Why the hate for Pam Geller? Well, she boasted of getting a mail from a young Norwegian man who planned "armed resistance" in Norway, and that she wouldn't out this guy because she thought it was justified. She deleted that post when ABB went on his massacre.
Pamela Geller goes way beyond "criticizing Islam". In her worldview, a war of eradication is the only option - genocide first, then maybe just cultural eradication once sufficiently many have been killed. You're entitled to your own opinions, and you're entitled to self defense, but when your opinions are this extreme, you have to settle for one or the other. Else you can't complain about being locked up for the rest of your life for safety reasons.
Not out of any sympathy for Pam Geller (a woman who in all likelihood could have prevented the Utøya massacre, but didn't), but there's a certain argument that if Facebook & co. are not responsible for what their users do - if they're a common carrier so to speak - then they should also have restrictions on what censorship they can do.
Because as you very well know, "they're a private company, they can do as they wish, first amendment doesn't apply to them" isn't without problems when it comes to a company at Facebook's size. Phone companies are private too, they still shouldn't be allowed to deny service to nazis.
If you want no legal liabilities for what your users use your service for, you should also have to give up the private freedom to discriminate.
"Corporate acquisition? Have fun reconciling the common customer databases"
Very apropos that, Jay Z and co are rattling the sabers and planning to sue the companies they bought the streaming service Tidal from. So even in streaming companies which should have a clear-cut userbase (especially when they have no free tier like Tidal), this is a problem. Or at least, enough to make noise over.
A year and some months later, Tidal is in trouble for not paying its bills. Jay Z thought Spotify was just lazy and greedy in not paying his multimillionaire buddies what they "deserve".
Now they're failing to pay their caterers, their taxi drivers and the indie labels foolish enough to trust them.
If you believe this crap, why don't you go ahead and publish e.g. the stolen sex tapes associated with "the fappening"? At least this lawyer has the consistency to admit that by his own logic, revenge porn should be perfectly legal.
I say that if you think there should be a right to privacy at all, then you must be against publication of stolen sex tapes.
Yes, sure, it's possible that the extremely rare politically relevant sex tape would be attempted suppressed under this provision. This is a hypothetical threat to democracy. But legalized sexual blackmail would be a far more serious threat. If catching the media's eye - for any reason - would make you fair game for any privacy invasion, who do you think the winners and losers will be?
My guess is that you'd get fewer normal men and especially normal women in the public eye, and more people like Trump, who don't give a damn about shame as long as they are the center of attention - in short, reality TV stars.
Sure. But going from that to "you can't trust your your bank receipt" is a stretch. Most of the bugs are going to be in code that doesn't really matter for the outcomes you care about, and even then, most of the time it's going to be really obvious (if your bank balance suddenly is 10^20, or temperature ends up as NaN in your weather model).
The real heavy lifting in scientific code goes on in numerical libraries. Those are written not just by specialist programmers, but programmers who are specialists on that specific topic. They are heavily scrutinized.
A tip is an interaction directly between me and the people who provided the service to me.
What kind of interaction? Is it an interaction between equals?
If tips is suitable for use between social equals, why don't your doctor or lawyer work for tips? Surely you'd like to incentivise good service there as well?
Another matter is that whether you want to or not, the interaction isn't just between you and your servant. In all monetary transactions there is always the regulatory party, the one you appeal to if someone doesn't pay or deliver what was paid for. In many states in the US, I understand that the regulatory party sees tips as wages in some ways, so that servers can be paid correspondingly below minimum wage.
"The act itself means nothing without the symbol" When I just gave you the example of wishing death on your mom, it was to explain why this is not true.
Your mom isn't a "symbol" in the commonly used sense, the sense that Jesus' name, or the cross, or the flag is. Still it's exactly the same underlying reason you won't do it: It makes you look like you are something you aren't - both to others, and maybe to yourself if you do it without good reason.
It is because stepping on a piece of paper with a name on it looks like a performative act, a ritual act of rejecting the person whose name is on it, that the "symbols have power". You - and maybe the teacher, it looks like - doesn't have a good grasp of performative statements.
It's got nothing to do with symbols, really. Why don't you just shout out now, "I wish that my mom dies of brain cancer!"? Is it because your mom is a symbol, and you are irrationally afraid that the sound waves emitting from your mouth have some sort of power to make it come true? No, of course not. It's because that would be a performative act. It would make you look like you assert something, something you don't wish to assert, and it will make you look like you are something you are probably not (namely a person who hates their mom).
Saluting flags or burning them, reciting pledges, writing notes with your ex's name on and throwing them in the fireplace, denying the holy spirit on youtube, you name it: these are loyalty displays. Teachers should not demand them, even as an "educational" tool, any more than they should steal from their students to teach them about stealing.
Anonymous coward, some theology for you: Paul was quite clear that it didn't really matter whether the meat you eat had been "sacrificed" to idols. He didn't care, he considered that the gods the idols represented probably did not exist, or anyway didn't matter if they did.
But he still would never eat meat, and told people to not eat meat if they knew it had been an idol sacrifice. Not for God's sake, but for the sake of the people for whom it WOULD matter. Both Pagans getting the wrong idea, and Christians having a hard time turning old habits.
So stepping on a note with "Jesus" on it would not matter in itself. But if you as a Christian do it deliberately as a ritual act, or in obedience to some silly college teacher, then it would matter.
I find the "lesson" manipulative either way. Compelled ritual acts always are - no matter whether the force behind them is subtle or crass.
And if it's always the word "Jesus", then of course there are going to be a lot of people in any class who have no objections to participate in a pointless ritual denigration of a religion, because it isn't their religion. That's one way it steps close to violating church/state separation (assuming the uni is state-sponsored - but even if it isn't, large civic organisations aiming to serve the whole community should adopt a policy of neutrality on their own).
But let's say it "works" as the instructor apparently also intended, and strengthens people in their Christian faith. Well, in that case it didn't strengthen them in their muslim faith or their atheist conviction. So it violates neutrality in another way.
This is different from the pledge of allegiance - rightly or not (I think no, and think the pledge should go away entirely), the pledge in the US is in a privileged position compared to other pledges, that Christianity isn't compared to other religions.
Rituals, reenactments, "role-playing" in educational contexts are manipulative. Just say no.
I am worried that he's working for the Atlantic Council, and that similarly elitist groups of people who think policy should be left to the experts (them) are wooing him like crazy.
But so far, it doesn't matter. Because everything they do is verifiable and up in the open. There are no anonymous sources, no authoritative narrative-pushing, just a lot of individually trivial but verified facts, that together paint really damning pictures.
As long as he sticks to his modus operandi, the worst that can happen is that they are selective about the general conflict they focus on. Even that is unlikely, since it seems the other 7 in Bellingcat are quite politically diverse (including even a former Stasi man, as you point out).
Bellingcat's MH17 coverage is truly damning. It does not rely on the error level analysis thing in the slightest.
It's rather funny. The guys can literally track the BUK launcher that shot down MH17 from town to town, with data you can verify yourself, but we're supposed to throw it all out because of an error level analysis that really wasn't sufficient to conclude editing?
That is exactly the crux of this issue: The suing California taxi drivers are arguing that they have more stringent background checks (requiring fingerprints to be regularly checked against a government database, among other things).
Another issue is that background checks don't matter if the background-cleared driver lets another drive for him, something that can be very lucrative. It is an issue in traditional taxis too, but judging by how Uber's background check seems to be a one-off thing, I bet it's a bigger issue with them.
"nobody's up in arms"? Where have you been, Timothy Geigner? You might have learned it from the clickbaiters at Kotaku, but you know who blew the whistle on the Shadows over Mordor demands? Totalbiscuit. Yeah, the youtuber with 1.8 million subscribers who's now staunchly on the gamergate side.
So much for the anonymous coward above's claim that this proves GG is all about hating women.
Don't forget that there are also people who will threaten to leave a bad review unless they get paid / free food / extra service of some sort. I tried to dig down in this story to make sure it wasn't that sort of extortion the critic was fined for, but my French isn't good enough, and I'm drowning in tertiary sources.
Yet another post on Democracy that fails to realise what it is. It isn't enough that you theoretically have an opportunity to influence decisions, if in practice there are people who wield influence a thousand times yours.
So Wikipedia, for instance, is extremely undemocratic. It has colossal unacknowledged power hierarchies. Some people are high up in that system, others know how to game it, they have more power in the collective decisions of Wikipedia than you ever will.
Similarly, any system that relies on the mass mobilization of more or less disinterested participants, is going to be undemocratic. Some people are immensely much better than others on mobilization, from being talented PR people, or having the means to employ them.
This is why systems based on mass voting, whether in elections or referenda, are undemocratic.
To make a truly democratic system, you need random sampling. This was obvious to the classical Athenians, who staffed all juries and almost all important positions by lottery. When a small randomly selected group makes decisions, the people in that group are much, much more equal in power. It's not a fight of who are best at mobilising the disinterested, because when you get picked in the lottery you have a much stronger incentive to get interested, to independently investigate the issues.
Slashdot almost had the right idea, by distributing mod points randomly. They had another part of the right idea in metamod, in that the comments you would see there would be randomly chosen for you. But in practice it failed pretty hard, as splitting it up like that made no sense, and they didn't even sort the comments by score.
Get forums right, then we can start talking about improving politics. Not because the latter isn't important, but because this is a great area to examine the problems. Believe me, randomization is needed. Threaded discussion is also needed.
Re: Re:
That's right, just like there are plenty of starving artists being useful idiots for RIAA and its ilk.
Re: Why all the hate for Pam Geller?
Why the hate for Pam Geller? Well, she boasted of getting a mail from a young Norwegian man who planned "armed resistance" in Norway, and that she wouldn't out this guy because she thought it was justified. She deleted that post when ABB went on his massacre.
Pamela Geller goes way beyond "criticizing Islam". In her worldview, a war of eradication is the only option - genocide first, then maybe just cultural eradication once sufficiently many have been killed. You're entitled to your own opinions, and you're entitled to self defense, but when your opinions are this extreme, you have to settle for one or the other. Else you can't complain about being locked up for the rest of your life for safety reasons.
Not out of any sympathy for Pam Geller (a woman who in all likelihood could have prevented the Utøya massacre, but didn't), but there's a certain argument that if Facebook & co. are not responsible for what their users do - if they're a common carrier so to speak - then they should also have restrictions on what censorship they can do.
Because as you very well know, "they're a private company, they can do as they wish, first amendment doesn't apply to them" isn't without problems when it comes to a company at Facebook's size. Phone companies are private too, they still shouldn't be allowed to deny service to nazis.
If you want no legal liabilities for what your users use your service for, you should also have to give up the private freedom to discriminate.
Re: Nothing special
"Corporate acquisition? Have fun reconciling the common customer databases"
Very apropos that, Jay Z and co are rattling the sabers and planning to sue the companies they bought the streaming service Tidal from. So even in streaming companies which should have a clear-cut userbase (especially when they have no free tier like Tidal), this is a problem. Or at least, enough to make noise over.
A year and some months later, Tidal is in trouble for not paying its bills. Jay Z thought Spotify was just lazy and greedy in not paying his multimillionaire buddies what they "deserve".
Now they're failing to pay their caterers, their taxi drivers and the indie labels foolish enough to trust them.
Re: Re: Re:
If you believe this crap, why don't you go ahead and publish e.g. the stolen sex tapes associated with "the fappening"? At least this lawyer has the consistency to admit that by his own logic, revenge porn should be perfectly legal.
I say that if you think there should be a right to privacy at all, then you must be against publication of stolen sex tapes.
Yes, sure, it's possible that the extremely rare politically relevant sex tape would be attempted suppressed under this provision. This is a hypothetical threat to democracy. But legalized sexual blackmail would be a far more serious threat. If catching the media's eye - for any reason - would make you fair game for any privacy invasion, who do you think the winners and losers will be?
My guess is that you'd get fewer normal men and especially normal women in the public eye, and more people like Trump, who don't give a damn about shame as long as they are the center of attention - in short, reality TV stars.
Re:
Sure. But going from that to "you can't trust your your bank receipt" is a stretch. Most of the bugs are going to be in code that doesn't really matter for the outcomes you care about, and even then, most of the time it's going to be really obvious (if your bank balance suddenly is 10^20, or temperature ends up as NaN in your weather model).
The real heavy lifting in scientific code goes on in numerical libraries. Those are written not just by specialist programmers, but programmers who are specialists on that specific topic. They are heavily scrutinized.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Traditionaly here...
Re: "Hospitality included"
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"The act itself means nothing without the symbol" When I just gave you the example of wishing death on your mom, it was to explain why this is not true.
Your mom isn't a "symbol" in the commonly used sense, the sense that Jesus' name, or the cross, or the flag is. Still it's exactly the same underlying reason you won't do it: It makes you look like you are something you aren't - both to others, and maybe to yourself if you do it without good reason.
Re: Re:
It is because stepping on a piece of paper with a name on it looks like a performative act, a ritual act of rejecting the person whose name is on it, that the "symbols have power". You - and maybe the teacher, it looks like - doesn't have a good grasp of performative statements.
It's got nothing to do with symbols, really. Why don't you just shout out now, "I wish that my mom dies of brain cancer!"? Is it because your mom is a symbol, and you are irrationally afraid that the sound waves emitting from your mouth have some sort of power to make it come true? No, of course not. It's because that would be a performative act. It would make you look like you assert something, something you don't wish to assert, and it will make you look like you are something you are probably not (namely a person who hates their mom).
Saluting flags or burning them, reciting pledges, writing notes with your ex's name on and throwing them in the fireplace, denying the holy spirit on youtube, you name it: these are loyalty displays. Teachers should not demand them, even as an "educational" tool, any more than they should steal from their students to teach them about stealing.
Re: Re: So apparently his suggestion to confront the symbol resulted in him being threatened and later reported.
Anonymous coward, some theology for you: Paul was quite clear that it didn't really matter whether the meat you eat had been "sacrificed" to idols. He didn't care, he considered that the gods the idols represented probably did not exist, or anyway didn't matter if they did.
But he still would never eat meat, and told people to not eat meat if they knew it had been an idol sacrifice. Not for God's sake, but for the sake of the people for whom it WOULD matter. Both Pagans getting the wrong idea, and Christians having a hard time turning old habits.
So stepping on a note with "Jesus" on it would not matter in itself. But if you as a Christian do it deliberately as a ritual act, or in obedience to some silly college teacher, then it would matter.
I find the "lesson" manipulative either way. Compelled ritual acts always are - no matter whether the force behind them is subtle or crass.
And if it's always the word "Jesus", then of course there are going to be a lot of people in any class who have no objections to participate in a pointless ritual denigration of a religion, because it isn't their religion. That's one way it steps close to violating church/state separation (assuming the uni is state-sponsored - but even if it isn't, large civic organisations aiming to serve the whole community should adopt a policy of neutrality on their own).
But let's say it "works" as the instructor apparently also intended, and strengthens people in their Christian faith. Well, in that case it didn't strengthen them in their muslim faith or their atheist conviction. So it violates neutrality in another way.
This is different from the pledge of allegiance - rightly or not (I think no, and think the pledge should go away entirely), the pledge in the US is in a privileged position compared to other pledges, that Christianity isn't compared to other religions.
Rituals, reenactments, "role-playing" in educational contexts are manipulative. Just say no.
Makes perfect sense to me, they're both in the business of poisoning people for profit!
Re: Since specifically mention Bellingcat, readers should know of a "fully discredited Bellingcat MH17 report".
I am worried that he's working for the Atlantic Council, and that similarly elitist groups of people who think policy should be left to the experts (them) are wooing him like crazy.
But so far, it doesn't matter. Because everything they do is verifiable and up in the open. There are no anonymous sources, no authoritative narrative-pushing, just a lot of individually trivial but verified facts, that together paint really damning pictures.
As long as he sticks to his modus operandi, the worst that can happen is that they are selective about the general conflict they focus on. Even that is unlikely, since it seems the other 7 in Bellingcat are quite politically diverse (including even a former Stasi man, as you point out).
Bellingcat's MH17 coverage is truly damning. It does not rely on the error level analysis thing in the slightest.
It's rather funny. The guys can literally track the BUK launcher that shot down MH17 from town to town, with data you can verify yourself, but we're supposed to throw it all out because of an error level analysis that really wasn't sufficient to conclude editing?
Arrested development, or should we say frozen?
Yeah, well, video games might not be the only escape that can inspire that kind of reaction. I thought this one was funny:
http://kindofnormal.com/wumo/2015/01/16
Re: Safety from what?
That is exactly the crux of this issue: The suing California taxi drivers are arguing that they have more stringent background checks (requiring fingerprints to be regularly checked against a government database, among other things).
Another issue is that background checks don't matter if the background-cleared driver lets another drive for him, something that can be very lucrative. It is an issue in traditional taxis too, but judging by how Uber's background check seems to be a one-off thing, I bet it's a bigger issue with them.
"nobody's up in arms"? Where have you been, Timothy Geigner? You might have learned it from the clickbaiters at Kotaku, but you know who blew the whistle on the Shadows over Mordor demands? Totalbiscuit. Yeah, the youtuber with 1.8 million subscribers who's now staunchly on the gamergate side.
So much for the anonymous coward above's claim that this proves GG is all about hating women.
Dysfunctionality of reviews
Don't forget that there are also people who will threaten to leave a bad review unless they get paid / free food / extra service of some sort. I tried to dig down in this story to make sure it wasn't that sort of extortion the critic was fined for, but my French isn't good enough, and I'm drowning in tertiary sources.
Yet another post on Democracy that fails to realise what it is. It isn't enough that you theoretically have an opportunity to influence decisions, if in practice there are people who wield influence a thousand times yours.
So Wikipedia, for instance, is extremely undemocratic. It has colossal unacknowledged power hierarchies. Some people are high up in that system, others know how to game it, they have more power in the collective decisions of Wikipedia than you ever will.
Similarly, any system that relies on the mass mobilization of more or less disinterested participants, is going to be undemocratic. Some people are immensely much better than others on mobilization, from being talented PR people, or having the means to employ them.
This is why systems based on mass voting, whether in elections or referenda, are undemocratic.
To make a truly democratic system, you need random sampling. This was obvious to the classical Athenians, who staffed all juries and almost all important positions by lottery. When a small randomly selected group makes decisions, the people in that group are much, much more equal in power. It's not a fight of who are best at mobilising the disinterested, because when you get picked in the lottery you have a much stronger incentive to get interested, to independently investigate the issues.
Slashdot almost had the right idea, by distributing mod points randomly. They had another part of the right idea in metamod, in that the comments you would see there would be randomly chosen for you. But in practice it failed pretty hard, as splitting it up like that made no sense, and they didn't even sort the comments by score.
Get forums right, then we can start talking about improving politics. Not because the latter isn't important, but because this is a great area to examine the problems. Believe me, randomization is needed. Threaded discussion is also needed.