It's good that they're fining Facebook for tracking users without telling them, albeit with a slap on the wrist, but it would be nice if the laws also had fines for tracking non-users without telling them.
What I think is daft is the insinuation that people will like these things, therefore they are bad. I don't particularly see the point of these things, but saying 'This is a terrible idea!' while at the same time saying 'People will use these so much that small stores will go out of business' are contradictory statements. If people want these, they'll use them. If people don't, then they will not be replacing anything. Which is it, are they horrible, or are they going to be welcomed? It can't be both.
This sounds like a bunch of attention seekers desperate for some relevance at someone else's expense, with some vague accusations of 'cultural appropriation' (that thing that every single human society has been doing since forever) thrown in for good measure, and while at the same time attempting to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their purchasing choices, because apparently when you vote with your dollars you are not responsible for what you're buying. The over-glorified vending machines are a bit silly, but why is anyone paying attention to what these detractors think?
I have a very hard time believing that. I can't speak to the quality of Harvard's education because I've never stepped foot in the place, but I've met a few people who went to those so-called 'elite schools.' They didn't seem any better or worse than those of us who could not afford the feeder schools, extracurricular activities, and other elements of institutionalized classism. The only difference I could tell was that they had nicer clothes and more expensive hobbies. Pardon me if I am highly skeptical of the claim that there's anything special going on there beyond networking and brand recognition, but I for one would much rather work with an Iowa State grad than someone from Harvard. At least I know which one has the ability to justly earn their position.
I prefer that psychos who hijack planes, hold the passengers hostage with a bomb threat, and manage to make off with $200k in ransom money get caught and brought to justice. Isn't that what the law is supposed to do?
There's nothing wrong with nice new features, but when you're adding unnecessary ones while ignoring what is really needed (like doing something about Firefox's memory hogging), that's a bit different.
because it will make Firefox faster, though at the expense of using more memory.
Firefox already uses an obscene amount of memory. The longer it runs, the more ridiculous its memory consumption gets, as it gets slower and slower to the point where it becomes unusable. Then crash, restart, repeat.
This still has not been fixed and now they're thinking up new ways to make it even worse? Firefox has become the Hummer of browsers. No wonder Chrome is taking over. NoScript is Firefox's sole redeeming feature at this point.
That doesn't at all disprove what I said. AS I mentioned, Monsanto does sue people. It is a well known and undeniable fact that they do. What I said is that they have never been documented to have sued someone for simple cross pollination, and that the cases I know of were justifiable, and could have been avoided had patents not been intentionally violated. I somehow doubt that the Center for Food Safety mentioned in your link, a group well known for their anti-GE activism, goes out of their way to mention those inconvenient details in their reports.
Your link also mentions the Bowman lawsuit, which was ongoing at the time that article was published. That was not one of the cross pollination cases (more of someone trying to get circumvent patent law with a perceived loophole), however the Supreme Court would later unanimously and in my opinion justly rule in favor of Monsanto.
I have never heard of a single case of that happening. The only cases where someone has gotten sued over cross pollination are those where someone then knowingly, purposefully selects for and propagates the transgenic material. If you don't want sued, don't violate patent law.
If that did happen, yes, it would be terrible. But when the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association filed a lawsuit against Monsanto a few years back, they were unable to provide a single instance of that happening when the judge requested it. That should tell you something.
For the most part, our crops are not particularly fit in the wild. They are to the wild plants what pugs are to wolves. A change made by genetic engineering will typically be pretty minor compared to the other aspects of the species. With drought and virus resistance, those have only been applied to corn and papaya/summer squash, respectively, and thus far there hasn't been any major ecological issues, although transgenes have been found in wild squash populations. You occasionally have canola or papaya growing feral in some places, but that doesn't have anything to do with their transgenics, and certainly they do not occur at a concerning rate as an invasive weed would. In theory there could be issues if a species able to reproduce really well were modified to survive well outside its typical range I suppose, but in general I think that would be the exception rather than the rule.
This is why opposition to plant patents makes no sense. Either patented plants are useful, in which case patents are clearly beneficial because they allow crop breeders to make a living and continue to make desirable new varieties, or the patents are not useful, in which case, it really doesn't mater if they are patented because you would be better off freely growing the older non-patented varieties.
The problem is, in their effort to demonize every single aspect of GE crops, the anti-GMO people want to have the argument both ways, that plant patents are bad and that patented plants are no good. That farmers choose to pay extra for the patented varieties should tell you exactly where they stand.
Patents already cover that. Next time you're looking at potted flowers, check out how many of them have tags that say 'Propagation Prohibited' under the patent number. The floriculture industry always has something new and patented on store shelves. Sterility is not necessary for market control, unless someone somewhere is illegally violating your patent.
Your post only serves to prove that GMOs are exactly what people oppose. You mention corporate control of them, and yet, plenty of non-genetically engineered crops varieties are also patented. Besides that, those patents expire, like all patents...Monsanto's first generation of GE soybean is now available as an off patent generic...and you fail to clarify what is wrong with a system whereby one makes something superior, gains control of it for a limited time to recoup their R&D costs, then it falls into the public domain. I can only conclude that corporate control is not the real issue, or else far more than GE crops would be targeted, and the argument would be more coherent.
You then mention herbicides and pesticides. This is actually a great reason to support GE crops. There are no insecticide resistant GE crops, but there are those which resist pests, and therefore need less insecticides. As for herbicides, yes there are herbicide resistant ones, but you neglect to consider the alternatives. Do you think weeds will just go away without herbicides? Nope, but without the GE crops, you have to use harsher types of herbicides, and soil damaging tillage, to control weeds. This argument makes sense only if you know nothing of how agriculture really works. Besides that, there are non-GE crops like the Clearfield lines are also bred to be resistant to herbicides, so even if you had a point, it still would not be a reason to oppose only GE crops as opposed to crop improvement in general. So we can conclude that this justification is also wrong. You may be referring to the recent dicamba problems, which is a real problem, but that is not an issue with the genetics so much with the herbicide formulation.
Finally, you mention issues of saving seeds, which farmers haven't done since the rise of hybrid seed in the 30's. You rarely save seed anymore because it is more profitable to use seed with hybrid vigor, which does not breed true in the second generation. That's not the fault of corporations, that's just how genetics works. Again, if this were the real issue, people would be protesting much more than GE crops, so we can conclude that it is another justification.
Basically, your reasons are invalid. They sound rational enough on the surface, so I can't fault anyone for believing them, but what they really are they are after the fact justifications to make GMO denialism seem somewhat rational to those not well versed in modern agriculture or crop genetics. Keep in mind, these talking points are coming from the same groups that also lie about non-profit, publicly funded projects, like the International Rice Research Institute's Golden Rice, or the University of Hawai'i's Rainbow papaya. Those who lie to you about science will also lie to you about business.
You're not wrong. Sci-Hub is in violation of the law, no doubt about that. Morally though, I absolutely could not care less, and think that what is really wrong is hoarding knowledge in the form of the tax payer funded publications which Sci-Hub is now making accessible for all.
I hope the Sci-Hub founder that Elsevier is after is never extradited. What she's doing is making the world a better place.
I still do not believe what Sci-Hub does is legitimately piracy. Piracy is downloading something you did not pay for. If my tax dollars already paid for the institutional overhead, the scientist's salary, and the grant money, downloading the paper is merely getting what I am owed. Those who monetize science are the real pirates, demanding money for access to that which was created with our tax dollars, charging universities obscene fees for the privilege of allowing their students to read it, and denying scientists and students in poorer countries access to important research.
I've had issues getting papers from the 50's thanks to this outrageous copyright business...the publishers claim to somehow be of benefit to science, and that Sci-Hub harms science, but tell me, how does that benefit science, and how does allowing me or anyone else harm it?
Copyright be damned, suing them is like suing a cop who returns stolen property because it cuts into the thief's profits. I'm a scientist, and I say long live Sci-Hub.
There's a difference between telling and labeling. I work in the area of crop improvement, and like most in a specialized scientific field, I want people to know more about what I do, not less. What is genetically engineered? Corn, soy, cotton, canola, alfalfa, sugar beet, papaya, summer squash, with apple & potato available in limited amounts, with traits including insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, drought loss mitigation, virus resistance, and consumer oriented traits. If I did not want people to know this, why would I so readily say it?
It is not knowledge I am against, it is the selective reporting of that knowledge, out of context, with no essential background information, doing nothing in the face of massive disinformation campaigns. Surely you can agree that selective reporting is deceptive, no? I listed one such example. As I've said before, nothing else is labeled, why GE? Ever seen a watermelon labeled as a triploid, an apple labeled as a bud sport, or a tomato labeled as being the product of embryo rescue techniques? Me neither, yet people eat them every day. Start there and I might believe the push for GE labeling has anything to do with education, not just the advancement of fear. Again, you ignored the question of why label only on thing.
Besides all that, if someone wants to know if food is GE, it takes about five minutes on Google. If you really care about this yet can't be bothered to educate yourself on your own beliefs, I don't see how anyone can demand a special labeling law. It's like demanding a law saying that bacon has to be marked as non-Kosher, in case anyone wanting to keep Kosher is too lazy to find out if bacon is acceptable to their religion.
You claim to not be singling out GE crops, yet you make no mention of labeling for anything else. Therefore, you clearly are, unless you would also like crops to be labeled if they were produced through techniques such as somaclonal variation, ploidy manipulation, mass selection methods, ect. You dodged every hard question.
If you label GE crops, but fail to give proper context, giving only enough information of misconceptions to spread, that is deceptive. It's like the textbooks saying evolution is only a theory; technically true, but also clearly lying. GMO labels are lies of omission.
I start from a position of distrust when it comes to pharmaceutical companies and multi-national chemical conglomerates
Fine, start from there. But the moment you deny the scientific consensus which says that GE crops are safe and benefitial, you've careened right into conspiratorial nonsense.
As for patenting, I suppose you would exhibit the same distrust of conventionally bred crops, which have also long been patented? Even if we do take this to be a good point, it applies to far more than GE crops. I suppose you re willing to pay the salary of the breeders who make your food supply possible then? From where I'm standing, the system works pretty well. You develop something, get a patent for a limited time to prevent someone from mass producing your hard work without having put in the possibly substantial investment of time, money, and energy, and then the patent expires. Where is the unfairness there? Ever eaten a Honeycrisp apple? It used to be patented, until the patent expired. Monsanto's first generation of genetically engineered soybean is off patent; you can literally buy 50 lb bags of generic GE soybean at Rural King now. And even if you just hate those big corporations for whatever reason, what of smaller plant breeders? Ever had a pluot, aprium, or pluerry? What of something like Zaiger's Genetics, who develops them? Should they just work for years and years on something, only to have someone bigger come along, buy one of their trees, and mass produce them, leaving Zaiger's with the bill? Without patents on their pluots, what do they do?
Well then start by labeling your products.
Why? Why single out GE crops for labeling? It can't be about consumer information, considering how readily available that information is, and that you do not make similar demands of crops produced through grafting, crops produced through induced mutagenesis, crops produced through wide crossing, crops produced through embryo rescue, or any other crop improvement technique.
In short, the objections you raise, while popular, do not have merit.
You are, perhaps willfully, ignoring the dozens of public universities working with GE crops. The University of Hawai'i's Rainbow papaya, Virginia Tech's Blight Blocker peanut, Texas A&M's HLB resistant citrus, Kansas State's biofortified tomato, to name a few. If there was not such strong opposition, more of those could make it to the market. Even then, no one said blindly trust anyone. Do you also think that vaccines are bad because of pharmacutical companies?
It is merely a last ditch attempt to keep Merkel in office
Last I checked, Germany loved Merkel and all she's done, or at least, a large portion of them do. That's the kicker...they want censorship. They don't seem to see the hypocrisy of using speech to advocate against free speech, but as far as I can tell, this is being met with applause.
Both your and OP's analogies fail to consider the vast scale. Maybe a better analogy would be to say you have millions of windows popping up everyday. Some may have wrongthink on them. You are expected to know where and when the wrongthink will occur on a window, or else you are also guilty of thought crime by virtue of ignorance.
Somehow, this is considered something other than madness, despite not just the inherent immorality and hypocrisy of censorship, but also the sheer impracticality of the matter. I sure as shit don't see Germany stepping up to propose how social media filters for latent thought crime.
Either way, the US may have a flaming dumpster full of faults, but I'm at least glad we have the Second Amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good that they're fining Facebook for tracking users without telling them, albeit with a slap on the wrist, but it would be nice if the laws also had fines for tracking non-users without telling them.
What I think is daft is the insinuation that people will like these things, therefore they are bad. I don't particularly see the point of these things, but saying 'This is a terrible idea!' while at the same time saying 'People will use these so much that small stores will go out of business' are contradictory statements. If people want these, they'll use them. If people don't, then they will not be replacing anything. Which is it, are they horrible, or are they going to be welcomed? It can't be both.
This sounds like a bunch of attention seekers desperate for some relevance at someone else's expense, with some vague accusations of 'cultural appropriation' (that thing that every single human society has been doing since forever) thrown in for good measure, and while at the same time attempting to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their purchasing choices, because apparently when you vote with your dollars you are not responsible for what you're buying. The over-glorified vending machines are a bit silly, but why is anyone paying attention to what these detractors think?
Metro also works on this principle.
I have a very hard time believing that. I can't speak to the quality of Harvard's education because I've never stepped foot in the place, but I've met a few people who went to those so-called 'elite schools.' They didn't seem any better or worse than those of us who could not afford the feeder schools, extracurricular activities, and other elements of institutionalized classism. The only difference I could tell was that they had nicer clothes and more expensive hobbies. Pardon me if I am highly skeptical of the claim that there's anything special going on there beyond networking and brand recognition, but I for one would much rather work with an Iowa State grad than someone from Harvard. At least I know which one has the ability to justly earn their position.
I wonder what the exchange rate for Woppercoin to Chuck E. Cheese tickets is?
I prefer that psychos who hijack planes, hold the passengers hostage with a bomb threat, and manage to make off with $200k in ransom money get caught and brought to justice. Isn't that what the law is supposed to do?
There's nothing wrong with nice new features, but when you're adding unnecessary ones while ignoring what is really needed (like doing something about Firefox's memory hogging), that's a bit different.
because it will make Firefox faster, though at the expense of using more memory.
Firefox already uses an obscene amount of memory. The longer it runs, the more ridiculous its memory consumption gets, as it gets slower and slower to the point where it becomes unusable. Then crash, restart, repeat.
This still has not been fixed and now they're thinking up new ways to make it even worse? Firefox has become the Hummer of browsers. No wonder Chrome is taking over. NoScript is Firefox's sole redeeming feature at this point.
That doesn't at all disprove what I said. AS I mentioned, Monsanto does sue people. It is a well known and undeniable fact that they do. What I said is that they have never been documented to have sued someone for simple cross pollination, and that the cases I know of were justifiable, and could have been avoided had patents not been intentionally violated. I somehow doubt that the Center for Food Safety mentioned in your link, a group well known for their anti-GE activism, goes out of their way to mention those inconvenient details in their reports.
Your link also mentions the Bowman lawsuit, which was ongoing at the time that article was published. That was not one of the cross pollination cases (more of someone trying to get circumvent patent law with a perceived loophole), however the Supreme Court would later unanimously and in my opinion justly rule in favor of Monsanto.
I have never heard of a single case of that happening. The only cases where someone has gotten sued over cross pollination are those where someone then knowingly, purposefully selects for and propagates the transgenic material. If you don't want sued, don't violate patent law.
If that did happen, yes, it would be terrible. But when the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association filed a lawsuit against Monsanto a few years back, they were unable to provide a single instance of that happening when the judge requested it. That should tell you something.
For the most part, our crops are not particularly fit in the wild. They are to the wild plants what pugs are to wolves. A change made by genetic engineering will typically be pretty minor compared to the other aspects of the species. With drought and virus resistance, those have only been applied to corn and papaya/summer squash, respectively, and thus far there hasn't been any major ecological issues, although transgenes have been found in wild squash populations. You occasionally have canola or papaya growing feral in some places, but that doesn't have anything to do with their transgenics, and certainly they do not occur at a concerning rate as an invasive weed would. In theory there could be issues if a species able to reproduce really well were modified to survive well outside its typical range I suppose, but in general I think that would be the exception rather than the rule.
This is why opposition to plant patents makes no sense. Either patented plants are useful, in which case patents are clearly beneficial because they allow crop breeders to make a living and continue to make desirable new varieties, or the patents are not useful, in which case, it really doesn't mater if they are patented because you would be better off freely growing the older non-patented varieties.
The problem is, in their effort to demonize every single aspect of GE crops, the anti-GMO people want to have the argument both ways, that plant patents are bad and that patented plants are no good. That farmers choose to pay extra for the patented varieties should tell you exactly where they stand.
Patents already cover that. Next time you're looking at potted flowers, check out how many of them have tags that say 'Propagation Prohibited' under the patent number. The floriculture industry always has something new and patented on store shelves. Sterility is not necessary for market control, unless someone somewhere is illegally violating your patent.
Your post only serves to prove that GMOs are exactly what people oppose. You mention corporate control of them, and yet, plenty of non-genetically engineered crops varieties are also patented. Besides that, those patents expire, like all patents...Monsanto's first generation of GE soybean is now available as an off patent generic...and you fail to clarify what is wrong with a system whereby one makes something superior, gains control of it for a limited time to recoup their R&D costs, then it falls into the public domain. I can only conclude that corporate control is not the real issue, or else far more than GE crops would be targeted, and the argument would be more coherent.
You then mention herbicides and pesticides. This is actually a great reason to support GE crops. There are no insecticide resistant GE crops, but there are those which resist pests, and therefore need less insecticides. As for herbicides, yes there are herbicide resistant ones, but you neglect to consider the alternatives. Do you think weeds will just go away without herbicides? Nope, but without the GE crops, you have to use harsher types of herbicides, and soil damaging tillage, to control weeds. This argument makes sense only if you know nothing of how agriculture really works. Besides that, there are non-GE crops like the Clearfield lines are also bred to be resistant to herbicides, so even if you had a point, it still would not be a reason to oppose only GE crops as opposed to crop improvement in general. So we can conclude that this justification is also wrong. You may be referring to the recent dicamba problems, which is a real problem, but that is not an issue with the genetics so much with the herbicide formulation.
Finally, you mention issues of saving seeds, which farmers haven't done since the rise of hybrid seed in the 30's. You rarely save seed anymore because it is more profitable to use seed with hybrid vigor, which does not breed true in the second generation. That's not the fault of corporations, that's just how genetics works. Again, if this were the real issue, people would be protesting much more than GE crops, so we can conclude that it is another justification.
Basically, your reasons are invalid. They sound rational enough on the surface, so I can't fault anyone for believing them, but what they really are they are after the fact justifications to make GMO denialism seem somewhat rational to those not well versed in modern agriculture or crop genetics. Keep in mind, these talking points are coming from the same groups that also lie about non-profit, publicly funded projects, like the International Rice Research Institute's Golden Rice, or the University of Hawai'i's Rainbow papaya. Those who lie to you about science will also lie to you about business.
It may seem like Silicon Valley is populated entirely with celebrity college dropouts
No it doesn't.
You're not wrong. Sci-Hub is in violation of the law, no doubt about that. Morally though, I absolutely could not care less, and think that what is really wrong is hoarding knowledge in the form of the tax payer funded publications which Sci-Hub is now making accessible for all.
I hope the Sci-Hub founder that Elsevier is after is never extradited. What she's doing is making the world a better place.
I still do not believe what Sci-Hub does is legitimately piracy. Piracy is downloading something you did not pay for. If my tax dollars already paid for the institutional overhead, the scientist's salary, and the grant money, downloading the paper is merely getting what I am owed. Those who monetize science are the real pirates, demanding money for access to that which was created with our tax dollars, charging universities obscene fees for the privilege of allowing their students to read it, and denying scientists and students in poorer countries access to important research.
I've had issues getting papers from the 50's thanks to this outrageous copyright business...the publishers claim to somehow be of benefit to science, and that Sci-Hub harms science, but tell me, how does that benefit science, and how does allowing me or anyone else harm it?
Copyright be damned, suing them is like suing a cop who returns stolen property because it cuts into the thief's profits. I'm a scientist, and I say long live Sci-Hub.
There's a difference between telling and labeling. I work in the area of crop improvement, and like most in a specialized scientific field, I want people to know more about what I do, not less. What is genetically engineered? Corn, soy, cotton, canola, alfalfa, sugar beet, papaya, summer squash, with apple & potato available in limited amounts, with traits including insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, drought loss mitigation, virus resistance, and consumer oriented traits. If I did not want people to know this, why would I so readily say it?
It is not knowledge I am against, it is the selective reporting of that knowledge, out of context, with no essential background information, doing nothing in the face of massive disinformation campaigns. Surely you can agree that selective reporting is deceptive, no? I listed one such example. As I've said before, nothing else is labeled, why GE? Ever seen a watermelon labeled as a triploid, an apple labeled as a bud sport, or a tomato labeled as being the product of embryo rescue techniques? Me neither, yet people eat them every day. Start there and I might believe the push for GE labeling has anything to do with education, not just the advancement of fear. Again, you ignored the question of why label only on thing.
Besides all that, if someone wants to know if food is GE, it takes about five minutes on Google. If you really care about this yet can't be bothered to educate yourself on your own beliefs, I don't see how anyone can demand a special labeling law. It's like demanding a law saying that bacon has to be marked as non-Kosher, in case anyone wanting to keep Kosher is too lazy to find out if bacon is acceptable to their religion.
You claim to not be singling out GE crops, yet you make no mention of labeling for anything else. Therefore, you clearly are, unless you would also like crops to be labeled if they were produced through techniques such as somaclonal variation, ploidy manipulation, mass selection methods, ect. You dodged every hard question.
If you label GE crops, but fail to give proper context, giving only enough information of misconceptions to spread, that is deceptive. It's like the textbooks saying evolution is only a theory; technically true, but also clearly lying. GMO labels are lies of omission.
I start from a position of distrust when it comes to pharmaceutical companies and multi-national chemical conglomerates
Fine, start from there. But the moment you deny the scientific consensus which says that GE crops are safe and benefitial, you've careened right into conspiratorial nonsense.
As for patenting, I suppose you would exhibit the same distrust of conventionally bred crops, which have also long been patented? Even if we do take this to be a good point, it applies to far more than GE crops. I suppose you re willing to pay the salary of the breeders who make your food supply possible then? From where I'm standing, the system works pretty well. You develop something, get a patent for a limited time to prevent someone from mass producing your hard work without having put in the possibly substantial investment of time, money, and energy, and then the patent expires. Where is the unfairness there? Ever eaten a Honeycrisp apple? It used to be patented, until the patent expired. Monsanto's first generation of genetically engineered soybean is off patent; you can literally buy 50 lb bags of generic GE soybean at Rural King now. And even if you just hate those big corporations for whatever reason, what of smaller plant breeders? Ever had a pluot, aprium, or pluerry? What of something like Zaiger's Genetics, who develops them? Should they just work for years and years on something, only to have someone bigger come along, buy one of their trees, and mass produce them, leaving Zaiger's with the bill? Without patents on their pluots, what do they do?
Well then start by labeling your products.
Why? Why single out GE crops for labeling? It can't be about consumer information, considering how readily available that information is, and that you do not make similar demands of crops produced through grafting, crops produced through induced mutagenesis, crops produced through wide crossing, crops produced through embryo rescue, or any other crop improvement technique.
In short, the objections you raise, while popular, do not have merit.
You are, perhaps willfully, ignoring the dozens of public universities working with GE crops. The University of Hawai'i's Rainbow papaya, Virginia Tech's Blight Blocker peanut, Texas A&M's HLB resistant citrus, Kansas State's biofortified tomato, to name a few. If there was not such strong opposition, more of those could make it to the market. Even then, no one said blindly trust anyone. Do you also think that vaccines are bad because of pharmacutical companies?
Your post is deeply intolerant of my fervent belief that all people are entitled to the right of free speech.
If you truly believe what you say, you will have your intolerant post removed.
Else, you do not truly practice what you preach and likely just assume you will always be on the right side of the censor.
It is merely a last ditch attempt to keep Merkel in office
Last I checked, Germany loved Merkel and all she's done, or at least, a large portion of them do. That's the kicker...they want censorship. They don't seem to see the hypocrisy of using speech to advocate against free speech, but as far as I can tell, this is being met with applause.
Damn it, that was supposed to be First Amendment. I mean, Second too, but not the relevant one.
Both your and OP's analogies fail to consider the vast scale. Maybe a better analogy would be to say you have millions of windows popping up everyday. Some may have wrongthink on them. You are expected to know where and when the wrongthink will occur on a window, or else you are also guilty of thought crime by virtue of ignorance.
Somehow, this is considered something other than madness, despite not just the inherent immorality and hypocrisy of censorship, but also the sheer impracticality of the matter. I sure as shit don't see Germany stepping up to propose how social media filters for latent thought crime.
Either way, the US may have a flaming dumpster full of faults, but I'm at least glad we have the Second Amendment.