bourgoin's comments

I think the only actor to that description that played a 'major' role on the show was the one who played Snoop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_Pearson

They load pretty much instantaneously, run few scripts, have no swooshing animations or scroll behavior overriding, elements don't jumble around and rearrange themselves as the page is loading... they are basically just plain text and hyperlinks on a plain background. From my perspective they're lightyears ahead of the state of English-language webpage design.

I guess they're behind in the sense that they have declined to incorporate many new bad practices. They're behind like a farmer who doesn't use pesticides, a candy-maker that doesn't use artificial coloring and flavoring, or a gas station that doesn't play ads on a screen at the pump.

But anyway, I agree. It's a shame. Thousands (or millions) of people have probably had the thought "Why does this player work so badly? Oh, it's some weird open source thing. Why don't they just use a normal player like other sites?"

The classic prohibitionist argument against "no victim, no crime" is that society is the victim when an individual uses drugs, because a productive, healthy, social individual who becomes a drug addict stops contributing to society, or even becomes a drag on it, making the world a slightly worse place for everyone. And for some drugs that may be the case... but it's beyond me how the solution to that problem should be to persecute the addicts rather than try to help them live up to their full potential.

Funnily enough, I went to sequelpro.com/legal to find that while their software is under the MIT license, as opposed to the more restrictive GPL license used by BTrDB, the website specifically calls out the icon as property of the project and its use is disallowed in forks. So, it looks like they really would care more about the logo being ripped off more than anything.

You say that the word 'justice' is being used in a Right-Wing Authoritarian (I assume that is what you mean by RWA) context. Here is a definition of RWA from Wikipedia (original source from "The Kinds of Conservatism" by Karen Stenner, Psychology Press 2009): "Right-wing authoritarians are people who have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who do not adhere to them. They value uniformity and are in favour of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it."

Merriam-Webster's first definition for 'justice' is "the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments." Now, that's a bit of a circular definition given that it contains the word 'just' in it, but the 'especially' clause is substantial.

I think that the common objection that people have to 'social justice' types is that they strongly reject those whose ideas do not fall in line with orthodoxy, and are quick to brand anyone who disagrees with them with labels like 'misogynistic', 'Nazi', 'alt-right', etc. The phenomenon of 'outrage mobs' (I find the term 'lynch mob' to be distasteful and inaccurate here) is a common example of this trait. Outspoken supporters of 'social justice' engage passionately in public shaming, in 'no-platforming' (i.e., suppression of free speech), and demand that targets lose their jobs. They seek to punish dissenters outside of the formalized system of justice (the courts; imperfect as their implementation of justice may actually be, they are certainly fairer than the mob rule and/or sovereign edict that they have replaced), and minimize the presumption of innocence before guilt is proven, preferring instead to encourage believing in victims unquestioningly. These tactics seem to be in direct contradiction to our definition of justice: 'the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims,' and sound more like the use of coercion to achieve uniformity.

I think that most people agree that in our society people should have equal access to opportunities, that unfair discrimination is bad, that it is good to help the disenfranchised, and that pervasive systemic injustices exist which should be rectified (reasonable people disagree on the degree to which the government is the entity responsible for implementing remedies, and how it should do so - but that is a separate discussion). Thus, it's difficult to argue against something which on its face bears the name of the concept of justice. Just like it's difficult to argue against something like 'The Patriot Act' which bears the unassailable concept of patriotism in its name, even though in reality it is unpatriotic. Those who oppose 'social justice' and 'political correctness' I think more specifically oppose the policing of discourse and the silencing of dissenters.

Thus, I implore you to reexamine your usage of the term Orwellian and consider that what is Orwellian is not the 'demonization of the words social justice,' but rather the usage of that very term by a group of people whose tactics are decidedly the opposite of justice in practice.

I read a post with an interesting idea recently: entities are currently treating customer data a an asset, whereas they should be treating it as a liability. If the regulatory incentives are set up such that customer data is a liability, companies will find it most efficient to buy insurance. And no successful insurance company will offer coverage without performing their due diligence. If the hardening itself is not the cost center, but rather the insurance premiums, then then end result may be companies doing infosec the right way, just because it's the most cost-effective thing to do.

Facebook has the right to moderate content on their platform however they choose. I think that saying that Facebook is "dirt" and "too powerful" because they moderate the content on their own website according to their own rules is a bit excessive, although I might agree with those descriptors with respect to some other things that they do.

You can find Facebook's standards on this topic here: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity

I was surprised at how explicit their community standards are. After a thorough read, it seems that in this case, they exercised them with consistency and even-handedness. I also find that to be something to like about your story. 24 hour account suspension seems like reasonable sanction for abuse of the reporting system. Abuse of the reporting system makes moderation difficult and obviously has to be penalized to prevent users from taking down non-violating posts just because they are in disagreement. Allowing users to do that is certainly not a recipe for healthy discourse.

For thousands of years parents did intend to benefit from their childrens' labor - this notion together with high child mortality rates was impetus for agricultural families to have lots of kids. They could be put to work in the fields.

While I agree with this statement in 2017, and I find the Youtube channel in question a bit freaky (no pun intended), your statement made me think about the exploitation of child labor throughout human history. I think those of us in the developed world today are happy to live in a society that doesn't exploit child labor. However, in today's free market, the internet, and social media particularly, sometimes creates incentive systems that may reward exploitation directory (ToyFreaks; putting your kids to work on the farm) or indirectly (Facebook might find that they have the power to influence the incidence of depression in their users, and that depressed users bring in greater ad revenue; YouTube might find that videos which educate children bring in less ad revenue than videos which appeal to base desires and offer little enrichment).

This is really the key idea. It reminds me of the story of Eleanor Longden [1], a psychological researcher who has heard voices for years and has come to learn to live with them. "Mental illness/health" is a powerful meme that isn't always for the best.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/ted-talk-e...