SIGNIT
3mo ago
Tearing down posters is a much a sort of speech as putting them up in the first place. Consider the natural limit if we could only put up posters and never take them down: the whole world would be tiled with posters. Since you don't own the public square in the first place, you don't have a right to have your displays persist there indefinitely. And the only productive way to communicate "this discussion isn't important in the first place" is to shut down the conversation. Allowing it to evolve into a debate implicitly accepts that it is a debate worth having.
SIGNIT
10mo ago
Do american blacks next.
Broadly, the question is not whether crime rates are higher, but instead how to interpret that fact. For example, using this information to discriminate against people based on their race would be racism. If you were to structure an immigration policy, you wouldn't ask what race a potential immigrants was. Instead, you would look at education, criminal record, and other non discriminatory factors and use that to inform your decision. In fact, the large disparity in these dimensions for mena immigrants can largely be attribute to the fact that such determinations were not used when accepting such immigrants, since they were accepted due to being refugees, or immigrated illegally.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
They spent half a billion dollars on this show. That's enough money to make good television that would get people talking about it because of how good it is. And it turns out that internet ideologues are not a massive market, whereas randos who barely use social media are. Those people are more likely to hear about a show from their friends talking about how good it is.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
It has many features that markdown doesn't:
I almost assume that "I wish there was a tutorial on how to use the features of this site somewhere ;/" is sarcasm, because there's a link below every post box labelled "formatting help" which provides a description of the rules.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
You're forgetting that reality has a left wing bias.
Consider the keffals drama: if it was a rightoid vying for a rightoid cause, they would not have enjoyed the success that keffals did. Keffals manages to represent the mainstream, popular interest, and thus with minimal effort on her part she can succeed in her goals. While keffals instigated and pushed forward the situation, she only managed to do so because the broader world was prepared and receptive. Compare something like the Ottawa trucker protests. Possibly due to the police being supportive of their cause, they managed to dig their heels in and create a protest that seemed to actually be challenging the powers that be. Gofundme was allowing them to receive donations. The media was altogether against them, the house of commons passed the emergency act and started freezing bank accounts and arresting people, and suddenly their whole movement was fucked. Keffals, while she might seem the underdog in a given matchup, enjoys the support of the cathedral, while the truckers, while they may have seemed to momentarily have the upper hand, didn't.
The relative penetration of either side on online platforms just reflects the inherent bias of those platforms. Fun, playful rightoid youtubers either got taken down, or completely shifted their politics towards leftoidism to protect themselves. Very serious and careful, usually quite milquetoast, rightoid youtubers are also still around. The result is that it seems like only leftoids can be playful, when in fact the platforms themselves filter away playful rightoids.
I don't see any meaningful way in which the "the Right [lost] the terminally online". Many terminally online people are rightoids. You don't usually see them on reddit or twitter, because they get banned on reddit or twitter. Or they attenuate their views there to avoid being banned.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
"Antisocial behaviour" needs to be operationalized. What is the ill effect that you expect to come about as a result of this behaviour? If I say that littering is anti-social, I mean that if everyone litters, than there will be shit covering the ground, and everyone will be worse off. In the case of ad-blocking, there are limits that prevent horrific outcomes.
For one, most of the ad supported content I consume is not at all necessary, and arguably makes me worse off, in that my time would be better spent doing other things. This is largely why such content is ad supported, rather than paid: they know that people won't feel like they can justify paying money for it. If everyone ad blocked and the service died, I wouldn't be worse off.
Second, there are many people willing to spend their own money providing many of the services I use for free. Examples include this website, and several others of its ilk. Often such websites rely on donations, or the purchase of cosmetic or other non-gating features to generate revenue. So if advertising based websites were to go down, there would likely be many websites to replace them. Such websites would often be improvements over their predecessors; content websites that are funded by advertising often have poorly researched and written articles, and use SEO to push out better articles which don't profit from advertising or from gating payments.
Third, platforms make enough profit off of the people that do look at ads to support some number of users that don't. This may sound trite: someone littering might reasonably argue that there are enough people picking up litter to make up for their actions. The key difference is that advertising as a service model relies on a small number of profitable users to keep things afloat. If I never or rarely purchase anything as a result of being advertised to, than I am a net negative to the advertiser. Therefore, I am no different, at an ecosystem level, from someone who blocks ads. Since the system already requires others to make up for my behaviour, it makes no difference whether I also happen to block ads.
Fourth, suppose that all of the above wasn't true. That is, the content was necessary, or at least strongly desirable, there was no way to fund it via donations, and an advertising model would successfully derive revenue from an most every users (at a system level). In that case, if I weren't to block ads, I would be (by assumption) sacrificing some portion of my income to in order to fund the advertising, but I would also have to look at ads whenever I used the service. I dislike looking at ads, and would prefer, all else being equal (which, by assumption, they are), to pay for the service instead. So if the service stopped being supported by advertising, and moved to being a paid subscription, then I would be no worse off, and in fact better off than were I to have begun looking at ads instead.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
the baby may gain moral weight once you introduce it to society
So as long as I don't do that, I can do whatever I like to the baby. Got it.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
Suppose that a mother didn't want her child, and planned to abort it. I suggested that I would instead pay her a fee for her to carry it to term, and give the baby to me. Clearly, the baby is outside society, in that it wouldn't exist but for my intervention, and in that the only way it interacts with society is through me. What moral restrictions apply to the baby? Why is this different from the moral restrictions on an animal?
SIGNIT
1yr ago
Manifest v3 doesn't ban adblockers. It imposes limitations on the way that adblockers can be implemented, but it doesn't eliminate them entirely. It is also the same model (as I understand) as is used by apple's safari in their extension system, notable for being the only adblocking system available on iphones. It is a much poorer model than we are used to, but it is not nothing. That apple chooses to implement a similar restriction suggests that the impetus behind this may be stronger than just making adblocking difficult. While apple makes money off of advertising, very little of it is on the web where content based ad blocking is used. DNS based blocking is still feasible under their and google's model. So the reason for apple to implement this restriction is plausibly the same reason for google to move to this model, with any effect on adblocking being a mere (perhaps beneficial) side effect. The reason given in both cases is that it prevents poorly designed or malicious extensions from consuming too many resources on the host device.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
Broadly that things will die anyways, and that the only way to prevent this altogether is eliminate life - which seems a far worse outcome than removing death. For most classes of animals that we eat, they would only exist if we farmed them, otherwise the number of their species in the wild would be effectively zero. This would not be matched by an increase in the number of members of any other species. It would be precisely and completely an elimination of lives, with no commensurate increase in life.
For animals that have been killed via hunting them in the wild, the argument would go that some level of predation is a natural part of the life cycle of such animals. A deer being picked off by wolves, or being picked off by a hunter, is not such a large change. Often, hunting is a way to prevent the numbers of certain species from increasing too much, which will have damaging effects on the rest of the ecosystem.
The exception to this general line of thinking is in cases where the life of the animal is so bad as to be not worth living, where the animal would in fact be better off not existing at all. This might be the case for certain forms of factory farming, but I don't believe it is the case for most of the meat that we consume. If it is, the would-be vegetarian could elect to procure their meat from sources that practice forms of farming they consider ethical.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
The lesson I've drawn is that the only way to make a successful offsite is to kill or severely neuter the reddit sub. Otherwise nobody will move over, and you'll have a dwindling group of ever witchier witches.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
The fact that it was a close race still tells us something very important, even if we knew that before he was elected. Furthermore, we can't in the general case know what the actual probability of something is, or whether an event is subject to random chance fluctuations, or is predetermined. The only reliable way to observe probabilities is via the frequency of events over time. The fact that trump got elected at all tells us something very meaningful, even if he didn't get elected in a landslide. We should definitely reflect on what that is, and how we should alter our behaviour to reflect it.
If speech can be used as a weapon to silence others by overwhelming them with speech, then the antidote - censorship - must also be a form of speech.
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