It seems extremely prejudicial and even driven by a bigoted and hateful motivation to emphasize the purchaser of the fragment when the story is really about the person who is accused of illegally taking and selling the fragments.
It would be like writing the headline like this "Oxford is Officially and International Illegal Historical Artifacts Dealing Organized Criminal Enterprise." if one were to have a bigoted bias against Oxford.
When one takes a step back the far worse villain then Hobby Lobby, is definitely Oxford, which was apparently complicit in this type of activity by way of insufficient controls to prevent it. But even that would be ridiculous in many ways, but not as ridiculous as blaming the other victim Hobby Lobby, that was defrauded by the Professor who also used Oxford's credentials and authority to make the sale.
You are suggesting here that when purchasing such artifacts for a major museum collection, that the Hobby Lobby/Bible Museum owners have zero responsibility to verify the provenance of the artifacts and the legality of their sale. All they have to do is just not ask any probing questions, and they should be able to claim that "we didn't know they were stolen!" Sorry, but that's outrageous.
Since after repeatedly violating the site guidelines and ignoring our explanations and requests to stop, you keep bringing personal attacks and ideological flamewar into the threads, we've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break the HN guidelines with.
You do realize the legal perspective on this idea is hundreds of years old and influenced by Biblical views of right & wrong, yes?
Someone all warmed up by contemporary political headlines raging about how reality works in a vacuum ignoring society has never really felt beholden to such views.
Pretty good argument for not pretending it ever can be, despite your obvious emotional addiction to thinking it must.
>>The contract was made in 2013 between Dr. Obbink and Hobby Lobby Stores
>extremely prejudicial ... to emphasize the purchaser of the fragment when the story is really about the person who is accused of illegally taking and selling the fragments.
i think laws are pretty consistent everywhere in civilized world - knowingly purchasing stolen staff is a crime, and buying ancient texts from an Oxford professor instead of buying them from Oxford doesn't really pass smell test (or like they say in legalese something like what would a "reasonable man" do)
That anything was stolen is a new accusation. The accusations against Obbink previously have all been impropriety-related, related to dealing with the Hobby Lobby people at all.
It's rather surprising (perhaps "fantastical" ?) that all of the rumors turned up such a smoking gun after all these years. This is a case where the 80%/20% rule didn't apply, and the real answer turned out to be 150%.
It seems to me that your link and its comments give plenty of hints that property is suspected of having been misappropriated, e.g. "The sheer volume of all these new texts was raising concern." or https://brentnongbri.com/2019/07/03/dirk-obbink-and-the-muse...
Given that some of the people involved are deep pocketed and litigious, and British defamation law appears to be fairly plaintiff friendly, the participants in that discussion probably exercised extra caution.
Sure, but people were thinking artifact smugglers and shady dealers and Obbink looking the other way, not theft from collections under his own care. Obbink is famous and well-known. He has published some of the most important papyri of the last decade. This is pretty brazen, if true.
Are you sure that you're not prejudiced on the side of Hobby Lobby? Because you're defending Hobby Lobby over something that they are not even accused of.
It's a matter of fact that they bought it, without due diligence.
Can anyone make sense of why some people have two versions of pictures, one close up of their bust, the other of most of their full body; while others only have a single image? It seems rather arbitrary if it's intentional at all.
I for one am rather curious about many recent Mozilla moves. They seem to be away from decentralized and distributed models, towards centralized ones.
You ask why not improve opensearch markup, just like I have asked why not improve RSS. I am quite convinced that the RSS model has a lot of untapped potential for a distributed internet, but it also thwarts central control, surveillance, tracking etc.
It strikes me as rather odd that Mozilla would be involved in such a dystopia extending enterprise. I realize that it is unlikely that not doing this work would not prevent it from being done at some point, but it seems like a worthwhile choice not to engage in it even if it just delays things long enough until regulations, laws, countermeasures, or even technology solutions can emerge, can catch up, or be developed.
Would you rather train text-to-speech technology based on conversations your television eavesdropped on, or with a collaboratively-built open database of voluntarily submitted content?
This is the perfect exit for precisely the problem you're pointing at: if the data is open it doesn't need to be massively harvested to make this work, and you can run the text-to-speech engine entirely offline on the device.
I think you may be underestimating this issue. It is leading to one of the most heinous and vile things someone can do on an internet forum, shadow banning, akin to putting them in an isolation cell; only worse worse, basically transporting them there without even letting them know they are/were put there and users keep commenting and contributing while being essentially locked away and lost in an authoritarian prison cell where no one can hear them. It's downright sick and depraved and one of the worst practices of the tech sector today for which there is zero justification regardless of what unapproved things were said.
There is a real sickness on the net today where "moderators" have come to think of themselves as the thought police, but even worse, not just thought police of an authoritarian regime, but a kind of self-anointed little dictator that rules over the user rabble at will and upon whim.
If you want to silence people, at least have the spine of any other run of the mill authoritarian and tell users their fundamental human right to speech and expression was taken from them … don't just silently transport them to digital purgatory. Again, it is a vile act that only the most depraved people would excuse, let alone endorse, no matter what unapproved things were thought and said … which are only words/characters on a screen that can be dismissed and ignored.
Ok, I've said my peace. It's a sick and depraved practice and I cannot stand by just not say something when the topic comes up while digital regimes like HN, reddit have, what are essentially digital version of hellish totalitarian regime isolation cells that "mods" disappear people/accounts to.
Shadowbanning is for spam accounts and new accounts that are egregiously and/or repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, especially if they show evidence of being serial trolls. That's a fundamentally different case—there are many users who simply create new accounts as we ban their older accounts and carry on posting as before. It isn't a good use of resources to patiently coax them to improve or even to reply to their posts at all. These users know perfectly well when we've banned them; it's a cat and mouse game and not at all an "isolation cell".
It's certainly true that there are a few good-faith users who get shadowbanned because we mistook them for bad-faith users—people who didn't realize that they were breaking the site guidelines and could have reformed if we had explained and asked them. But there are orders of magnitude fewer of these than your comment implies. I'd prefer that there not be even one such lost lamb, but it's just a hard problem to solve. Software can't distinguish these and moderators can't read intent correctly in every case.
And yet, here you are, validating the very criticism of your heavy handed authoritarian nature. You make the very same kind of authoritarian claims of "evidence" (where is it, show it and provided it for public scrutiny and audit then) and you weigh that "evidence" against arbitrary (yet comically inline with your own self-interest) measure against ambiguous rules. It's the authoritarians' playbook 101, regardless of whether the authoritarians are competent enough to recognize it, let alone self-are enough. (pro tip: you guys never are … never)
Just try to reflect on the authoritarian and supremacist mentality you have with language like "It isn't a good use of resources to patiently coax them to improve or even to reply to their posts at all"; yet your expend resources to censor and control and rule with an iron fist anything that is not to our liking.
No one is talking about obvious spam or any kind of illegal language like credible threats of violence or stalking or bulling, but if you were at least honest with yourself you would acknowledge that it has nothing at all to do with "good use of resource" and all to do with control. Because it is irrefutably true that if it were about "good use of resources" you would wholeheartedly avoid censorship of legal language and not violate what what has been deemed a human right, free speech.
You types, people with the authoritarian supremacist mentality you clearly have, are always quite to rationalize why it is fine that you be the arbiter of right and wrongthink, but it never avails you of the inherent evil exhibited by controlling speech and expression, no matter how much beneath you or inferior and unworthy you decree that speech to be.
You're arguing for a style of moderation that has never applied on HN, because this isn't that kind of site. Rather than complaining about that here, it would be in your interests to find a different forum that is more aligned with the kind of moderation you want to see.
There's room for lots of different kinds of internet forum. It's good for different sites to make different choices about how they operate—that gives users get a richer set of communities to choose from. The thing to realize, though, is that there are tradeoffs. For example, you can't both have a site that's dedicated to intellectual curiosity and allow aggressive comments and flamewars. If you try, the flames will burn out the curiosity. That has significant consequences for moderation on a site like HN, where curiosity is the core value. In order to preserve HN for its intended purpose, we have to respect that reality.
It isn't "authoritarian supremacist mentality", or any of the other things you describe, to want to maintain a particular kind of internet forum. If your job was to maintain a public garden, you wouldn't allow drag racing in the flower beds.
It would be like writing the headline like this "Oxford is Officially and International Illegal Historical Artifacts Dealing Organized Criminal Enterprise." if one were to have a bigoted bias against Oxford.
When one takes a step back the far worse villain then Hobby Lobby, is definitely Oxford, which was apparently complicit in this type of activity by way of insufficient controls to prevent it. But even that would be ridiculous in many ways, but not as ridiculous as blaming the other victim Hobby Lobby, that was defrauded by the Professor who also used Oxford's credentials and authority to make the sale.