I love the fact that this thread is empty while the one about deplatforming white supremacists is chock-full of people screaming about free speech. Really makes the whole thing a bit blatant.
That's not what I said. Do not put words into my digital mouth.
I said, silence -is- complicity with white supremacy. If you, after all of the injustices demonstrated in enormous detail over the last 400 years, are still silent when white supremacists continue to oppress the oppressed, you are complicit in white supremacy.
We are talking about two different things. I claimed that purging white supremacists from platforms is a good thing. I also claimed that silence is complicity. These are orthogonal. I am not a decision maker for one of these platforms, and don't feel the need to draw a specific line in the sand. Your attempt at a "gotcha" is fruitless, I'm afraid.
Let me turn it around, do you think that white supremacists deserve a platform?
It wasn't supposed to be a "gotcha" at all. Any reasonable person would have agreed that silence isn't an expression of complicity with white supremacy, or of sexual consent, or a love of progressive metal.
However, since you insist upon evading the obvious logical conclusion that your own freely-offered premises suggest, there is no turning anything around. This thread is over.
Do you mind explaining that statement, as I’m sure you can understand that at face value it sounds pretty extreme. Actions in silence are more impactful than being loud but doing nothing.
This is a fallacy, I'm sorry. It's true that it can be impossible to determine what the specific characteristics of a belief that make it okay to silence, but that _doesn't mean there aren't differences_. We don't know when an acorn becomes a tree, but we know there is a difference. We can safely say that a tree is not an acorn, even though we don't know when that transition occurs.
We _know_ it's wrong to advocate for the ethnic cleansing of people. We _know_ it's wrong to talk about how Blacks are genetically inferior. We _know_ it's wrong to spread lies about how Jews control mass media. We can silence these evil, ignorant beliefs without being afraid that all other beliefs are at risk of being silenced.
The German state has been banning and imprisoning sympathizers of white supremacist groups for a few decades by now. I'm not seeing a mass censorship of non-hate-based ideologies there.
I'm not seeing the slippery slope. To say that purging one ideology is the same as all means that you see no difference between hateful supremacist positions and any other types of ideas. Which is ridiculous.
I can't argue in good faith with someone who believes that white supremacists should continue to have a platform. I hope you do some research and look back on this comment with shame. White supremacists do not deserve a platform, flat out. Disagreeing with this is explicitly agreeing with white supremacy.
Do you think it is correct or incorrect to deplatform white supremacists? Do you think white supremacists deserve a platform?
Edit: I've asked variants of this question several times in this thread, all without response. I can safely assume that those who won't freely answer this question are (attempting) to hide their bias.
This kind of half-measure response is exactly why white supremacy continues to thrive in America. You cannot argue with a white supremacist on reasonable ground, their world view is intrinsically incorrect, and I am convinced that you cannot convince a white supremacist they are wrong through debate.
> Nor is it ethically palpable.
Do not ascribe your ethics onto me. I think it is extremely ethical to deny white supremacists a platform. In fact, it is the most ethical choice. Those who refuse to interact with our society in good faith do not deserve the stage.
White supremacy does not thrive in America. That is a fantasy.
I'd love to link you to a Scott Alexander essay at this point which examined that very question and concluded, based on evidence and data, that there might be a few thousand genuine white supremacists in America. But of course he deleted his blog so I can't.
This is why so many people are arguing with you. The statements by the left and the observable reality are so out of whack it's clear it's a "dog whistle", as they like to say. The revolutionary left are using the word white to mean something quite different to its normal definition. It seems rather to be used to mean "anyone who isn't black" or more perniciously, "anyone conservative". Alexander had a great essay on this redefinition of whiteness as well, but alas ...
Yeah it's kind of shocking to see people defend white nationalist speech on private platforms. Of all the marginalized groups out there why does the group that advocates for the discrimination, removal, or even genocide of historically discriminated and murdered people (black people, indigenous people, Jewish people) need defending?
people aren't defending these things. they are defending this 'slippery slope' idea that if you give companies the power and support them in banning content based off of ideological stuff, then you risk that 'bannable' content threshold slowly growing.
it's literally a straw man to imply people are focused on individuals in this situation, they are just worried about precedent and the future.
No private platform, even those that claimed to be a "bastion of free speech" [1] when they were first created has ever not banned for ideological stuff. Back in 2015 this same discussion came up [2]. 5 years later we're still worried about sliding down the slope. What is too far? Hating fat people? Hating trans people? Hating black people? Should a private platform allow it all even though people supporting those views actively harm people?
And we can even see what happens when platforms try to truly allow all speech. Voat [3 NSFW] is a good example, Gab is another example. The worst content takes over and your platform gets rejected by most of the world. Way before reddit banned the_donald they had to specifically delist it from the front page because awful content would end up being the first thing people saw. [4]
I also don't expect that Youtube or reddit or Twitter would end up banning all ideological content, religious videos will not get banned one day, discussing electoral politics will not get banned one day, we're not going to slide off the slope because the slope isn't there.
While those who defend them may disagree, defending white supremacy is in itself white supremacy. They defend it because they believe it.
The thing that still continues to shock me is that there are people here that argue on behalf of white supremacists but still argue that they themselves are not, instead they are playing "devils advocate". At some point, let's call a duck a duck.
Are you seriously comparing the struggle of Jews in Nazi Germany to white supremacists being deplatformed in America?
If you are, you should really take a step back and evaluate the gravity of that statement.
Edit: Saw your edit. You can usually click the timestamp to reply when there is no reply button.
Thank you for the clarification. I'll repeat my previous statement because it still applies, I can tell that you simply don't grasp the gravity of your statement. It is -hilarious- to be called a nazi for calling for white supremacists to be deplatformed. I think I might print this out and put it in my cube (when I eventually get back into the office). Turns out, I was the Nazi the whole time, not the white supremacists! /s
Edit, again: For the readers, he edited-in, and then edited-out, calling me a Nazi for saying that white supremacists shouldn't have a platform. Just wanted to make that clear.
Edit, again, again: I did understand your point, I just refuse to engage with it, because it is ridiculous.
Edit, again, again, again. This edit-back-and-forth is funny, but I have to go now. I sincerely hope that you do some research and realize that your defense of white supremacists only entrenches them into our culture further. I hope that one day, you look back on your views here, and realize that you truly did not have to defend them, but chose to anyway.
Why? There is a massive political movement for racial equality happening all over the country. They are responding to pressure from consumers, which they very much should, because all of these companies have ignored these issues for decades. They aren't coordinating with each other in some conspiracy to silence white supremacists. The -people- want white supremacists to be deplatformed (a good thing!).
I'm not sure what the laws are for physical protests. Do mall car parks and similar places on "private" but non-enclosed land have to accommodate public protest? Is that sort of thing what you're talking about?
I'm leaning towards the idea that platforms with no barrier to entry should be treated as public to some degree, while those with a sign-up process more involved than email and password are still treated as private.
No... I'm talking about things like 'privately-owned public space' in cities like San Francisco (so Salesforce park), or city sidewalks.
In most cities, the land owner even in downtown will own the sidewalks, but there is an 'easement' that says it's a public right of way. However, it's a public space, and anyone can protest or say what they want there. Their freedom of speech is protected, even though the land is private. The land is certainly private because the landowner is responsible for upkeep and can generally modify it so long as the sidewalk meets certain requirements.
All this is to say is that we have a model for privately owned public space -- spaces where private interests have certain rights and obligations and ownership but where accomodations for the public must be made.
In San Francisco at least -- only using it because I'm most familiar -- certain buildings are required to have public spaces, and you in general have a right to be in this space for free. There are even some beautiful rooftop decks that are privately owned but have been made public to meet the requirement -- like the deck on one kearny.
If by “it” you mean privately-owned websites, then no, it cannot be forced to do so. That would be a violation of the websites’ owners own freedom of speech. Not to mention their property rights! I thought the right to absolutely control one’s own private property was the most sacrosanct of conservative values?
"Private" property becomes morally murky when you extend an invitation to the general public to use that space. Doubly so when a small handful of these privately-owned websites are responsible for carrying a the vast majority of the of the discourse on the internet.
As it stands, Google+Youtube, Facebook, and Reddit (1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th most popular websites in the country) currently have the power to ban, or worse, guide, all discussion of any topic they wish, with no accountability whatsoever. That is a frightening amount of power to have, and one that I don't believe the free market is equipped to deal with its abuses.
This latter problem is something I'm legitimately surprised more people are not concerned about. Just because they're using this power to target something you don't like doesn't mean it won't be used for more nefarious purposes in the future.
The pressure is more directly from advertisers. Major consumer brands don't want their advertisements appearing next to objectionable user generated content.
"Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane."
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
I don't agree with them, I don't believe that a statistically observed difference in a particular trait according to racial phenotypes implies that racial phenotype is "inferior" or "superior" to begin with. And it turns out that just as I originally said, he didn't say them.
To clarify, what exactly is it that you disagree with, that the statistical observation in question exists, or that if it does exist, it doesn't necessarily imply that the racial phenotype in question must be "superior" or "inferior"?
I'll take your second branch, and I'll take the contrapositive: Because there is such overwhelming evidence that all humans belong to a single genetic legacy, one single race, we therefore must reject the entire premise that started the statistical inquiry. Instead, we are obligated to realize that IQ is not correlated with some mythic "g" number, and instead correlated with socioeconomic status and quality of education.
> I'll take your second branch, and I'll take the contrapositive:
What I originally said was;
"it does exist, it doesn't necessarily imply that the racial phenotype in question must be "superior" or "inferior"?"
So the contrapositive to that would be that it does imply that racial phenotype differences must also necessarily imply superior or inferior.
To give you credit though, that does not seem to actually be what you're saying at all though. Breaking down what you do actually say;
> Because there is such overwhelming evidence that all humans belong to a single genetic legacy
Has nothing to do with what I said at all. I never claimed that racial phenotypes imply a separation in species.
> one single race
Appears to deny the existence of racial phenotypes by interpreting the term "race" to mean "species". That doesn't mean that racial phenotypes don't actually exist.
> we therefore must reject the entire premise that started the statistical inquiry.
Putting aside the question that this assumes that the entire premise that started the statistical inquiry in question is well known and completely accepted already, and regardless of what we do to the premise that started the statistical inquiry in question, we still have the results of the statistical inquiry in question to contend with.
This doesn't actually answer any questions.
> Instead, we are obligated to realize that IQ is not correlated with some mythic "g" number
I should hope we are not obligated to realise that at all, because as a simple question of correlation, g factor and IQ is indeed highly correlated, so any such obligation would make us willfully ignorant. In fact the way some IQ tests have their efficiency measured is to observe that correlation. To say that again for emphasis; it is the very way in which many of the tests in question are given validity.
> instead correlated with socioeconomic status and quality of education.
There's no "instead" here. IQ scores correlate statistically on all three measures (amongst many others).
Frankly, the way people address this entire issue desperately trying to make it something other than what it clearly is, when what it clearly is doesn't necessarily imply that it is thus somehow acceptable to persecute racial minorities, or view a specific racial phenotype as "inferior" or "superior" actually does favours to the racial tribalist perspective.
If there's an observable undeniable widespread campaign resulting in the continuous deplatforming and vigorous persecution of all the people in the world who dare to point out that the sky is blue because some of the people who claim that the sky is blue also claim that therefore all people that aren't blue should be killed, and that there's a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the sky is blue, that puts them at definitely correct regarding two of three points, and silencing everybody who claims simply that the sky is blue and nobody should be killed as a consequence of it removes the visibility of the most compelling argument for why the narrative that all non blue people should be killed is ridiculous.
Instead all that remains for the neutral disinterested observer is a massive chorus of people claiming that all blue people / non blue people should be killed and that the sky is any colour other than blue. All under a blue sky. Is it any wonder they throw their hands up and go crazy?
Once upon a time I would've said I don't understand this seeming stupidity, but being older and more cynical now I can't help but suspect it's simply a desperate attempt to throw more fuel on the divide and conquer bonfire by entrenched political elites so the underclass can be kept at each other's throats over table scraps while the aforementioned political overclass gleefully continues looting the vast majority of global wealth.
But hey, I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist, now continuously rate limited for my evil wrongthink, so whatever.
I'm disgusted with, and tired of this place.
I've been here eleven years now and I've watched the quality, slowly at first, and with increasing rapidity in more recent years, decline and the minds that gather here spew thought terminating cliches in progressively more shrill chorus as time has gone on, and writing this now I realise that I just get nothing whatsoever out of engagement here anymore, so this will be my final post.
Best of luck to anyone who intends to stick around and see if it pulls out of its decade long nosedive, but I'm done.
Glad to hear it. One nitpick: The contraposition of some claim P -> Q is not ~P -> ~Q, but ~Q -> ~P. I hope that you study some logic and biology in your newfound spare time. Best of luck.
Antifa USA 2020 is not the paramilitary wing of a german stalinist party, even if "Antifa in Germany 1931" was one. It is not the same organisation. It is a lifestyle branding sold to left wing youth, like Che Guevara t-shirts.
Now there is an organisation in the USA that has recently started to use the Antifa Branding. It's called Torch Network or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action but that one, too is not related to Germany 1931 or to Stalinism.
It might be news to you, but very few of the people who participated in the successful Russian communist revolution of 1917 were knowledgeable about the finer points of Marxism too. You don't really need that many. The rest can be useful idiots. The few knowledgeable people behind the scenes know and exploit this. 6 months before it happened, BTW, Lenin said in a lecture in Zurich that a revolution would not happen in his lifetime. But a rail car full of German cash helped things along quite nicely. So if you think this can't happen here, you should probably reconsider.
Same with Cultural Revolution in China or Khmer Rouge. Same with Nazi Germany - I seriously doubt Hans Sixpack hated Jews or Slavs all that much. In a way, Fascism was too "lifestyle branding". Germans, down and out after WW1, were sold this grand vision of Third Reich and Lebensraum stretching shore to shore on the Eurasian continent. Oh, and if you're against it, not only you'd get "canceled", you'd get shot by the nearest ditch. We're a few years out from that at the moment. In terms of tangibles outside lifestyle branding, BTW, Antifa at the time wasn't that different from fascists themselves. They wanted a communist authoritarianism, hammer and sickle and everything, while fascists wanted more of a capitalist version. Any sort of "democracy" wasn't even up for discussion.
Same with communism. Why wouldn't a "working class" Ivan Sixpack want to "own" the factory he works in? It did not occur to Ivan to think about what that'd actually mean in practice. 5 years later Ivan dies of starvation, 15 years later his extended family ends up dying in Gulag, for being "counterrevolutionary element". He did not end up improving his condition before he kicked the bucket either: the factory is now owned by the state, and it's illegal to not work there. Ivan was a useful idiot, and he outlived his usefulness. Don't be like Ivan.
You add nothing to your claim that it is the same organization and i will keep refuting that as the nonsense it is.
> The FBI says antifa uses social media to organize, but there’s no specific organization or leadership structure.
To me it looks like a very loose group of "anti-parental-authority" youth on the left fringe, which mostly idiolises fantasy-feelgood-anarchism, mixed with some older anti-klan streams that are special to the USA. You can't just claim that is the continuation of the paramilitary wing of KPD 1931 halfway across the planet, then also claim it is basically Thälmanns KPD, which is basically Stalin himself, because all things loosely related are the same thing. I call bullshit.
Those far fetched stories about how revolutionaries have found themselves abused by some autocratic authoritarian putschists are nice and true, but they do not give any substance to your claim that current Antifa USA is a stalinist organization. Your argument seems to be "all leftist revolution must end in stalinism, therefor they are all stalinists", which is so ridiculous, there should be some Godwins law variant for that.
That democracy you speak of is based on the believe in pluralism, yet you deny the existence of pluralism in the vague field that spans from KPD and Antifa 1931 to todays USA. You somehow completely ignore the 1980s hardcore anarchistic punk scene, 90 years of history, and instead you throw in some "cancel culture" and "maoist culture revolution". You have nothing backing your claim that it is a stalinist organization except matching symbols on anti-capitalist merchandise sold for $5.99 and a generalized red scare.
Now i agree with you on warning about the dangers of totalitarian authoritarianism. On that part we are fine. But you are crying wolves because of a freaking chihuahua! Yes that thing is related to wolves, and it is annoying, but you are the idiot for thinking they are the same. Freedom and Liberalism are not attacked by some rioting teenagers in downtown Seattle. Those who make encryption illegal and want everything on the net monitored by the Ministry for State Security for signs of domestic terrorism, those are the wolves.
>
It stopped being that within a couple of days of starting and was co-opted to advance other goals. It's for "racial equality" only inasmuch as no sane person will argue _against_ racial equality. Same as "antifascism" is also _nominally_ against something that's unquestionably bad, so no sane person will disagree with the core premise.
This is a wonderful theory, but the past couple of years (Centuries, in the case of racial equality) of political discourse in America has shown that it does not match reality.
There are plenty people who have no problem arguing for racism, or for fascism, and thanks to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, those people have gained both a lot more influence and a lot of, to put it charitably, allies of convenience - or, to put it uncharitably, true believers.
The equivalent is if a Tupperware salesperson tried to sell you tupperware by showing you a _doctored_ image of your friend buying tuperware while literally holding a sign saying "Hey [Your Name], buy this too!".
That kind of attitude assumes you're law-abiding, civic, and righteous enough to never need one. Or you're not one of those people but nonetheless choose to reject second chances (even though there's a risk it will be used against you) in the spirit of self sacrifice for the common good.
Because Google has a financial interest in keeping these malicious "rights holders" happy and profits from the stealing of profits from YouTube creators. Until it becomes illegal, or YouTubers organize, Google will continue to steal from creators.
Taxis are paid directly by their customers, so one of the criterions does not apply. (Note that some taxis are employees of taxi companies, but they need not be, as far as the regulation at hand is concerned.)
Whose employee? That of the taxi organisation which regulates them, but doesn't actually pay them? That of each of individual customer, who are the ones who pay them?
Does this reasoning mean that all waiters are independent contractors? They collect cash directly from the customer and reserve a portion of that before passing it on to their employer (the tip) - taxi drivers (who are members of a firm) due end up paying the firm dues for the service of having a pooled call center and possibly maintenance services.
I think trying to determine if someone is an employee based on if they receive cash from customers is a pretty arbitrary line that seems to exclude some pretty valid definitions of independent contractors like temporary workers and sales consultants.
And that is part of the reason many people also criticizes the tipping system in US/Canada. An arguably broken system from another industry doesn't make for a good comparison.
I am purely speaking from my own experience and I can't speak absolutely... but every city I've ever lived in has had a few random cabbies driving around that are far outnumbered by the cab companies - whether this is yellow cab or something random like Boston's Metro Cab[1]. If you ever need to call and schedule a cab to the airport you'll be calling into a dispatch center - rather than just arranging it with a dude. My impression is that street hires are a pretty small proportion of the taxi market.
No, you don't understand. They are customers of the dispatch company. They pay the dispatch company licensing fees and rent. Totally different, way more exploitative and way more legal arrangement.
Where, in France? Considering they are employees in the Benelux I find that implausible. Especially considering that the OP is about a French court saying that Uber was just trying to find a loophole so they wouldn't have to treat their employees like any normal taxi company.
I think that's a mis-categorization - I do agree that these exist (and a lot of them fall into the "airport taxi" class since that's a reliable place to get business) and a cab operating in such a manner sounds plausible to be an independent contractor. But organizations like Yellow Cab exist and is the way most folks hail a cab, even at hotels - when you ask the concierge to get a cab for you they'll almost certainly call a local company and ask for a cab to be sent over - someone actually needs to be monitoring that phone, and the logistics of each cabbie having a phone in the car is kinda crazy "Oh ernie is currently driving someone, bart might be available I'll call him" so there is a central dispatching center with a few employees that just help make sure that the cabs are well distributed to quickly respond to calls.
I said they never had radios in the past. These aren't radio taxes. They pick people up from the side of the road. That's most taxies in my experience.
This seems like a good time to plug my tiling window manager for Windows, workspacer. https://www.workspacer.org/
I use xmonad on my linux machines, and wanted something similar for Window, so workspacer trys to replicate that style of window manager (configurable via writing C#, dynamic layouts, etc).
I've been using it every day for about a year, but its still pretty early, there are some applications for which it freaks out, but for the most part it works! What it really needs is a good set of docs and a bunch of examples, but I haven't had any time to flesh it out.
I was hoping to see some unique tricks in the source for Fancy Zones, but it looks like it more or less does the same thing as workspacer, managing the set of open windows and occasionally calling SetWindowPos.
Oh! This is the closest I've seen to what I want when on Windows. I run linux at home but Windows at work, so I miss i3 a lot. I've tried some other tiling WM attempts for Windows before but none of them have worked very well...
Just downloaded it and I have some pretty specific/opinionated requests already :P
I like it when the config file is explicit - as in that there are no defaults outside of what is specified in the config file. This way it's very easy for a new user (like me) to edit things like keybinds, colors, etc. without having to basically recreate the default config to then edit it.
Also, since I'm an i3 user, I'd like if there was the possibility of navigating windows using directions instead of in a sequence, and to create layouts on the fly by doing splits and resizing. Maybe this is already possible by writing some code in the code though?
Nothing too important, but thought I'd voice my initial thoughts. Thanks for your work!
I'll go ahead and plug my dmenu equivalent[0], since that's also something I use when on Windows and which someone might find useful.
on default config: yeah, I'm not sure what the best story is here. I would like the out of the box experience to be nice, and I want to be able to configure anything, but I also want to be able to ship nice improvements to the defaults without making all users update their own config. For example, I just pushed a commit that adds a default ignore for a new start menu process in 1903. If I place that ignore in the "template" for the config file, then all users with a custom config will need to somehow diff their config with the default. I am 10000% open to suggestions on how to make this better.
On the fly layouts would be neat. Since layouts are just an instance of ILayoutEngine, you could probably just write a bunch of custom code to allow you to make splits however you want. I would be super interested in seeing what this looks like!
wlines is awesome! There is a feature in workspacer similar to dmenu called "menus", but there are a few bugs, mostly around it sometimes not showing up in focus, which is a pain. I have some config on my work machine that lets me press alt-shift-p and navigate to a bunch of work projects I maintain, only typing the first few characters of the project I'm looking for.
The way most software I've seen resolve this is to have a defaults config file and a user config file. defaults is defined by the application maintainers and the user config overrides any settings in the defaults.
So you can do updates to the defaults but if users wanted to specify specific customisations those would be preserved. Also users can browser the defaults config and copy/paste chunks of that config into the user config file.
Those files are often named differently and/or located in different parts of the file system hierarchy; but the concept is the same.
right now, configuring workspacer is a very imperative, mutable process, because you just setup instances of objects, and call functions that setup some state. some care would need to be taken to design an API that could be "layered" in that it could be easily overridden by the user. this is a good idea!
Might be just as easy as making sure that all of your defaults are documented in the doc-comments of relevant properties and encouraging people to use CSX editors that have good documentation tooltips for API exploration (like VS Code with OmniSharp)?
Honest question here: what are the advantages over fancy zones? I'm a linux i3 user and want to give a try on windows with fancy zones, I can give workspacer a try as well.
fancy zones is very different conceptually from i3/xmonad or workspacer.
fancy zones allows you to define a static layout, and then drag windows into the zones you create.
layouts in workspacer are defined in code, and are "always on", in that the window position/size is always handled by workspacer, instead of only when you ask for it.
Some applications like to reset their own position occasionally, or don't take kindly to being resized from an outside process. WinSCP is an example where workspacer tries to resize/position the window, and WinSCP itself listens for the move event, and moves itself. workspacer gets that second move event, and cycles back and forth forever.
For the few cases where it doesn't work right now, I have ignore routes setup in my config file (so workspacer will just ignore any matching window). I should probably make a list of the few common apps that are weird.
Martin Prikryl (the WinSCP main developer) is quite active on their forums and on StackOverflow questions about WinSCP; might be worth asking why or if it could be turned off;
