It’s changed, I’m in the same boat. The only new channels I’ve found that I love are after seeing them promoted outside of YouTube. They clearly intersect with other channels I’ve subscribed to and watch regularly but were never recommended. I also notice that the recommendation queue for videos on these channels tries to steer you away to larger more mainstream channels that are only tenuously related.
Build a shed first. There are lots of free designs online. Choose one with a window so you’ll know how to frame openings and fit windows and doors. Put the type of siding you’d want for the house on it.
Then build a detached garage, get experience with pouring a slab, attaching walls to a foundation, trusses, more practice with exterior doors and windows, insulation, wiring. If you’re really feeling confident you could put a half bath in it to practice plumbing.
You should be ready for the house at this point. You’ll either love it or hate it so much you’ll just hire someone to do it for you. Having a shed and garage on site is a big plus for building a house since it gives you a warm dry place to work and store your tools. I’ve known people who built their garage first so they could live out of it while building the house, only works if you’re a bachelor though.
For TV viewing, try to watch the "fixing the stuff that went wrong" style TV/YouTube shows, where a builder is going around going, "Oh god, you can't do that that way, do that this way".
Part of learning is learning from mistakes -- you learn which parts of the "correct" way to do something are essential, and you learn why the correct way is correct, when the incorrect way fails. Ideally, that's the part you want to outsource as much as possible; if you were working with an experienced builder, they'd be correcting you constantly to keep the mistakes from affecting the build, but hopefully YouTube can at least show you the big "don't"s.
Pro-tip: most fasteners (nails and screws) are not "structural"; they hold wood in place, but they don't support weight. That's why eg windows are framed the way they are, instead of just nailing a 2x4 between two others; it allows each piece of wood to be supported directly by another.
> Pro-tip: most fasteners (nails and screws) are not "structural"; they hold wood in place, but they don't support weight. That's why eg windows are framed the way they are, instead of just nailing a 2x4 between two others; it allows each piece of wood to be supported directly by another.
Very good tip. So very often I see decks (for example) built improperly, relying on non structural fasteners to hold it all together. This kind of stuff tends to fail in a number of years. I've seen a few collapsed porch roofs for the same reasons. Make sure your fasteners are rated for how they're used. A general rule of thumb is that wood sits on wood, not attached to the side.
Matt Risinger on youtube has some good ones. Most of his videos also have comparisons of construction methods, too. New vs. old, expensive vs. cheap. Other videos have some 'best practices'.
I don't have a good playlist or show to link off-hand, but here's a wonderful video about someone finding terrible things in their old house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v33Gb2xPhU
In general you want "fixing old houses" videos that focus more on the tear down and guts and less on the "look how pretty my house looks at the end" before & afters.
Here’s one from reality, bacteria. If we create self replicating machines, even if we do not intentionally introduce variation, they will vary from generation to generation. They will presumably not be indestructible and so some form of selection will be possible. If their reproduction cycle is fast enough they could potentially deviate from their intended purpose in a very short time.
Remote inspection and checksum of the device firmware can solve this problem. You should worry about intentional hacking of the firmware, i.e. self-replicating botnet.
This assumes that the firmware contains no bugs. As soon as it does, there is always the possibility of unexpected behaviour and an unintended evolutionary trajectory.
I used to be concerned about this issue, due to the obvious analogy with biological evolution, but later I realized that it's an easy risk to guard against.
It's a straightforward engineering problem to reduce the possibility of accidental program mutation to any arbitrarily low level, for example using SHA-2 (with which the chance of an undetected error is 1e-77). Of course, you can have "somatic mutations" where one part of a machine or another malfunctions, for example due to damage or errors during construction; but those don't get propagated to the next generation, so they don't produce the kind of progressive deviation you're describing.
This doesn't happen in nature for a variety of reasons, among which is that as such corrective mechanisms become progressively more perfect, the evolution of the species using them becomes progressively slower, and therefore the perfection of the error-correction mechanisms never quite arrives. Moreover, any species whose evolution becomes very slow is at a major disadvantage when the environment changes sufficiently; it will probably die out and leave no descendants after the next climate change, even something minor like an Ice Age, much less a meteor strike.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the number of generations is quite limited in practice. If, to take an unrealistically risky example, you have an alcohol-dependent nanobot replicator weighing 2 picograms, and you set it to reshaping a tonne of alcohol-soaked soil, it can't make more than 5e17 copies of itself, for which it only needs 59 generations. We aren't talking about thousands or millions of generations: even if time allows for them, space doesn't.
1e-77 (.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 01) is a number that it can be difficult to get a handle on. If we, to take another unrealistically risky example, converted Ceres into 2-picogram nanobot replicators, there would only be 4.7e35 of them, so the chance that one of them would have a mutation in its program that SHA-2 couldn't detect would be 4e-42, assuming that there were just as many erroneous replications as correct ones. (If only one out of every 1000 nanobot firmware installations had a copying error, the chance that one of them went undetected would instead be 4e-45.) The universe is only 4.3e26 nanoseconds old.
So, human malice or extreme carelessness would be necessary.
The idea that a designed machine could be competitive with living things at self-replication (the sole target of a multi-millenia optimisation process) seems… pretty unlikely to me.
Those who are downvoting this are being blatantly disingenuous. Tobacco alone kills over 480,000 people per year in the US. There is a very strong case for banning it if your fundamental concern is the health of others and the upkeep of the health system.
No one can honestly look at these figures and come away with with the opinion that we need to protect the unvaccinated from themselves through mandates while turning a blind eye to these other self inflicted diseases. Argue for or against limiting personal choice to preserve health but be prepared to defend your position on all of these fronts.
Let's start with the simplest: tobacco. There is no way to make it disappear, you can only make it illegal. Our experiments with making other addictive drugs illegal had been a complete failure, I doubt you could even find convincing research that shows that making them illegal has led to less deaths due to them. Whereas vaccine passports appear to actually work. That is a major difference.
I think it’s still too early to draw conclusions about how effective vaccine passports are. There is still a significant proportion of people not accepting them, there is also another group who have been vaccinated but are now protesting the use of vaccine passports, and with the requirement of a third shot and the potential requirement for a fourth or continuing boosters we cannot know how the sizes of those groups will change. If vaccine passports become permanent my money is on it following a similar progression as prohibition or the war on drugs, it will eventually become a law that everyone flaunts. The human cost will depend on how much violence the state is willing to pursue enforcing laws that no one wants. If history is a reliable measure it will be horrific, biased, and long lasting.
I take issue with this comparison: just because the prior 'experiments' have been failures does not mean that future efforts which utilize entirely different methods will be. The war on drugs was already highly criticized for its ineffectiveness on several accounts: there is definitely a way to eradicate the problem, but those were not it and even people at the time knew it.
To be clear I was not advocating banning all of those things, I was saying that mandating vaccines is as counterproductive as trying to revive prohibition or enforce weight loss.
Alcohol consumption directly affects people who do not consume it in a multitude of ways from the monetary cost of increased demand on the health care system, police, prisons and damage to public property to the emotional and psychological burden of interacting with the inebriated or dependent to the physical impact of abuse and accidents caused by intoxication.
I for one fully support a complete ban on humans manually operating motor vehicles as soon as we can get to self driving cars.
A scarier argument that I saw yesterday was something called a welfare check or something in which a police officer and a jail doctor can just declare you something like insane and you no longer have any medical autonomy.
You don't have to reach for hypotheticals about how we will ban people from eating a second cookie or a full size candy bar. This is the law we have today. People with mental health issues apparently have effectively no rights. Imagine making the wrong people angry and you end up drugged up in a strait jacket... Or if you want to go conspiracy theorist, a specific set of photos appears in your iCloud account and you face prison time where you are very likely to face abuse from the guards and other prisoners alike. This is also the reality we already have, no need to reach for hypotheticals.
Drunk driving is very illegal. If we could identify unvaccinated people who infected others and punish that with jail time, would you be happy about that?
Would the people who were infected even want to press charges? Assuming they were vaccinated, they would probably have an extremely mild case, if they were unvaccinated then they would essentially be arguing a case against themselves.
No. I don't even have a strong opinion about punishing people for infecting others through negligence. But I think it is worth bringing up whenever anti-vaxxers bring up alcohol and drunk driving.
To be clear, I am not opposed to vaccines. I think the current vaccine is the best option for people at high risk of negative outcomes due to COVID. What I am opposed to is coercion by the state on something that is a personal choice. Calling this argument “antivaxx” is another example of the disingenuous way people are behaving. It’s a smear campaign that is being parroted without any critical thought.
This is snarky but poses a real question. If we ban people from spaces or events due to their vulnerability to COVID then why do we not do the same for those vulnerable to other diseases? Flu is a good example for the young and elderly since it poses a significant risk. It would strain the argument but you could make a case for banning the obese from fast food restaurants based on this reasoning as well.
Don't forget what makes COVID19 so insidious: without testing, it takes time before an infected contagious person shows symptoms. By the time they decide to stay off public spaces, they have already potentially spread the virus.
With the common flu, you know almost instantly so you stay home to recover.
Fat people know their condition and it's their choice to eat fast food anyway. And obesity is also non contagious.
> Symptoms can begin about 2 days (but can range from 1 to 4 days) after the virus enters the body. That means that you may be able to pass on the flu to someone else before you know you are sick, as well as while you are sick. Some people can be infected with the flu virus but have no symptoms. During this time, those people may still spread the virus to others.
> People with COVID-19 have had a wide range of symptoms reported – ranging from mild symptoms to severe illness. Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus. Anyone can have mild to severe symptoms.
The only people they would need to protect are other unvaccinated people who have made the choice to take whatever risk there is in going unvaccinated. The choice to not be vaccinated involves knowing that you may contact the virus from someone else and may become very ill or die. Attempting to protect someone by taking away their ability to make that choice is equivalent to removing the option to eat enough food to become obese.
> Attempting to protect someone by taking away their ability to make that choice is equivalent to removing the option to eat enough food to become obese.
We do that to obese people already. It's called a diet. Some of them even go farther than mere "prescriptions" but with psychological tricks to keep people on track. Also, really, comparing obesity to COVID19 is an apples to oranges thing. Obesity is not even viral.
What you're missing is that in all these measures that seem so controversial (lockdowns, vaccination campaigns) preserving an individual's life/health is secondary to the main goal, a means to an end. The main goal is to not overwhelm the public healthcare infra.
No one cares if you want to go to a concert when you're ill but when that illness has the potential to strain public health resources, then that's a different story entirely.
> Don't forget what makes COVID19 so insidious: without testing, it takes time before an infected contagious person shows symptoms. By the time they decide to stay off public spaces, they have already potentially spread the virus.
but AFAIK even vaccinated people can spread the virus?
As I mentioned in another comment, let's not forget that preventing spread through all these measures is all in service of a greater goal: avoiding strain on public health infra.
To put it another way, it doesn't matter if vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus (any virus, even) as long as this infection chain does not result to an unmanageable pipeline of people who might need intensive medical care. In this context, the main benefit (but by no means only) of vaccines is the decreased hospitalization rate.
> As I mentioned in another comment, let's not forget that preventing spread through all these measures is all in service of a greater goal: avoiding strain on public health infra.
If the ends justifies the means, what other public health interventions should we carry out, even in cases where there's no direct harm to society[1]? Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. Should we have blood pressure/cholesterol "passports" to pressure people into being healthier?
[1] ie. you getting infected and infecting other people, as opposed to the more tenuous link of you getting infected, having to go to the emergency room, causing the emergency room to go over capacity and causing someone to die because of lack of care
> Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. Should we have blood pressure/cholesterol "passports" to pressure people into being healthier?
Is heart disease exponentially contagious with the potential to strain medical resources in a matter of days?
Again, these aren't interventions against social freedoms, rather an intervention to prevent a public service from being DDoSed, so to speak. The measures a matter of _hospitalization_. It's pointless to compare a "cause of death" metric to a "plain case count" metric.
>> Is heart disease exponentially contagious with the potential to strain medical resources in a matter of days?
> How is this relevant when vaccinated people are still contagious?
Because while still contagious, they are not exponentially contagious. It's not like I left out that important qualifier in the statement you are replying to.
Vaccinated people can spread in case of a breakthrough infection and infections are less likely to occur in vaccinated individuals.
> Just like banning encryption isn't against social freedoms...
Way to go attacking a straw man, and not even a particularly clever one at that. What does encryption have anything to do with vaccination and vaccination passports?
>Because while still contagious, they are not exponentially contagious. It's not like I left out that important qualifier in the statement you are replying to.
1. source?
2. It really wasn't obvious because you failed to link "vaccinated" with "not exponentially contagious".
>What does encryption have anything to do with vaccination and vaccination passports?
In the previous comment you basically made the argument that the measures are justified because they're not "interventions against social freedoms, rather an intervention to prevent a public service from being DDoSed". I just took that argument to its logical conclusion. Law enforcement resources are stretched pretty thin, right? Why not give them a helping hand as well by allowing them to eavesdrop on everyone's communications? After all, it's not an intervention to decrease public privacy, it's an intervention to prevent law enforcement resources from being DDoSed.
1. For one, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... -- the jury still seems out as to by how much exactly the spread is prevented, it seems to depend on the vaccine and social demographics of the population studied. But at least for vaccines approved for use in the US and EU, the reduction seems significant.
2. I mean, this whole discussion is rather about the merits of vaccinations no?
> ... I just took that argument to its logical conclusion ...
This is just dishonest and misleading chain of reasoning:
- Law enforcement and public health are both public resources, yes, but of different nature and not comparable. I thought that's rather self-evident. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that law enforcement is indeed stretched thin, aiding law enforcement takes on an entirely different form than aiding the public health sector.
- Encryption is not analogous to vaccination passports at all. It's not even an apples to oranges comparison, more like, apples to cars.
Have you done pure MDMA? Like actually tested it before hand to make sure? It’s an extremely different experience to alcohol or other psychedelics. Your description sounds more like the cut E that is mostly just speed or other drugs.
It's also important to mention that pure MDMA is much rarer in the US than it is in Europe, and given that HN is very majority American, it is likely to find more experiences with bad quality MDMA here than you would in another forum
In some more liberal countries you can buy kits that let you know what you've just bought off that bloke at the end of the bar with the stickers still on his baseball cap.
> If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
>…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it.
All these calls for censorship make me think we really are doomed to repeat history forever.
Everyone always seems happy to carve out their own exceptions to freedom of expression. Freedom, except for racism. Freedom, except for transgenderism. Freedom, except for porn. Freedom, except for violence. Freedom, except for political dissent or mis-gendering or the promotion or criticism of a religion.
As someone who falls near the middle on most issues I probably detest a larger percentage of speakers than anyone who's solidly on the Left or the Right, but I have no issue understanding that my freedom depends on their freedom. If the people I despise are not free to speak then neither am I.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
It stands to reason then that if all speech is truly free eventually some speech will be censored. America doesn't allow people to say "Fuck" on public TV broadcasts, therefore all speech isn't free. No one is harmed by a curse word. Worst case a child will learn the word a few years earlier than when they usually do, and yet we censor that anyway.
Therefore, you can't say that all speech is free speech on all channels.
What you say in person may at worst get you into an altercation or ostracized, but you have the right to say it. Once your voice is amplified out of earshot you are no longer truly free to speak as you will.
You can say what you want to say, yes, but the repercussions of your words amplify with every repetition. Not everyone is aware of that, and when you are on a platform where, by words, you can incite a group to violence safely from the other side of the country, you should have your speech monitored and censored if need be.
Go and actually read Popper and you'll find he was close to a free speak maximalist his views on when you shouldn't "tolerate" intolerance was an incredibly high bar that almost nothing ever hits.
My read of Popper was that we should be prepared to even use force against intolerant people who are not willing to engage in rational debate.
What Popper didn't anticipate is that the square of public opinion would become the internet, and a big question this creates is if the internet is a place where rationale debate and proportional representation of ideas is possible or not.
If the internet were to make the public square of opinion a place of irrational debate, I think Popper would be very much against it, and would want us to do something about it.
Here's a quote from him:
> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
So the condition he puts forward is: can we counter the intolerants on the internet by using rational arguments? If we can, than suppression (he claims) would be unwise, but if we can't, than suppression by force (he claims) might be warranted.
To me it seems he’s clearly saying that if they decide to use force then we should be prepared to respond in kind not that we should use force to suppress irrational argument. The end of the first sentence maps to the end of the second.
How I interpret it is not that we should use force to suppress irrational argument, but that if we are failing to counter intolerance with rationale argument in the public opinion, than we should be prepared to do even more to counter it, maybe even to use force. And then he lists examples of what he'd consider cases where more than just countering with rationale argument would be justified, and those are: denounce all arguments, not willing to discuss at a rationale level, not willing to listen, believing they are being deceived, using pistols and fists.
So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
>> Go and actually read Popper and you'll find he was close to a free speak maximalist his views on when you shouldn't "tolerate" intolerance was an incredibly high bar that almost nothing ever hits.
> So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
> Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
Your snark isn't warranted. The Wiki article you yourself cited says where Popper introduced the concept and even speaks about what his limitations were.
I will let you read that again to find them, rather than providing a quote.
Honestly, given the comment being replied to started with "go and actually read" I think the snark is warranted if they want. Also, for what it's worth I think they were trying to modulate that snark a bit by using "friend".
If it's truly easy to realize what is being asked, a pointer in the right direction is useful. If it does require a lot of work, then providing some evidence to at least get someone started if not an actual reference would be called for.
In any case, I'm not sure a comment that boils down to "if you actually read X, you'd know that what you just said is wrong" is worth defending, regardless of whether you think it's factually correct or not. You could have just pointed out that there was evidence of this position and left it at that.
For what it's worth, I only bothered to reply because you're not the only person that took the comment that way. The strongest possible interpretation of the prior comment is "This isn't helpful to me. If you're going to state I'm wrong, please provide more information on how so I can address that usefully" which I think is a vary valid complaint to what it was responding to. Interpreting snark where it doesn't necessarily exist or providing additional snark in your own in response (not that you did this) isn't a useful way to move the discourse forward.
> The internet sucks for nuance, but "friend" in this context doesn't read as modulation to me, it reads as sarcasm (and thus intensifies the snark).
It does suck for nuance. The safest and most useful thing to do here (as a place that tries to keep things civil) is to assume it's not snark and treat it as sincere. If it was sincere, treating it as if it's not is causing more of a problem, and if it's not, treating it as if it is leads to useful responses.
> I don't think that's the case. There are a couple of other comments that read the GGP as unnecessarily snarky.
I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
> The only thing I did that was unique was note that he didn't have to search through "25 books" to get the answer, because his own source gave it directly.
I'll just say that if that information was known to the original replier, it should have been included, and if it wasn't, perhaps the reply should have been reworded?
That you actually provided useful info is another reason I bothered to reply to yours. As one that actually provided value to the discussion, I hoped to steer any additional eyeballs responses might draw to a useful comment, rather than a useless one.
I don't want to clutter this discussion too much with meta forum etiquette stuff, which I'm already prone to do at times, so I'll try to refrain from any additional responses on this.
> I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
When I use the word friend with a stranger, I mean it to say, "I have no ill intentions towards you". I'll look for a better way to express that in the future if the intent isn't coming through.
Maybe using the word "callous" made it seem that way, but that is an accurate depiction of what their response was, rough, without thoughtfulness, the reflexive expression of an above average mind unconcerned with how their message was received.
Just look up where he wrote about this paradox of tolerance? It was in a footnote. (To guard, I'd guess, against people deliberately misinterpreting his words in the main text and going "Ha, look at this doctrinaire free-speech absolutist." I've read the book that was in.)
Why does where it was written matter? Saying that it being written in the footnotes invalidates the argument is the logical fallacy of poisoning the well.
You would actually need to refute the argument directly for your assertion to have any weight to it.
- People make a big deal about renowned philosopher Karl Popper warning us of the danger and incoherence of tolerance towards free speech. I think this misuses his rep.
- The one-paragraph quote on the Wikipedia page linked above was Popper's full writing on this. You don't need to look further for it.
Others were already addressing the object-level arguments.
That's such a weird reply. You claimed, were told that it's not accurate, and then went on the offense with a slightly nicer version of "why should I read about the things I claim? How about you prove that it's not as I read on that one meme on imgur.com".
I didn't ask why I should read it. I asked for what to read. If they so much as selected the single book they're basing their claim on that would cut down their homework assignment by 96%.
I don't need chapter and verse, just a homing beacon would suffice.
Besides, we're roughly adults here. Someone saying "Nuh-uh" to an oft-quoted article has the gravitas of damp toast. Why shouldn't I question their response?
Because you haven't read the source you're basing your claim on, you've only read about it from other people who haven't read it and are parroting it because it fits their agenda.
What the hell kind of response is this? You try to puppet Popper's work, I tell you that's not at all what he said, you affirm you never read any of it and complain it's unreasonable to expect you to read it.........
Well, you're the first person I've encountered who has said that the well-known and oft-quoted bit of his work that I even provided a link to in wikipedia with quotes taken directly from is completely false in all regards.
You followed that up with a command to read more of his work without narrowing down out from which of his 25 books would provide any context to back your assertion up.
I just want a little more context than a single sentence from some person on the internet to re-evaluate my hypothesis. That shouldn't be too much to ask. Especially since you're asserting that you know more about the subject than the people who authored the Wikipedia page and every person who has written an article about it.
No, it doesn't. Went to the Supreme Court, and that is not free speech. "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
> Went to the Supreme Court, and that is not free speech.
No, it didn't go to the Supreme Court.
> "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
While the phrase may be used that way, its referencing nonbinding dicta (expressions in a ruling that are not germane to the decision rule for the case actually before the court) that does not reflect preexisting law from a case that has since been almost entirely overruled and is widely recognized as being an aberration that (in its actual binding holding) allowed extensive government regulation of core protected political speech.
It reflects neither the law before the decision, the binding case law created by the decision, nor the state of the law after the decision was rejected.
Okay, but how do you reconcile that with the fact that hate speech and propaganda has been a part of almost all atrocities ever done in the past?
Or put some other way, how do you reconcile that your freedom can be affected by someone's else's freedom? Like what if I use my freedom to turn others against you and have them hate you and berate you and bully you and ridicule you and refute you, and potentially have them vote for laws that take actions against you, or possibly have them commit hateful acts towards you, etc.
Not the OP, but basically you are complaining about humans. I am not convinced that by banning certain expressions you get any security against future oppression.
Stupid hateful people might get trapped by anti-hate-speech laws, but the smarter ones, precisely the ones you need to be careful about, are fairly good at avoiding them and may even use the threat of prosecution to raise sympathy from the part of population that dislikes the incumbent government.
Most European countries have vibrant extremist movements (left, right, Islamic) even though their freedom of speech is much more limited than the U.S. standard.
I see your point, and I think that needs thoughts for sure.
I think most people (including myself) don't know why some harbor hateful resentment and intolerant ideals. And it isn't clear how to deal with it. It's very possible that we need to resist the temptation to try and simply brush those people aside. But I think one thing that isn't clear is if one of the cause for this increase is related to the internet providing bigger megaphones to those smart ones who like to recruit members to their ranks.
And part of that for me is how recommendation algorithms on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube operate, it seems to be tuned towards sensationalized and hateful content. So it does give you the impression that those platforms are failing to educate people with values of tolerance, liberalism, freedom, and individual rights which the USA is founded on.
It's a great question though, you probably don't fight intolerance with intolerance, but at the same time, you might need to be ready to fight it if it comes to that. But how do you avoid having it reach this point?
I have no issue with people turning against, hating, berating, bullying, etc. me. These are simply matters of feeling and opinion. I do have a problem when other people feel entitled to escalate such conflicts by reacting to these unwelcome points of view with real, actual violence, including government censorship. Even, and perhaps especially, when these people are purporting to act in my defense.
Ok, but what are you referring too? Because I'm not sure I'm seeing any government censorship (except for maybe the voter suppression and the child protection laws as well as some of the anti-protest forces deployed by the government in recent protests like BLM). And I'm mostly seeing violence driven by hate speech, like the various shootings happening.
I would be very against government censorship or interventions against constitutional rights of free speech and right to assemble and protest, and right to vote.
Maybe I just don't have the data you have, but right now I'm not too sure I follow you.
I would posit there's little correlation between hate speech laws and hate crimes.
For example, the United States has no hate speech laws. In 2017 there were 2,024 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Germany has very strong hate speech laws, both applying to private citizens and obligating online networks to censor them. In 2020 there were 2,032 anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany. Despite restrictions on hate speech, Germany has four times the per-capita anti-Jewish hate crimes as the US, a country with no hate speech laws.
How about the UK? They have strong hate speech laws. You can get arrested there for teaching a dog the Nazi salute. In 2018 there were 1,201 Islamophobic attacks in the UK. Despite having a rabidly Islamophobic president at the time, the US only had 223. That's over twenty-six times the per-capita Islamophobic hate crime rate.
Always in tandem with propaganda I feel. So it would censor criticism of the regime, and any opposite viewpoint, while replacing all voices with the pro-regime voices instead.
I'm not sure this is the same as letting one freely voice their hate of another and propagate lies and falsehoods about them.
I guess you see it as let's just all use propaganda and defamation against each other, and hopefully that evens out where we all meet in the middle through constant bi-directional propaganda and hatred.
But I see it more as let's not allow the use of propaganda and hate anymore, because those things are at the detriment of other people's freedom, and you should only be free to do what doesn't take away freedoms from others as well, unless it has been agreed between both parties through a contract and a system of laws.
I don't really have a proof that one would have better outcomes over the other, but personally I find having a civil debate in good faith with rational arguments is more pleasant than to have a demagogue debate in bad faith using appeal to prejudice, emotions, desires, falsehoods and defamation. So I'd rather we as a society needed to engage respectfully, rationally and in good faith, and I wouldn't mind this to be enforced both culturally and by law.
I've heard the "slippery slope" and the "what if that just radicalizes demagogues even more" arguments, and the latter one I find more possibly valid. I feel the slope isn't that slippery personally, like the slope would only slip if the person in power was again a demagogue ruling in bad faith, and at that point it be too late anyways, since they'd already be in power.
Now the argument that it could radicalize demagogues further, by giving them more ammo to justify themselves, I think that's a more plausible prediction. I'm not too sure about this bit yet, so I could be convinced here, but I'd need to also be convinced that letting demagogues continue to have large public reach isn't itself a bigger threat.
In that case lets apply your principal evenly to all rights.
Freedom of movement: heading somewhere we don’t agree with, ok but you aren’t allowed to use public roads since we own those. Good luck getting to the voting station.
Freedom of assembly: we don’t support your protests cause, stay off public property, go hold your protest at your own house.
Freedom of conscience: fine think whatever you want but if you attempt to record it in any way we’ll block you.
A right without the means to act on it is nothing at all. You’re arguing for a society built like a prison. You should be ashamed.
YouTube, as well as other major Internet companies, have a near-monopoly over their sectors which leaves them lacking any competitive drive to be better, do better, or for people to go elsewhere.
Without realistic alternatives it is spontaneous (even if erroneous) to think about the implication of private infrastructure over public rights. But the real matter is an issue of scale.
I am convinced that sooner or later governments will wake up and that the tech giants will be broken up or severely limited: the European GDPR and the Chinese crackdown on the sector are only the first signs.
This is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because you can see a flaw with a system does not mean there is a flaw.
Sometimes the flaw is with you & or your line of thought.
In this case, equating "not being allowed to post far-right propaganda on every concourse of communication" is not the same as being harassed at your own home because people are allowed to protest.
Isn't the root problem here is the near monopoly held by god-tier corporations? Shouldn't FB/Goog have the right to moderate their content as they see fit? Shouldn't their network effect de facto monopolies be regulated so that there is room for other voices?
An illusion of truth can be created by repeatedly stating falsehoods by agents with an agenda to push. The question isn't about censorship, but rather how we can make our liberal democratic societies resistant to this type of manipulation, which inevitably results in terminal decline.
What I've come to realize is this asks far too much of the average person. Ideas do not win on their logical merits. Rationality is not the driving force of opinion for the majority of people. The alternative is probably worse, as some sort of totalitarian regime, but I just don't think billions of humans are capable of ensuring their own survival as a species
People have a right to speak, but they don't have a right to have their speech amplified by others. There is no right to broadcast. Mill would agree with this, assuming you could explain to him how broadcast media works, which didn't exist in his time.
Mill wasn’t talking about rights; he was talking about the propensity to suppress unpopular speech, why that’s dangerous, and accordingly, and the moral necessity (and implications) of open discourse.
(So we've already given up on "Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it" then. Fine. Truth is relative.)
No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth? Thoughts and prayers?
> No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
That would suggest we might benefit from a better mechanism for establishing the truth.
The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
Do you have a better suggestion?
> What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth?
The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?
> Thoughts and prayers?
Open and vibrant debate.
> Does freedom come with any responsibility?
Sure it does, though assessing culpability is often a nightmarish impossibility, especially a priori.
Should we establish prior restraints on individual’s freedoms to enforce correct speech and beliefs?
"The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
"Do you have a better suggestion?"
I do not. But open and vibrant debate only works when people are capable of determining when the debate has been settled, at least for the moment. And are willing to accept the settled decision.
Have you ever had a serious chat with a creationist? Of course, there is no positive evidence that can disprove the young earth theory, any more than you can disprove solipsism. The creationist argument ultimately fails because of the implications of its own flexibility. I've known people who claim that the faster they drive, the better they drive. Or that they are perfectly safe to drive stoned or drunk. fortunately, in those cases culpability is, as you point out, is easy.
Anti-intellectualism comes in many varieties. Someone can be so skeptical that they do not accept any argument because, say, Big Media and The Man are out to oppress them...somehow. Someone else can be so un-skeptical as to believe the first comforting story that comes along in spite of any facts suggesting that reality is harsher.
Open and vibrant debate is the only way to establish the truth, but truth is not established by popularity, nor by who yells the loudest.
"The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
"How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?"
I have no idea what Rolling Stone article you are talking about. Is it one of these:
Not really an answer to my question, but I'm sure it's very comforting to intensive care patients spending hours to days on gurneys in hospital hallways.
Freedom is easy if it doesn't come with responsibility, precisely because culpability is often a nightmare to identify. How many people are you willing to injure or kill in the name of freedom?
Should we just get used to the fact that there are no limits on lies and an idea just dreamed up by some rando on the internet is just as true as something from a so-called expert?
Marx was almost right: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Postmodernism, the first time around, was the comedy.
>Fossil-fueled Development – Taking the Highway (High challenges to mitigation, low challenges to adaptation)
This world places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress and development of human capital as the path to sustainable development. Global markets are increasingly integrated. There are also strong investments in health, education, and institutions to enhance human and social capital. At the same time, the push for economic and social development is coupled with the exploitation of abundant fossil fuel resources and the adoption of resource and energy intensive lifestyles around the world. All these factors lead to rapid growth of the global economy, while global population peaks and declines in the 21st century. Local environmental problems like air pollution are successfully managed. There is faith in the ability to effectively manage social and ecological systems, including by geo-engineering if necessary.
Compared to the other four scenarios this one sounds a lot better even with the massive environmental challenge it would pose. The economic outcome of the “best case” scenario sounds more like universal poverty.
>inequality is reduced both across and within countries. Consumption is oriented toward low material growth and lower resource and energy intensity
