348 karma · joined October 28, 2020
I've never seen an induction hob ever. Almost everyone I know has gas or electric and electric has always been more difficult to cook on.
> (Also, including phrases like "are you stupid" in comments just makes you look foolish)
Making statements like "In Europe the risk of having someone greet you with an assault rifle is non-existent, because people just can't buy them." is stupid. Where I live (in the midlands outside of the cities) it is non-existant. In London or Manchester it is probably much higher.
Also there is no such thing as an "assault rifle". I not even into firearms and I know the term is bullshit.
However it is more difficult to cook well on electric hobs than gas hobs as you can't directly adjust the heat as needed. Given the choice (I don't have it) I would take gas everytime.
As for Sanders. He has lost influence because he betrayed his base twice (he endorsed a candidate that the base consider to be totally corrupt) and lets face it he is too old now.
> In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience.
Funnily enough a friend who went to Berkerley University was making the same point about debate today in a discord chat. I will admit I am more of a layman but try to stay away from many of the common fallacies in argumentation. It is an interesting idea that moderation itself is something that would need experience.
> I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.
I would say reddit being the prime example. People always bring up the really vile stuff e.g. r/jailbait, r/natsoc (or whatever it was) as examples, the first I would remove in a heart beat as it isn't a free speech issue. However the list of subreddits and the posts that were being removed were often a lot less controversial IMO.
However one of the other comments, somewhere else in this thread I responded listed a lot of "right-wing" content in itself is somewhat objectionable. People have to remember that includes centre right libertarian types (like myself, I am a free market capitalist) and people who just believe in more old fashioned traditional values.
Not at all. If you give governments powers to censor people, sooner or later you will have someone in power that will use those tools maliciously against their own populace.
Therfore you don't allow a government (or anyone else for that matter) to censor except in very specific circumstances e.g. when the content is considered obscene (child pornography being an example).
That why it is important that everyone has a right to speak their mind, even if it highly objectionable.
People seem to think the censoring ideas makese them go away. Nothing can be further from the truth. It just moves it elsewhere. If people are motivated they will find a way to get their message out there.
> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
Anti-semitism has been around 100s (if not 1000s) of years. Nazism was most prevalent in the 1930s to the mid 1940s. Homophobia and anti-LGBTQ views have been existed since the beginning of time I would wager. The last time I checked that was well before the internet was around.
AS for the the move towards populism (by the way there is left wing populism as well) and facism is because politicians don't address valid concerns around thorny subjects like immigration, whereas people outside the overton window will talk about those subjects. This isn't a problem with free speech it is a problem with these issues not being discussed and addressed by those in power in a serious manner.
As for propaganda (which is what meant by fake news) has been around since pen was put to paper.
> Second, while almost everyone in the communities supporting a distributed web are good people, with good intentions, seeing some names in there is concerning to me. Regarding IPFS, advocates (at least for a while) included people like Nick Lim of BitMitigate and VanwaNet, companies responsible for rescuing, among others, pro-nazi website The Daily Stormer and the platform 8chan, a cesspool full of Nazi propaganda, child pornography, and other hate speech.
This is the same crap old crap from governments and traditional news outlets to justify spying on their citizens and other privacy violations, which I am sure many people on here are opposed to.
> Gatherings on 8chan have been blamed for at least three mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the one in the mosque in Christchurch, all of them motivated by racial hatred.
The same can be said about more mainstream websites and communication services. IIRC the Christchurch shooter streamed the shooting on facebook.
> The first real examples of the distributed web aren’t particularly encouraging either. Among some of the most popular apps (“popular” in relative terms, of course) for the distributed web is DTube, a sort of YouTube that is built on top of IPFS. As you can expect, the website is full of questionable content, including conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency scams, weapons, RT International’s Russian propaganda… and of course, porn.
Not porn! Porn has never got onto the web before, we better stop this right now. /sarcasm
People used make the same criticism of large successful services we have today like Youtube, Reddit, Vimeo by saying the content was trite or dangerous. They used to same thing about novels in the 18th century.
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Ultimately his lamentations will be meaningless. Someone will pick up where he left off and continue the effort.
I consider myself a "center-right liberatarian", however when doing political compass tests I come out right in the middle of the quad. I frequently try to _steelman_ the opposition.
So lets go through your examples:
> * A stonetoss comic about the relationship between race and IQ. This was the top post on the page. It was posted by a user with the username "NationalSocialism".
The Stonetoss comics I've seen pretty racist and usually contain anti-semetic tropes. So I will give you that one. No argument from me there.
> * A comic caricaturing an asexual person who decries Christmas but celbrates a silly celebration of their own, supposed to show hypocrisy
There is a lot of people even on the left that believe a lot of people have replaced traditional religion with some other form of spirituality. Usually this person proclaims themselves to be an athiest and laments about traditional religion while claiming to be. It is a trope, but there I've certainly seen it and it is somewhat of a hypocrital position.
So I don't see anything particularly wrong with this based on your description.
> * A comic showing a caricature of a fat black woman shouting in a white woman's face, and the white woman pushing her away. The title is "At this point if a White woman looks at a Black wrong she is a "karen""
The person that posted it could be racist. However to give someone the benefit of the doubt from your description this is commenting on the perceived hypocrisy. Karen means "entitled white woman" and I've seen it used as an insult (to deflect from the actual issue) to a white women making a valid complaint about someone behaviour (and that person happened to be black woman).
> * A post from the "Controlavirus" sub-forum, arguing that lockdowns mean life has lost its color. (One of the only non-caricature comic and reasonable posts I could see on the front page)
A lot of people are suffering due to the corona virus lockdown. My grandmother's dementia has gotten worse because visits to her are very restricted due to the lockdown and it been very upsetting to my mother.
So out of the four examples you have given. Only one I would find objectionable based on your description. Whereas you have found 3 that are objectionable.
> Even on a bad day, load up the Reddit front page and it's nothing like this, even if you were to browse for hours, you wouldn't see an endless stream of reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny.
I find most of the content of the front page on reddit trite. It is full on worn out pop culture references, consumer culture nonsense, cute animals, strawmanning right wing politics and ideas and other crap that I am not interested in.
As for "reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny", most of the people that spend a lot of time online on these sites are younger. I've noticed as someone that is almost forty is that a lot of this is younger guys blowing off steam online because they are frustrated by their circumstances.
The first being your framing. The discussion is frequently framed in the following manner: Complaints about having their content remove or discussion groups removed is some sort of nazi-larping shitposter or other undesirable looking to cause trouble. I am sure there are quite a few that may fit into that, but you cannot lump all complainants into that category because it just isn't true.
The second is that is fundamentally doesn't address the actual complaint itself. When people are complaining about removal of content on social media, they aren't actually complaining about the rules per se. They are complaining about how they feel the rules are enforced.
Frequently the compliants are (but not limited to):
* That enforcement of the rules is applied arbitrarily and overwhelmingly favours one particular group based on the personal politics of the moderators. Whether that is true or not is another matter, they perceive it to be so and this isn't frequently addressed.
* Context is frequently ignored within a discussion and because it has certain verboten terms it is removed. This is true because this has happened when content in the UK have been removed because people have used local colloquisms that are considered offensive outside of those communities but not within them.
e.g.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/faggots-peas...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7911927/Meat-lover-...
* Enforcement is more lenient if someone is well-known (a presumably makes signifcant income for the site and themselves).
Btw what is a "objectionable content" can be completely arbitrary e.g. a subreddit that was a criticism of consumer culture was removed, there was nothing on there that could be considered objectionable. I won't even get into the removal of criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party since Chinese companies own a large stake in reddit now.
I've noticed this when visiting the shops daily when I get my lunch. Before mask were mandated, almost everyone kept each other at a distance. Since mask wearing people have barely bothered.
I've mentioned this to friends on my discord server. Some are from Europe or elsewhere in the UK and they have noticed the same.
I never claimed to know anything about your history or your country. What I've noticed was the usual perversion of history through the modern lens which does happen in my country in exactly the same manner. I can quite clearly recognise it.
As for "authority". I don't have to ask for your permission and I am glad that obviously annoys you considering your high handedness with me. It is quite funny that an American is soo against people speaking their mind.
> Oh, I'd consider brushing up on your reading skills, too. You clearly comprehend nothing that's going on in this thread, so stop pushing your distorted, delusional narrative. It doesn't play well here among actual Americans. Maybe there's a reason for that.
I know exactly what going on here thankyou. People having differing view points is the spice of life and why people like to converse. Marking those that don't agree with you as "distorted, delusional" won't play well in the long run.
It was pretty obvious to me what was meant, but at this point it is pretty obvious people want to make it about something else.
You are splitting hairs now. The point I am making is that frequently on this site observations are discounted immediately as survorship bias. It almost as if it the only one people know.
It simply isn't survorship bias if something been going on for hundreds of years in a particular direction.
> Also, tropes are often tropes for a reason. You can't dismiss something just because it comes up often.
I am dismissing it because it doesn't make sense and it is frequently overused. Thus the hammer and nail analogy.
In any event it pointless continuing this discussion further. So lets just leave it.
It has become such a trope of this site I have heard other people mention it on discord discussions and I haven't brought the subject up.
If you start with a faulty premise we can just stop there (and one that is a complete trope).
As for societies domninated by "elite". If you read any Pareto all societies have been dominated by elite interest groups. It is called "Elite Theory". It is nothing unique to America or the Anglosphere.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/elite-theory
> At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, 'compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.' Inflammatory stuff – and it burned Pareto's reputation.
Unfortunately it is the basis of fascism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_po...
People are simply expressing that a police state is scary and those that work for the police state are working against the interests of their citizens and the ethos of the nation. Whether or not that was the original intention of your founders is irrelevant.
The number of times this comes up on here it is a bit of a meme. So I will counter with the maxim of "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail".
I never said that. I was criticisng how he was analysing it. Today there is a habit of denouncing all the progress someone did in the past because their attitudes and actions at the time weren't up today's standards.
> Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.
The point is that a combination of things that culminated in Europe (partly because of Christianity but not wholly) resulted in the secular societies we have in the Western world today. I will remind you just because you don't find it compelling doens't mean that it isn't valid. I think there is little bit of truth to it, but I don't think it tells nearly the whole story.
I know that many people seem to think that Christians are fundamentalist lunatics like Ken Ham, but most aren't.
> The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.
Less perfect means that "It was a step in the right direction". This isn't really difficult to grok.
> Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.
You really shouldn't. It distorts people's view of history.
> Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.
I am not an American, I don't know anything about the people involved and don't claim to. I was simply commenting on the fact that people seem to view history through the standards of today.
> Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.
I did no such thing.
* Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens e.g. Tom Holland (a documentary film maker in the UK) argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there (whether that is valid or not I have no idea).
* You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today. Someone that would have been seen as progressive back then would be seen as some sort of ultra-traditionalist far-right fridge thinker. You have to judge them by the standards of the time. I am sure in 200-300 years people will see us as backwards, poorly educated and barbaric.
I don't know the history of the events or the characters that led to American indepedence (I am not an American) but what I do find when people feel the need to character assasinate important figures of the past is that they do massively over simplify events and the people involved.
When people pretend they are arbiters of what is and isn't valid because they don't consider it fair it stops any avenue of investigation because they consider it forbidden.
As much as I don't like Apple or their store, if they are going to provide value I am going to work with them. Pretend that for a minute that apple gave me a 10 fold increase on revenue. 70% of a 1000 is still more than 100% of 100.
Also number of people sideloading an app on Android I would wager is negligible compared to store purchases and could be considered to be irrelevant.
So again the question is how much of their revenue came from those stores and how much value does that add to the business?
It is really easy to say "that's extortion" but I personally would take the extra revenue over not having it at all.
I've built and repaired quite a few push bikes over the years I am still using fairly standard shimano kit. The problem with exotic equipment is that even decent shops might not be able to repair it and it normally requires specialised tools.
I mucked about with Campag and some other exotic kit and it is always a PITA as you always have to go hunting around for parts of ebay after a few years because threads and tapers on things like bottome brackets aren't compatible.
Generally in this scenario your job is to make a change that fulfils the requirements, verify that it works and test it manually, pass it onto QA and move on. Businesses often don't care your improvements unless it is a new feature and it will make you look bad because it will take you longer to complete a task than they deem necessary.
As for refactoring in this situation. Don't. Even making seemly simple changes can it makes it difficult for others to code review it, or could incur breakage (yes there are some systems that are this fragile).