Hyman Rosen 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (1141)

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 18 May, 2022 @ 01:16pm

  There have been too many people thinking for any original thoughts to still be possible.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 18 May, 2022 @ 09:03am

  The playwright's name is usually Anglicized as "Chekhov". You may be thinking of the Star Trek character.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 18 May, 2022 @ 09:01am

  Yes, but I am not suggesting forcing platforms to do anything. I am criticizing platforms for viewpoint-based censorship and expressing hope that they will change to do better. The reason you woke ideologues keep insisting that we want to force platforms to change is so that you can hide behind the First Amendment and say that platforms cannot be forced to change. True but irrelevant. Criticism is not force.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 18 May, 2022 @ 08:05am

  Of course they have privacy, but it could be something as simple as the whole family sitting down to fill out their ballots together, and one family member then not wanting to publicly demur.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 17 May, 2022 @ 11:51pm

  I am not a Trump fan, very much the contrary, but of course freedom of speech should apply even to people one disdains. Why would I want Twitter to die? Twitter is a wonderful platform for people to communicate with each other. I want Twitter to be better, which means not engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. I don't use Twitter myself (but not as a boycott, just because I don't find the format appealing). However I did delete my Facebook account after they gave me several timeouts for posts similar to the ones I write here. Not only did I find the viewpoint-based censorship repugnant, but the "community standards timeout" process itself seems designed to encourage self-censorship, trying to nudge people away from posting unwoke opinions. That actually illustrates another problem with the platforms. On Facebook I was a member of a number of affinity groups most of which were not political, and in which I only posted things appropriate to those groups. But the community timeouts apply across the board. That's why it took me a while to decide to leave - I had to weigh the cost of being silenced against the benefit of being able to participate in those other groups. That's why the "go somewhere else" suggestions are not terribly useful.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 17 May, 2022 @ 11:42am

  Well, that sure put me in my place. They're years of laughter, actually.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 17 May, 2022 @ 11:31am

  Wokersti

  https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/12/09/why-the-wokerati-are-cultural-marxists/ Not invented by me.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 10:14pm

  It's cute that you think that you can "win" a back-and-forth comment section slap fight. Did your mother drop you on your head a bunch when you were a kid?

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 10:02pm

  I don't know whether any of your litany of problems actually happened, or happened in numbers that would have changed anything, but I doubt it. My problem with vote-by-mail is that it can do away with the secret ballot. In New York, for example, many Hasidic communities have a strong bloc vote dictated by their community leaders. If any of the community members would like to defect and vote differently, they can do that easily at the voting booth, but if they're mailing in their ballots, someone can be watching them as they fill them out.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 02:01pm

  As opposed to only a woke view? No. We're going to have both.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 02:00pm

  That's a magnificently stupid idea. We already have a functioning opt-in eugenics, where people can choose to use genetic testing to decide whether to abort a fetus that will become a disabled child, or even one of the unpreferred sex. People in high-risk populations use genetic testing to see if a marriage might lead to problems, such as if husband and wife are both Tay-Sachs carriers. The notion that you're going to be able to stop people from optimizing the health and well-being of their children is about as dumb as having schools hide their children's mental problems from parents.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 01:47pm

  3 million is also known as a lot, and yet Clinton's margin in the popular vote did not result in her becoming president. It is both true that Biden's plurality in the popular vote was 7 million votes and that a change in 43 thousand votes in the narrowest swing states would have given the presidency to Trump. This is the system by which we elect presidents. You are welcome to try to get enough votes to change that system, but until then, emphasizing the disparity in popular vote may be satisfying, but it's the electoral vote that decides who gets the office.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 05:56am

  On the other hand, referring to "rape babies" is wrong. Most importantly, a child is not responsible for how it was conceived. Secondarily, pregnancies conceived of rape are as irrelevant to the majority of abortions as lack of rape by transwomen in bathrooms is irrelevant to keeping transwomen out of women's bathrooms. They are rare cases used to stir up voters who might not be excited to action by the more mundane realities.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 05:46am

  Not exactly. Twitter started off as a site for everyone, but then the wokerati at the company and elsewhere became alarmed that non-woke opinions were becoming popular on the site, and determined to do something about it. Of course, being woke, they didn't think of it in terms of woke and non-woke, just in terms of right and wrong, good and evil, true and false. But the effect was the same, increasing resistance to wrong-think until people finally noticed and pushed back.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 04:42am

  Being suspicious of a site that incorporates "truth" in its name is entirely appropriate. It's a near certainty that right-wing sites springing up in response to left-wing bias on the major sites are themselves going to be useless and biased. They might grow into something better given enough time, or they might just metastasize the way Fox News has. It would be better if the major sites purged their left-wing bias and didn't splinter their user bases.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 04:35am

  No, I want the same rules for all people. If those rules resulted in banning Trump, those rules are wrong. And if course there is a question whether Twitter's rules are correct. Just because Twitter is free to set its own rules doesn't immunize them from criticism.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 04:32am

  On the contrary, I despise forced-birthers and am as pro-choice as it is possible to be. Women (only!) should have the right to terminate their pregnancies for any reason or no reason (including having a child of a different sex or not wanting to create a disabled or mentally retarded child).

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 04:27am

  Because the first-mover effect is hard to overcome. Twitter is enormous compared to the newcomers, and everyone is already there and using it, so it takes great effort to overcome that inertia and get people to go somewhere else. Presumably Trump's narcissism is such that it makes him unable to use a small service where he does not have an enormous number of followers, ironically illustrating that problem. Using "woke" in derision isn't about resisting social change, it is about calling out the lies of a ridiculously false constellation of left-wing ideas that should not be permitted to go unchallenged. Not calling Black people by racial slurs is welcome social change. Saying that transwomen are women is abject denial of physical reality.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 16 May, 2022 @ 04:17am

  Because they're bad services with poor leadership whose base membership is the disaffected alt-right decamping from elsewhere. It's hard to attract more people that way. The way to do that is Twitter-style. First pretend to be for everyone, then raise the woke temperature and hope to retain your membership because they haven't noticed.

• On the post: Boiling Elon Musk – Jumping Out Of The Pot Of Platform Law?

  

  Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 15 May, 2022 @ 07:34pm

  Ooh, gender-based epithets. How unwoke! You dumb prick.

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