The twitter files broke so many people's brains. They revealed essentially nothing of consequence, but it validates those who were already convinced that twitter was "silencing conservative voices".
Of course when we look at any sort of success metrics that actually matter to a twitter personality, the top spots are overwhelmingly conservative pundits, and essentially always have been.
I'm just responding to one flimsy anecdote with my own flimsy anecdote. You can believe me or not. But I would suggest you ask yourself why you responded to me with this and not the guy I responded to, who also didn't provide evidence where they were.
Just for other people's benefit: this comment is an excellent example of the kind of harassment women and others face online. When they try to relate their lived experiences, they are questioned relentlessly and asked for proof of things that obviously cannot be proven in a conclusive manner. (And if any proof is given, the goalposts are typically moved.)
If your first response to someone saying "I was harassed" is "I need objective evidence before I believe that this could possibly have happened", you're part of the problem.
1. This person didn't claim THEY were harassed. They claimed others were harassed. This was not THEIR lived experience. They were talking about harassment secondhand.
2. The secondhand claims of inappropriate language were made on the internet. The internet is different than the physical world. Much text typed on the internet is/can be recorded. It is a very common practice for someone who is being harassed on the internet to share with others the record of their harassment. The internet is perfect for this. It's certainly much messier out in the physical world to prove which is the analogy you seem to be trying to apply to internet communication.
3. I just asked WHERE it happened, not to provide a precise record of the claims. It wasn't a tall ask to respond with an internet location (i.e. channel).
4. Questioning claims is NOT harassment, especially when the cost to produce evidence supporting the claim approaches zero (as on the internet). This is a toxic mentality to employ, though I'm sure you think you are being noble with your #believeallclaims approach. If anything, people who employ a "DON'T QUESTION IT!" approach do themselves a huge disservice, as that is probably the least persuasive tactic to do and immediately signals a huge red flag to any neutral onlookers.
The topic here is asking for where secondhand claims of harassment on a part of the internet happened, with the context of it being contrary to MY lived experience in similar parts of the internet. I'm trying to square how this secondhand claim could be contradictory to MY lived experience, and to update my understanding if given new information.
As a last rhetorical example/hypothetical: Let's say I made a claim that someone replied to a tweet of mine this week calling me the n-word. Do you automatically believe me? If you sought to prove my claim by looking at my tweets, are you a racist that is harassing me? What if there is absolutely no record of the alleged tweet reply happening/existing (even accounting for a potential delete)? Would you ever waver in your belief of my claim?
That's great! For the sake of humanity, can you please start documenting your realizations/interpretations in some sort of readable/understandable format, with your reasoning? Especially those realizations/interpretations which are not super widely held, as it'll help move the ball forward with humanity understanding how things have evolved.
If you did this, then perhaps you'd be a bit less frustrated when others come to your interpretation years later. And if you are looking to status seek, you can gain some status points in the process!
This is not meant as a criticism, hopefully more of an inquiry if you so choose. Is it possible that your 'feeling' of your brain being irreparably damaged is actually factually incorrect? And that your assumptions/model of the plasticity of the brain may be wrong and skew a bit negative?
Is it possible that these negative thought patterns are holding you back? Awhile back, I became aware of some irrational negative thought patterns I had myself, and worked on reframing them, and it helped immensely w/ confidence.
This is what therapists have told me, but when my mind totally blanks when asked a question in a meeting, or when I can't vocalize a coherent thought without stumbling over myself, or when I have to read a paragraph 20 times over for the information to stick, I have a hard time believing it's just a negative self-perception.
On examining the negative thought patterns, I think there's at least a couple parts to it:
1. If you very much believe no amount of physical health interventions will have any cognitive effects, then it seems like the probability of you sticking with any sort of health/fitness routine is very low. If in fact, health/diet/fitness DOES have positive cognitive effects (it's been proven scientifically and there are tons of anecdotes), you may end up depriving yourself of a really great thing for improving quality of life and cognition. So examining the possibility that your cognition is not doomed and immune to physical health interventions could greatly increase the odds of improvement.
2. In 2 of your examples, they were social situations. In my experience, negative thought patterns can definitely impact that. I'm saying this somewhat loosely, as I'm not an expert, but have done research in the past on this: Thoughts can trigger bio/physiological responses in the body/brain that can definitely impact cognition.
Would you actually be interested in reading about Wikimedia finances though? Wikimedia is a non-profit and posts all of their financial data publicly [1], why not go read it there?
What's interesting is that you somehow know that the author is someone who hates wikipedia, yet you refuse to read his article(s). How did you arrive at the conclusion that the author is someone who is heavily biased against Wikimedia and shouldn't be trusted? Are you just memetically repeating something others have said on the internet about the author, or did you read other articles/claims from this author and independently arrive at your conclusion?
If the latter, how could you have not researched Wikimedia finances even a little to validate claims the author makes? In which case, you would have something substantive to communicate to others on the internet to be aware of about the claims of the author, instead of the anti-intellectual ad hominem approach you took here.
I explained my approach in other comments. Look up the bullshit asymmetry principal for why I don't owe you the answers to your accusatory style questions and your "what's interesting" observations. Neither do I owe the author anything more than pointing out a history of heavy bias. You, like the author, are indeed ignorable. No one owes you a conversation and your cross-examining style is against HN rules.
You dismissed the article and author by labeling it a 'hit piece' by 'someone who hates wikipedia'. When other users asked if you had any substantive critiques of the claims in the article, you responded by saying you don't need to read or respond to the article's claims because of the 'bullshit asymmetry principle' that you adhere to.
The next natural question that I asked is how you arrived at the conclusion that the article/author is heavily biased (or filled with 'bullshit' as you have stated)? You respond by implying what I was asking is 'bullshit', and you don't need to answer any questions about it.
Overall, this thread/tangent has not been constructive. I was responding to your ad hominem on the author and shallow dismissal (which is against HN guidelines) of the article with no supporting arguments/remarks/evidence. Yes, my tone was more direct, as I'm not a fan of shallow dismissals based on ad hominem attacks. Probably my mistake for even engaging given the content of the comments that were posted to others.
Like you have stated a number of times here, you don't need to read/respond to anything you don't want to and you don't owe anybody anything. For future reference, this is just an implied rule in life, and doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Feel free to ignore this comment as you have stated you will, and I definitely don't expect/want anything else out of this conversation.
> You dismissed the article and author by labeling it a 'hit piece' by 'someone who hates wikipedia'.
Both of which are factual.
> The next natural question that I asked
You didn't just ask the next "natural" question. You were snarky, made accusatory questions, and broke HN rules.
> You respond by implying what I was asking is 'bullshit', and you don't need to answer any questions about it.
You left out the part where I said don't owe you the answers to your accusatory style questions. Which is the crux of the problem.
> For future reference, this is just an implied rule in life, and doesn't need to be explicitly stated.
Thanks for the advice. Here it is again explicitly stated because I'll continue to use my style of communication:
I don't have any obligation to reply to heavily biased "journalism" or the cross-examining style questions you used.
> I was responding to your ad hominem on the author and shallow dismissal (which is against HN guidelines)
It was ad hominem, but of the useful kind. It was not a shallow dismissal because I gave a solid reason folks should ignore his writing on that specific subject. That's the opposite of a shallow dismissal. All of my comments got a lot of up-votes. People here clearly found my observations useful. And my defense of my observations useful.
In contrast to comments similar to yours which got flagged.
> Feel free to ignore this comment as you have stated you will
Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said I'll ignore any future comment you make. I said something different. Which anyone can re-read and make up their own mind about.
How can you be sure any research won't result in violence? How do you establish whether a given piece of research/data will result in violence?
Is your basic operating model for this: "Never show any data that shows there are group differences, because it can be used by violent extremists"?
If that is your operating model, do you support getting rid of ANY data out there that shows differences between groups in ability/behavior, as it could result in violence? For instance, should we ban all public violent crime reporting, if that showed group differences, as it would be something used by those violent extremists you mention?
> This chapter shows that the right wing's essentialized construct of the Jew as criminal in the Weimar period was translated into policy and action in Germany after 1933. Until 1938, when the Nazis unequivocally embraced the guiding principle that “The Jew is outside the law,” they often took pains to charge individual Jews with specific crimes, usually focusing on technical aspects of tax laws and currency-exchange regulations. On the one hand, they sought to exploit the racist agenda and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the other, they wanted to give the impression that the Nazi State was simply zealous in applying the letter of the law.
But making it known that the line of questioning will bring violence to others is implying that if the person continues the line of questioning, they are then knowingly and intentionally bringing violence to trans people. In a lot of legal systems and with informal norms, if you know your action will cause harm to others, and you do it anyway, you are considered a cause of the harm.
Claims that an action can cause violence are ultimately claims that the action causes violence.
I think with the popular conception/definition of walkability and the assigned importance of that conception is a little over-rated.
I personally feel like it overvalues commercial activity (restaurants, retail, grocery, entertainment). Obviously, it depends on how often you want to partake in said commercial activities as far as how you would value it.
I would love if the conception of walkability could also take into account:
'How far can I walk without having to worry about cars/crossing streets/waiting for lights?'
'How safe/comfortable is the walk? Will I be walking by people who will harass me/be high on drugs/try to sell me something?'
'How easy is it to string together a run without having to stop?'
'How busy are the sidewalks? Will I have to be dodging people on their phones all the time?'
'Is it easy to take a dog for a walk? Or are there limited green spaces?'
'Are there social/interest groups nearby that meet up?'
I find some of these types of factors much more important than closeness to X number of commercial venues. So a busy downtown street may get a high walkability score (i.e. Walk Score) because of the restuarants/retail/theaters, but it might be atrocious to my conception of walkability.
As an extreme example: Times Square in NYC is considered a "Walker's Paradise" with a walkability score of 100 on Walk Score. But it seems like the worst possible place to walk, and most NYC locals I know avoid that area like the plague.
I agree with this. Having been in times square, it was nothing but being constantly bumped, having to say "No" to people hawking their CD to support their burgeoning music career, and keeping your wallet close by to avoid being pickpocketed.
The strip in Las Vegas is not far behind. While people didn't tend to bump me, there was a never endings series of people trying to get me to buy their prostitutes for the night.
I grew up in a rural area, and I experienced zero instances of loud ATVs and shotguns where I lived, at any time of day. This view sounds like a TV trope, which one might lean on if they don't have much in-person experience of living in a rural area themselves.
The advice to try it before you buy it is sound though.
There was no accusation of making up anything, as I cannot possibly know your personal experience.
What I was doing was pushing back on using comically outlier events as something representative of rural living, that the GP would have to reckon with if they were to live in a rural setting. Nobody I know who has lived in a rural environment has ever experienced what you highlighted. If you did experience that, it sounds like you just had shitty neighbors or you lived next to a recreational area where that is more likely to happen, and I would caution against extrapolating that experience to being the norm among rural residents.
The irony is I never have been woken up by ATV's and shotguns in decades growing up in a rural environment, but have certainly been woken up by those things a number of times in urban environments.
It's great that you experienced the idyllic version, but note that the phrase "rural area" glosses over a diverse array of places, and that your experience may not be universal.
