Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
23d ago
I'm amused at how gun possession is supposedly a right, and yet with all the caveats laid out here, it seems more like a privilege in practice. Meanwhile, driving is supposedly a privilege, but I'd bet a million dollars I could get a NJ driver's license and own any car I wanted in NJ sooner than I could own any gun I wanted in NJ. Driving seems to be more of a right than guns are.
Markass
Not the worst
23d ago
OP's point is that if you answered this way then you win favor with the MAGA crowd but out yourself as a nutjob who believes in conspiracy theories to everyone else. So there is no way to answer "who won 2020?" without losing favor with someone.
Markass
Not the worst
24d ago
I think this particular restriction came about because of one bad actor known as UnrealSkybox who spams websites with CSAM and has a seemingly endless network of residential proxies to burn through to do it. The farms is pro-privacy and allows and encourages registration with regular VPNs.
Markass
Not the worst
24d ago
I think gender ideology in general is a "gotcha" question such that, no matter what you believe, you are forced to pick a side. Consider the choice of which pronouns to use to refer to a transgender individual, let's say a male-to-female.
- She: You subscribe to gender ideology and believe this person is a woman.
- He: You don't subscribe to gender ideology and believe this person is a man.
- They: You are trying to sit on the fence and placate both sides, but this is unlikely to work. In particular, progressives will notice if you keep saying "they" when a transgender person's preferred pronouns are she/her (after all, in progressive spaces displaying your preferred pronouns is normalized), and will correctly recognize you as a coward trying to play both sides, if not a person who doesn't subscribe to gender ideology.
- Some other pronoun: Same as above. If it's not the person's preferred pronouns, this is considered a transgression in the eyes of progressives.
- No pronouns: This is awkward but possible. However, people aren't stupid, and progressives will notice you doing this too and treat it as a transgression.
There is no choice you could make that means you are neither for nor against gender ideology, especially when progressives treat neutrality the same as being against. The difference between pronouns and the "what is a woman?" question is that the latter is used by conservatives to explicitly call out and expose the beliefs of the answerer, while pronouns are a way for progressives to hijack an existing social norm and turn it into an implicit belief test.
Markass
Not the worst
27d ago
There's always creeps in every place. The difference between Roblox and most places is that most places ban pedophiles when they're reported.
Markass
Not the worst
27d ago
The content isn't necessarily the problem, although some games may be cause for concern. The users are, and Roblox not only consistently fails to act on credible reports of pedophiles and child molesters, but also attacks anyone who tries to get creeps arrested or even publishes reports on the problem, e.g. burying Ruben Sim in frivolous litigation.
Markass
Not the worst
28d ago
I interpret OP to mean that little ghetto babies are a drain on government finances in the short term, as resources need to spent raising them, but they are not a drain in the long term, as they (theoretically) will be fully grown adults who can support themselves with minimal government assistance. I don't think OP missed any words.
Markass
Not the worst
29d ago
Climate activists often make incredibly misleading arguments they think will promote climate activism but once people find out they've been mislead it just sows distrust in the entire field.
You're right. The first thing that comes to my mind when talking about climate change -- and I'm surprised it's not more well known -- is the Extinction Clock website that compiles failed climate-related predictions, especially relating to catastrophe. (Unfortunately it appears to have been down for months now, so here's an archived version.)
To this day I see climate activists wondering why no one trusts them, and I must be going crazy because that website should be like a mirror to them, and if I were them I would go look in the mirror and see #1 Reason Why People Don't Trust You, Exhibit A. The one way they can have even a small hope of recovering trust in people is if they are willing to publicly admit that their predictions have been wrong and talk about the steps they are taking to ensure being wrong won't happen again. This is the only way, and there is no shortcut. Doubling down further on wrong predictions, and especially tying them to a moral failing on the part of the audience, only sows more distrust.
Markass
Not the worst
30d ago
Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?
Over a long period of time, you get used to your own smell and don't notice it unless it changes. These people's hygiene have been nonexistent for so long, the only recourse is for somebody to tell them they stink. Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.
Markass
Not the worst
30d ago
Relevant: The Rush from Judgment
Markass
Not the worst
30d ago
I feel bad for those theater employees. They do NOT get paid enough to deal with literal manchildren.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
You know what they say, it's only a war crime if you lose the war.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
It seems that it's harder as a Ukrainian than an African to take refuge in Europe and it's harder for a European than an Indian to take refuge in America, when ideally it should be the other way round. Why do we not incentivize the best and most culturally similar minds to come to our countries?
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
4chans fights with Ofcom are hilarious but are you personally willing to stop traveling to the EU and the UK?
Yes? The only correct move is to keep your ass and your assets in the US, where the First Amendment exists. Elon Musk capitulated to Brazilian censorship when Brazil threatened to arrest X employees and seize X assets, and his mistake was going to Brazil in the first place. If he had not done that, he could have told them to fuck off, which is what Kiwi Farms and 4chan did to Ofcom.
I genuinely cannot think of any value in traveling to the EU or UK, especially if they are hostile to you or your site. Look what happened to Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
Here in particular I can see potential for people to rate things as "dislike" but also "informative".
You have no clue how many times I wish I could rate something "informative" on the rest of the Internet.
The only thing about stickers I would recommend is to never send notifications for them, not even as an option. Xenforo has them out-of-the-box and Josh has to constantly deal with users who get negrated and then in turn revenge negrate every single one of the other user's posts. For a while, he disabled notifications entirely, until people complained (completely genuinely) that they relied on the sticker notifications to engage with threads they wanted to keep up with, rather than anything sane like the forum software's watchlist. Also, people were writing userscripts that aggregated all the stickers from their posts after he deliberately broke that functionality. So he begrudgingly re-enabled it.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
Jesus. Did they take the playbook straight from Amazon Go? I'm surprised the NDA wasn't longer.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
suggesting you redistribute this somewhat triggers empathy and accusations of killing your sweet grandma.
I despise such an emotionally manipulative accusation. The social contract used to be that after your parents took care of you when you grew up, you would take care of them in their old age. I don't need to pay more taxes for grandma to be taken care of. Rather, my taxes end up going to people who have absolutely no relation to me and don't even pretend to vote in my interests. This breakdown in the social contract correlates with attacks on traditional family structures and contributes to an atomized, isolating society. It feels like we broke something that was working perfectly fine, and now we're trying to fix it with band-aids.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
There were also people who thought there was more to King's murder than it seems, even still to this day.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
Basically, it seems like this is a case of liberal legislators not thinking carefully about the incentives they are creating. But maybe I am missing something.
Yet another one of the Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. If only politicians were mandated to demonstrate second-order level thinking.
It's terrifying how many bad laws are written because they think there's a magical button to fix a problem with no downstream effects. (Assuming they did this out of incompetence rather than malice.)
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
I'm not such a stickler that I would reject a drunken unenthusiastic "sure", but the biggest deal-breaker for me is that she physically walked away from the living room when he touched her (or at least, that's what she claimed). Absent anything else, that's a clear indicator that she didn't want it. Up until that point I might be willing to forgive him for just having a drunken misunderstanding, but when he followed her and touched her again, that's pretty clearly rape. (Again, assuming she's telling the truth.)
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
Ok, but this isn't dry, unenthusiastic sex. This is just straight up rape. She told him no and he persisted anyway. That's the central example of rape. The only issue is whether she is telling the truth and I'm inclined to believe her absent any convincing argument otherwise.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
The entire point that I've making over several posts is that "it's not that much harder to" is bad reasoning.
I can agree, but I think it depends on the specifics. I brought up Sanctioned Suicide because I think not naming the forum made no difference whatsoever in terms of the number of suicidal people who now know that it exists. Not just "it was harder to find out what site it was," I think it made zero difference and the level of difficulty was the same as if he had just named it outright.
Besides that, I'm hesitant to agree with your principle in all cases because it seems quite easy to shift blame from one party to another party who it does not make sense to hold accountable. One of your examples was "I didn't intend for my cryptocurrency to be used for money laundering" and, well, that reminds me of GrapheneOS.
A while back, European governments verbally attacked GrapheneOS (and even Pixel phones, which is the only way to run it*) as an enabler of pedophiles, because the police found it effectively impossible to break the security features of GrapheneOS. Under your set of ethics, GrapheneOS is responsible for the abuse of their system by pedophiles. In fact the argument is stronger because while pedophiles are highly motivated, they are unlikely to be able to code the security features on their own. But I don't agree. First, because there is no feasible way for GrapheneOS to prevent pedophiles from using their system without also harming everyone else, since any system that supposedly does so will inherently weaken the security of GrapheneOS. If police can break in, so can hackers. Second, because it's just not their responsibility!
(I'm not saying service providers, intermediaries, developers etc. can never be morally responsible for abuse committed by others. For example, if you're a platform like Discord or Roblox, you are enabling pedophilia the minute you receive a credible report of someone being a pedophile and fail to ban them. The difference here is the ability to ban specific people without affecting innocents, and having knowledge of someone being a pedophile.)
*There is a Motorola model in development, but it hasn't come out yet.
The question of naming the forum as doxing doesn't come up because you want to harm the forum. You are not unintentionally enabling harm, you are causing harm deliberately!
Well, yes, this was a given. My point was that naming the forum would harm others, namely, suicidal people who (the theory goes) would not have committed suicide otherwise.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
There are degrees of harm. Posting the full name harms more than posting the first name, which in turns harms more than saying "a guy I know".
This sounds fine in theory. In practice, I'm not sure it makes a difference. If you post the content of a tweet but blur out the name, it's not that much harder to find the original author (depending on which tweet you post). And if the entire point of these ethics is to prevent bad actors from harassing people, do you really think those bad actors would just give up when they see a blurred name? If they want to harass people, they are motivated enough to do it anyway. The only way to escape responsibility is to not post anything at all, akin to the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
I'll give another example. Let's say there's a forum out there where people are allowed to discuss suicide and how to achieve it in detail. Let's say you're a mildly successful musical British-Irish Youtuber who stumbles upon the existence of the forum and want to campaign against it, but you also subscribe to this theory of ethics and you could never in good conscience make the forum more notable than it already is, as you believe that you would be responsible for more suicides if you did that. How do you report on the forum without inadvertently promoting it to more suicidal people?
Your theory goes that he would be in the clear (or at least cause less harm) by doing the following:
- Not referring to the forum by its actual name.
- Not using any actual screenshots of the forum.
- If needing to reference specific posts, recreate the posts using his own graphics.
- Don't mention anyone specifically by name.
- Don't even say which suicide methods are which.
So does this work? The answer is a resounding no.
Tantacrul's video on Sanctioned Suicide did all these things. He called it "Sorrow Solution", he never used actual screenshots (save for one censored screenshot) and he made up fake names for everyone. In the wake of his video, the number of visits to the site actually significantly increased in a way that the website operators noticed. It's not even clear at all that the number of visits in the aftermath was less than if Tantacrul had been upfront and used the site's real name instead of "Sorrow Solution". It's very likely that a majority of the visits came from suicidal people (or even curious people) who watched Tantacrul's video and decided to look for themselves. If someone is motivated enough to commit suicide, they're not going to let a silly thing like the "Sorrow Solution" name replacement stop them. The forum even got its own Wikipedia article after this. It turns out that you can't report on the forum without promoting it. (Also, his recreated screenshots only served as an avenue for further misrepresentation of the site, but that's another discussion.)
So again, it seems like the most ethical thing to do in the face of a forum where people teach others how to commit suicide is... nothing. Or at least not to make a Youtube video on it, I suppose.
(unless Taxxon is a public figure)
He is. So is it fine (or less harmful) to criticise public figures?
Sometimes acting in an ethical manner means not doing things you want to do or not doing things that benefit yourself.
It's not clear to me that Hbomberguy's skeet benefited him. Being anti-lolicon may win you the support of fellow anti-lolicons, but most people are already against lolicon anyway, and the ones who are in favour are fierce advocates who will target you with nasty tactics (e.g. calling you a pedophile) for being against it.
It's not clear to me that being a critic in general benefits the critic. (Unless it's movie criticism and you're Roger Ebert, I suppose.) The primary benefactor of criticism is the one who is criticised, so they can take the feedback and improve. If I didn't care at all about someone and at least have some sense of respect for them, I wouldn't criticise them. I would just not say anything.
Well yes, we can't have 100% absolute rights everywhere because punching someone in the face (without good cause) violates their rights. But it's hard for me to see how me owning a gun inherently infringes on the rights of others. Meanwhile, I can own a car very easily despite it being just as capable of being used for mayhem and violence. Driving is a privilege that functions like a right and guns are a right that function like a privilege.
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