posting2fast's comments

Which by definition makes it a view they allow a reply to. refer to my original, now flagged comment. If they actually respond to your arguments and questions, that's not what I'm talking about, and it's more than you had the grace to offer.

And then what? Then they change their mind?

If someone in the street calls you a frog murderer, and you ask why they think you are one, and they say they can see it in the distance between your eyes, and keep trailing you and scream frog murderer, interrupting every other conversation you want to have for the rest of your life, where would you draw the line. And would you offer video evidence of everything you ever did to placate them? What if they just scoffed and said everybody knows frog murderers know how to fake video?

When you say "views", you simply don't understand the distinction I'm making. I have spent so much time discussing with bigots of all stripes in the last 1.5 decades. I don't regret it, it's never totally wasted, especially when it's not just trading insults -- but misunderstandings and ignorance are not the cause, that only applies to those on the fringe, not at the core of something like Nazism. "Show that person is an idiot" is referring to someone who would be phased by that, because their opinions come from their own person and thoughts, because they actually are opinions. (By the way, such a person often has their views challenged by at least one person anyway, themselves)

I know and have dealt with those, but have you dealt with those where that isn't the case? Where the espoused belief is not a belief, but a cover for more, and endless abyss, and where the offered arguments hardly register with the person enumerating them? For you it may register when you say something and someone else refutes it. But for some it doesn't, they just register amusedly that you actually spend time and energy on what they can produce without end and at zero cost to them.

> Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others.

-- Hannah Arendt

Another way to look at it would be the differentation between an individual person speaking, and a person channeling a mob. It doesn't have to be a racist mob, it can also be a "politically correct" mob, you know?

I remember when a girl strolled into the Myspace forums and said "hi guys, I'm a fascist, let's discuss". I was intrigued, then a bit shocked by her views, but I had to respect the person for being honest about them and open for discussion. But IIRC most people were just assholes to her, she was an asshole back, and got banned shortly after, no idea why. But I remember thinking it sucked, that is was a very poor performance on behalf of "the" group. In that case, the "right-minded people" were kind of acting as a mob, and she was a person speaking as a person.

I'm not arguing for any government banning something here, and unless I'm mistaken, neither is Mozilla. But even as private individuals, we simply should pay more attention and not just lump everything together as "something someone else doesn't like" and all that. Mob psychology and politics are no joke, neither are alienation and lack of perspective, shortening attention spans, inability to form coherent sequential toughts. Networks that datamine people and then influence them for maximum bit-sized engagement, that's no joke. People funneling themselves into "communities" where they play meme bingo, that's no joke.

Being downvoted and shadowbanned on HN for comments people can't refute, now that is a genuine joke, and oh look, my comment got flagged already. Because replying to it is not enough, one simply has to assume I haven't thought about what I said, and punish me for one's assumption. And of course, your reply is kind of the least charitable interpretation of my comment possible, as if I never argued with someone who had opinions they didn't like, without even attempting to understand what I was hinting at, and as such against the guidelines, but hey.

> As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

-- Hannah Arendt

Sounds silly, right? Who dat ho anyway, huh? Well, this is not an intellectual climate to seriously elaborate on serious things, so I'll have to just leave it at the suggestion to not judge icebergs by tips while preaching about letting others speak. Thanks for the demonstration of hypocrisy, bye. People so weak and dishonest I genuinely prefer as enemies rather than allies.

Just saying that doesn't absolve you from making an actual argument.

> Ask all the millions of people that have a relative killed by a car if they would care at all.

How motherfucking dare you! My father did die in a car crash when I was a kid. But I also live in a country where totalitarianism actually happened. You should wash your mouth, and then you should sit down and make the argument.

Because to reply to all of it, including

> "If you are Black, gay or any number of other things, are you cool with giving up such control in an openly hostile social climate?"

with

> "If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer."

is absolutely not good enough. Would you be okay with that being quoted "out of context" like that (it wouldn't really be, it's the degree of seriousness you decided to muster) like that on billboards with your real name attached to it?

-- Noam Chomsky

And what does it even mean to say something is subjective? Contrary to what? And what does judgemental mean? That you can be whatever you want, and think of yourself however you want, but others may not see you how they see you? What's wrong with judgement?

> American diplomats in Germany were well aware of the Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents. Yet the US government respected Germany’s right to govern its own citizens and was hesitant to aid those being targeted.

> Throughout spring 1933, tens of thousands of Americans signed petitions protesting the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. Hundreds of petitions were sent to the State Department, but the US government made no official statement against the German regime.

> The Uighurs see themselves as a minority facing cultural, religious and economic discrimination. When Xinjiang was incorporated into the People's Republic of China in 1949, they comprised roughly 80 percent of the region's population. Controlled migration to Xinjiang of Han Chinese has reduced this share to 45 percent

[..]

> Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months. Zenz estimates the number to be closer to hundreds of thousands. More precise figures are difficult to obtain. Censorship in Xinjiang is the strictest in China and its authorities the most inscrutable.

[..]

> Normal journalistic research in Kashgar is inconceivable. No one wants to talk. A Uighur human rights activist who met up with us four years ago didn't respond to a single one of our text messages. His phone number is no longer listed. As we later learned, he disappeared months ago. But whether he was thrown into a re-education camp or prison is unknown.

[..]

> Every family begins with 100 points, one person affected by the system tells us. But anyone with contacts or relatives abroad, especially in Islamic countries like Turkey, Egypt or Malaysia, is punished by losing points. A person with fewer than 60 points is in danger. One wrong word, a prayer or one telephone call too many and they could be sent to "school" in no time.

Bring "stability" to the Middle East?

What the US did and does in the Middle East is not something any other nation can solve for them; bring those who waged wars of aggression to justice, show genuine good will towards those you mistreated, that's something any nation owes either way (it's not like many European nations don't have a lot to make up for, for example). You're responsible for not making it worse, and owning your shit. That's not just what "number one" must do, even the smallest must do it. Others are responsible for sorting out their mess. You don't have to bring peace to the Middle East, just not more war. You don't have to bring democracy to China, just don't look the other way or even help rationalize and justify it.

> [2016-08-23 04:46:27] <WikiLeaks> But he’s jewish and engaged with the ((()))) issue.

then please provide a source to that other thing, who you are referring to with "he", and maybe a reason for not making what you are referring to more clear as well.

It's also very nice that because of the barrage of downvotes, or maybe moderator action, I can't respond 13 minutes after you posted your comment when I actually had finished this reply, but have to keep the tab open and submit later... so I'll respond to another comment here as well:

> Do you consider referring to racism to be the same as being racist?

No I don't, which was my point. Saying "$someone is Jewish and engaged with the ((())) issue" isn't using that dog whistle, but referring to it. Without context it's really hard to judge why the Jewishness is mentioned; I don't know what the ((())) issue refers to in that specific context, what "engaged with" means, nothing. Could easily be bad, could be benign, but the claim was they "used" ((())), and that's false. Even if they're actually antisemites, they did not use the brackets in that tweet from 2016-08-23 04:46:27. Fact.

I mean, calling him also a "rat" kind of makes it moot in a way, that's not good, antisemitism or not. But if they are antisemitic, I want more than hearsay and being sloppy about something like "referring to X" and "using X". This is not acceptable. For one because it would be important in light of WL, but even more importantly because of antisemitism.

Generally, that some antisemites might like WL would never surprise me. With almost anything that criticizes society and the powerful in it, you often can find antisemites who are superficially interested in the subject so they can re-route it to Jews being the root of all problems. So in a vacuum, tweets "at" WL that seem antisemitic are to be expected -- the question is how WL deals with them, and what they themselves put out. I do not consider that question settled, mind you, but those who raise it, and those who approach it, have no right to be this sloppy.

Remember when that Google guy was fired and people said he "posted a memo to the internet"? He posted a memo in an internal discussion group devoted to the issue he posted about, and others leaked it on the net. Yet the lie is still out there in people's heads. And that wouldn't be acceptable even if he was a total red pill chauvinist. When it was cool to be dishonest about Jews, to exclude them inevitably leading to violence against them, some people did that. Now it's cool to be dishonest about and violent to Jews in some milieus, sexists, racists or antisemites in others -- as if the methods don't matter at all, just who wins, as if using certain methods doesn't make you something, too. Or to put a very sharp point on it, as if putting racists into concentration camps would actually end once you killed all racists, as if it could.

No, but one might refer to such slang, you just did it yourself, and nothing more can be seen in those particular tweets.

That is, unless you're referring to something else, but with accusations as serious as this, and antisemitism being as sadly pervasive and serious as it is, I would like to see a source. If you actually are referring to the DM's on that page, just no, and wtf, since it's only time "(((" appears in all of it, the only other time Jewishness is mentioned seems not to be by Wikileaks.

So, where's the meat?

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

> Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/

[..]

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

-- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"

From that (lip service) to the ElsaGate autoplay fiasco in under 2 decades, and of course using public resources to get the foot in the door. Par of the course.

That's the worst case scenario for me. Compared to (!) that, this is how I feel about climate change and nuclear war:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/there-will-come-soft-rai...