It's Kipling's law of the jungle, which reads the same forward and back: "the pack is the strength of the wolf, and the wolf is the strength of the pack."
I think it's analogous to how we Earthlings don't just rely on abstract logic to reproduce our genes, but instead have strong, inbuilt, irrational urges that drag us in that direction whether our reason think it wise or not. We can work around it, we can rationalize our actions, but it's still lurking the in the bottoms of our brains.
Having a tribe that will join together to defend you is a huge deterrent to an attacker. Unless the atracker can manage to isolate their target and sever their social bonds. (E.g., abusive relationships, and the discussion of slavery in "Debt: the first 5000 years".)
This was great! With one odd exception, it told me exactly which stories were April Fools' jokes, and let me ignore them when I wanted, and laugh at them when I wanted. Please do this again every year! (But yes, you may want to triple the encryption strength...)
I don't think this will happen. Rusty's very clear about his policy - he simply deletes spam/troll posts. And he deletes accounts, too, on the second offense (the first just gets you a warning). And now he's banning anonymous access. This by itself ups the ante for the troll brigade, and it doesn't account for any additional safeguards on how accounts are acquired (waiting period, email/IP address duplication, and the like).
Basically, Kuro5hin is a benevolent dictatorship, being run in the form of a democracy just because the dictators like the idea. And you know what? It's rather refreshing.
He vented on the web. What's wrong with that? Are we going to take away all mechanisms for dealing with stress that people have and let them explode and commit suicide or mass homicide?
No. We'll just keep prodding them until they start making noises about lashing out, and then remove them quietly, so we don't disturb any of the normal students.
The most frightening quote I saw in the article was this one, by Principal Schofield:
"Columbine was a definite worry," he says. "If you disenfranchise somebody to the point where you become their enemy or their classmates become the enemy, then you want to remove them. Columbine did come up. Parents didn't want to send their kids to school until he was removed."
This just gets scarier and scarier the more I think about it. It's the same sort of attitude that slaveowners had in the Old South - they prodded the slaves to weed out any signs of rebellion. The instant anyone began to stand up for themselves, they were killed.
It's also the attitude taken by bad manufacturers - if there's a problem with one of their processes, and it turns out a faulty product every so often, they don't fix their process. They just discard the faulty product and keep right on going, as it's too much of a bother to actually fix their problem.
Just another argument for "schools == assembly-line factories", I guess...
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It's Kipling's law of the jungle, which reads the same forward and back:
"the pack is the strength of the wolf, and the wolf is the strength of the pack."
I think it's analogous to how we Earthlings don't just rely on abstract logic to reproduce our genes, but instead have strong, inbuilt, irrational urges that drag us in that direction whether our reason think it wise or not. We can work around it, we can rationalize our actions, but it's still lurking the in the bottoms of our brains.
Having a tribe that will join together to defend you is a huge deterrent to an attacker. Unless the atracker can manage to isolate their target and sever their social bonds. (E.g., abusive relationships, and the discussion of slavery in "Debt: the first 5000 years".)
Them's my two cents, anyway. :-)
This was great! With one odd exception, it told me exactly which stories were April Fools' jokes, and let me ignore them when I wanted, and laugh at them when I wanted. Please do this again every year! (But yes, you may want to triple the encryption strength...)
I don't think this will happen. Rusty's very clear about his policy - he simply deletes spam/troll posts. And he deletes accounts, too, on the second offense (the first just gets you a warning). And now he's banning anonymous access. This by itself ups the ante for the troll brigade, and it doesn't account for any additional safeguards on how accounts are acquired (waiting period, email/IP address duplication, and the like).
Basically, Kuro5hin is a benevolent dictatorship, being run in the form of a democracy just because the dictators like the idea. And you know what? It's rather refreshing.
No. We'll just keep prodding them until they start making noises about lashing out, and then remove them quietly, so we don't disturb any of the normal students.
The most frightening quote I saw in the article was this one, by Principal Schofield: This just gets scarier and scarier the more I think about it. It's the same sort of attitude that slaveowners had in the Old South - they prodded the slaves to weed out any signs of rebellion. The instant anyone began to stand up for themselves, they were killed.
It's also the attitude taken by bad manufacturers - if there's a problem with one of their processes, and it turns out a faulty product every so often, they don't fix their process. They just discard the faulty product and keep right on going, as it's too much of a bother to actually fix their problem.
Just another argument for "schools == assembly-line factories", I guess...
Cariset