Hyman Rosen 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Another Day, Another Blatant Attack On The 1st Amendment From The Florida GOP

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2023 @ 04:29pm

    Did I say something? Anyway, your problem (in this context; I don't mean to imply that you have only one) isn't that you support laws against freedom of speech, it's that you don't recognize that legal silencing of speech based on viewpoint by private entities remains censorship. You want censorship outsourced to entities not bound by the 1st Amendment, and will then claim that it's not censorship as long as the ideas being silenced are ones you hate. It is legal censorship when Amazon refuses to sell When Harry Became Sally and legal censorship when Florida's public school libraries remove books with LGB+T content from their shelves.

  • On the post: Another Day, Another Blatant Attack On The 1st Amendment From The Florida GOP

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2023 @ 04:21pm

    Of course this bill is idiotic and would be unconstitutional if passed, which is unlikely. Just as anyone can file a lawsuit making any claims they want, any legislator can propose a bill containing anything they want. Stupid legislators like Brodeur will produce stupid bills. I'm curious who you think has been claiming that Republicans, Florida or otherwise, DeSantis or otherwise, are fighting for free speech? Republicans are, and always have been, opposed to freedom, whether it's library censorship, pushing religion in schools, trying to shut down drag shows, trying to shut down live or published porn, forcing recitation of loyalty oaths, and on and on. The Republican opposition to New York Times Co. v. Sullivan is certainly against freedom of speech, not for it. If anything, all defamation claims should be held to the actual malice standard, not just claims against certain special people. The only thing I can think of is Citizens United, where liberals were totally against freedom of even clearly political speech, and sought to shut down such speech using the excuse that the speakers had organized themselves as a corporation, and then falsely claimed that such silencing was OK because "corporations are not people" and that their opponents believed otherwise. Republicans make occasional noise about opposing cancel culture, but only in self-serving ways, when the speech that is canceled is something they favor. They didn't oppose retaliation against athletes who knelt during the Anthem, for example.

  • On the post: As Twitter Goes Down Yet Again, Report Highlights How Fragile Its Infrastructure Has Become

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 02 Mar, 2023 @ 10:37pm

    Censorship is the act of the censor, silencing opinions based on viewpoint on platforms the censor controls. The fact that the censured is legal is irrelevant. The fact that the silenced may be able to speak on a different platform is irrelevant.

  • On the post: As Twitter Goes Down Yet Again, Report Highlights How Fragile Its Infrastructure Has Become

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 02 Mar, 2023 @ 07:37pm

    It doesn't matter how many times I would "try", any more than it mattered on another thread where I pointed out that all of Scotland was recently "fixated" on a male rapist who claimed he was a woman and wanted to be sent to a women's prison. Just like defenders of police do, woke ideologues will take every example as an "isolated incident", or "not really a platform", or any of the other usual excuses for why a discomfiting truth doesn't count. Of course I knew this; the canonical example of The Babylon Bee being suspended for satirically giving Dr. Rachel Levine a "man of the year" award is well known, so asking for an example that will be immediately rejected is just sea-lioning.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 27 Feb, 2023 @ 07:33am

    Well, if the site refuses to recognize how insightful I am, I can at least bask in the reflected glory of having prompted the insightful post. (I'm the "Hateful Hijacker", posting there as AC to skip the moderation queue. Maybe I should adopt that as my moniker.)

  • On the post: Netflix’s Unnecessary Password Crackdown Is Already A Hot Mess

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 08 Feb, 2023 @ 11:06am

    I loved it because even wokest Hollywood recognizes that woke ideology is widely hated and ripe for satire and attack. Especially the notion that being a part of the woke ideological favored victim groups gives someone a "way of knowing" that's privileged over factual reality. What you say is especially funny because Lydia Tár is herself lesbian. But lesbians are now the enemy of the woke, because they refuse to become romantically and sexually involved with men who claim to be women, only with real women.

  • On the post: AMC’s ‘Fix’ For Declining Movie Theater Attendance? Charging You More Money To Sit In The Same Seats

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 07 Feb, 2023 @ 07:22pm

    AMC A*List

    The AMC AList subscription program charges $25 per month for seeing up to three movies per *week, with no surcharge for premium formats like IMAX and Dolby. They have also announced that this new Sightlines surcharge will not apply to A*List. This program is an absolutely incredible bargain; in NYC where I live, a single IMAX ticket costs more than the monthly fee. If you use it to its full extent, as I do, you are paying only $2 per movie. Unlike MoviePass, A*List is run by AMC itself, so there isn't that shadiness going on here. I don't know if it's sustainable, but I've been a member for over five years (suspended during the pandemic theater closures), and I've had no trouble at all, and I've seen so many movies that I would otherwise never have gone to.

  • On the post: Pretty Much Every Expert Agrees That Elon Has Made Twitter’s Child Sexual Abuse Problem Worse

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 07 Feb, 2023 @ 06:12am

    It's hilarious how the use-mention problem shows up with respect to child pornography. Just like using the "n-word" in hypothetical legal cases about workplace harassment. There's something very wrong with a system that would prosecute people who are looking for child pornography in order to tell people accurately how much child pornography exists.

  • On the post: Netflix’s Unnecessary Password Crackdown Is Already A Hot Mess

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 07 Feb, 2023 @ 05:57am

    I'm a member of AMC A*List. I love going to movies. I saw 150 in theaters in 2022 and I'm at about 15 this year. Nothing was really offensively woke, even when touching on social justice topics. I did love the scene in Tár where Cate Blanchett demolishes a "BIPOC pansexual" student who disdains Bach as a dead cis white man, even though it's used against her later. Let's see what else I remember. Bros played all sorts of queer identities for laughs. In A Man Called Otto, Tom Hanks is very nice to and accepting of a young trans man kicked out of home by parents. Women Talking is very unrealistic in how the women talk, including having a trans man, given their supposed illiterate religious background - it's easy more like College Philosophy Students Talking. Gangubai Kathiawadi has a trans woman politician as a villain.

  • On the post: Netflix’s Unnecessary Password Crackdown Is Already A Hot Mess

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2023 @ 08:25pm

    AMC Too

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/business/amc-movie-ticket-prices/index.html AMC is now planning to charge more for better seats at movie theaters. It's a vicious process. By definition, only your customers are giving you money, so if you want more money, it becomes so tempting to try to soak your existing customers for more instead of increasing your base, especially in saturated markets. They probably recognize that it will engender ill will, but hope they will make more than they lose.

  • On the post: It’s Time To Codify The ‘NY Times v. Sullivan’ Standard Into Law

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2023 @ 10:16am

    Large generic speech platforms absolutely attacked freedom of speech, by silencing opinions based on viewpoint. Freedom of speech is not limited to the 1st Amendment and government censorship. Freedom of speech is the ability to speak freely on a platform without being silenced by the owners of the platform when they don't like the viewpoint of the speech. The fact that a private platform is allowed to censor in this way does not make it any less a deprivation of freedom of speech for the silenced. Neither does it matter that the silenced can find another place to speak, because censorship is the act of the censor, silencing speech on the platforms the censor controls.

  • On the post: Elon Musk Is Running Scared From Mastodon; Cuts Off The Best Tool For Finding Your Twitter Followers There

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2023 @ 10:54am

    I think it's been said here before; you can tell a lot by whether a wall is meant to keep people out or to keep people in.

  • On the post: Incredibly, Facebook Is Still Figuring Out That Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2023 @ 01:46am

    Form a consistent set of principles, say what they are, and apply them evenhandedly. Then people might not be happy with what they see, but they will at least be able to understand why they're seeing it. Even better, offer them the option to see everything, so that they can verify that the material they are normally not seeing is correctly absent according to those principles. (Not real spam, though, on the grounds that essentially no people want to see it. Maybe a representative sample.) Don't ban people, only content. The same person might violate the principles sometimes and not at other times. If you live in a society that holds freedom of speech as a foundational value, then if you aim to be a generic speech site (rather than one taking sides on some issues), make your principles viewpoint-neutral. Let the people tell each other what they think, rather than you silencing some of them. Offer users the ability and tools to set up groups that can filter content as they wish for themselves. Then people can sort themselves into those groups, and be happy with not seeing opposing views. Accept criticism when warranted and take considered action, but do not panic at the inevitable attacks. Stand firmly behind the principles you've articulated, unless you find the counterarguments valid, and then gracefully admit that you've changed your mind. Try to figure out the attack vectors beforehand. Understand that people will attempt to game whatever you do, and prepare for that. Don't flail at individual attacks. Take time to understand what is happening, and determine a response that will constructively address the issue, recognizing that whatever solution you attempt will in turn become a new target for attacks. Listen to what your technical people tell you; otherwise you'll fall into the Truman quote about Eisenhower - "He'll say 'Do this!' and 'Do that!' and nothing will happen."

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2023 @ 05:17pm

    E14n starts even earlier than you think. Instead of people building stable, sustainable businesses that will throw off a steady profit for their owners, the Shark Tank / VC mentality has taken over, with people looking to create lottery tickets, hoping that they will be able to quickly sell out for millions. No one cares about the product, least of all about its quality - that's just an afterthought to prime the lottery pump. That's what happens when the wrong kind of capitalists become folk heroes.

  • On the post: Court Laughs Off OAN Conspiracy Network’s Claim It Was ‘Censored’ By DirecTV

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2023 @ 11:32am

    Prior Restraint

    some speech wont be tolerated per their discretion they either agree to that or go somewhere else
    This is known as "prior restraint". It's unconstitutional when the government does it, and violates the principles of free speech when private platforms do it.

  • On the post: Facebook And Instagram Agree To Restore Trump’s Accounts

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2023 @ 02:47am

    Large generic speech platforms should not be censoring opinions based on viewpoint. If they do, they should be encouraged / shamed / bought out to stop doing that.

  • On the post: YouTube’s New Content Policies Around Mature Content Results In Chaos

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 28 Jan, 2023 @ 05:42pm

    Obviously it's time to move these videos to Mastodon.

  • On the post: DirecTV Kicks Right Wing Newsmax Off Its Cable Lineup, Prompting More Baseless GOP Whining About ‘Censorship’

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 27 Jan, 2023 @ 08:50am

    These stupid cable-versus-service wars go on all the time, as the services demand more money from the cable providers to carry them and the cable services demur. Then both sides propagandize to try to get viewers to influence the other side into surrendering. There are no beleaguered good guys in any of these fights.

  • On the post: Twitter’s ‘Fixed’ Blue Verification Program Still Horribly Broken, As The Taliban Gets Verified

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 25 Jan, 2023 @ 11:40am

    The social order makes the rules for itself, through spoken and unspoken consensus. Part of the social order is having the self-control to live life in a way that may not maximize personal satisfaction but contributes to wider benefits for everyone else; this is something that, in a proper society, is inculcated into children from the moment they are able to understand what they are told. Depending on how society chooses to organize itself, people may be free to abandon the social norms that maintain it, but they cannot be free from the consequences of doing that, and we who are not willfully blind woke ideologues see those consequences every day.

  • On the post: Twitter’s ‘Fixed’ Blue Verification Program Still Horribly Broken, As The Taliban Gets Verified

    Hyman Rosen ( profile ), 25 Jan, 2023 @ 08:03am

    Go to school, pay attention, and learn knowledge and skills. Form stable relationships, get married, do not have children out of wedlock, stay married, and raise children in two-parent families. Use what was learned in school to find productive jobs. Do not glorify crime and misogyny in poplar culture. When others commit crimes or behave antisocially, call them out and report them to the police as necessary. Do not commit casual low-level crimes such as littering, shoplifting, or fare-beating. Do not use drugs or alcohol to the extent that it interferes with the rest of life excessively. Do not fight with other people. Do not use excessively foul language.

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