barristan_selmy
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User ID: 2094
barristan_selmy
1mo ago
Google recently agreed to pay the "link tax" and play ball, despite my initial hope that they would fight it more. So it's looks more likely now that they will continue to play ball. Kind of unfortunate in my view, since I think that an abrupt end to social media services operating in Canada would be an unintentional and extremely positive outcome from this whole thing.
barristan_selmy
1mo ago
In practice these bills have enabled far leftist authoritarianism and hate speech, by censoring valid opposition
Too much "bothsidesism" is not in itself an accurate assessment of reality
Thanks, I don't really disagree. But as explained in reply to another commenter, I think it's important to steelman the issue a bit and try to argue from a politically neutral perspective to explore how this issue can be argued effectively with progressives as well as conservatives. The reality as we know is that this bill has partisan objectives and I think everyone reading my post here is capable of filling in the blanks with their own experience of the actual political reality in 2024.
barristan_selmy
1mo ago
The Conservatives are leading the Liberals 42 - 24 in national polls
Pierre Pollievre's only objection so far seems to be that it creates too much "bureaucracy". I would guess that the average Tory voter is still easily swayed by moral panic "it's for the children's safety" type arguments. But this is already his solid base, and I think there's a failure of imagination going on in terms of what could be gained by taking a stand here.
So Canadian news media is in a spot where if they do their job they are likely to go bankrupt after the next election.
A cynical interpretation of course is that they are doing this for the same reason they are funding the CBC so well. Also a bit of cronyism perhaps given that our Deputy PM made her bones in the newsroom at the Globe and Mail.
barristan_selmy
1mo ago
This is progressive-speak for "misgendering", interpreted as such by every court and tribunal, and you know that
I don't know that. Can you please elaborate?
I have been deliberately avoiding discussing this bill from a strict culture war perspective and instead trying to steelman it a bit from a "is this good for democracy" perspective. Of course, every one of these provisions is open to being interpreted from a leftist political slant and yes, we all know that's exactly what this current government intends to do.
barristan_selmy
1mo ago
Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act)
For those who aren't following, Canada's Liberal government last month tabled a sweeping new bill targeted at regulating speech on social media. The bill lays out seven regulated categories of speech:
- Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor
- Intimate content communicated without consent
- Content used to bully a child
- Inducing a child to harm themselves
- Hate speech
- Inciting violence
- Inciting violent extremism or terrorism
To enforce these restrictions, the bill establishes a set of new appointed government entities in order to enforce compliance with these rules by social media companies, with penalties running up to 6% of global revenue. In addition, it empowers Human Rights Tribunals to investigate complaints by individuals against other individuals and levee fines of up to $20,000.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the public discourse around this bill has been... the lack of public discourse around this bill. What the hell has happened to us?
Maybe this is the inevitable end game of the gradually hollowing out of the Fifth Estate that has been happening all these years, including by the government itself who has been gradually buying themselves a loyal Ministry of Information through their steady funding increases to the CBC all these years. Maybe it's the disastrous result of a generation entering the body politic that has been steadily brainwashed by the ideologues running our school system, no longer able to form thoughts on their own or engage with the world for more than six seconds owing to a constant addiction to digital stimulation, building the world in their own small-minded safetyist self-image.
Or is it that despite what we promised ourselves never to do, we have finally let 9/11 age out of our collective memory? I for one remember a time not so long ago when the word "government" in Western countries conjured up associations with shady business interests, massive dragnet surveillance, imperialist wars for oil and geopolitical hegemony, extrajudicial black sites, and general suspicion and persecution of Muslims. It was the Big Bad Neocons who were trying to take over the world and police your thoughts. If our government at the time had tried to police online speech and set up a system of kangaroo courts in order to prevent "harms", our media would have been up in arms and many of us would have taken to the streets to protest. Yes, it was cool and righteous to be anti-government.
Now our government says only "extreme" online hate speech would be subject to the rules, and that despite the powers that the legislation grants in theory, they will behave with restraint. And are we really going to believe this, this time around? This is the same government and the same PM who labeled the entire trucker protest movement as Nazis, for the reason that someone used a swastika flag in order to call him a Nazi, and who subsequently imposed emergency powers to crush them.
And what about when the worm turns, and the next moral panic and/or government comes around? Will they persecute Trudeau in the courts for perpetuating hate through his use of blackface? From a cosmic justice perspective this is surely a satisfying outcome, but it's a lamentable world where our political process has degenerated into a saga of political gangsterism where the ingroup and outgroup each take turns exacting revenge on each other. This is definitely the direction we're headed in.
Of course, if you wanted the ridiculousness of the whole thing to be self-evident, you would be hard pressed to pick a better time to introduce the bill than right now. 25 years for "inciting genocide"? In a time when the word genocide is being thrown about wantonly by both Israel and Palestine supporters as the accusation du jour, no one knows exactly what inciting genocide means, except that you can get 25 years for doing it on social media when Albert Speer got only 20 years for his role in architecting a system of literal concentration camp slave labour.
I've got to hand it to the government though, because when you look at who will bear the burden of actually policing social media day-to-day, they have sidestepped the real responsibility. No, it's the social media companies themselves that will determine what does and doesn't constitute hate speech, inciting genocide, bullying a child, whatever. Failure to comply is not an option, because they can be fined up to 6% of their global revenue. Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada, I have no doubt that given the choice between trying to toe the line and interpret the rules reasonably, and dialing up their content filters to 11, they will choose to play it safe and do the latter. As the late Charlie Munger advised us: never underestimate the power of incentives, which of course we will because we're a nation that seems to do so repeatedly and pathologically at every turn.
Now all that being said, I have avoided the seemingly mandatory disclosure by commenters on this particular issue that there are parts of this law that I'm in favour of (less anyone accuse me of being against protecting children from sexual victimization). I am generally in favour of criminalizing suicide encouragement towards a child, and revenge porn, as long as these trangressions are held to the same level of scrutiny as say, uttering death threats, and are tried to high standards in a criminal court. As I've explored a bit, hate speech, inciting violence, and inciting violent extremism or terrorism are all going to be far too open to interpretation and used to suppress political debate and dissent. As for "content used to bully a child", I don't even think I have to go into just how vague that is or how likely it is to lead to an overwhelming flood of investigations and complaints, and I don't believe that we even should reasonably attempt to protect other people's children from most forms of bullying. So there's the nuance of my position.
In the end, what we will end up with if this bill passes will be a bland, claustrophobic version of the internet where political discussion is restricted to the point that we can barely talk about the weather, and so we just spend all our time online shopping and looking at pictures of food. And for all our political apathy in this county, it might be exactly what we deserve.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
Can TikTok do the same? Can it just turn down the dials on a soldier, make him less effective? I don't know.
According to a Canadian army officer I know, yes. He took a course during the post-Afghanistan years that was supposed to teach “strategic thinking”. One of their case studies was a problem that the US military faced: amid high unemployment in places like Karachi, Pakistani youths with nothing better to do were being recruited by the Taliban and crossing the mountainous border regions to kill American soldiers. How to solve this?
The obvious and favored course of action was to apply airpower and bomb the heck out of suspected tunnel areas and waypoints in the mountains with B52s. Cost: on the order of $100m - $1b. However, an alternative course of action that was considered took a PSYOPS angle: buy a few hundred generators and a few thousand Xboxes and set up free gaming centers around Karachi. The theory being, by distracting the youth with video games, they would be less likely to seek adventure and meaning by joining up with the Taliban. Cost: on the order of $1m - $10m.
The leadership at the time chose the former course of action. But several years later, the latter course of action is being studied by aspiring senior officers as a brilliant example of innovative and strategic thinking that could have saved a portion of the trouble of fighting a war.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
Not over the course of the last year, but I went through a personal experience with abortion that has changed my feelings. I have always leaned heavily pro-choice since I see the value of human life as something that basically starts from zero and accumulates over time as we develop. Any other position is extreme, the only room for uncertainty is in drawing the line of when a life is valuable enough to protect against the potential harm of bringing a child into the world who is unwelcome, un-cared for, or has some condition that makes them unequipped to lead a good life. And as I see it, the potential for suffering is low for an embryo or an early fetus that has a brain significantly less developed than a newborn baby. So I would have said, go ahead, abort as many as you like! As long as it’s the first trimester. Plenty of valid reasons to abort well into the second trimester as well, but at that point I would not allow it just for poor planning or inconvenience. Lastly, it’s important that women have good access to abortion to prevent the societal harms of unwanted pregnancies.
Then, at the age of 24, my girlfriend and I got pregnant. We caught it a bit late at six weeks. It came as a real surprise because she was on the pill, it turned out later there was a recall on her medication. But we figured we weren’t ready, so the very next day after we found out we headed into the clinic.
At the clinic it turned out she was carrying twins. That made it a lot harder, for some reason, maybe because it felt special and unlikely to happen that way again if we decided to have kids later. But we still went through with it.
The reality of going through an abortion is it’s a highly unpleasant experience. No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you. I felt, and still feel deeply ashamed about the whole thing. Not because of societal pressure or stigma or anything like that, but because fundamentally I killed my unborn children.
I am still pro-choice and my views around timing and access to abortion have not changed, but I now think it is not a decision to be taken lightly and there are valid reasons to be hesitant to have an abortion. I am far more sympathetic now to doctors who refuse to perform or condone abortions as well (it’s also explicitly forbidden under the Hippocratic Oath). And paradoxically, I have a lot less sympathy to those who attempt to interfere with couples seeking abortions and the doctors facilitating that process. It’s extremely difficult to make that decision and carry through with it, and any barrier to access could lead to an outcome they will regret for the rest of their lives.
Bravo, you just perfectly described the theory of my early career and the careers of several other quants I know. Source: am a recovering quant.
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