Some of the very same "very smart people" who wrote the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights were responsible for the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798. One of the effects of those acts was to restrict speech that was critical of the federal government.
There has never been a NON-moving goalpost when it comes to free speech, not in America or anywhere else. If it were so simple, there would never be any debate about the subject. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is a high ideal, but it is not written in any legal document in any nation (it was invented by a biographer of Voltaire as an explanation of Voltaire's views on free speech).
The most dangerous lie in all of politics is "the answer is simple." It discourages deep thought and thorough research, and makes compromise impossible. The truth is, everything about governance is extremely complicated as it involves the weighing of hundreds or thousands of priorities.
Unless free speech is worth preserving at literally any cost (and I daresay there is a line that even you would not cross, e.g. the extinction of the human race), then a line must be drawn *somewhere.* The debate over where to draw that line is ongoing and important.
Congratulations, you totally missed the point of the original speech.
I don't think I did, and I sincerely believe that trying to apply it to the Reddit situation at all is disrespectful to its meaning.
When the speaker said "First, they came for the socialists", they meant something very specific by "came for." The Nazis were rounding people up, putting them in camps, stealing their property, and killing them. As they go down the list of types of people that "they came for," there is no confusion about what was going on. Everyone knew that it was bad, but they were unmotivated to act to stop it because they hoped they would be spared if they kept their mouths shut. The only way it could have been stopped was through the collective actions of people who were not yet targets, but they did not act.
What is happening at Reddit is not remotely similar to what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Not only are people not being harmed by those in power, they aren't even being silenced. I don't care if Reddit shuts down racist subreddits, but it's not because I'm not a racist. It's because there is nothing Reddit could ever possibly do that would harm me in any way. They have no power to make the world worse. They CAN, however, make it a little bit better by removing this particular platform for people to threaten, harass, and intimidate people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or body type.
In whose reckoning or opinion?
In REDDIT's opinion. It's their site. They make the rules. Because not all viewpoints are valid, they are within their rights to make their own determination about which viewpoints should be represented on their site.
I'm not advocating shutting down groups because of their viewpoints, I'm advocating shutting them down for their specific actions. Threatening someone isn't just speech, it is an action. Encouraging someone to commit suicide is an action. Promoting violence is an action.
One more comment, to specifically address your 1960s socialists example:
I am not arguing that popular opinion cannot veer dangerously into censorship of dissenting political ideas. It can, and it has, many, many times in human history.
What I AM arguing is that shutting down racist subreddits is not moving us closer to that scenario. There is a big difference between dissenting political speech and truly hateful speech. Everyone can see the difference, but hateful speakers like to make a false equivalence between the two, and they can use that argument to convince well-intentioned people that shutting down one is the same as shutting down the other.
There's "mainstream viewpoints," and then there's viewpoints that are unambiguously in favor of hating people and/or deliberately bringing them harm. There are reddit groups that exists solely to express hatred for a given race, sex, sexual orientation, or body type. I'm not talking about "we think homosexuality is a sin," or "we believe that culture is too permissive of unhealthy lifestyles." I'm talking about "[type of person] is garbage, and we want to hurt them, shame them, and ultimately exterminate them."
There is no slippery slope connection between that type of viewpoint and the universe of unpopular but legitimately held viewpoints out there. If we ever reach the point where the majority of Americans support the extermination of a particular race, it won't be because we stopped enabling racist speech.
First they came for the racists and we all celebrated because we were not racists and racists suck. Then they came for the pedophiles and we all celebrated because pedophiles hurt children, and seriously what the f*** is wrong with you? Then they tried to come for the socialists and we said "WTF, dude?! That's a valid political viewpoint that isn't explicitly about hate and harming others!"
And then the rest of the speech kind of fall apart because seriously, not all viewpoints are equally valid.
Having an outlet in text for these kinds of things is far better than having none and then having these people act it out for real in their areas. It can also give people a head's up since some of these people post their manifesto before they act out.
This is a popular argument for sure, but is there actual evidence for it? It's possible that "venting" dangerous desires in a controlled setting prevents people from acting on them, but it seems equally possible that it could lead to the escalation of those desires through exposure to new fantasies and the support of like-minded people.
It just seems like a really dangerous assumption to make.
It is absolutely about ethics. The question is, is it more ethical to preserve unencumbered freedom of expression on your site or to prevent a radical few from using your platform to harm others?
If you're prepared to blurt out an answer as though it were obvious, you haven't given it enough thought. Ethics is a subtle and complicated subject, and there are many situations where different ethical standards must come into conflict.
Nobody seriously expects that Disney's customers will boycott over this. If they suffer any fallout at all (which I doubt), it won't be from the consumer side. It will be the chilling effect this story has on new hiring. If more skilled workers think twice before accepting a job with Disney, it could inconvenience them in the future.
Even that worst-case scenario is pretty mild, so you can expect Disney to put do a little bit of spin control on the story and then forget about it.
I know this is a troll, but in case anyone is mislead I want to clear up a factual error: Jailbroken iPhones absolutely can make purchases from the App Store. I have a history of jailbreaking my phones when they get old to enable certain mods and extensions that are not supported by Apple (for example, I had a notification center on my iPhone before Apple released theirs in iOS 7). It didn't change anything about the way I ran or installed my official App Store apps, and I never downloaded a pirated app.
Even if this were patentable, it strikes me as a bad idea to be the company that patents it. Surge Pricing is already one of the most hated features of Uber. Even if that hatred is unfair, there is definitely going to be more pushback as Uber's business grows. When local governments and consumer groups inevitably start trying to sue them for "gouging," wouldn't it be better to have "common industry practice" as a defense, rather than being the only company that is doing it?
This would be part of my strategy. For the last couple of years, Jobs has been announcing amazing new developments at every public address. The expectations build. The rumor mills churn. The stocks inflate.
Then one of two things happens. Either the announcement is completely beyond what anyone expected, and stocks boom, or the announcement simply meets expectations...and the stocks plummet.
Jobs needs huge, unexpected extravaganzas to keep things booming, but he doesn't have enough of them for every conference. So what does he do? He gradually lowers our expectations by announcing mundane but arguably important developments. The iPod HiFi. The updated Mac Mini. The Intel Mac Pro. Enhancements in Leopard.
Then, when our guard is down... BAM! Out comes the iPhone, or the touchless iPod, or the iWatchEverythingFromMyCouch media center. The impact will be greater when we're no longer expecting it.
Okay, blame the new slashdot commenting system for my last reply. I thought you were replying to a different post. The post you were replying to definitely WAS derogatory, so you weren't out of line. Sorry about that!
Cut the GP poster some slack. Yes, Time Machine does more than System Restore, but that doesn't mean it's "nothing like" it. The comparison is apt, especially considering that System Restore is a feature more than one Mac user has wished Apple would incorporate into OS X.
Instead of sniping at the poster by suggesting that they are ignorant, you could have tried wording your reply more positively. For example:
"In your post, you said that Time Machine was like System Restore. I'd go even farther and say that it's better than System Restore for the following reasons..."
I guess you took a comparison to System Restore to be some sort of insult to Time Machine, but it surely wasn't intended to be.
Ah, yes. Robert Kennedy, Jr., the very picture of impartiality and fairness in a feud between Democrats and Republicans. Why, I can't think of any reason that he'd want to sway the debate in favor of one party!
In your example, there is already a perfectly functional system in place for dealing with a murderer in your house - calling the police and getting the blue hell out of there.
Okay, so it's a lame example. It's just hypothetical though, and if accepted in the spirit intended, we ought to assume there is some good reason for the cameras to be there.:-P
If the murderer isn't there now but the police say one might show up at some point today, are you still as willing to surrender your privacy? How about at some point within the month? Or possibly during the next several years? And just how reliable is their evidence for this hypothesis?
All very good questions, and ones that should be carefully considered. In fact, I think it supports my point, which was not that the phone record monitoring is justified but different people have different answers to these questions. The fact that they answer differently than you would does not make them stupid or submissive. It just reveals that their priorities are different than yours, which can be due to any number of divergences between your life experience and theirs.
Yes, it all sounds very bad until you realize that "the public values security over privacy" is a false statement, or at least very misleading.
The truth is that the public values a certain amount of security over a certain amount of security. Everyone has their threshhold, and it's different from person to person.
For example, I'd object greatly to having surveillance cameras mounted in my home if the conditions were "the cameras are a permanent fixture so the government can better protect our nation from terrorists". On the other hand, I wouldn't object at all to the same cameras if the conditions were "they are a temporary fixture so that we can track down and arrest a serial killer who was recently spotted entering your house." Heck, I'd help them install the things!
In that case, the security issue (my life was in immediate danger from a murderer) outweighed the privacy issue (I might get caught picking my nose on camera).
In the case of the phone record issue, the 63% cited have weighed the loss of privacy in this case (the government knows who you've called, when, and how many times, but not what you said) against the perceived security threat (the chances of averting a terrorist attack are improved by the government having this data).
Disagree if you want - observe that 37% of those surveyed did. But don't accuse the other 63% of being stupid sheep unless you know what reasoning they applied to their opinion. What are they personally giving up (in more specific terms than just "privacy")? What are they personally gaining?
This article summary and the article itself have some subtle and not-so-subtle bias that takes the form of unfair presumptions. I'd like to list a few examples:
"Ironically, the grant was for a study into the detrimental effects of intelligent design on Canadian academics and leaders."
This isn't ironic at all. In fact, I find it highly likely that the funds were denied precisely because of the nature of the study.
"Jennifer Robinson... said the university has asked the SSHRC to review its decision to reject Alters's request for money to study how the rising popularity in the United States of 'intelligent design'...is eroding acceptance of evolutionary science in Canada."(emphasis mine)
If this is indeed an accurate description of the research, then it is operating on a foregone conclusion. That's bad research. They aren't trying to determine if this is happening, they just want to show to what extent it is happening. I think they ought to address the "if" first.
"- a controversial creationist theory of life -"
Whether or not Intelligent Design is a "creationist" theory of life (and really, it should read "theory of the origins of life") is the very heart of the debate over its teaching. It is pretty glib for the reporter to simply declare that it is conclusively "creationist". I expect that many people will reply to tell me that "there is no debate at all -- among people whose opinions matter", but if there were no debate, there would be no problem.
In my reckoning, the primary difference between creationism and "intelligent design" is the attitudes of the people who actually study it. Intelligent Design researchers accept the findings of modern science while rejecting some of the conclusions reached by the mainstream scientific community. Creationists, or "creation scientists" as they are sometimes called, tend to reject the very findings themselves, dismissing new discoveries as mistakes or unimportant if they contradict the creationist agenda.
I have a great deal more respect for Intelligent Design than I do for "Creation Science".
Alex Trebek: And let's see what Tom Cruise put down for his Final Jeopardy response. He wrote "Yahoo Go". "Yahoo Go". And his bid? "For It." "Yahoo Go For It." Wonderful.
Tom Cruise: Ha ha! Help me help you, Alex. Help me help you.
Unfortunately, the whole idea of charging more for more popular songs and less for less popular songs is absurd. It will have two results:
Niche artists that already have trouble selling enough songs to make money will have an even harder time making any money, since they will receive less money per track.
Artists will have an arbitrary cap on how popular they are allowed to become. Get too popular, and your price will grow too high to attract new buyers. Wonderful.
A possible solution would be to impose a minimum and maximum price per track, but if you're going to do that, why not just stick with a flat rate? It can't make that much of a difference.
I'm hoping for the price cut, too, but there would be added value that the Mac would have over the replayTV. Here are some of the things that I'm positive Apple would include as features that no sub-$400 DVR does:
1.) Plays DVDs. No need for a separate DVD player. 2.) Plays and rips CDs 3.) Stores and plays your digital music library 4.) Allows both audio and video downloads from the iTunes Music Store (tangent: will they be renaming it to simply the "iTunes Store" in the near future?) 5.) Sync with the iPod directly
And then there are the features that it could offer, but might choose to leave out of a simplified DVR: 5.) Browse the web 6.) Play games 7.) Run the full OS X 8.) Play video downloaded from other sources
Don't get me wrong. I would kick up my heels for joy if they priced this thing at $300, but it would still be a great value at $500. Plus, if they lowered the price that much, I'd be worried about subscription fees.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I follow you, but I'm uncertain if you're disputing what I said or agreeing with it.
Some of the very same "very smart people" who wrote the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights were responsible for the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798. One of the effects of those acts was to restrict speech that was critical of the federal government.
There has never been a NON-moving goalpost when it comes to free speech, not in America or anywhere else. If it were so simple, there would never be any debate about the subject. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is a high ideal, but it is not written in any legal document in any nation (it was invented by a biographer of Voltaire as an explanation of Voltaire's views on free speech).
The most dangerous lie in all of politics is "the answer is simple." It discourages deep thought and thorough research, and makes compromise impossible. The truth is, everything about governance is extremely complicated as it involves the weighing of hundreds or thousands of priorities.
Unless free speech is worth preserving at literally any cost (and I daresay there is a line that even you would not cross, e.g. the extinction of the human race), then a line must be drawn *somewhere.* The debate over where to draw that line is ongoing and important.
Yes. Sadly, that is exactly what I mean.
Assuming free speech should be banned to control what people can talk about within the public eye is more dangerous.
You say that as though it's a universally agreed-upon truth. It's not. That's why we have these discussions to begin with.
How do we determine what's most harmful? Public opinion poll? Scientific study?
Congratulations, you totally missed the point of the original speech.
I don't think I did, and I sincerely believe that trying to apply it to the Reddit situation at all is disrespectful to its meaning.
When the speaker said "First, they came for the socialists", they meant something very specific by "came for." The Nazis were rounding people up, putting them in camps, stealing their property, and killing them. As they go down the list of types of people that "they came for," there is no confusion about what was going on. Everyone knew that it was bad, but they were unmotivated to act to stop it because they hoped they would be spared if they kept their mouths shut. The only way it could have been stopped was through the collective actions of people who were not yet targets, but they did not act.
What is happening at Reddit is not remotely similar to what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Not only are people not being harmed by those in power, they aren't even being silenced. I don't care if Reddit shuts down racist subreddits, but it's not because I'm not a racist. It's because there is nothing Reddit could ever possibly do that would harm me in any way. They have no power to make the world worse. They CAN, however, make it a little bit better by removing this particular platform for people to threaten, harass, and intimidate people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or body type.
In whose reckoning or opinion?
In REDDIT's opinion. It's their site. They make the rules. Because not all viewpoints are valid, they are within their rights to make their own determination about which viewpoints should be represented on their site.
I'm not advocating shutting down groups because of their viewpoints, I'm advocating shutting them down for their specific actions. Threatening someone isn't just speech, it is an action. Encouraging someone to commit suicide is an action. Promoting violence is an action.
One more comment, to specifically address your 1960s socialists example:
I am not arguing that popular opinion cannot veer dangerously into censorship of dissenting political ideas. It can, and it has, many, many times in human history.
What I AM arguing is that shutting down racist subreddits is not moving us closer to that scenario. There is a big difference between dissenting political speech and truly hateful speech. Everyone can see the difference, but hateful speakers like to make a false equivalence between the two, and they can use that argument to convince well-intentioned people that shutting down one is the same as shutting down the other.
There's "mainstream viewpoints," and then there's viewpoints that are unambiguously in favor of hating people and/or deliberately bringing them harm. There are reddit groups that exists solely to express hatred for a given race, sex, sexual orientation, or body type. I'm not talking about "we think homosexuality is a sin," or "we believe that culture is too permissive of unhealthy lifestyles." I'm talking about "[type of person] is garbage, and we want to hurt them, shame them, and ultimately exterminate them."
There is no slippery slope connection between that type of viewpoint and the universe of unpopular but legitimately held viewpoints out there. If we ever reach the point where the majority of Americans support the extermination of a particular race, it won't be because we stopped enabling racist speech.
First they came for the racists and we all celebrated because we were not racists and racists suck.
Then they came for the pedophiles and we all celebrated because pedophiles hurt children, and seriously what the f*** is wrong with you?
Then they tried to come for the socialists and we said "WTF, dude?! That's a valid political viewpoint that isn't explicitly about hate and harming others!"
And then the rest of the speech kind of fall apart because seriously, not all viewpoints are equally valid.
Having an outlet in text for these kinds of things is far better than having none and then having these people act it out for real in their areas. It can also give people a head's up since some of these people post their manifesto before they act out.
This is a popular argument for sure, but is there actual evidence for it? It's possible that "venting" dangerous desires in a controlled setting prevents people from acting on them, but it seems equally possible that it could lead to the escalation of those desires through exposure to new fantasies and the support of like-minded people.
It just seems like a really dangerous assumption to make.
This isn't about obligations, it's about ethics.
It is absolutely about ethics. The question is, is it more ethical to preserve unencumbered freedom of expression on your site or to prevent a radical few from using your platform to harm others?
If you're prepared to blurt out an answer as though it were obvious, you haven't given it enough thought. Ethics is a subtle and complicated subject, and there are many situations where different ethical standards must come into conflict.
Nobody seriously expects that Disney's customers will boycott over this. If they suffer any fallout at all (which I doubt), it won't be from the consumer side. It will be the chilling effect this story has on new hiring. If more skilled workers think twice before accepting a job with Disney, it could inconvenience them in the future.
Even that worst-case scenario is pretty mild, so you can expect Disney to put do a little bit of spin control on the story and then forget about it.
I know this is a troll, but in case anyone is mislead I want to clear up a factual error:
Jailbroken iPhones absolutely can make purchases from the App Store. I have a history of jailbreaking my phones when they get old to enable certain mods and extensions that are not supported by Apple (for example, I had a notification center on my iPhone before Apple released theirs in iOS 7). It didn't change anything about the way I ran or installed my official App Store apps, and I never downloaded a pirated app.
Even if this were patentable, it strikes me as a bad idea to be the company that patents it.
Surge Pricing is already one of the most hated features of Uber. Even if that hatred is unfair, there is definitely going to be more pushback as Uber's business grows. When local governments and consumer groups inevitably start trying to sue them for "gouging," wouldn't it be better to have "common industry practice" as a defense, rather than being the only company that is doing it?
This would be part of my strategy. For the last couple of years, Jobs has been announcing amazing new developments at every public address. The expectations build. The rumor mills churn. The stocks inflate.
Then one of two things happens. Either the announcement is completely beyond what anyone expected, and stocks boom, or the announcement simply meets expectations...and the stocks plummet.
Jobs needs huge, unexpected extravaganzas to keep things booming, but he doesn't have enough of them for every conference. So what does he do? He gradually lowers our expectations by announcing mundane but arguably important developments. The iPod HiFi. The updated Mac Mini. The Intel Mac Pro. Enhancements in Leopard.
Then, when our guard is down... BAM! Out comes the iPhone, or the touchless iPod, or the iWatchEverythingFromMyCouch media center. The impact will be greater when we're no longer expecting it.
Okay, blame the new slashdot commenting system for my last reply. I thought you were replying to a different post. The post you were replying to definitely WAS derogatory, so you weren't out of line. Sorry about that!
Cut the GP poster some slack. Yes, Time Machine does more than System Restore, but that doesn't mean it's "nothing like" it. The comparison is apt, especially considering that System Restore is a feature more than one Mac user has wished Apple would incorporate into OS X.
Instead of sniping at the poster by suggesting that they are ignorant, you could have tried wording your reply more positively. For example:
"In your post, you said that Time Machine was like System Restore. I'd go even farther and say that it's better than System Restore for the following reasons..."
I guess you took a comparison to System Restore to be some sort of insult to Time Machine, but it surely wasn't intended to be.
Ah, yes. Robert Kennedy, Jr., the very picture of impartiality and fairness in a feud between Democrats and Republicans. Why, I can't think of any reason that he'd want to sway the debate in favor of one party!
In your example, there is already a perfectly functional system in place for dealing with a murderer in your house - calling the police and getting the blue hell out of there.
:-P
Okay, so it's a lame example. It's just hypothetical though, and if accepted in the spirit intended, we ought to assume there is some good reason for the cameras to be there.
If the murderer isn't there now but the police say one might show up at some point today, are you still as willing to surrender your privacy? How about at some point within the month? Or possibly during the next several years? And just how reliable is their evidence for this hypothesis?
All very good questions, and ones that should be carefully considered. In fact, I think it supports my point, which was not that the phone record monitoring is justified but different people have different answers to these questions. The fact that they answer differently than you would does not make them stupid or submissive. It just reveals that their priorities are different than yours, which can be due to any number of divergences between your life experience and theirs.
Yes, it all sounds very bad until you realize that "the public values security over privacy" is a false statement, or at least very misleading.
The truth is that the public values a certain amount of security over a certain amount of security. Everyone has their threshhold, and it's different from person to person.
For example, I'd object greatly to having surveillance cameras mounted in my home if the conditions were "the cameras are a permanent fixture so the government can better protect our nation from terrorists". On the other hand, I wouldn't object at all to the same cameras if the conditions were "they are a temporary fixture so that we can track down and arrest a serial killer who was recently spotted entering your house." Heck, I'd help them install the things!
In that case, the security issue (my life was in immediate danger from a murderer) outweighed the privacy issue (I might get caught picking my nose on camera).
In the case of the phone record issue, the 63% cited have weighed the loss of privacy in this case (the government knows who you've called, when, and how many times, but not what you said) against the perceived security threat (the chances of averting a terrorist attack are improved by the government having this data).
Disagree if you want - observe that 37% of those surveyed did. But don't accuse the other 63% of being stupid sheep unless you know what reasoning they applied to their opinion. What are they personally giving up (in more specific terms than just "privacy")? What are they personally gaining?
Don't get bent out of shape. Just remember to quote it like so:
"Sic Heil Bush" [sieg]
This article summary and the article itself have some subtle and not-so-subtle bias that takes the form of unfair presumptions. I'd like to list a few examples:
"Ironically, the grant was for a study into the detrimental effects of intelligent design on Canadian academics and leaders."
This isn't ironic at all. In fact, I find it highly likely that the funds were denied precisely because of the nature of the study.
"Jennifer Robinson... said the university has asked the SSHRC to review its decision to reject Alters's request for money to study how the rising popularity in the United States of 'intelligent design'...is eroding acceptance of evolutionary science in Canada."(emphasis mine)
If this is indeed an accurate description of the research, then it is operating on a foregone conclusion. That's bad research. They aren't trying to determine if this is happening, they just want to show to what extent it is happening. I think they ought to address the "if" first.
"- a controversial creationist theory of life -"
Whether or not Intelligent Design is a "creationist" theory of life (and really, it should read "theory of the origins of life") is the very heart of the debate over its teaching. It is pretty glib for the reporter to simply declare that it is conclusively "creationist". I expect that many people will reply to tell me that "there is no debate at all -- among people whose opinions matter", but if there were no debate, there would be no problem.
In my reckoning, the primary difference between creationism and "intelligent design" is the attitudes of the people who actually study it. Intelligent Design researchers accept the findings of modern science while rejecting some of the conclusions reached by the mainstream scientific community. Creationists, or "creation scientists" as they are sometimes called, tend to reject the very findings themselves, dismissing new discoveries as mistakes or unimportant if they contradict the creationist agenda.
I have a great deal more respect for Intelligent Design than I do for "Creation Science".
Alex Trebek: And let's see what Tom Cruise put down for his Final Jeopardy response.
He wrote "Yahoo Go". "Yahoo Go". And his bid?
"For It." "Yahoo Go For It." Wonderful.
Tom Cruise: Ha ha! Help me help you, Alex. Help me help you.
A possible solution would be to impose a minimum and maximum price per track, but if you're going to do that, why not just stick with a flat rate? It can't make that much of a difference.
I'm hoping for the price cut, too, but there would be added value that the Mac would have over the replayTV. Here are some of the things that I'm positive Apple would include as features that no sub-$400 DVR does:
1.) Plays DVDs. No need for a separate DVD player.
2.) Plays and rips CDs
3.) Stores and plays your digital music library
4.) Allows both audio and video downloads from the iTunes Music Store (tangent: will they be renaming it to simply the "iTunes Store" in the near future?)
5.) Sync with the iPod directly
And then there are the features that it could offer, but might choose to leave out of a simplified DVR:
5.) Browse the web
6.) Play games
7.) Run the full OS X
8.) Play video downloaded from other sources
Don't get me wrong. I would kick up my heels for joy if they priced this thing at $300, but it would still be a great value at $500. Plus, if they lowered the price that much, I'd be worried about subscription fees.