13thLetter

Sure, but in that conceptual form they're not laws. The original comment seemed pretty confident about some law that was being violated, so I wanted to know which one it was.

Well, you're definitely right about that. But it's worth keeping in mind that vigilantism is much more likely when the state (or equivalent organization, such as the university in question) declines to enforce order.

> so I found it hard to believe that some of the smartest students in the country would have such a poor reaction towards it.

Intelligence is orthogonal to wisdom. They could theoretically be the smartest students in the country, but even if so that doesn't mean they're wise or emotionally stable. I would recommend that you obey your own judgement here.

Which "free speech law" would that be which is being violated here?

That's not a globally applicable principle. Kidnapping a person and locking them in a cell is wrong when a private citizen does it, but it's right when the state does it (after properly handled arrest and a fair trial and so forth, of course.)

Honestly, I used to agree with you on this, but I'm starting to think that this craziness isn't going to end until the "activists" start getting a taste of their own medicine. And it's not like they won't claim they're being persecuted anyway...

This is the rub, isn't it? In other contexts, these adults would be raising children, holding down full-time jobs, or leading squads in the Army. That we have contexts -- at allegedly elite universities, no less -- where they are not expected to be emotionally capable of handling a Halloween costume or an op-ed they disagree with is somewhat terrifying.

Maybe I missed out on the news about the US and UK, so please fill me in. What free speech has been limited? What political opposition has been banned? Which dissidents have been arrested? Who has been persecuted for their sexuality? Which neighboring countries have been invaded?

> We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike.

This is the key.

Twitter has a serious problem with abuse, and it's not the abuse that's usually talked about. At any point, anything you say -- no matter how anodyne -- can be ripped out of context by someone with malevolent goals and then used to trigger a global outrage storm. This has resulted in death threats or people even losing their jobs. I wouldn't post on Twitter any more than I'd take a shortcut through a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Why take the risk?

> Exxon isn't being sued because oil is a health risk. Exxon is being sued because the argument is that they new it was a health risk,

Gonna stop you right there, because I was objecting to the whole absurd idea of defining oil as a "health risk." If you want climate change policies, just argue for the policies, don't try to slip them in through the back door by redefining the problem as something else.

> Climate change is certainly a health risk. Already there have been numerous issues with fresh water access in developing countries due to local climate change that is largely caused by human activity

a) "Local climate change" that is "largely caused by human activity" is not what we're talking about here.

b) If something causing issues with fresh water access is enough to define it as a "health risk" then every natural or human-caused disaster in the history of the world is a "health risk" and the term is meaningless.

c) If we can define any problem worldwide as a "health risk" and on that basis sue anyone who disagrees with our evaluation or recommended policy, that's a recipe to legally shut down any argument.

> They are not being sued because they sold oil. They are being sued because they lied about the known health risks associated with buying their oil.

Defining climate change as a "health risk" is insane, sorry. If we go down that road, any policy someone doesn't like could be defined as a "health risk" by a sufficiently creative and unscrupulous debater. Legalize drugs? Health risk because of more addicts. Oppose mass surveillance? Health risk because of injuries from crime and terrorist attacks. Favor green energy? Health risk due to poisonous materials used in manufacturing solar panels. Et cetera.

Please at least be honest about this. People like the NYAG are unable to get their agenda through democratically, so they're going to sue their way to victory instead.

You're confusing two different concepts. "Going strong" means it's quite lucrative to sell oil. Which it is.

> Global climate change is costing the world tens of trillions of dollars

It has certainly been speculated that if the ocean rises due to climate change, that will be very expensive, but I'm not aware of any current expenses of twenty trillion dollars or more that can be directly and convincingly linked to climate change. Since you seem very certain about it, though, perhaps you can provide some links?

> the Mozilla one spells out explicitly that discussion in non-Mozilla spaces does not fall under the CoC and is a private matter

Now, see, that is good (and frankly, surprisingly sensible given some of Mozilla's past behavior.) I'd be much less concerned about a code that spelled out things like that.

It's when CoC advocates strenuously fight against adding such terms that I get suspicious of their motives.

"High priority Z trains" still take three to six days to get to their destination. Freight schedules are unpredictable, and that's fine, because freight doesn't care. Passengers do care.

> I have a hard time buying the argument that I should be taking a flight from Portland to Vancouver because the system can't handle it.

Do you really want to sit overnight from Portland to Vancouver on a train as opposed to flying there in an hour and twenty minutes? Most people don't.

Thing is, freight trains are a far better use of the track than passenger trains: the system is ideal for slow-moving bulk cargo that doesn't care if it has to sit on a siding for a week, not to mention that it's a much less damaging way of moving heavy material around than trucks. Passengers, meanwhile, want to go specific places at specific times, and that just does not coexist well with freight. Better for passengers to travel by air, private car, dedicated high-speed rail, and other systems focused on the job.

There's nothing wrong with the basic idea of a code of conduct, in and of itself. There are a lot of things wrong with the current crop:

1. They tend to be heavily politicized, pushing one group's societal views on the entire community.

2. Many attempt to police people's behavior on their own time outside the community.

3. They remain remarkably silent about certain kinds of uncivil behavior, such as public shaming campaigns or importing of outside political disagreements. Often the codes are written with input from people who frequently indulge in this behavior.

4. People with objections are often steamrollered and accused of various social sins for not going along, or a code is simply imposed on the community and all discussion is ignored or closed.

If you want these codes to be established without the angry opposition usually seen, you need to address these points.

Literally one person politely asked you for more information, and you call "sealion" on that? You're not going to convince anyone of the rightness of your cause by reaching ways to dismiss and shame criticism instead of answering it. If your points are correct, they will stand up to scrutiny without the need for such things.

Not sure what you're saying here? Amtrak service is notoriously terrible and technologically backwards, which does not strike me as a good argument for having the US government nationalize an industry.

The guy in that linked post just pulled his 10,000 BC biomass estimate out of thin air. I wouldn't go around making any major life decisions based on it.

a) How is "put it in Yucca Mountain" not satisfactory? b) Do you demand similar levels of safe storage for all of the hazardous materials, many of which are far more dangerous than nuclear waste, produced by other industries, including those involved in renewables technologies?

That is certainly your right, but we should base important technical decisions like this on peer-reviewed science, not knee-jerk emotional reactions.

True; many of these dream reactors probably won't work, because that is the nature of things. But the full-scale engineering never gets done because of anti-nuclear propaganda playing on mass public ignorance, so at the rate we're going now we'll never know.

No, I like my simile better.

Nothing and nobody will stop you from bringing oxygen tanks on your climb, and learning to use them is relatively straightforward. Changing the system of campaign finance in the United States, on the other hand, requires navigating dozens of immensely complex special interests, will be opposed by one or both major parties, and we haven't even gotten to what the courts might say yet. It's hard.

"Lest you forget, the plaintiffs wanted to bash Hillary Clinton around"

Wait, why would it be wrong to bash a politician around again?

That's like pivoting from "I was unable to climb this mountain" to "I'll tear down this mountain with my bare hands." He switched from something achievable that he was qualified for to something immensely more difficult that he had no experience in. What's the result of that been?

And, you know. Even if Citizens United is overturned (hooray! It'll once again be illegal to make a movie critical of Hillary Clinton during an election! Joyous day!) Lessig's contribution to that is zero; that's going wherever it's going with or without him. It would have been better for all of us if he'd stuck with copyright where he could have made a difference.

Lessig's actions in the past several years have been a major disappointment. I admired his work in pushing the copyright case (Eldred v. Ashcroft) all the way to the Supreme Court. Even though he lost, that at least got the issue into the media a little bit, something no one else has managed; that's something that could have been built upon.

But instead of building on that and (for example) working with tech indistries to lobby for more sensible copyright legislation, he decided to go after a far more enormous and difficult task of somehow reforming the entire election system, something which I have to wonder if he even has any particular qualifications or experience to do. Then he decided that the way to accomplish that was to run for President, which is generally taken by the media and most people who follow politics as the sign of a crank. And now that's evaporated, as one would have expected, and we're back where we started. No Presidency, certainly no election law reform, and the same old awful copyright laws getting worse all the time.

And then the causes that are not popular with those in power will be the ones defined as "political."

The plaintiffs in Citizens United, lest we forget, wanted to be permitted to release a movie critical of a presidential candidate during an election. If that is made illegal again, that strikes me as being quite definitely against the spirit of the First Amendment.

Great article. The author did a fantastic job of making the techniques understandable and bringing them down to earth, without dumbing them down -- people who are experienced in graphics are going to learn a few tricks as well from reading this.

Conway is certainly welcome to try to sell these guns, but given their unpopularity it's unclear what the market is -- unless he's relying on the government to require them by law. In which case the statement "for technology and innovation, we have to ignore politics," is not an accurate description of what he's doing.