What's the big deal about the 1st Amendment and "Freeze Peach" anyway? The majority of anti-vaxxer neo-Nazis are spreading disinformation and literally killing people with their bad ideas.
1. You can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
2. Paradox of tolerance anyone?
3. We already limit "frees peach"
4. Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequences (freedom after speech)
5. Twitter-Facebook-Insta-Snap-Google-Apple are private companies. It's exactly the same as if you owned a mom-and-pop store and I said you couldn't tell the guy screaming "KILL ALL N-------" to leave.
If everyone were banned from expressing false information on social media, as defined by trustworthy fact checkers, the world would be a better place.
The state has an interest in forcing people to make the Right Decisions. Thus... who cares about free speech anyway, when it can lead to the Wrong Decisions?
But yes, that is one of many Legitimate State Concerns.
The system is broken, we need the EFF to do more than just clutch their pearls about somebody trying to do something.
If they want to be the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they can take inspiration from the self-organization that occurs on other frontiers. When there are no rules, you get vigilantes. Well managed, the vigilantes establish the rules, by popular consent. Poorly managed, the most violent ones impose their own rules.
The EFF is well positioned to help establish rules. So merely saying "There shouldn't be any rules", they'll simply be brushed aside one way or the other.
>But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.
WP doesn't permit primary sources (usually), many right wing publications inc Fox News are banned - for not being a "Reliable Source", actually that activists will push source bans via wiki-lawyering (see the talk pages). I've been subject to Wiki-lawyering because a topic I contributed to became politically contentious, and activists jumped in the thread to revert disagreeable sources.
Wikipedia permits breaking rules if it "makes wikipedia a better place", and do not permit (WP:POINTY) you to try to enforce the same rules equally on other pages. The rules are often arbitrary and political articles are hijacked by activists - typically an active, small minority. The co-founder, Larry Sanger noted this in the earlier days as academics sitting on pages of their discipline, then as Wikipedia became a key source of information, editors were hired to represent certain causes (they are supposed to disclose them), and it became a hive of political activity.
Example - recently a user "TheTranarchist", a main contributor to gender pages, wrote about how she fights bigotry with her Wikipedia edits. She was tempbanned with pushback for those posts - the Vast Majority keeps quiet.
Next we have people like GorillaWarfare who see a hitpiece on people without WP pages - e.g. the CEO of cloudflare - and create a wikipage sourcing just the hitpiece.
WP:GOODBIAS - says bias is a good thing, using uncontentious examples (we are biased to a heliocentric, not geocentric model), but WP:GOODBIAS is actually used to explain away political activism on fuzzy issues.
WP:TRUTH - verifiability, not truth. There is provably false information on Wikipedia which can't be pointed out (except in the talk threads) because the sources referenced are either banned, or it falls under WP:OR (no original research). E.g., a man disappears, there's an article written that he's dead, source the article saying he's dead, turns out he's alive and pictures of him are posted on Twitter, can't edit the page until a new article comes out retracting the death. I could continue with all the nonsense I see on there, but I'll leave it at that.
Fox News isn't banned, unlike the Daily Mail. When it is on the record that everyone from the hosts up to network executives were aware and continued to report falsehoods, one might think the lady doth protest too much.
The absolute worst bias is where news sites have an active interest in only reporting one-sidedly. As only "reliable" sources can be used, only their reporting gets picked up and states as fact. Gamergate is one of the most blatant examples of that. So much so, that the very wiki page on it fuels a cycle of "there is no way that so much of it is made up"
>Pushing cochlear implants is like genocide on deaf people.
If this is serious, I've now read the dumbest thing I may ever read in my life. People who've been traumatized by rape affirm their lives as rape survivors. Yet, we don't consider preventing rape an attempt at cultural genocide of the rape survivor culture and community. Likewise, combat veterans have their own culture and community. We don't consider preventing war as cultural genocide of veterans.
Call it culture if you'd like, it arises from being injured in some way, or not having an ability. Restoring this ability and preventing the injury is an absolutely good thing. Reframing the community of the disenfranchised as a 'culture' so you can call this benefit 'cultural genocide' is nonsense semantics. Deaf 'culture' dying is as good as people being born with functional hearing.
It is serious. I think it's an argument that has enough internal sense and structure that it can't just be called a stupid argument and tossed out.
I'm here to explore the ideas around this, not trash nor proselytize any particular idea for the sake of it. You won't get very far by starting with comparing deafness to having been raped or having your leg blown off. Rape survivors are not a distinct cultural group.
Take deafness and ability entirely out of the equation for now.
People who speak sign language as a native language are a distinct cultural group with a long and separate heritage from the hearing world. For example, American Sign Language is related to French Sign Language and the speakers of each can understand each other somewhat. While British Sign Language is totally different and American and British deaf people can't even easily speak to each other in sign, only in writing. There's a whole cultural world there, as vibrant and functional as hearing ones.
They get along fairly well. People born deaf and raised in a deaf community generally have better outcomes socially and economically compared to deaf people raised in isolation in hearing culture. Yes, they cannot hear, but they don't feel they're missing anything and, functionally speaking, they'd survive on their own just fine without hearing.
I was born quite hard of hearing, and I am going deaf as I get older. I was raised hearing. Bitterly ironically, I'm musically talented and it is one of my great pleasures. I am also linguistically talented, particularly with phonetics. (Taught myself in my teens to improve my speech and it became a fascination.) And yet I am losing the capacity to sense those things.
Trust me. I get it. I get it very well. The deaf have no idea what they're missing.
And yet Deaf culture is a precious thing that also deserves to exist.
It is an impasse and a seeming paradox and I don't have an answer. Raise every child hearing and allowing sign and the culture to die out is undesirable just as people who could hear music and speech being unable to hear them is.
Being deaf is an inherently negative aspect. You either have the ability to hear, or you do not. If you do not, it is a dis-ability. No one wants to lose an ability to do something.
Someone who lives an extensive period of time without an ability may have learned how to live without this ability. They learn to cope and affirm their life with its faults in their current state. Offering the ability they lost and have learned to live without may be declined because of the affirmation of their life as it is. It could be declined because the transition is uncomfortable as well. Either way, being deaf is still negative, they've just psychologically coped well.
If you had the choice, would you choose that your child be deaf or not? That you be deaf or not? If one isn't deaf, would they choose to become deaf or not? This entire argument results from academic nonsense that anyone outside that context can see through.
Regarding culture, culture is defined as "the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.". A social group of veterans (injured or not) absolutely can be considered equivalent as your usage. Preventing war is a cultural genocide if you consider it that way. You're saying that a culture which arises from suffering, injury, evil and so on deserves preservation by refusing to prevent the evil that causes them. Alcoholics Anonymous has a culture, Gamblers Anonymous, etc.
Yes, it is academic nonsense based on semantics. It doesn't matter if they don't feel they're missing anything - what you've never had you cannot miss. What you've had, lost and coped with you've learned not to miss. No one buys into this pedantry but academics with too much time on their hands.
EDIT: I apologize for "proselytizing" and "trashing" that view. My sister is an ASL teacher and she's made the same points you have to me, so I'm aware of the debate, and so have strong views on the matter. I have heard and considered everything you've said beforehand. I believe this sentiment comes from empathy and affirmation of deaf people as taught by those who are close with that community. Yet, I also believe this view is nonsense that someone outside that context can clearly see.
Being deaf is an inherently negative aspect. You either have the ability to hear, or you do not. If you do not, it is a dis-ability. No one wants to lose an ability to do something.
Someone who lives an extensive period of time without an ability may have learned how to live without this ability. They learn to cope and affirm their life with its faults in their current state. Offering the ability they lost and have learned to live without may be declined because of the affirmation of their life as it is. It could be declined because the transition is uncomfortable as well. Either way, being deaf is still negative, they've just psychologically coped well.
If you had the choice, would you choose that your child be deaf or not? That you be deaf or not? If one isn't deaf, would they choose to become deaf or not? This entire argument results from academic nonsense that anyone outside that context can see through.
> No one wants to lose an ability to do something.
This is true, though strictly speaking there are people obsessed with the idea that they eg. have too many limbs and suffer body dysmorphia related to that. They often amputate their own limbs in an attempt to feel right.
1. You can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
2. Paradox of tolerance anyone?
3. We already limit "frees peach"
4. Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequences (freedom after speech)
5. Twitter-Facebook-Insta-Snap-Google-Apple are private companies. It's exactly the same as if you owned a mom-and-pop store and I said you couldn't tell the guy screaming "KILL ALL N-------" to leave.
If everyone were banned from expressing false information on social media, as defined by trustworthy fact checkers, the world would be a better place.