Similarly, if you don't like a company denying you the right to say something on their site, be an adult. Find another site. Start your own. Don't go whining to the government that the company needs to be forced to give you a platform.
Free speech is being eroded by government action (like SESTA), sure. It's not being eroded by Reddit or Facebook or Twitter, since they can't stop anyone from expressing themselves.
Except that you're missing the point. Nazis have a public forum. I believe they had to go out of country to host it, but that didn't stop them. Reddit has a right to shut down Nazi propaganda on their site that is independent of whether Nazi propaganda is a good thing or not. (Full disclosure: I have a strong personal hate for Nazis, in addition to the rational hate.)
So, since one government organization made a decision that's probably wrong (I don't know quite enough of the facts to judge), we overturn centuries of precedent? There will be stupid laws. There will be unconstitutional laws. There will be stupid decisions. We can't avoid that.
Of course, you apparently think the hard left gave rise to Hitler, which is patently ridiculous. The right wing supported him and brought him to power. The leftist parties were implacably against him, which is why they got banned so fast.
"Free Speech" means you're entitled to say what you want. It doesn't mean, and never has meant, that you can say what you want using someone else's facilities. I have no respect for the whiny snowflakes who feel entitled to write hateful things on other people's walls.
My observation is that Trump supporters and fellow travelers judge people on anything, and are very free with horrible insults. While there's a lot of insults going the other way, it's not even the same order of magnitude.
Some of the things said about the Parkland survivors mark the speakers (and those who said those things appear to be on Trump's side) as truly despicable human beings.
What's this "MY soapbox"? Start your own website. If the Daily Stormer can find a host, so can you. That's YOUR soapbox. Reddit is somebody else's soapbox.
A place of public accommodation cannot (in the US) turn me away because I'm white, or because I'm male, or because I have my own religion, or because I was born in the USA, or (at least in my state) because I'm straight. They can darn well keep me out or kick me out for reasons of my behavior. If I go to the Mall of America and start with the Nazi propaganda, I'm pretty sure I'll get asked to clean up my act or leave.
It's just "I don't like you therefore you don't get MY platform"
FTFY. Neither Reddit nor Facebook can prevent you from expounding whatever stupid thing you want. All they can say is "not on my platform", and requiring them to give up all editorial control opens a REALLY nasty can of worms.
And this would be different from the pre-Internet USA....how? You've always had to rely on someone with some publishing muscle to present your opinion. It's actually better now. The Daily Stormer found a new home; why can't you?
In the US, a hate crime is a crime that involves some sort of terrorism towards a group. The "hate" part is one of many things that can be taken into account while sentencing. It doesn't determine whether something is a crime or not.
You say that like they're incompatible things. Regrettably, there are a lot of people who use religion to support their hate.
And regardless...people are entitled to their opinions. No one gets to reach into their heads and deem thoughts "hateful" or "criminal" based on nothing besides their own opinion.
Partly right. You can have your own opinion, and I can believe that it marks you as an abomination of a human being. I get to label thoughts hateful. So do you. We don't have to agree. We don't get to label thoughts criminal.
There's a reason the broadcast networks used to be bound by "equal time" laws, when other media never were.
Sure - broadcast uses bandwidth in the EM spectrum, which is a limited resource. Newspapers aren't in practice limited by the laws of physics, and neither are web sites. Broadcasters were limited in what they could do back when newspapers were the primary public forum.
And, as always, nobody's talking about oppressing your free speech rights. You never had the right to say anything you wanted on somebody else's forum. Would you have gotten your underwear all twisted up when the local newspaper didn't publish your letter to the editor?
And I fail to follow you. You claim that "Classical liberals (like myself) believe people should choose their gender roles freely", which I have no objections to. You claim that "Societies can function with a small percentage of people who don't conform to their gender roles". This means that you believe that there can be a small number of people who take on the gender roles of the opposite sex (assuming there is an opposite sex, as there is for almost all humans). This should mean that you believe that there can be people who are biologically female in masculine gender roles, and people who are biologically male in feminine gender roles, without problems, as long as the number of such people is small (and it is).
Therefore, it's convenient to have a name for people in masculine gender roles or feminine gender roles, since it doesn't line up precisely with male/female, and you're fine with that under the current circumstances. "Gender" is in common use for this.
Now, you need to find where you learned telepathy and sue for your tuition back. It's failing you badly.
I am the recognized authority on what I believe, so I'll tell you some things I believe.
Gender roles are defined by society. They aren't completely arbitrary, although many things about them are. Masculine and feminine usually go with male and female, respectively. Injustice and oppression do exist in the world, and I'm against them. Therefore, current society is imperfect. Differences in outcomes based on gender or race or whatever are suggestive of differences in opportunity, and should be investigated. (I'm in favor of equality of opportunity.) In this process, we've found a lot of injustice and oppression that was just accepted as normal. Since we'll never be perfect, we should keep investigating differences in outcome.
It's unclear to me what you mean by "authoritarian laws" here. You may be referring to anti-discrimination laws, which do not appear to me to be authoritarian in general, although as with all things there will be cases where the laws are unfairly applied. The Oregon bakers got what they deserved, but I'm not at all comfortable with the Colorado bakery decision. No legal system is perfect. As far as indoctrination, everybody does it. Most people think their view of things is reasonably close to the correct one, and want others to believe it. I've seen people trying to indoctrinate others into believing that gender in the social sense is completely linked to sex in the biological sense, and I disagree with them.
Hold on now. Who's talking about banning hate speech? I'm claiming that "hate speech" is a useful phrase. As I pointed out, it's difficult or impossible to nail down precisely, but there are examples of hate speech and examples of not-hate speech. I'm also claiming that private companies have the right to refuse to carry it, and to define it as they please. Forcing private companies to carry all contributed content indiscriminately would remove their ability to have useful forums.
It's time to start acting like adults here, and consider that there's differences between the speech that should be legal and the speech that is moral and the speech that an individual company finds best to permit on its systems. If you don't like the Terms of Service of an existing company, the free market approach is not to try to legislate its activities or to accuse it of denying your rights, but to start up your own. I prefer the free market approach except where it clearly doesn't work, so I'm not in sympathy with your complaints.
If you don't like what someone's not letting you say, argue with them, walk away, or start your own service.
BTW, I do have a right to be offended. You have the right to disregard my feelings of offense and maybe snicker at them. It's called "freedom of speech".
Here's how it works. I don't use Comcast or Netflix, but let's use your examples.
Netflix pays a lot of money for connectivity. This is presumably factored into what they would charge me. It's actually not really my business. Netflix makes a profit on me or they don't, and that's their problem. If they screw it up, then either they go bankrupt or I get crap service and go somewhere else. Your free market in action. I pay money for connectivity. Nobody's asking anything for free. What I want is to be able to access Netflix and any other similar site on an equal basis, getting the connectivity I'm paying for.
At this point, you start going on about how the Internet works, apparently missing the point that Net Neutrality has been in effect for a long time now. What happened in the Obama administration is that the courts found that the FCC couldn't enforce Net Neutrality without reclassifying ISPs, and so the FCC did that, to be compliant with the law. Nothing about NN changed then, only the legal technicalities. Pai changed this, so your references to the pre-Obama internet are irrelevant.
So, to go through your list of effects:
1. Companies would still pay for the bandwidth they use. No change.
2. I would continue to pay about what I do for the service I get. In reality, I get 40 megabit service over fiber from the phone company, and pay a certain amount of money per month. As long as I don't need more than that, I'm fine. If content providers send more data that overwhelms this, I'd either not use them or I'd pay more money. If a company were a real bandwidth hog, I'd have to consider that in deciding whether to be their customer. The company would also have to pay more for its bandwidth, so it would presumably have to charge me more.
3. The "public" internet would continue as it has been, since the regulations would not have changed.
4. Small companies would be able to access the internet on the same terms as larger companies. Their expenses might be higher per amount of traffic, because there can be economies of scale, but that's how the economy works. A small company would not have to pay extra to have their content delivered through my ISP.
Your big error is in your "Yet another lie" paragraph: you assume that there was something besides Net Neutrality that would prevent Comcast from shaking down their cable business competitors for more money. You also don't understand the regulations that have been in place, and exactly what the Obama-administration change was.
If you think "the instinct to defend and protect" is male, you've never threatened a baby in the presence of the mother. Women can be fiercely protective, and they can extend that to large groups. The will-to-kill isn't what it's cracked up to be: see David Grossman's "On Killing". Men typically want to use guns for posturing, not killing.
Hari Seldon didn't use a gun. Seldon used scientific advances in an attempt to protect civilization, which is a reasonable thing for a woman to do. The Mule was a freak, and it doesn't really matter what sex. There are other non-sex-specific roles. The mayor in the second half of Foundation and Empire could have been anyone, per Asimov's description. There are characters I wouldn't change the sex of, like Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow, or Arkady whats-her-last-name.
I don't know what "spirit and power" you mean. I tried to watch Fury Road, and gave up because it was making no sense and I wasn't following it. Charlize Theron played a character no worse than the norm. There were some very nice visuals in the part of the movie I saw. I don't know how well Helen Potter would have sold. There's a lot of urban fantasy written with female protagonists, and some of it is of high quality. (As we know, 90% of it is crap, per Sturgeon.) Seanan McGuire has had two such series nominated for the Hugo award. (As I expected, Miles Vorkosigan won the first time, and I think the Five Gods will take home another one of those wondrous trophies that just stay what they are without effort.)
I am completely not remembering arranged matings in the Foundation series. They've occurred in other stories, like Dune. I don't even remember "a higher level of abilities" taking place in the trilogy.
It would be more difficult to change sexes in Dune, although I don't remember any particular reason Mentats were male.
Every statistical test for randomness ensures that numbers are uniform to within maybe two standard deviations. If the numbers are too evenly distributed, that suggests they aren't really random. If you generate 1000 random numbers from 1 to 10, and each number occurs 99, 100, or 101 times, that very strongly suggests the generator isn't random. If two numbers occur under 60 times and two others over 140 times, that would also be strong evidence it wasn't random (if I remember the formulas correctly, standard deviation should be under 10).
Do we need leverage to join an existing treaty? We'd need leverage to renegotiate, of course, but it's likely we could just step into the treaty actually signed.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, if you don't like a company denying you the right to say something on their site, be an adult. Find another site. Start your own. Don't go whining to the government that the company needs to be forced to give you a platform.
Somebody once called me a "black propagandist" on an Internet forum. That's my favorite so far.
Free speech is being eroded by government action (like SESTA), sure. It's not being eroded by Reddit or Facebook or Twitter, since they can't stop anyone from expressing themselves.
Except that you're missing the point. Nazis have a public forum. I believe they had to go out of country to host it, but that didn't stop them. Reddit has a right to shut down Nazi propaganda on their site that is independent of whether Nazi propaganda is a good thing or not. (Full disclosure: I have a strong personal hate for Nazis, in addition to the rational hate.)
Hint: Google, Facebook, and Twitter don't do that. They'll treat you as your behavior indicates, not anything innate to you.
So, since one government organization made a decision that's probably wrong (I don't know quite enough of the facts to judge), we overturn centuries of precedent? There will be stupid laws. There will be unconstitutional laws. There will be stupid decisions. We can't avoid that.
Of course, you apparently think the hard left gave rise to Hitler, which is patently ridiculous. The right wing supported him and brought him to power. The leftist parties were implacably against him, which is why they got banned so fast.
"Free Speech" means you're entitled to say what you want. It doesn't mean, and never has meant, that you can say what you want using someone else's facilities. I have no respect for the whiny snowflakes who feel entitled to write hateful things on other people's walls.
Which is why I'm really leery of Kindle.
My observation is that Trump supporters and fellow travelers judge people on anything, and are very free with horrible insults. While there's a lot of insults going the other way, it's not even the same order of magnitude.
Some of the things said about the Parkland survivors mark the speakers (and those who said those things appear to be on Trump's side) as truly despicable human beings.
What's this "MY soapbox"? Start your own website. If the Daily Stormer can find a host, so can you. That's YOUR soapbox. Reddit is somebody else's soapbox.
Don't assume that leftists are united on that one. I agree with the decision on the Oregon bakery, but not that one.
A place of public accommodation cannot (in the US) turn me away because I'm white, or because I'm male, or because I have my own religion, or because I was born in the USA, or (at least in my state) because I'm straight. They can darn well keep me out or kick me out for reasons of my behavior. If I go to the Mall of America and start with the Nazi propaganda, I'm pretty sure I'll get asked to clean up my act or leave.
And this would be different from the pre-Internet USA....how? You've always had to rely on someone with some publishing muscle to present your opinion. It's actually better now. The Daily Stormer found a new home; why can't you?
In the US, a hate crime is a crime that involves some sort of terrorism towards a group. The "hate" part is one of many things that can be taken into account while sentencing. It doesn't determine whether something is a crime or not.
You say that like they're incompatible things. Regrettably, there are a lot of people who use religion to support their hate.
Partly right. You can have your own opinion, and I can believe that it marks you as an abomination of a human being. I get to label thoughts hateful. So do you. We don't have to agree. We don't get to label thoughts criminal.
Sure - broadcast uses bandwidth in the EM spectrum, which is a limited resource. Newspapers aren't in practice limited by the laws of physics, and neither are web sites. Broadcasters were limited in what they could do back when newspapers were the primary public forum.
And, as always, nobody's talking about oppressing your free speech rights. You never had the right to say anything you wanted on somebody else's forum. Would you have gotten your underwear all twisted up when the local newspaper didn't publish your letter to the editor?
And I fail to follow you. You claim that "Classical liberals (like myself) believe people should choose their gender roles freely", which I have no objections to. You claim that "Societies can function with a small percentage of people who don't conform to their gender roles". This means that you believe that there can be a small number of people who take on the gender roles of the opposite sex (assuming there is an opposite sex, as there is for almost all humans). This should mean that you believe that there can be people who are biologically female in masculine gender roles, and people who are biologically male in feminine gender roles, without problems, as long as the number of such people is small (and it is).
Therefore, it's convenient to have a name for people in masculine gender roles or feminine gender roles, since it doesn't line up precisely with male/female, and you're fine with that under the current circumstances. "Gender" is in common use for this.
Now, you need to find where you learned telepathy and sue for your tuition back. It's failing you badly.
I am the recognized authority on what I believe, so I'll tell you some things I believe.
Gender roles are defined by society. They aren't completely arbitrary, although many things about them are. Masculine and feminine usually go with male and female, respectively. Injustice and oppression do exist in the world, and I'm against them. Therefore, current society is imperfect. Differences in outcomes based on gender or race or whatever are suggestive of differences in opportunity, and should be investigated. (I'm in favor of equality of opportunity.) In this process, we've found a lot of injustice and oppression that was just accepted as normal. Since we'll never be perfect, we should keep investigating differences in outcome.
It's unclear to me what you mean by "authoritarian laws" here. You may be referring to anti-discrimination laws, which do not appear to me to be authoritarian in general, although as with all things there will be cases where the laws are unfairly applied. The Oregon bakers got what they deserved, but I'm not at all comfortable with the Colorado bakery decision. No legal system is perfect. As far as indoctrination, everybody does it. Most people think their view of things is reasonably close to the correct one, and want others to believe it. I've seen people trying to indoctrinate others into believing that gender in the social sense is completely linked to sex in the biological sense, and I disagree with them.
Hold on now. Who's talking about banning hate speech? I'm claiming that "hate speech" is a useful phrase. As I pointed out, it's difficult or impossible to nail down precisely, but there are examples of hate speech and examples of not-hate speech. I'm also claiming that private companies have the right to refuse to carry it, and to define it as they please. Forcing private companies to carry all contributed content indiscriminately would remove their ability to have useful forums.
It's time to start acting like adults here, and consider that there's differences between the speech that should be legal and the speech that is moral and the speech that an individual company finds best to permit on its systems. If you don't like the Terms of Service of an existing company, the free market approach is not to try to legislate its activities or to accuse it of denying your rights, but to start up your own. I prefer the free market approach except where it clearly doesn't work, so I'm not in sympathy with your complaints.
If you don't like what someone's not letting you say, argue with them, walk away, or start your own service.
BTW, I do have a right to be offended. You have the right to disregard my feelings of offense and maybe snicker at them. It's called "freedom of speech".
Here's how it works. I don't use Comcast or Netflix, but let's use your examples.
Netflix pays a lot of money for connectivity. This is presumably factored into what they would charge me. It's actually not really my business. Netflix makes a profit on me or they don't, and that's their problem. If they screw it up, then either they go bankrupt or I get crap service and go somewhere else. Your free market in action. I pay money for connectivity. Nobody's asking anything for free. What I want is to be able to access Netflix and any other similar site on an equal basis, getting the connectivity I'm paying for.
At this point, you start going on about how the Internet works, apparently missing the point that Net Neutrality has been in effect for a long time now. What happened in the Obama administration is that the courts found that the FCC couldn't enforce Net Neutrality without reclassifying ISPs, and so the FCC did that, to be compliant with the law. Nothing about NN changed then, only the legal technicalities. Pai changed this, so your references to the pre-Obama internet are irrelevant.
So, to go through your list of effects:
Your big error is in your "Yet another lie" paragraph: you assume that there was something besides Net Neutrality that would prevent Comcast from shaking down their cable business competitors for more money. You also don't understand the regulations that have been in place, and exactly what the Obama-administration change was.
Of course I do. However, something that's plausible isn't really FUD, as you claimed it was.
If you think "the instinct to defend and protect" is male, you've never threatened a baby in the presence of the mother. Women can be fiercely protective, and they can extend that to large groups. The will-to-kill isn't what it's cracked up to be: see David Grossman's "On Killing". Men typically want to use guns for posturing, not killing.
Hari Seldon didn't use a gun. Seldon used scientific advances in an attempt to protect civilization, which is a reasonable thing for a woman to do. The Mule was a freak, and it doesn't really matter what sex. There are other non-sex-specific roles. The mayor in the second half of Foundation and Empire could have been anyone, per Asimov's description. There are characters I wouldn't change the sex of, like Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow, or Arkady whats-her-last-name.
I don't know what "spirit and power" you mean. I tried to watch Fury Road, and gave up because it was making no sense and I wasn't following it. Charlize Theron played a character no worse than the norm. There were some very nice visuals in the part of the movie I saw. I don't know how well Helen Potter would have sold. There's a lot of urban fantasy written with female protagonists, and some of it is of high quality. (As we know, 90% of it is crap, per Sturgeon.) Seanan McGuire has had two such series nominated for the Hugo award. (As I expected, Miles Vorkosigan won the first time, and I think the Five Gods will take home another one of those wondrous trophies that just stay what they are without effort.)
I am completely not remembering arranged matings in the Foundation series. They've occurred in other stories, like Dune. I don't even remember "a higher level of abilities" taking place in the trilogy.
It would be more difficult to change sexes in Dune, although I don't remember any particular reason Mentats were male.
Every statistical test for randomness ensures that numbers are uniform to within maybe two standard deviations. If the numbers are too evenly distributed, that suggests they aren't really random. If you generate 1000 random numbers from 1 to 10, and each number occurs 99, 100, or 101 times, that very strongly suggests the generator isn't random. If two numbers occur under 60 times and two others over 140 times, that would also be strong evidence it wasn't random (if I remember the formulas correctly, standard deviation should be under 10).
Do we need leverage to join an existing treaty? We'd need leverage to renegotiate, of course, but it's likely we could just step into the treaty actually signed.