13thLetter

Oh, I agree with you as far as majority rules. It's not great, but you need something and that's less unjust than most other options. What I'm complaining (pointlessly) about is that in these cases majority does not rule: some administrator or corporate functionary has already decided, and that's that.

With regards to who should be trusted to manage communities, I'm afraid I can't convince myself to believe in the experts. In most cases, these "experts" are not people who have successfully managed communities or are even particularly well educated on how they work; they are self-appointed thought leaders with, often, fringe agendas and little concern for who gets trampled in the process of enacting them. They are generally the last possible people you would want to put in charge of anything.

>. If programmers want to run their own communities and not rely on the advice of experts, they're welcome to do it outside the mainstream platforms.

Not if the "experts" do everything in their power to marginalize and poison the public image of those non-mainstream platforms, unfortunately. I think it was either Scott Alexander or one of his commenters who pointed out that, if you take over a community and impose anti-witchcraft policies, you can then easily dismiss any alternate communities -- with a certain amount of accuracy, even -- as being full of witches.

"Act now and solve it."

By doing what?

Unfortunately, we've seen a lot of situations where the "majority," at least of those who speak up, are (for example) opposed to heavily restrictive codes of conduct proposed by outside groups, yet the code is forced through anyway by project leaders. Majority rule seems to be valid only when the majority votes the "right" way.

Eh, for one thing, ideology in journalism can be just as much what you choose to report on as how you report on it. You could find right-wingers who will complain at you all day about how CNN/NBC/whoever spend virtually no time reporting on things which make the current Administration look bad and lots of time reporting on things which make their opponents look bad, and it'll be hard to say they're wrong.

I doubt it's possible for the news to be truly non-ideological for this, and many other, reasons. The best one can hope for is a news organization that is a) straightforward and open about its political viewpoint and b) reports in a sober and accurate manner with a minimum of flinging partisan red meat around. There are a fair number of American news sources that are a), but b) is much harder to come by, especially on television. Given this, I can understand why some Americans flock to the BBC or Al Jazeera or whoever, even if I personally despise their editorial positions.

It's not so much that the news is a government mouthpiece, more that each network tends to report the news in a fashion that supports its political views: CNN, MSNBC, and the traditional alphabet networks on the left, Fox News on the right. (And, of course, these are American definitions of left and right, so feel free to map them to your nation of origin however you please.) If the network is simpatico to the party in power, they'll sound like government propagandists. If not, RT or Al-Jazeera will have nothing on how venomous they get.

To put it another way, imagine the Guardian vs. the Daily Mail, but on television instead. No one, I hope, would pick up a copy of those newspapers expecting the unbiased facts; same deal here.

This is all legitimate. Unfortunately, we're in a culture -- one might almost call it a status quo, really -- where certain trolling and harassment is renamed "punching up" or "calling out" and is not only permitted but encouraged.

If we genuinely want harassment to stop, the very minimum that's necessary is for all people to be treated equally under the anti-harassment policies. Otherwise, why would those who are defined as valid targets have any investment in the smooth running of our systems? We'll create a permanent enemy and never have a day's peace until the end of time.

It's a big deal once you can easily predict who is punished for ToS violations, and who gets to skate, by checking to see who has the right political views and/or friends at Twitter.

If you're going to lump together everything even tenuously connected to the military (all of NASA? all of the State Department? all of the Department of Energy?), I'd feel entitled to lump together everything that sends out checks, and the military would still be smaller -- much smaller, in fact. Interest on the debt isn't going to help you either, as we'd have to slice out the entitlements portion of that as well.

And, of course, this doesn't even get into the question of whether the amount of military spending is right or wrong. "Look at this huge number! It's bigger than this other number!" isn't a meaningful argument. "This number is bigger than it should be, and here's why" is.

"Well maybe it was true in early 90s' But today if you include mandatory (entitlems) or just discretionary spending budget in the pie. Mandatory spending is dominated by medical (medicare etc) and social security. So that part doesn't sound right. Anyone know more?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_bud...

Defense was third, behind Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. So no, it's not right. They may have been interpreting discretionary spending as the whole thing, in which case defense is the largest single piece.

Well, we know how this will go. A number of commenters will object, pointing out how the code of conduct reserves the right to police what people say in non-project spaces, relies on secret evidence and opaque processes, and does not protect people from being harassed for their political views. Then the project maintainers will ignore them and install the code anyway.

" As a general rule (because everything is naturally full of gray areas) it's considered to be impossible for whites to experience institutional racism in countries where we're the majority."

Sorry, what? Considered by whom? Because we should have a word with these people about how unimaginative they are.

For one thing, there are plenty of ways a member of group X could experience institutional racism in an X-majority country. Perhaps they live in a Y-dominated region of the country, or work for a Y-owned company, or group Y has more political/economic/cultural power in society despite being a minority, or they work for an organization whose policy is to hire and promote Y preferentially.

More generally, I don't see the purpose of desperately insisting that institutional racism can never affect group X. To say that group X can be harmed certainly doesn't mean that group Y isn't harmed more. It's a weird and pointless linguistic game that harms the purpose of achieving equality of opportunity by gratuitously driving away allies.

If I were inclined to be rude, I might make a smartass remark in kind about how you seem to believe that the police should indiscriminately open fire on demonstrators the second they fail to cooperate in any way...

...but I won't, because I know the situations are more complicated than that and if we were speaking in person instead of over the Internet you'd probably agree with me on that, even if we didn't agree on the fundamentals of the issue.

"But, it's disingenuous to think that all demographics get an equally fair shake/generous response from law enforcement when they are holding (or believed to be holding) a gun."

Maybe they do and maybe they don't, but that particular argument doesn't work at all. There's a huge difference between a protest (even with armed protesters) in broad daylight surrounded by cops and news media, and a split-second confrontation between a police officer and a suspect in the middle of the night. You cannot boil down both situations to "a person may have a gun."

(To be clear, that's not to make any moral judgements about the people involved in those two different situations, or what cops should or should not do. Just saying they are different, and it's dangerously simplistic to line them up next to each other and believe you've proved anything.)

This is an argument that gets wheeled out a lot, and I'm afraid I don't see the logic in it at all. More Americans died in car crashes in December, 1941 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, too; are you going to assert that, therefore, Japan bombing Pearl Harbor was not a problem?

Simple: because they aren't pointing the AR-15s at anyone or breaking any laws. Hope that answers your question -- anything else you need help with?

Why do you doubt that?

As a counter data point, the police chief of Detroit recently advised the city's residents to carry guns for their protection. The reaction on right-wing blogs which covered this was applause.

"For we got rid of things like having slaves be counted as 3/5 of a person of representation."

Just in case you didn't know, the "a slave is 3/5 of a person" that is so oft-decried today was an anti-slavery measure. For the purposes of Congressional representation, if a slave was counted as a full person, then the slave-owning states would get expanded numbers in Congress for all the non-voters being kept in slavery. Three-fifths, as opposed to full representation, at least kept them from gaining as much power as they would have otherwise. These things generally aren't as simple as one is often told.

Unless they're going to create some sort of limit on how much Twitter mobs can dogpile people, doxx them, and call their employers to get them fired, no thanks. You'd have to be crazy to post on Twitter and take those risks, no matter how anodyne you think you're being in your tweets.

"Looting and rioting is critical component of a public protest, and it's morally justified."

No, it really isn't. Quite aside from the immoral way you have just cheerfully sacrificed strangers' homes and livelihoods in the name of your transient political goals, looting and rioting leads to businesses and productive citizens leaving and a collapse of the local economy. Go to Detroit if you want to see how that works out in the long run.

Incidentally, even if somehow rioting is okay as long as just people of the appropriate skin color are the ones being harmed, perhaps you should keep in mind that the folks who start businesses in low-income areas of American cities tend to be either local black people or immigrants. That's who suffers when buildings get burned down in the name of "justice."

And how many people did Pinochet kill, compared to the number of people Stalin or Mao killed?

It's neat how "political views" is missing from that list up there. I wonder why that is.

A consistent point of view, but you'll have to apply it to newspapers, book publishers, and television too, just for starters. Money in politics is going to migrate towards any method of advertising that it isn't completely banned from.

I'm not convinced that content-based restrictions can be easily applied, either, even putting aside one's confidence in the regulators. To take the above example of a documentary attacking Reagan, it would be easy for it to have the subtext of "and don't vote for Mitt Romney this year, he's just like that Reagan jerk."

That just kicks the problem up one level: now you've got to figure out the distinction between political speech and non-political speech. I'm not familiar with how things work in Belgium, but in the United States Hollywood has released a large number of explicitly political movies in the past fifteen years, such as Lions for Lambs or Bowling for Columbine or Munich, and that doesn't even get into the political subtexts that are often present even in mass-market blockbusters. Would those be forbidden under this policy?

Assuming that you do come up with a plausible way of drawing a line here, you also need to have general trust that this power will not be abused. Given the heavy politicization of regulatory agencies in the United States, a large portion of the population is worried -- not without substantial justification -- that "is this speech opposed to the party in power" will be one of the factors used to draw that line.

"2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery."

Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a large number of people to coordinate, inevitably shading over into a corporate legal structure... just like, say, a union, or a political party, or a newspaper. So how are you going to decide which corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech, whatever that means, and which aren't?

"You link to these things like they are incriminating evidence; I just see someone pushing back against an onslaught on bullshit."

No. You are depersonalizing her actions as "pushing back" against some impersonal force. What she actually did was engage in sustained harassment, bullying, and blacklisting campaigns against specific individual human beings.

It's the commenter above me who was insinuating that someone was so mentally traumatized that they couldn't help but lash out at innocent parties; if you find that insinuation uncivil, perhaps you should direct your remarks in that commenter's direction, not mine.

No. Even if she has been victimized, that does not give her the right to engage in sustained harassment and blacklisting campaigns against third parties. If she is suffering from such terrible PTSD that she cannot keep herself from lashing out at undeserving victims, I feel for her but she needs psychiatric care, not enabling comments such as we are seeing on this post.

Incidentally, the original definition of the word "privilege" is "private law." I'll leave that to others to decide how that applies to granting one person the permission to engage in the same harassing behaviors she wants others punished for.

I've never seen any use of the word "privilege" that didn't map directly to "shut up," and sadly this comment is no different.

If you disagree with the parent comment, make an argument, don't just throw out a buzzword that's only meaningful to a tiny political fringe and think that's going to convince anyone of anything.

> What makes you think that a public ISP/whatever would rely on 'ever-bigger threats' for budget?

Perhaps I was unclear. Facebook will violate your privacy to sell ads. The government agency will violate your privacy to justify its budget. In both cases your privacy is violated, with the additional point that you can't quit using the government agency and if you get in their grill too much they can have you killed.

> As far as actual examples, I'm pretty confident in saying that some of the organizations that produce the highest-quality media content are publicly funded. NPR or the BBC are two examples that pop into my head.

They're very high-quality, and they also generally represent a single minority point of view in their societies. The two qualities are not mutually exclusive.

It's a weird blind spot a lot of people have. As if a government agency whose budget depends on a perception of ever-bigger threats will be more reluctant to violate people's privacy than Facebook is, or a government agency run by a single political party will report the news more evenhandedly than Fox News does. Large bureaucracies don't magically become trustworthy just because you painted a flag on their side.