JasonFruit

I think a lot of efforts to support one or the other side in a war overlook that governments often do things that are supported by only a small portion of their people, and that support is often achieved only through dishonest propaganda. And while the governments have the resources to weather economic and social pressure, their people frequently do not, the more so the more repressive the government. If we can't very directly target the government, not the people, we should keep out of wars that are not an attack on us.

I'm not sure what point this addresses; maybe none. But I have to ask: who are the targets of these ads? Who are the people who would not have committed violence and genocide against the Rohingya until they saw a Facebook ad advocating it?

The cool thing is that if it's valuable, you can leave the iteration artifacts in the literate document, not as commented-out blocks like we often see, but as a part of the explanation of how we arrived at the final version of our solution. Not all code that's in the document has to end up in the compiled/executed files.

Two problems with that thinking: a) even if you think you have a perfect design, you are still at "great, but not perfect", and b) there's no strategic advantage to doing less well than your opponent. In trying to avoid the later state where your enemy catches up to you, you're reducing or eliminating the initial advantage, which is probably not what you want.

Wasted a fair amount of time on this before realizing it's Mac-only.

That it caused a catastrophe and the participants were rocket scientists doesn't mean the problem was anything more than poor communication. The information on the slide in question wasn't hard to understand; it was arranged in a way that distorted its meaning.

When someone insists on redefining your position before they'll argue with it, it's a sure sign they have a position they'd like to attribute to you and argue with instead. You've done that twice. I'm not interested.

"Lawyer-brain legalism" describes the right way to interpret law, though. The way to fix it isn't to be flexible about the law, but to write better law.

> ...resorting to First Amendment absolutism is intellectually lazy at best. It feels like having a nice solid black&white answer, but it is not, since the result of the answer is the destruction of society.

That's quite an assertion, but I notice you back it up with nothing at all.

What you describe as the libertarian version is the non-cartoon version of "First Amendment absolutism": you can say what you want, but you're not immune from demonstrable consequences of what you say. There's nothing in that position that requires or suggests that people should be coercively prevented from speech that is unpopular, incomplete, or incorrect. In that light, the objections you present mostly fail to address my point.

The only exception is your extension of the FDA and FTC rules regarding food and drug advertising to non-advertising speech, which would present a lot of practical problems, creating a vast opening for frivolous and harassing lawsuits against public figures and discouraging the expression of much valid and worthwhile opinion. I'd oppose it, and I can't imagine that it would find support outside the sort of election-year rhetoric that evaporates on contact with reality.

They most emphatically do not need them, but they have them nonetheless.

You're doing it right, opposing bad information with good. All of what you say here makes sense, including "This is why you shouldn't get your medical advice from Joe Rogan." Where that breaks down is when that turns into, "This is why you shouldn't be allowed to get your medical advice from Joe Rogan."

People make unwise choices all the time, and when we try to prevent them from doing so coercively, we fall into a pit of unintended consequences. When people see powerful people suppressing a point of view, it makes it more sympathetic to many of them, even if they would otherwise have rejected it as unreasoned.

Chemical and biological weapons are very useful in warfare as a way to demonize one combatant. False or doubtful claims of chemical weapons deployments have an effect on the response of the public and international organizations that is entirely out of scale with the damage that could be inflicted.

Your comment came off as lacking compassion; perhaps I was mistaken in that impression.

And you're missing some compassion.

It's pus, not puss. What you wrote could give a false impression.

Just go to gemini://geminispace.info/ and start searching. You'll find more interesting things on your own.

I'm a conservative libertarian, reading what communists have to say for themselves.

I've been enjoying Gemini using Lagrange on desktop and Deedum on mobile. It's reminiscent of the early web: the kind of people who put up Gemini capsules are not talking about the kind of stuff you see on every popular website, so you get detailed idiosyncratic takes on history, technology, politics, religion, crafts — all manner of things. For example, I'm ardently opposed to a particular political point of view, and using Gemini I've found a lot of interesting, introspective writing by people who adhere to it that has given me a new, if not more positive, perspective that I could not have gained on the more public web.

It's worth checking out.

What on earth do you mean? I'm literally browsing the web with it right now.

That was sarcasm.

Hawking's reputation can take the hit, and it's always good to have a skeptical counterpoint to a hagiographical mainstream. Reexamining someone's intellectual legacy now and then is worthwhile.

I understand that libraries have to prioritize what uses space in their circulating collections, but does "old book" really equal "awful book"? A few are in the awkward space between being current enough to be useful today and old enough to have historical interest, but many of them are just a little outdated in appearance and tone, which in no way means they can't be a valuable part of a library collection.

> "The State of Israel is Jewish and so it will remain," said Simcha Rothman of the far-right Religious Zionism party, a member of the opposition who brought the law forward with Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked. "Today, God willing, Israel's defensive shield will be significantly strengthened," he told the Knesset hours before the vote.

When a search provider decides to allow one side of a story to be presented but to remove sites that present the other side, that's pure bias. It may be justifiable bias; that's arguable. But you can't call that unbiased by any sensible definition.

"If it saves even one life, it will be worth it!"

Even if it means preemptive curtailment of their liberty, privacy, and choice, whether or not they would actually have committed suicide if left unmolested.

It looks great on mobile too.

That sounds humanitarian...

On a complete side note, I grew up in Wisconsin, live there now, and have never heard anyone refer to another Wisconsinite as a "Sconnie". I think it's purely a marketing thing. "Sconnie Geek Nation," indeed!

The name is so atrocious that I have misread it as Unilicense for all these years, only realizing how truly bad it was a decade later.

I'd say he also encapsulated the appeal of Trump: he's wrong, sure — they're all wrong — but at least he's a different kind of wrong. People thought they'd give it a shot, because how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.