IGI-111

Poor folks must live a constant emotional rollercoaster reading this site.

I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.

Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.

In fact I feel this is the main miscommunication that causes the "it wasn't real X" debate. People use the term X to refer both to the goal and the method of implementation.

Norway is a liberal democracy. The workers don't own the means of production there.

And the Soviet Union was indeed a socialist state. Statism and socialism aren't mutually exclusive, and being both is exactly the point of a dictatorship of the proletariat. That it didn't bring what it promised is just one more tired argument. Scotsmen are never true socialists for some reason.

All in all, Venezuela's woes aren't all to blame on socialism, but you can't really help but point out that it's a direct application of the principles layed out in The Road to Serfdom. The State grew by violating private property to redistribute it, scared off any outside investment, consolidating into an all-in policy on oil. And that investment had to be controlled, which means loyalty became more important than competence to recruit oil industry officials. And the rest was just one market fluctuation away.

I doubt the form they have on their website where you have to know your id to opt out of the spying would hold up in court.

This is so self referential it should be called Brandolini's paradox.

Email is a different beast, being private communication. But Usenet is exactly what you describe, a decentralized forum. And unsuprisingly it had both the best and the worst of humanity in there.

You get one guess as to which of those two got portrayed more in the media.

That we can't produce secure voting software is just a testament to how much we suck at software engineering and making safe computers in general, because cryptographically this is a solved problem.

Hell I'd argue that modern implementations like Estonia's are pretty close to an acceptable standard of trustlessness. But that's thanks to open standards and public ledgers. The closed source voting machine was never a good idea, and never will be.

Given the ancap vibe of blockchain in general this is all a bit ironic isn't it?

I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.

These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.

It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".

People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.

The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.

Not sure why, I blame total ideologies that prescribe the personal being political.

You're free to think that it's all bunk and tyranny of the majority is just fine. Many people do.

I'd just like it to be clear to everyone that such an opinion is being against free speech. Because what greatly annoys me is when people try to claim that they advocate a "reasonable" version of free speech when they simply oppose it. Or indeed try to claim that their censorious position is a liberal one.

Which I am not at all accusing you of incidentally.

That said on the topic of conservation, or more accurately History, I don't think you can convincingly argue for forgetting things as a society. The cost of repeating errors are as great as the benefits of safekeeping knowledge.

It's a tired tune to say that RMS was right, but he was. Letting people be controlled by software is not a good idea for pragmatic reasons that go beyond mere morality.

Moreover people like Mill or Popper would argue people have a duty to engage every idea, because that's how the open society works.

The reduction of free speech to the first amendment and to State censorship is a modern american barbarism that is as absurd as it is baseless in either its historical roots or its application by any free judiciary, including the American one.

Telling people to shut up because their ideas are unpopular is and always will be illiberal.

I'm not sure if i agree with that, but there once was a time when the only people who would ever need a decentralized network were the military, and the benefits did generalize to everyone.

I think it's too early to tell.

I think there's a market for impossible to take down information. The competitors aren't the Amazons of the world, more like whomever is hosting Scihub.

This is a lie. And you don't have a fact to back it up.

There is no way for you to make up a rule about what should be banned besides "I don't agree with it".

You won't build an open minded community if its rules mandate righthink. Doesn't mean you can't try and protect people from the kind of stalking and abuse that has happened here.

It's a shame that we have to have more than "be professional and don't be a dick" as community guidelines, but if we have to might as well do it correctly.

The gamble we're making is that we're smart enough to survive in the most dire conditions.

That's a stupid gamble, but we might win. Plus we're on a roll so far.

Earth is just a bootstrap.