I thought sociopathy was linked to neurological defects/abnormalities. Now maybe in utero hormone levels might be responsible, at least in part, but the research I've seen is that most cases of antisocial disorder are really a matter of how the brain works.
I'm hoping firefighters throughout the US keep that in mind when a Verizon building catches fire. "WEll, you know, we do have to prioritize our resources. Can't fight every fire..."
"Plastic particles may highly concentrate and transport synthetic organic compounds (e.g. persistent organic pollutants, POPs), commonly present in the environment and ambient sea water, on their surface through adsorption.[43] Microplastics can act as carriers for the transfer of POPs from the environment to organisms.[23]
Additives added to plastics during manufacture may leach out upon ingestion, potentially causing serious harm to the organism. Endocrine disruption by plastic additives may affect the reproductive health of humans and wildlife alike" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Jones is just the latest version of the snake oil dealer. I doubt he believes a word he spouts. He makes money by convincing gullible idiots to watch his crap. The more outrageous he is, the more money he makes.
Or made. The bans, if they are sustained are going to cut off his main revenue streams. He's not crying foul because those big evil companies are silencing his voice, he's upset because they're hitting him in the only place that matters, his wallet.
What part of life isn't fair is it that you're not getting? Both sides have been beating their own and each other for decades? The public perception, right or wrong, is that the far right is scarier. And right or wrong, investors and advertisers care about the public perception. That's what social media companies are reacting to, because the people that give them money don't want them giving a platform to right wing extremists. Bitching about Twitter, Facebook and Google not treating Antifa the same as the white nationalists, white supremacists, incels and other right fringes is going after the wrong target. They only care about money, they don't care about you, me or fairness. If a certain group makes them nervous, that's the group that will get banned.
You'd be better of convincing the public that Antifa and various anarchist groups are just as scary. But businesses are about making money, though how it is that Twitter still exists is beyond me, but people keep lending money. They're just responding to advertisers and investors, the people that pay the bills.
Building strawmen of your opponents is a useful exercise in the echo chamber, but when you leave it, you probably should abandon it for a more balanced view of the opposition. After all, it was Obama who did more than any modern president to try to shut down the border, until Trump. He was just wise enough to keep the increased enforcement quiet, so as to not irritate the rabble on the left.
I don't think Nazis are a well spring of dollars. If they were then investors wouldn't have been screaming at Twitter's. Oars. Shareholders have everything to do with this. You don't think Disney fired James Gunn as a community service, do you?
And fair or not, left wing kooks simply don't spook investors as much. Is it right? Probably not, but money doesn't care about right. So grow a pair. Antifa anarchists just don't scare the general public as much as white supremacists. Life ain't fair, and if you're just discovering that now, I congratulate you on leading such an insulated life.
I guess what I'm saying is that in the harsh logic of economics, right wing extremists can't really be monetized. Left to their own devices, these groups either end up associated with Stormfront and private mailing lists or delivering their material in brown wrappers so the neighbors don't know who the Nazis in their neighborhood are.
And who is going to pay for this? Do you think advertisers and shareholders will just sit idly by as a gang of far right kooks generate bad publicity? Whatever twitter may pretend to be, what it is is a publicity trading machine meant to print money for investors. Part of the reason the social media companies are starting to give the Alex Jones' of the world the boot is because shareholders don't want the bad PR these users bring.
So go start your TOS-lite social media platform. But sooner or later, if you expect to scale it up, you're going to have to borrow other people's money, and those people will have expectations that are greater than "yeah, boot them if there's a criminal or civil complaint".
It's the golden rule; "he who has the gold rules".
It would solve some of the problems. At the end of the day, any social media company is going to be caught between the rock and a hard place. Unless they go to a full-on subscription model (which I doubt would ever be able to sustain itself, or at least see anywhere near the membership of, say, Twitter), they're going to need advertising dollars. And when you're the CEO of your "no limits on speech" social networking site gets a call from the marketing department reporting Big Corps 1, 2 and 3, which make up 30% of your ad revenue, are pulling the plug if you don't shut down some accounts they view as posting egregious material, I think, regardless of your personal views on the platform being open to all views, you're going to probably start axing those accounts. Even worse, your board, who is pretty itchy that shares may tumble due to the whole issue, might start mumbling about changes in the leadership.
Even Fox News, which on occasion has gone full-Breitbart, has reigned in the likes of Hannity, because, at the end of the day, it's not really about the people reading the articles, it's about the people with the wallets paying for the advertising space and other services. Twitter has basically had a gun put to its head by shareholders, and seeing as it is a company owned by a bunch of shareholders, and its fiduciary duty is to maintain and grow the value those shareholders have put into it, well, they're the bosses.
I'd say any social media site of any size is going to eventually run up against the same issue, and will, like it or not, deal with it exactly the same way. There will never likely be the kind of competition that will still allow Alex Jones to easily access tens of millions of people for cheap. Sooner or later, his kind will get booted from all the major ones.
If that's the case, then it would apply to any online forum where any kind of moderation happens. But the reality is that for anyone, even the government, to go after a social media site for illegal or defamatory posts would require them to demonstrate intent. If someone makes a death threat via Twitter, in a criminal trial clearly no one could accuse Twitter of being an accessory. It had no intent, it's just basically a message service. It's get dicier for civil suits, and I suppose it's possible that someone who was defamed or in some other way harmed might name a social media company in a civil action, but unless it could be demonstrated that the company somehow willfully or tacitly approved of those posts, and not merely let it slide through because content moderation for sites with millions of users is a very hard problem with no perfect solution, I'd say it would be rather hard to demonstrate any culpability in court. In general, the jurisprudence around online forums these days has to more to do with these companies complying with court orders to cough up anonymous users' identities, and that in itself suggests the courts don't view social media companies as active participants, but rather simply as the medium in which an illegal or actionable activity has taken place.
There's a delicate balancing act here, because fundamentally companies like Twitter and Facebook are private concerns, and in essence their platforms are their property, so they are allowed to make the rules, and apply them as they see fit. The appropriate avenues for policing these companies, as it were, is to apply pressure to them if you feel they've treated someone unfairly, probably in the form of just not using the platform, in favor of one you view as more friendly to your notions of free speech. This isn't a problem for the government to solve, any more than it's the government's problem who I let into my house.
The bad part is that companies who have put their eggs in these particular baskets are going to have an increasingly unsustainable business model. Oh, and Socialism!
I agree. Who needs one of those new fangled horseless carriages; noisy, slow, break down a lot. A horse and buggy, boy, it worked for our fathers, grandfathers a long ways back. No need to invest in this troublesome new technology. Mark my words, in fifty years, no one will own these silly horseless carriages!
It was pretty much that easy 20 years, and yet the Alpha and PowerPC ports of Windows NT shriveled on the vine because developers weren't interested. Getting past four decades of x86 momentum is clearly harder than compiling a new binary.
The chief problem for Microsoft is that a large part of the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by x86/64 applications. Despite 15 years of pushing.NET, and now with.NET beginning to look like an at least credible cross platform environment, even Microsoft's own flagship apps are pretty entrenched in the x86/64 world. Yes, they're making big efforts, but the fact is that there are a whole host of Windows apps that won't run. This is a re-run of Windows NT's early days, where the OS could boot up on multiple architectures, but the suite of apps that could run on anything but x86 was too small to sustain those ports of the operating system. And x86 emulation isn't going to cut the mustard either. It's a useful stopgate at best. Sooner or later Microsoft is going to have to push developers away from native x86 compiled, or they're going to find themselves at a disadvantage even on the desktop.
The problem with every single Communist revolution is it never got past the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", which naturally, considering human nature, it never would. Once you have the dictators in power, they almost never give it up. The Revolution must be maintained, even encouraged, because so long as there is some dark counter-revolutionary force, real or imagined, the tyrants can just keep up the facade that Utopia is just over the hill, apparently in perpetuity. Unfortunately men like Cincannatus, Diocletian and Washington, who retired to their farms, are very rare, and more typical are the Stalins, Maos, and dare I say, Maduros, who go so far as to actually create the conditions to guarantee the necessity of tyranny.
Various schemes like nurse practitioners certainly can help, but the chief problem is aging demographics in most industrialized nations, which means patients are getting older, with more complex conditions, and that means you need doctors, and not just doctors, but more specialists. So sure, you can take some load off of the system by looking at alternative delivery methods, but that's not likely to get anywhere near enough to solving the primary issues.
The problem is that the United States isn't the only jurisdiction trying to grab foreign-trained doctors. A lot of industrialized countries are looking at foreign talent to fill skilled labor pools that, for a variety of reasons, can't be filled by domestic labor supplies. The UK, for instance, has a very large shortage of doctors, and is soaking up talent anywhere it can find it, so right away you start with inter-jurisdictional competition to lure qualified doctors.
It's no different than when these countries claim they're making their own operating system, and then all they really produce is some variant of Linux or Android with a different skin.
I'm not dismissing anything. I think Communism is a doomed political and economic theory, even if one were to find a society that was at Marx's right level of advancement for the workers revolution. I'm actually underlying the most critical flaw of Communism as it was enacted in places like Russia and China. The only way an industrialized country ever became Communist for any length of time was largely because it was imposed (I'm thinking Poland and Czechoslovakia in particular, both of which had a large industrial base before the Soviets imposed Communism on them). It never came to fruition in the nations that Marx figured it would be. The greater workers revolutions that were supposed to deliver Communism to the masses in the 1850s and 1860s in Europe never happened, in part because the rulers of these states were canny enough to realize that they needed to reform their political and economic systems (hence limiting hours of work per week, the growth of free primary education, health and safety laws, and so forth).
No, I honestly believe that the purist forms of socialism even in the ideal capitalist state that Marx envisioned would failed every bit as spectacularly, and probably far more quickly, then it failed in the Soviet Union. But the fact is that the revolutions Marx predicted never happened at all, and the first communist states were primarily agrarian states still not heavily industrialized. The Hungarian revolution in 1919 is a bit of an exception, though it lasted less than a year, so I consider it a bit of an outlier.
Even Lenin had to concede that Russia was not ready, and implemented or retained limited free enterprise, simply because the Russian economy was so broken by WWI and the civil war, so right from the get-go, the Soviet Union couldn't invoke Marx's purist version of socialism. Of course Stalin was much more doctrinaire than Lenin, and his collectivization efforts lead to the catastrophes that gripped the Soviet Union in its first two decades. A similar process occurred in China int he 1950s, with Mao's attempts during the Great Leap Forward to increase steel and agricultural output leading to worthless chunks of iron and mass starvation.
So, in fact, I agree with your primary point that Communism was a doomed enterprise from the beginning. I'm just pointing out that not only was it not workable in the long term, it wasn't even workable at the outset, and in fact, the supposed conditions that would lead to workers revolts which would see the Proletariat boot out the Bourgeois never happened either. Marx was, in fact, wrong about just about everything, with one exception. I think where Marxist theory does tend to shine some light on things is on the notion of class struggle. While it doesn't apply in all times in places, it is a useful tool for explaining various peasants uprisings, and even more general civil wars and revolutions like Rome's Social War and the American Revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought sociopathy was linked to neurological defects/abnormalities. Now maybe in utero hormone levels might be responsible, at least in part, but the research I've seen is that most cases of antisocial disorder are really a matter of how the brain works.
I'm hoping firefighters throughout the US keep that in mind when a Verizon building catches fire. "WEll, you know, we do have to prioritize our resources. Can't fight every fire..."
Not quite, Sparky:
"Plastic particles may highly concentrate and transport synthetic organic compounds (e.g. persistent organic pollutants, POPs), commonly present in the environment and ambient sea water, on their surface through adsorption.[43] Microplastics can act as carriers for the transfer of POPs from the environment to organisms.[23]
Additives added to plastics during manufacture may leach out upon ingestion, potentially causing serious harm to the organism. Endocrine disruption by plastic additives may affect the reproductive health of humans and wildlife alike"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Jones is just the latest version of the snake oil dealer. I doubt he believes a word he spouts. He makes money by convincing gullible idiots to watch his crap. The more outrageous he is, the more money he makes.
Or made. The bans, if they are sustained are going to cut off his main revenue streams. He's not crying foul because those big evil companies are silencing his voice, he's upset because they're hitting him in the only place that matters, his wallet.
What part of life isn't fair is it that you're not getting? Both sides have been beating their own and each other for decades? The public perception, right or wrong, is that the far right is scarier. And right or wrong, investors and advertisers care about the public perception. That's what social media companies are reacting to, because the people that give them money don't want them giving a platform to right wing extremists. Bitching about Twitter, Facebook and Google not treating Antifa the same as the white nationalists, white supremacists, incels and other right fringes is going after the wrong target. They only care about money, they don't care about you, me or fairness. If a certain group makes them nervous, that's the group that will get banned.
You'd be better of convincing the public that Antifa and various anarchist groups are just as scary. But businesses are about making money, though how it is that Twitter still exists is beyond me, but people keep lending money. They're just responding to advertisers and investors, the people that pay the bills.
Er I mean left wing kooks scare less than right wing kooks
So here we are. Right wing nuts scare advertisers and investors less than right wing kooks.
Building strawmen of your opponents is a useful exercise in the echo chamber, but when you leave it, you probably should abandon it for a more balanced view of the opposition. After all, it was Obama who did more than any modern president to try to shut down the border, until Trump. He was just wise enough to keep the increased enforcement quiet, so as to not irritate the rabble on the left.
I don't think Nazis are a well spring of dollars. If they were then investors wouldn't have been screaming at Twitter's. Oars. Shareholders have everything to do with this. You don't think Disney fired James Gunn as a community service, do you?
And fair or not, left wing kooks simply don't spook investors as much. Is it right? Probably not, but money doesn't care about right. So grow a pair. Antifa anarchists just don't scare the general public as much as white supremacists. Life ain't fair, and if you're just discovering that now, I congratulate you on leading such an insulated life.
I guess what I'm saying is that in the harsh logic of economics, right wing extremists can't really be monetized. Left to their own devices, these groups either end up associated with Stormfront and private mailing lists or delivering their material in brown wrappers so the neighbors don't know who the Nazis in their neighborhood are.
And who is going to pay for this? Do you think advertisers and shareholders will just sit idly by as a gang of far right kooks generate bad publicity? Whatever twitter may pretend to be, what it is is a publicity trading machine meant to print money for investors. Part of the reason the social media companies are starting to give the Alex Jones' of the world the boot is because shareholders don't want the bad PR these users bring.
So go start your TOS-lite social media platform. But sooner or later, if you expect to scale it up, you're going to have to borrow other people's money, and those people will have expectations that are greater than "yeah, boot them if there's a criminal or civil complaint".
It's the golden rule; "he who has the gold rules".
It would solve some of the problems. At the end of the day, any social media company is going to be caught between the rock and a hard place. Unless they go to a full-on subscription model (which I doubt would ever be able to sustain itself, or at least see anywhere near the membership of, say, Twitter), they're going to need advertising dollars. And when you're the CEO of your "no limits on speech" social networking site gets a call from the marketing department reporting Big Corps 1, 2 and 3, which make up 30% of your ad revenue, are pulling the plug if you don't shut down some accounts they view as posting egregious material, I think, regardless of your personal views on the platform being open to all views, you're going to probably start axing those accounts. Even worse, your board, who is pretty itchy that shares may tumble due to the whole issue, might start mumbling about changes in the leadership.
Even Fox News, which on occasion has gone full-Breitbart, has reigned in the likes of Hannity, because, at the end of the day, it's not really about the people reading the articles, it's about the people with the wallets paying for the advertising space and other services. Twitter has basically had a gun put to its head by shareholders, and seeing as it is a company owned by a bunch of shareholders, and its fiduciary duty is to maintain and grow the value those shareholders have put into it, well, they're the bosses.
I'd say any social media site of any size is going to eventually run up against the same issue, and will, like it or not, deal with it exactly the same way. There will never likely be the kind of competition that will still allow Alex Jones to easily access tens of millions of people for cheap. Sooner or later, his kind will get booted from all the major ones.
If that's the case, then it would apply to any online forum where any kind of moderation happens. But the reality is that for anyone, even the government, to go after a social media site for illegal or defamatory posts would require them to demonstrate intent. If someone makes a death threat via Twitter, in a criminal trial clearly no one could accuse Twitter of being an accessory. It had no intent, it's just basically a message service. It's get dicier for civil suits, and I suppose it's possible that someone who was defamed or in some other way harmed might name a social media company in a civil action, but unless it could be demonstrated that the company somehow willfully or tacitly approved of those posts, and not merely let it slide through because content moderation for sites with millions of users is a very hard problem with no perfect solution, I'd say it would be rather hard to demonstrate any culpability in court. In general, the jurisprudence around online forums these days has to more to do with these companies complying with court orders to cough up anonymous users' identities, and that in itself suggests the courts don't view social media companies as active participants, but rather simply as the medium in which an illegal or actionable activity has taken place.
There's a delicate balancing act here, because fundamentally companies like Twitter and Facebook are private concerns, and in essence their platforms are their property, so they are allowed to make the rules, and apply them as they see fit. The appropriate avenues for policing these companies, as it were, is to apply pressure to them if you feel they've treated someone unfairly, probably in the form of just not using the platform, in favor of one you view as more friendly to your notions of free speech. This isn't a problem for the government to solve, any more than it's the government's problem who I let into my house.
The bad part is that companies who have put their eggs in these particular baskets are going to have an increasingly unsustainable business model. Oh, and Socialism!
I agree. Who needs one of those new fangled horseless carriages; noisy, slow, break down a lot. A horse and buggy, boy, it worked for our fathers, grandfathers a long ways back. No need to invest in this troublesome new technology. Mark my words, in fifty years, no one will own these silly horseless carriages!
It was pretty much that easy 20 years, and yet the Alpha and PowerPC ports of Windows NT shriveled on the vine because developers weren't interested. Getting past four decades of x86 momentum is clearly harder than compiling a new binary.
My VPN uses ROT13, you insensitive clod!
The chief problem for Microsoft is that a large part of the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by x86/64 applications. Despite 15 years of pushing .NET, and now with .NET beginning to look like an at least credible cross platform environment, even Microsoft's own flagship apps are pretty entrenched in the x86/64 world. Yes, they're making big efforts, but the fact is that there are a whole host of Windows apps that won't run. This is a re-run of Windows NT's early days, where the OS could boot up on multiple architectures, but the suite of apps that could run on anything but x86 was too small to sustain those ports of the operating system. And x86 emulation isn't going to cut the mustard either. It's a useful stopgate at best. Sooner or later Microsoft is going to have to push developers away from native x86 compiled, or they're going to find themselves at a disadvantage even on the desktop.
The problem with every single Communist revolution is it never got past the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", which naturally, considering human nature, it never would. Once you have the dictators in power, they almost never give it up. The Revolution must be maintained, even encouraged, because so long as there is some dark counter-revolutionary force, real or imagined, the tyrants can just keep up the facade that Utopia is just over the hill, apparently in perpetuity. Unfortunately men like Cincannatus, Diocletian and Washington, who retired to their farms, are very rare, and more typical are the Stalins, Maos, and dare I say, Maduros, who go so far as to actually create the conditions to guarantee the necessity of tyranny.
Various schemes like nurse practitioners certainly can help, but the chief problem is aging demographics in most industrialized nations, which means patients are getting older, with more complex conditions, and that means you need doctors, and not just doctors, but more specialists. So sure, you can take some load off of the system by looking at alternative delivery methods, but that's not likely to get anywhere near enough to solving the primary issues.
The problem is that the United States isn't the only jurisdiction trying to grab foreign-trained doctors. A lot of industrialized countries are looking at foreign talent to fill skilled labor pools that, for a variety of reasons, can't be filled by domestic labor supplies. The UK, for instance, has a very large shortage of doctors, and is soaking up talent anywhere it can find it, so right away you start with inter-jurisdictional competition to lure qualified doctors.
It's no different than when these countries claim they're making their own operating system, and then all they really produce is some variant of Linux or Android with a different skin.
Why do people keep think I'm defending Marxism? The system never worked. It was not even implementable
I'm not dismissing anything. I think Communism is a doomed political and economic theory, even if one were to find a society that was at Marx's right level of advancement for the workers revolution. I'm actually underlying the most critical flaw of Communism as it was enacted in places like Russia and China. The only way an industrialized country ever became Communist for any length of time was largely because it was imposed (I'm thinking Poland and Czechoslovakia in particular, both of which had a large industrial base before the Soviets imposed Communism on them). It never came to fruition in the nations that Marx figured it would be. The greater workers revolutions that were supposed to deliver Communism to the masses in the 1850s and 1860s in Europe never happened, in part because the rulers of these states were canny enough to realize that they needed to reform their political and economic systems (hence limiting hours of work per week, the growth of free primary education, health and safety laws, and so forth).
No, I honestly believe that the purist forms of socialism even in the ideal capitalist state that Marx envisioned would failed every bit as spectacularly, and probably far more quickly, then it failed in the Soviet Union. But the fact is that the revolutions Marx predicted never happened at all, and the first communist states were primarily agrarian states still not heavily industrialized. The Hungarian revolution in 1919 is a bit of an exception, though it lasted less than a year, so I consider it a bit of an outlier.
Even Lenin had to concede that Russia was not ready, and implemented or retained limited free enterprise, simply because the Russian economy was so broken by WWI and the civil war, so right from the get-go, the Soviet Union couldn't invoke Marx's purist version of socialism. Of course Stalin was much more doctrinaire than Lenin, and his collectivization efforts lead to the catastrophes that gripped the Soviet Union in its first two decades. A similar process occurred in China int he 1950s, with Mao's attempts during the Great Leap Forward to increase steel and agricultural output leading to worthless chunks of iron and mass starvation.
So, in fact, I agree with your primary point that Communism was a doomed enterprise from the beginning. I'm just pointing out that not only was it not workable in the long term, it wasn't even workable at the outset, and in fact, the supposed conditions that would lead to workers revolts which would see the Proletariat boot out the Bourgeois never happened either. Marx was, in fact, wrong about just about everything, with one exception. I think where Marxist theory does tend to shine some light on things is on the notion of class struggle. While it doesn't apply in all times in places, it is a useful tool for explaining various peasants uprisings, and even more general civil wars and revolutions like Rome's Social War and the American Revolution.
"I have these completely anecdotal claims that prove I'm right..."