate the "unskilled" general public on "how to be aware, recognize, and exercise their rights and freedoms" under the 2nd Amendment while respecting local laws. Folks generally are 1) aware they have the right and 2) have a low-friction no-special-technical-skilled path to exercising that right. The FLOSS movement is nowhere near that level of educating and making aware non-technical users of their freedoms, their digital rights, and how to then act upon them and exercise them. Folks generally are 1) unaware of libre software and 2) don't have a low-friction no-special-technical-skilled path to exercising that right.

It may focus on user's rights, but it still requires technical expertise to exercise half of the 4 freedoms: #1 (inspection & modification) and #3 (distributing your modifications). Merely knowing to ask "can I see the source code" I would put into the "technical user" realm. Overwhelmingly, most people don't know or don't care.

The other two freedoms #0 (freedom to run) and #2 (freedom to share) are readily obvious to non-technical users. "Double click to run" and "drag and drop <on external drive> to copy". Unfortunately, they are also often permitted by non-free/libre software. So non-technical users that can readily see they can do #0 and #2 and generally have no litmus test to further determine whether the software is "free/libre".

This is a case where the ideology's practical concerns hamper its purity. I critique despite generally liking the FLOSS ideal, but it's important to know its flaws.

Woosh. I know the legal definition of Corporate Personhood. This is not the same idea as saying "I believe corporations are human-people", which is what the sarcastic poster was playing with. That distinction is the point of the satire: we all know you meant the former when you agreed with the sarcastic-poster on the latter; hence the satire exposing the absurdity of it.

Yeah my apartment neighbor, who is a corporation, broke down crying the other night from all the stress at work and the news. Cried really loudly, could hear through my walls. But at least their ex-wife-divestment lets him see his kids-subsidiaries on the weekends. But he's going to be moving out soon to be closer to his mother, who is a conglomerate and frail, so he can take care of her.

A real tear jerker of a life. But for some reason he never worries about eating healthy -- or eating at all, for that matter. Maybe I should try giving him some body-positive feedback for emotional support.

Bah, you know what, maybe it's my flawed humanism getting in the way, maybe it'll be easier for me to just become a corporation, too.

> If you don't want to feel criticized when people point out basic facts to you

Dude! As I said, you could treat me as a full fledged adult and we could have an actual intelligent conversation. Rather than you try to not-very-wittily say a one-liner "pwned a lib" stand-in for an actual conversation.

> don't use things you don't know as the basis for an argument why people should feel justified in committing crimes against innocent people.

Is the "thing I don't know" about "whether the guys is insured"? How does this tie into your goalpost-shift into moralizing me about the riots? Could you really not have taken a second to construct an argument so we can have a conversation? 'Cause now it seems like you are really hell-bent on merely trying to make me look like an idiot in a "got'em" zinger.

> There is zero justice in looting and arsoning this sports bar, stop trying to say that there is, and you won't feel like a fool when presented with the facts.

Are you trying to censor me? I can say what I damn please, thank you. You may not like it, but my arguments are here to stay.

My original point highlights there's going to be a wide spectrum of anecdotes coming from the riots. Using a sports bar example is stupid because I see a distinction between life and property. I wanted to challenge that anecdote directly with a counter-anecdote. I even said insurance "can't undo a bad system" which I intended to also be a point in favor of the very anecdote I was providing a counter-example for: the system has obviously failed the guy as he's at a total loss of his business. I showed the absurdity of loss of things versus loss of life. You don't see me straw-manning you by imagining you're OK with genociding people to protect "stuff".

On the other hand, you then assumed a lot and constructed a strawman of me, imagining me as, as far as I can tell, some drooling idiot that doesn't know "only insured parties are covered by insurance" and thinks that "the dozen or so people killed so far in the riots is OK" and that "the riots are a part of the movement for social justice". I highly recommend taking a step back and really look at yourself and ask what kind of conversation you're looking to have here. So far, it feels like you just want to insult me.

Let me tell you what I think straight up so we can clear this air and you can see me for what I actually believe. If you want to keep insulting me, that's fine. I, quite frankly, don't care about your opinion. I'm stepping away from your toxic bullshit after this. I'm frustrated that ideological-incest of Reddit and /pol/ is leaking to HN.

I believe these riots are a part of the wider movement to draw attention to police brutality (but not associated with the BLM organizers necessarily) due in part to the way the police over the last 20 years has shifted their training to be less community-focused and become much more military in training and viewing confrontations in a militaristic rather than civic light. This affects every citizen, not just black people.

Do I want riots in general? No. Do I want these riots in particular? No. Do I applaud the loss of life in the riots? Hell no! Do I think the damage to property is OK? Fuck no. Do I think comparing total loss of a man's business to the loss of George Floyd is OK? No. But as uncomfortable as the riots are, they're here. In reality. I've got to accept that and figure out what the hell to make of it.

But fuck my beliefs, if people are so frustrated that they are rioting and the National Guard can't even restore order, that is a very strong signal that the civic system used to govern the people is broken. That should start a productive dialogue to those of us outside and able to look in. Is it only the police force no longer connecting with the local community and becoming more of a State Police? Is it local elected officials who've been ignoring their constituents? What are all the straws that broke the camels back?

There are additionally conversations about how movements against injustice should be conducted. We could be having similar conversations to the original debates around Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr's differing approaches to changing civil rights.

Finally, a word of warning: it's too easy to paint all the rioters as bad guys, their cause as obviously flawed, and therefore their movement as immoral. Liberties and injustices cuts both ways: when it's your pet protestors rioting, I sincerely hope you don't have to face your anti-clone.

For the record, I'm not feeling like a fool here, despite your operating assumption as such (there were no facts presented in your non-argument).

Glad to know you think of my intelligence so uncharitably that you have to explain a tautological definition.

I know that insurance only covers the insured. I charitably assumed the reading audience of HN knows that, too. Is there something more insightful you wanted to share? For example: have a conversation on the general risks of taking insurance versus not, or whether in these particular anecdotes the owners in fact did/didn't have insurance and their reasons for it? Or was it really just to try to make me look like a dumbass to the crowd?

If you want to play the anecdote game: There's also a local Indian Restaurant whose owner was on the phone with the police while watching it burn on the local news, and he basically said "Let it burn. If that's what it takes to get justice."

Insurance will replace the buildings and stuff. Insurance can't bring George back, nor can it undo a bad system.

I am 100% not straw manning them. I couldn't believe the conversation I was having. It's very few people that have this crazy of a hardline stance, but they're out there.

I'm sorry! Based on context, I understood your post to refute mine to support sneak. And sneak and I have had heated debates about the Fediverse before, and you've stumbled into the latest one. :)

In the future, it would definitely help me and others understand your motivation better if you could even include one more sentence in your communication like "Just here for a correction: some instances are transparent..."

I will strive to be more charitable.

Main-instance Mastodon (run by the main dev) has made moderation choices that people disagree with. It means conversations here always brings out this same group group of people that disagreed with all these decisions and somehow believe their speech (their bytes) must physically be shipped to everyone else in some network, and must be examined by everyone on the network so that others can decide for themselves whether to listen. I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it.

This group of people have shifted to this position because they no longer have the "de-platform/systemic-censorship" argument that arises when someone is banned from a centralized service, resulting in a total loss of access to the entire platform. Conversely, on the Fediverse they're still there but simply can't talk to some % of users. And that can easily be rectified by being a part of multiple communities and abiding by their rules.

I've tried to write about how ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses) is not a censorship-resistant network and that the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations [0]. Feedback I literally got from here on HN was "I'm disappointed in you", when I think it's an accurate and realistic view. Especially when standing in the shadow of FreeNet.

The same liberty of free-speech and free-association that lets a far-left community thrive, and a far-right community thrive, also lets them block each other (which is a good thing -- it would be ugly otherwise).

[0]https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-tool

You're right, my mistake. In some cases it is not transparent.

However, this is not a systematic censorship problem, unlike centralized services with opaque policy language and a complete boot out the door. People are free to run their own instances or have multiple accounts across different instances.

Whether you think they're correct is irrelevant to the question at hand. Freedom of speech and association means you're free to not federate/talk to those problematic instances, and maybe you'd be much happier for it. On the other hand, not being OK with it and trying to fight for transparency means you're trying to externally force these communities to be run in the way you want, which may be received well, but not always b/c forcing unwanted change is exactly the opposite point of Federation: communities will be built the way their members want to build it. Like the real world, some value transparency and some don't.

It's one thing to argue specific bans about specific instances and disagree on the other party's interpretation; it's a totally different claim to say that the entire system is corrupt with opaque censorship.

Mastodon != Fediverse

Mastodon is just one ActivityPub software. PeerTube and Pixelfed let your loosely-connected Twitter clones also be loosely connected to Instagram clones. It's a big world.

So I wouldn't get too hung up on one developer (me included).

Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

However, it's very presumptuous to say:

"I really wanted Mastodon to be where I can find everyone."

That's Facebook and Twitter. And even then you can't find everyone.

People go to the Fediverse to build the community they want, not be subjected to "everyone". It's this clash of collective rights vs individualism that seems to drive so many of these ridiculous arguments. It's no different (or, in fact, it may be better now) than getting banned from one of the many phpBB forums of 20 years ago. Those communities thrived and the banned didn't even have an instance leftover to call a home: everything was gone when they got banned.

Just because you want to find everyone, doesn't mean everyone wants you to find them.

Instance banning is neither silent nor invisible. Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons, anytime. I would be in agreement with you about silent/invisible censorship, but that's not what's going on here.

This is a categorically different problem than MITM.

> But admins can still choose to block instances in the future that I might have interest interacting with. It is like a gamble choosing an instance.

Then have multiple accounts and abide by each instances' rules.

> Making an instance is tedious, and once someone in charge finds out who you hangout with, your domain name gets blocked. Such is socializing.

You can still hang out with the folks you were hanging out with. They blocking you has no bearing over who you hang out with, unless you let them get under your skin.

Based on your responses here and elsewhere it sounds like you have a bone to pick with Mastodon because you can't find a solution where you get to be heard by everyone all the time, from the far-left to the far-right. That's not a right and that's not "free speech", that's trampling on others' freedom of association and their right to build communities as they see fit: Not every person is welcome in every community. Who are you and I to dictate what a "correct, healthy community" is?

You can't force user's eyeballs to read the bytes you ship to their computers unless you want to go full Clockwork Orange.

Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason.

Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs.

Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.

Oops, I think I misunderstood what I was replying to. I see what you mean.

I'm more interested in exploring getting the entire AP ecosystem be encrypted by default, using Chris' work.

I don't think I care that much about profile deep-linking to other apps. I would rather obsolete that need.

ActivityStreams is a data format, not a protocol. ActivityPub is the protocol that Mastodon, Pleroma, etc use which shares ActivityStreams data.

Have you seen the "About" page on instances? It lists exactly what you want: what instances are defederated by the instance. Here's the page for the instance I reside in:

https://mastodon.technology/about/more

> I'd much rather see ActivityPub implementations support good profile deep linking to existing (read: safe) messengers

This is something myself and a few others are interested in pursuing.

> social distancing NOT correlating with a reduced death rate.

The point is to reduce the infection rate so that the total number of hospitalizations (Covid19 or otherwise) does not exceed the healthcare system's capacity. I doubt your uncited claim here is comparing apples to apples.

I've only been once, but that store is amazing. If memory serves me right, there's a cat resident there. Wonder if that's a long standing tradition.

Hey don't feel bad, you're in great company. In NC we've also got the gerrymandering, anti-trans bathroom-bill, state-legislature-hates-the-governor partisanship (state R's would rather burn the state constitution than let the D's participate), and pro-Republican election fraud to top it off. Just think how many other states can still join in!

> Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.

I've demonstrated that everything except blame is useful when doing analyses of engineering failures or disaster analysis. I have professional experience in this both in the computer science world and in the traditional engineering world.

Identifying root causes like "lack of testing prevented deployment of limited resources optimally which exacerbated these effects: X, Y, ..." is a useful and actionable way to identify and address problems. And then people can look at these blameless analyses and make their tough decision, and then go beyond and demonstrate accountability for their choice. This can be repeated as many times as necessary all around the world, within nations or across nations in a collaborative response (such as the joint vaccine development initiatives).

Adding "blame" just exacerbates emotions (political or personal or what have you), clouds judgement, and usually results in a worse outcome by whatever measure of the disaster (usually number of deaths). That's my "unstated reason": blaming is an active choice that leads to more deaths as history has shown repeatedly, whether by famine due to supply chain issues plus political rejection of food aid, or a "not invented here syndrome" of rejecting medical supplies, or societal instability resulting in mass protest and political revolution (and more death and starvation), for example.

I don't blame Trump for Covid. Just like I don't blame China for Covid. There are a set of things China could have done differently, just like Trump could have done things differently. "Blame" is really saying "Trump should have never had to do any preparation differently because China should have done things differently," which is the definition of living in an alternate reality. Life says "tough shit" and doesn't treat him like a special snowflake. Plus it does not inspire confidence in the kind of leadership principles the President is following: just how many other things is he relying on others like China to do so that he doesn't have to make any preparations?

If I were inclined to distrust China, instead of blaming them I would be crapping my pants with how emphatic the President repeatedly assures the American people that he relied on them to manage such a disaster for him (and us). That is what he is saying when he tries to blame them.

I think China did as well as they could -- it was a bad outcome because it escaped -- but shutting down their entire society for a few months to bring their new cases down to 0 was effective for them. Sucks it escaped their borders but it's no longer their problem at that point. And it is scary that the whole free world is looking at the authoritarian regieme and going "gee they got down to 0 new cases" and then look at the Leader of Free World USA's high daily new case load and cringing. And then looking in horror at Want-To-Be European Leader Of Free World Germany reopening and watching their daily case rate rise.