• 2 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I support robust enforcement of anti hate speech laws. In fact I’ve reported hate speech/ hatecrime to the police before.

    We’re not talking about laws, we’re talking about social media platform policies.

    Social media platforms connect people from regions with different hatespeech laws so " enforcing hatespeech laws" is impossible to do consistently.

    If users engage in crimes using the platform they are subject to the laws that they are subject to.

    I don’t care that it’s legal to advocate for genocide where a preacher is located, or at the corporation’s preferred jurisdiction, I don’t want my son reading it.

    The question was: is there a way a platform can be totally free speech and stop hate speech. I think the answer is “kinda”


  • I think it may be possible if you understand a difference between the right to speak and the right to be heard.

    Ie the right to say something doesn’t create an obligation in others to hear it, nor to hear you in the future.

    If I stand up on a milk crate in the middle of a city park to preach the glory of closed source operating systems, it doesn’t infringe my right to free speech if someone posts a sign that says “Microsoft shill ahead” and offers earplugs at the park entrance. People can choose to believe the sign or not.

    A social media platform could automate the signs and earplugs. By allowing users to set thresholds of the discourse acceptable to them on different topics, and the platform could evaluate (through data analysis or crowd sourced feedback) whether comments and/or commenters met that threshold.

    I think this would largely stop people from experiencing hatespeech, (one they had their thresholds appropriately dialed in) and disincentivize hatespeech without actually infringing anybody’s right to say whatever they want.

    There would definitely be challenges though.

    If a person wants to be protected from experiencing hatespeech they need to empower some-one/thing to censor media for them which is a risk.

    Properly evaluating content for hatespeech/ otherwise objectionable speech is difficult. Upvotes and downvotes are an attempt to do this in a very coarse way. That/this system assumes that all users have a shared view of what content is worth seeing on a given topic and that all votes are equally credible. In a small community of people, with similar values, that aren’t trying to manipulate the system, it’s a reasonable approach. It doesn’t scale that well.




  • I’d probably start designing and building a rolling ball clock/ sculpture, then hit some sort of obstacle and switch to making a self recirculating eddy current tube, get frustrated and try to design and build an electronically commutated counter rotating propeller driver, get frustrated and try to build a garage sized 3d printer, get frustrated and try to build a delayed action door closer get frustrated and try to build a co-planar compound cycloidal reducer, get frustrated and then forget my wife’s anniversary until 4pm the day before.











  • I’m not a historian, but here goes:

    my understanding is that yes, the battle for air superiority over Britain was nearly won by Germany.

    However, I don’t think Germany was ever close to Naval superiority e.g. the Bismark was sunk within 8 days of its first offensive operation. This was August of 1940, before Britain had won air superiority. Naval superiority is pretty important for landing craft. Oh, in the topic of landing craft how would Germany have actually transported enough troops? Also the geography/topography of southern England is more defendible (cliffs of Dover).

    I can’t easily find how many Axis troops were being used to defend Europe’s Atlantic coast, but it seems that Hitler had imagined using 300,000 as part of his Atlantic Wall, and that the he had fallen short of that. Britain evacuated 338,000 troops from Dunkirk. That number of troops being used defend the cost of southern England is um a lot.

    Also, I think you’re misrepresenting the alliance with the Soviets. Nazism was inherently anti-communist and Stalin knew that war was a matter of time. By the time the Nazis could have built sufficient landing craft for an invasion Stalin would have finished his purge/reorganization of the Red Army. As soon as those boats got wet the Red Army would have been rolling towards Berlin.

    Honestly, I think it would have greatly shortened the war, at the cost of more of Europe being subjected to Soviet domination.



  • Sorry that it has taken me a long time to respond, I’ve been at the cabin, away from my phone.

    Yeah the problem is that because of the history of discrimination we don’t have words for relatively harmless discriminatory tendencies. So if I were to say

    I have racist tendencies

    it sounds like I’m admitting to being a “capital R” racist, when what I mean is,

    I was taught incorrect stereotypes by media as a child, and sometimes despite my best efforts to be egalitarian, these biases cause me to make bad judgements. I try to notice when this happens, to make sure I treat people fairly.

    Yeah I’m not saying anyone is a jerk for having sexual interest only with feminine people with vaginas and boobs, I’m just saying that it’s kinda trans-erasure (and therefore technically transphobic) to say

    I’m exclusively attracted to cis-women

    Because a person doesn’t know the assigned birth sex of every woman they’ve ever been attracted to.

    OurToothbrush was offended because she is a transwoman and attracts men that think they’re exclusively attracted to cis-women. She’s on the front line of transphobia, and searching for a partner puts her at a too real risk of being murdered by a transphobe.

    Yeah it sounds like absolution is a relevant term. People like to think that there are only biological males and biological females and that’s that. It’s not that simple. People like to think that there are racists and non-racists and that’s that. It’s not that simple. People like to think that there are transphobes and non-transphobes and that’s that. It’s not that simple. To me, being an ally is is about supporting a community to defeat unfair discrimination. Imo supporting individuals with friendship isn’t exactly the same but it’s better than nothing.


  • Sorry that it has taken me a long time to respond, I’ve been at the cabin, away from my phone.

    Yeah the problem is that because of the history of discrimination we don’t have words for relatively harmless discriminatory tendencies. So if I were to say

    I have racist tendencies

    it sounds like I’m admitting to being a “capital R” racist, when what I mean is,

    I was taught incorrect stereotypes by media as a child, and sometimes despite my best efforts to be egalitarian, these biases cause me to make bad judgements. I try to notice when this happens, to make sure I treat people fairly.

    Yeah I’m not saying anyone is a jerk for having sexual interest only with feminine people with vaginas and boobs, I’m just saying that it’s kinda trans-erasure (and therefore technically transphobic) to say

    I’m exclusively attracted to cis-women

    Because a person doesn’t know the assigned birth sex of every woman they’ve ever been attracted to.