[edit] Retracting my unnecessary jab around the moderator's comments being modified several times and their moderation leaving a lot to be desired. The latter was rude and uncalled for.
I'll refrain from commenting on you personally, but I will say that I've been here for around a decade and dang's moderation has been excellent over that entire period.
Sometimes it has even been aimed at my comments, and I cannot really cite a single example where I feel dang has been unfair.
I would also note that you failed to even attempt to say why you think dang's moderation was lacking, here.
Oh it's true that I build my comments by posting an initial stub and then adding to them bit by bit. That's the process that works, for whatever reason. But I'd never do that to create a misleading impression—on the contrary, in such cases I'll always add "Edit". If you replied before I added the bit about joke tags, I didn't see that and I'm sorry.
I actually have the 'delay' field in my profile set to allow time for such incremental edits, but not for long enough to mask all of them.
This sort of multiple-headlines-in-one-day undermines the argument for bans. In the Alex Jones case in particular it appeared he was being selected for a broader community image rather than actions on specific platforms.
Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.
> Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak.
Of course not, no one is claiming they are the ultimate arbiters of morality.
But they do have the right to decide who can use their platform (as long as they don’t discriminate against protected groups). The broader public can then judge them positively or negatively for these decisions.
The thing is are these companies platforms like a phone company or are they publishers? Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company. I do not recall a time when a phone company would cut your service because they found it to be distasteful or controversial.
That said I don't really know what these users were actually banned for saying. It could have been pretty bad and although I might not agree with what they said I hope that people are free to express their thoughts and ideas even though I might find them personally offensive.
>Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company.
Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate. They all do that already. There's no sudden legal line between moderation involving messages with spam or bigotry.
I think anyone amplifying messages on a large-scale in a one-to-many manner, between people that aren't equally engaged in a conversation together, should be considered to start accruing responsibilities over the content of what they're participating in amplifying, in a way that a phone companies largely don't have. I think social media companies have been largely shirking that responsibility by phrasing it as a free speech issue and letting anything go.
It is a gray area and social media platforms sit somewhere in-between being a common carrier and a being a publisher. Your right there is no hard legal line but the more they decide what is allowed and what is not allowed the more they move farther away from being a common carrier.
> Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate.
It appears that those links describe the conditions before passage of the communications decency act of 1996. That was all overturned by section 230 of the CDA.
My limited understanding is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which is apparently one of the most important laws for this topic), passed in 1996, provides very broad protections to web platforms:
1) They can't be held liable for user-generated content, e.g. Facebook can't be sued for a defamatory statement that I make in a post on their platform.
A newspaper that authors and publishes an article making a similar defamatory statement could be held liable. I believe that Facebook could be held liable if the company itself authored and published the defamatory statement, instead of merely distributing my defamatory statement.
2) They can moderate user-generated content visible on their platform as they see fit, without trying to be "neutral" and without losing their liability protections (item 1 above).
Apparently, before this law, internet companies were worried about being held liable for what users said if they did any moderation (and some companies were sued for this).
This longer video (33 mins) from Legal Eagle is nice as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWIi-Ppe5k. It's been a few weeks since I watched it so hopefully I didn't miss too many important details.
Section 230 protection should not exist. When this was enacted, nothing like Facebook, YouTube,Twitter, etc. existed, and InfoSeek and AltaVista were the leading search engines...
I love Robert's Rules of Order! I'd love to see someone build video meeting software that implemented it somehow. Or does that exist? A brief search was fruitless.
The last copy I owned had a great introductory essay, describing the principles a rule of order could help realize: e.g. 1) to focus on potential concrete actions rather than some interminable search for agreement on beliefs; 2) to allow even minority/fringe opinions to get some hearing
Alex Jones lent a camera crew to Wolfgang Halbig when he travelled to Newtown, CT to harass the parents of the first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting. Years and years from now those sites you're referring to will still bear the shame of not having banned him earlier.
In my opinion, while a low point even for a high-functioning schizophrenic with a talk show, that is still small potatoes compared to the journalists who repeated the 'WMD's line. And no one is calling for them to be deplatformed.
Publishing official government statements is bad, including when there is no sane way to independently verify them, but slander you've just made up is fine?
They did a bit more than publishing official statements. They were very vocal about denouncing and shaming anyone doubting those statements including my whole country France was attacked, boycotted and more by these people.
Figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is actually not that easy. As such I have a lot more acceptance for those being wrong while promoting the status quo than those intentionally pushing the overton window. The latter is what should require commitment/conviction, to weed out the bad. And seems to be what is getting axed right now.
Investing into shitty companies will make you loose your investment. Why should this be different with ideas?
Funny, I take the opposite conclusion - figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is not easy, therefore I think we should be slower to condemn people who get contrarian bets wrong.
To extend your metaphor, if I invest in a bad company, sure, my finances will suffer. But if it were that easy to tell which companies were bad there'd be no reason to invest at all. People who bet against the crowd and are right are generally considered heroes. I agree there should be a cost to trying to be a hero, but I don't think we currently have enough of them and I'm leery of making it harder to be one.
The logic you've provided says nothing about whether we should condemn Alex Jones, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make. Unless you think we should be slow to condemn people who arrange for the harassment of parents whose children were murdered by a gunman in their elementary school. But that seems like an implausibly villainous thing for anyone on HN to believe.
My point is, he seems to be held to a higher standard than 'mainstream' journalists, despite the fact that these mainstream journalists send signals that they should be taken seriously and he does not. That sticks in my craw.
He's not. Judith Miller was fired from NYT ending her career as a reporter within a couple of years of her original Iraq reporting. Alex Jones continues to make a living being a repugnant human being.
Honestly, you're dignifying this argument. Judith Miller probably believed the story she was selling about Iraqi WMDs, and in the cause itself. She was wrong. Alex Jones deliberately harassed the parents of first graders who had been crowded into a coat closet and shot at close range. This is the moral difference between a negligent doctor and a serial killer.
The distinction is especially material here, because this is the standard-issue message board argument against journalism, or "the mainstream media": that it must be conducted at the highest standards of scrupulous accountability, a standard far higher than any of us hold our own work to (I like to call this "The Djikstra Amnesia Effect"). And if it isn't, its practitioners are no better than Alex Jones.
FWIW, I think that Bush II, Obama and Trump should all be tried for war crimes. Probably Clinton and Bush I, and all the veeps, but I'm not as informed about them.
I'm sure it was done in coordination with the advertisers that pulled their ads. Probably a group coordination between the companies and groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense that spearheaded the original advertising blackout.
I was on ChapoTrapHouse a day before the ban. It was indeed leaked, and the ban happened exactly at the same time that it was leaked. This probably wouldn't have been the case unless it was coordinated.
They did not ban racist subreddits like /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/fragilewhiteredditor.
If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators. They are literally racially segregating users.
According to this post [0] only allowing black people to post was a time limited action. As an Aprils fool joke only black people were allowed to post, which resulted in positive feedback from the community, according to the mods. Now everyone can post again, where as black people can get verified and a special flair (a small visual indication next to their username). Some threads [1] are reserved for verified people, but non-black person can also get verified (but might not get a flair).
That special flair thing is amazing. I had no idea. I wonder how long before we see forums using it for other skin colors and genetic types. It's exactly the opposite of the trend of text-oriented interfaces democratizing access.
While this is informative, it leaves out one big thing. Rule number 1 in the sidebar is "Posts from black people only".
> This sub is intended for exceptionally hilarious and insightful social media posts made by black people. To that end, only post social media content from black people.
Your [1] has three standards for three groups of people.
1. black people who can verify and get a flair
2. non-white and non-black people who can verify but don't get a flair
3. white people can ask the moderators for entrance, but it only says they will will "receive further instructions." It's not clear what these further instructions are supposed to be.
This is racist and if a right wing subreddit did it, they would have been banned years ago.
I find it odd people aren't bringing up the obvious motivation for this. Simply calling it racism seems obtuse.
Anywhere race is a topic and anyone can join, but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything. How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?
It's not a trivial problem, and it's inherent anywhere your online identity isn't linked to your real one.
>but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything.
They aren't verifying identity, they are verifying skin color and using the information to then discriminate against their users. A person with verified skin tone and not verified identity can dress themselves in all sorts of lies just as trolls do everywhere on the internet.
>How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?
I'm not saying it's a good solution in an absolute sense, nor do I have any idea how well it's working.
I'm just saying I think it's obviously motivated by a real and inescapable issue, and I don't think there is a simple and obviously better solution given the constraint that you want to have an online forum where people can acknowledge and discuss things related to racial identity.
I seem to remember some period in history when people of one race were forced to wear a special flair on them . Yellow six pointed star, on a sleeve, or a chest .
Damn, I never actually heard this being spoken about on reddit.
It's interesting, I'm not from the US and I find it curious that these situations arise. I can understand and empathise with (as a 'person of colour' as it's called over there) the arguments of both sides, but deep down I find this kind of 'positive segregation' morally wrong.
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa. And yet, majority/minority are regional properties. How do you know a redditor's region in order to moderate their comment appropriately? Or are reddit employee regions the only ones that matter?
It's clearly a farce. Majority/minority status is a red herring. It's used only to enable reddit and mods to selectively apply the rules for their own ends. The fact is, it's unethical to call any race sub-human, regardless of whether the majority shares your views.
> According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.
Which is silly on its face. If two opposing races that hated each other held equal power, they might not be able to get the upper hand on the other, but they still hate each other solely on the basis of race. Is this the "non-racist" utopia they're after?
I don't know how widespread this belief is but I personally know people who believe this and it seems to be only spreading in the current heavily polarized environment. It is truly astonishing to witness
But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice.
So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical? We don't want to be hypocritical, right? So we should never denounce hatred and bigotry! Brilliant!
I am super, super tired of "if you denounce bigots that makes you just as bad as them."
> So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical?
How do you get from "don't hate the haters" to "don't denounce hatred and bigotry"? Seems like you're missing a step like, "denouncing entails hatred". Do you actually believe that's true?
There used to be this notion of condemning the act and not the person. It actually used to be a progressive principle arguing for criminal justice reform geared more towards rehabilitation than punishment. It's sad that this nuance has been lost.
If you can't denounce without getting into dehumanization, you're guilty of exactly the same kind of hate that the most virulent racists in history are guilty of.
No, but you replied to GP in defense of "denouncing hatred and bigotry" (something they didn't even argue against) without directly addressing a pretty important point, i.e. dehumanization (which they did).
Was there another way I should have read your comment with that in mind?
I suppose I am just very weary of a particular style of argument in this debate, which -- in addition to the tactic I called out -- frequently seems to include restating what the other person said as something worse, and then arguing against that restatement. And with all respect, that's what I think is happening here.
The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."
Given that I'm being downvoted repeatedly, I guess others don't see it that way, but I'm going to be blunt. I just reread the thread and I do not think I'm the one giving things an unfair reading. I don't see a call for "dehumanization" here, and if folks are going to come down on me for failing to address an argument that isn't being made, I don't know what to say. ("Have you stopped beating your wife yet?")
> The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."
With respect, that's not at all what's happening. I started this sub-thread with this comment [1] criticizing the wording of the policy which emphatically does not focus on just "hate is hate", and "prejudice is prejudice", but is worded specifically towards protecting "marginalized groups".
And it's quite clear on reddit that it's not applied even-handedly to both minority and majority groups. If you think otherwise, go try defending Trump supporters as an experiment and see what happens.
So my comment here [2] to which you objected was not "restating what the other person said as something worse", but was raising the additional point that, despite the policy, hating on the majority is accepted as perfectly fine on reddit, and plenty of other places (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
These redefinitions probably grew out of "critical theory" which is taught in social studies. The initial protests citing this line of argument seem to have started on college campuses, so there might be some merit to saying it grew out of academia.
Well, when people are arguing over the meaning of words - in this case "racism" - it is sometimes useful to reference what the "experts" think. There are entire fields of study within academia dedicated to this topic (often but not always including the word "critical").
Of course, whether or not said people have anything meaningful to say on the topic is not broadly agreed upon.
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
The majority where? I can't find any specifics on what the majority qualifier is applied to (ex: the community in which the speech occurs, the geographic community of the user, etc).
It's even worse than that. People can honestly disagree about whether the term "racism" accurately describes something or whatever, but that's a far cry from actively condoning ("..this rule does not protect...") the whipping up of hate towards a majority of the population. The internet is full of nihilists and misanthropes who genuinely hate everyone and everything - I'm sure they can't wait to abuse this weakness in every way they can possibly think of. All for teh lulz, of course.
It's just racism dude. Not even white, just tired of the mental gymnastics people go through to justify their actions against white people based sole on their skin color and what they've committed against their people. You're doing the same thing. In the end it's just the tribal, racialist bullshit I'm freaking tired of. It never ends, because we keep justifying evildoing whenever it benefits our side at the given time. If we keep doing this, we have no right to complain when some other group does it to us at some other point in the future.
No. If someone says or does something to me based only on my race, they are a piece of shit racist. I don't care how many years his people has been oppressed by some other group of people.
In promoting racial discrimination against white people, you’re also displaying a bigoted and reductive view of Africa. The African peoples are more than the slave trade, more than colonialism. Africa is a remarkably diverse and populous continent with a history that exist beyond the impact of whiteness. It saddens me that your reducing to victimhood the whole of African identity is what passes for anti racism.
>In promoting racial discrimination against white people
Not promoting anything of the sort. These are factual observations of history, any student of history feel free to chime in so we can focus on facts over feelings.
>The African peoples are more than the slave trade, more than colonialism.
I agree African history is much more than slavery, but the European invention/export of racist theories/science and the dehumanization of Africans started during the same period (The Renaissance, ~15th-17th century continuing into the 21st century) Africans were enslaved and robbed. This period cannot be ignored in any discussions of the history of racism.
"Scientific racism was common during the period from 1600s to the end of World War II. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and discredited, yet historically has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races."
"For Africans to be considered reverse racists, they would have to rob Europeans to the point of poverty/death, enslave them for 400+ years, attempt multiple genocides and mass executions of the European people, deprive Europeans of education and economic equity for centuries based on skin color, engage in state assisted terrorism, THEN continue to promote hatred and acts of violence against them on Reddit."
Nothing promoting discrimination against white people in that quote, just replaced the word black/African with European in a summary of history. Not sure how you missed this simple role reversal exercise.
This thread started in response to a hate speech rule that allowed hate speech towards the [white] “majority” population. This is explicitly racial discrimination. I read everything you wrote as a response to that initial topic. If you merely meant to discuss your preferred definition of racism, I think a different thread would have better conveyed that.
I don't understand this. For all of my life I thought racism = discrimination against someone due to their race. In the same way that sexist = discrimination against someone due to their sex. Ageist = discrimination against someone due to their age. Is this not the clear cut definition anymore? At what point did it diverge?
An '-ism' is an ideology which is used for organizing the world. The big difference is whether it's an individual ideology or a systemic ideology.
1 person renting out property = a rentier. Private ownership of land = capitalism.
1 person not hiring women = a misogynist. Companies not offering parental leave and assuming the primary caregiver is the mother = sexism.
Zuckerberg saying "young people are just smarter" = a bigot. Focusing on algorithms in software interviews which new-grads will have an easier time solving = ageism.
It's very common to call a prejudiced or discriminatory individual a "-ist" because the individual is subscribing to an ideology. But, that's emphasizing the individual rather than the society. If you only look at individual people as racist, they feel like isolated cases which don't have good solutions. Furthermore, you're absolving people who aren't explicitly discriminatory but who are still supporting systemic discrimination.
- This company will hire anyone who's qualified, but they're full of ivy-league graduates because they rely heavily on campus recruiters. Even though they aren't prejudiced when hiring, they are classist because they cater to high-class people.
- This bank will offer a mortgage to anyone with a steady paycheck and a safe-investment property. However, due to red-lining and racial covenants, Black people weren't able to purchase safe-investment homes so they didn't get good mortgages.
Granted, it's an uphill etymological battle because the individual usage is so common. When people argue for the systemic definition, they're arguing that we should focus on processes rather than individuals.
If you haven't noticed, we've spiraled down to the point where group think determines what is real, not facts or logic. If you can convince thousands people to scream that something is racist, then it "becomes" racist, no matter whether it meets any factual concrete definition of what racism is. Once this behavior started, it was then used as justification to change the definition of racism to something it never used to be.
Reddit's definition seems more contextual, it weighs the dynamics of current economic, cultural, institutional, etc... racism
Here is the Oxford dictionary definition:
"The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as ‘typical’ of particular peoples. The category of race may itself be challenged, as implying an inference from trivial superficial differences of appearance to allegedly significant underlying differences of nature; increasingly evolutionary evidence suggests that the dispersal of one original people into different geographical locations is a relatively recent and genetically insignificant matter."
> If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators.
I think there's a good reason for doing that, given that such a sub can almost trivially become a hate sub for mocking people on Twitter, much like fatpeoplehate. "We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle.
"White" is a catch-all term for light-skinned ethnic groups with "defaultness" in American society. There is no such thing as "white history," "white heritage," or "white culture," except in opposition to "non-default" ethnic groups.
If you change the founding principle to "we want our community to be largely Russian," that would be totally fine by me.
Additionally, opposition to the "largely black" founding principle implies opposition to women-only spaces and other community groupings that are largely accepted in society.
What do generic "Europeans" have in common with each other? As a Russian, I feel like my culture overlaps relatively little with French, German, or English. Moreover, which parts of "Europe" are actually included in this taxonomy? Are Romani considered white? What about Southern Italians? Black people in France? It all boils down to "people of European heritage with white skin (whose ancestors wrote books and stuff that I like)," which is wishy-washy and tautological.
Not sure about whites and blacks in the US, but as far as genetics are concerned, (black) Africans have far more genetic diversity than (white) Europeans.
Africans enslaved in America effectively had their original cultures denied and destroyed. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize Black but not white when referring to American subcultures. (Whiteness isn't genetic. E.g. in South Africa under apartheid Chinese people were legally black but Japanese people were legally white.)
That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture, which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades. And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.
Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture. The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.
When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively. The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.
In sum:
Black - African American
white - Mainstream American (includes everybody: The fictional character Steven Quincy Urkel could be called "white" in this sense.)
>That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture,
There is no one "Black" culture either.
>so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture
And yet if you capitalize Black it doesn't mean black supremacists?
Why do you hold different standards to white and black?
>which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades.
St. Patrick's Day is not specifically an Irish holiday. It is a Christian holiday which is popular amongst Irish.
>And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.
There are many blacks who kept their cultures as well. Not all blacks were slaves. Many voluntarily migrated to the US.
>Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture.
You are contradicting yourself. You said "There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK" and yet you also admit there is no single "Black" culture.
>The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent.
Not all blacks living in the US were slaves.
>That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.
But there is no single black culture. You yourself said that white should not be capitalized because there isn't a single culture.
>When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively.
When I say white people I mean white people. I don't mean anything else. I don't mean culture. If I meant culture I would say culture.
I have never seen anybody saying anything different than I said. Please provide examples of mainstream people using the the phrase differently.
>The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.
I feel like I was really clear. We don't agree, obviously, but I don't want to argue about it with you any more, so I'm going to go ahead and let you have the last word.
I agree it's a bit wishy-washy. But that's what it means. Everyone (in the U.S.) when they say whites, they pretty much always mean anyone with white skin who have European heritage.
Yup, so even if some poor Croatian guy just got off the boat, as long as he looked white enough for Americans, some of them would say he benefited from American slavery of blacks and must renounce his white privilege.
Regardless of your origin or connection to American history, I think it's healthy and socially responsible to face your "default privilege." The point isn't to feel guilty, but to become fully aware of the social structures underpinning your country, and to develop a sense of empathy for those who are forced to consider their skin color every day of the year when you can go weeks without even thinking about it. (And I say this as a first-generation immigrant.)
In any case, this has little to do with the original topic of establishing a black-focused community.
Spend his whole life being taught about white privilege and is never allowed to say that he understands so he has to get re-educated all the time. If he says he has already heard it before and understands then he is obviously a racist Nazi Trump supporter and must violently be re-educated about his white privilege.
""We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle."
Freedom of association is a thing. Now, would you agree with the statement, ""We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle." ?
Just because someone claims something is anti-racist doesn't make it so. Almost all organized evil is done in the name of something good. Look at how laws like the The Patriot Act are named.
The people behind these bans are leftist extremists going after their rightist extremist enemies. Their "good intentions" are paving our path towards hell.
The former literally segregates users by requiring them to send in a picture with their skin color visible. The latter expresses a racial prejudice in the name.
For example, Reddit previously banned the "fat people hate" subreddit, where they sat around and made fun of fat people, while these subreddits, where all they do is sit around and make fun of people based on the color of their skin are allowed to prosper.
If anything, a subreddit dedicated to making fun of people based on the color of their skin is a lot more bannable than making fun of people based on their weight ..
/r/fragilewhiteredditor is not racism. Being a "White redditor" is not a race. The sub is not about hating redditors for being white, but for talking about and possibly getting angry at people who are very blind to their prejudice or priviledges
Honest to goodness, it’s a marketing and advertising initiative. I do think some of the subreddits that are being banned deserve it for violating Reddit site wide rules and refusing to stop, among other things. However, Reddit took on the identity of being free speech oriented early on and gradually eroded it over time, and every time they ban a few bad big subs that are indefensible, they usually coincide bans to a large number of other smaller subreddits that are almost ostensibly somehow adjacent but are not really violating any rules in the same fashion. I think this is intentional, because most of the people who would be annoyed by the collateral damage are celebrating because of the headlining bans. This creates quite a conundrum. Maybe this ban wave is truly different, but it would take me by surprise if so. (I didn’t look into exactly what subs were banned yet.)
At this point it feels like Reddit saves the big important bans specifically so they can be announced in ban waves, because by the time they happen the response is always, “how in the world did this take over a year to be done?”
edit: to my point it looks like they banned over 2000 subs this time. I doubt that list hadn’t been growing over time. I checked out one that was apparently for a podcast and the little bit I could view on Wayback Machine looked pretty damn ordinary, with only mildly edgy jokes. Not immediately casting doubt that there is good reason but it sure feels like every other ban wave I’ve seen from Reddit.
Socialist subreddits being banned for glorifying John Brown (who caused an insurrection against slavery in the South) was not an anti-racism initiative. It was probably a PR move calculated to look good to the mainstream media and co., while being able to "both-sides" conservative media.
Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.
We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.
Coordination doesn’t mean collusion, there are plenty of reasons why to coordinate such as to avoid platform hopping and not having to deal with a bunch of angry people flocking to your platform and to share the news cycle.
The likelihood of high profile bans like these not being coordinated is slim.
I'm pretty sure social media platforms all have the same problematic groups set up for one click deletion. If one pulls the trigger it's trivial for the rest to do it too.
It's the same coordination you see in penguins jumping off an ice flow. They'll all bunch up looking for sea lions they know are lurking. Eventually one jumps in or gets pushed and they all jump in right after.
Ban waves aren’t that simple they take time to prepare the legal, PR, community relations and tech support etc required.
While it probably isn’t as spontaneous as the penguins I also don’t see it as some smokey or well these days vapey dark room where they sit around the table with a bunch of dossiers laid out in front of them taking a vote.
Collusion has an obvious negative connotation, but any coordination that happens in secret is inherently collusion.
Either way, my request still stands. Is there any evidence to suggest these companies are working together instead of us all just assuming that is the case?
Define evidence, companies share information all the time including their legal departments.
We have had multiple simultaneous ban waves this is not a new occurrence, at this point one would ask for evidence to show its not the case since the fact that this happening is self evident.
Do you care to point to something that backs up that claim? I can't find any mention on that subreddit about anything relating to Youtube or Twitch bans.
You're right. I was more pointing out that "people knew" before hand that a ban was coming, which means other platforms/groups knew about it and so could have prepared for it. If anything that's less of an argument that it's coordinated and more an argument that they're piling on after seeing one platform do it.
Thanks, but in my first comment I described exactly that possible scenario of companies rushing these announcements once they realized a competitor was acting on the issue. Once again, I don't know why so many people are assuming this is coordinated.
Context matters. You analogy isn't applicable because it removes the context for these response. The boycott of Facebook didn't hit critical mass until the end of last week. These companies are taking preemptive action so they don't receive a similar boycott. That is an explanation that doesn't require coordination.
> That is an explanation that doesn't require coordination.
Yes, and it's a huge stretch. That's good for Yoga, but bad for explanations, and it works just as well for 9/11. The simplest, most plausible explanation: they coordinated. Further weight for that explanation? They've coordinated on similar issues before.
> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this
Yes and no, this is less collusion and more to avoid platform hopping basically if one platform bans them they’ll flock to another even if the medium isn’t identical or the platform is not optimal for their use case any platform would do in times like these.
I’m pretty sure at this point when the behavior pattern is known the platforms inform each other of high profile bans.
The others follow suit to avoid being branded as the one that didn’t or worse as the one that accepted the now pariahs “with open arms”.
It’s to prevent this, so you don’t have their user base hope to the other platform to express their anger, it also helps when you share the news cycle.
This isn’t an opinion for or against this pattern just an observation on why it makes sense.
I don't know about that. Twitter didn't ban Molyneux and I've not seen people branding Twitter as "The platform that permits Molyneux". (Until me, just now)
Why? There is a massive political movement for racial equality happening all over the country. They are responding to pressure from consumers, which they very much should, because all of these companies have ignored these issues for decades. They aren't coordinating with each other in some conspiracy to silence white supremacists. The -people- want white supremacists to be deplatformed (a good thing!).
I'm not sure what the laws are for physical protests. Do mall car parks and similar places on "private" but non-enclosed land have to accommodate public protest? Is that sort of thing what you're talking about?
I'm leaning towards the idea that platforms with no barrier to entry should be treated as public to some degree, while those with a sign-up process more involved than email and password are still treated as private.
No... I'm talking about things like 'privately-owned public space' in cities like San Francisco (so Salesforce park), or city sidewalks.
In most cities, the land owner even in downtown will own the sidewalks, but there is an 'easement' that says it's a public right of way. However, it's a public space, and anyone can protest or say what they want there. Their freedom of speech is protected, even though the land is private. The land is certainly private because the landowner is responsible for upkeep and can generally modify it so long as the sidewalk meets certain requirements.
All this is to say is that we have a model for privately owned public space -- spaces where private interests have certain rights and obligations and ownership but where accomodations for the public must be made.
In San Francisco at least -- only using it because I'm most familiar -- certain buildings are required to have public spaces, and you in general have a right to be in this space for free. There are even some beautiful rooftop decks that are privately owned but have been made public to meet the requirement -- like the deck on one kearny.
If by “it” you mean privately-owned websites, then no, it cannot be forced to do so. That would be a violation of the websites’ owners own freedom of speech. Not to mention their property rights! I thought the right to absolutely control one’s own private property was the most sacrosanct of conservative values?
"Private" property becomes morally murky when you extend an invitation to the general public to use that space. Doubly so when a small handful of these privately-owned websites are responsible for carrying a the vast majority of the of the discourse on the internet.
As it stands, Google+Youtube, Facebook, and Reddit (1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th most popular websites in the country) currently have the power to ban, or worse, guide, all discussion of any topic they wish, with no accountability whatsoever. That is a frightening amount of power to have, and one that I don't believe the free market is equipped to deal with its abuses.
This latter problem is something I'm legitimately surprised more people are not concerned about. Just because they're using this power to target something you don't like doesn't mean it won't be used for more nefarious purposes in the future.
The pressure is more directly from advertisers. Major consumer brands don't want their advertisements appearing next to objectionable user generated content.
"Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane."
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
I don't agree with them, I don't believe that a statistically observed difference in a particular trait according to racial phenotypes implies that racial phenotype is "inferior" or "superior" to begin with. And it turns out that just as I originally said, he didn't say them.
To clarify, what exactly is it that you disagree with, that the statistical observation in question exists, or that if it does exist, it doesn't necessarily imply that the racial phenotype in question must be "superior" or "inferior"?
I'll take your second branch, and I'll take the contrapositive: Because there is such overwhelming evidence that all humans belong to a single genetic legacy, one single race, we therefore must reject the entire premise that started the statistical inquiry. Instead, we are obligated to realize that IQ is not correlated with some mythic "g" number, and instead correlated with socioeconomic status and quality of education.
> I'll take your second branch, and I'll take the contrapositive:
What I originally said was;
"it does exist, it doesn't necessarily imply that the racial phenotype in question must be "superior" or "inferior"?"
So the contrapositive to that would be that it does imply that racial phenotype differences must also necessarily imply superior or inferior.
To give you credit though, that does not seem to actually be what you're saying at all though. Breaking down what you do actually say;
> Because there is such overwhelming evidence that all humans belong to a single genetic legacy
Has nothing to do with what I said at all. I never claimed that racial phenotypes imply a separation in species.
> one single race
Appears to deny the existence of racial phenotypes by interpreting the term "race" to mean "species". That doesn't mean that racial phenotypes don't actually exist.
> we therefore must reject the entire premise that started the statistical inquiry.
Putting aside the question that this assumes that the entire premise that started the statistical inquiry in question is well known and completely accepted already, and regardless of what we do to the premise that started the statistical inquiry in question, we still have the results of the statistical inquiry in question to contend with.
This doesn't actually answer any questions.
> Instead, we are obligated to realize that IQ is not correlated with some mythic "g" number
I should hope we are not obligated to realise that at all, because as a simple question of correlation, g factor and IQ is indeed highly correlated, so any such obligation would make us willfully ignorant. In fact the way some IQ tests have their efficiency measured is to observe that correlation. To say that again for emphasis; it is the very way in which many of the tests in question are given validity.
> instead correlated with socioeconomic status and quality of education.
There's no "instead" here. IQ scores correlate statistically on all three measures (amongst many others).
Frankly, the way people address this entire issue desperately trying to make it something other than what it clearly is, when what it clearly is doesn't necessarily imply that it is thus somehow acceptable to persecute racial minorities, or view a specific racial phenotype as "inferior" or "superior" actually does favours to the racial tribalist perspective.
If there's an observable undeniable widespread campaign resulting in the continuous deplatforming and vigorous persecution of all the people in the world who dare to point out that the sky is blue because some of the people who claim that the sky is blue also claim that therefore all people that aren't blue should be killed, and that there's a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the sky is blue, that puts them at definitely correct regarding two of three points, and silencing everybody who claims simply that the sky is blue and nobody should be killed as a consequence of it removes the visibility of the most compelling argument for why the narrative that all non blue people should be killed is ridiculous.
Instead all that remains for the neutral disinterested observer is a massive chorus of people claiming that all blue people / non blue people should be killed and that the sky is any colour other than blue. All under a blue sky. Is it any wonder they throw their hands up and go crazy?
Once upon a time I would've said I don't understand this seeming stupidity, but being older and more cynical now I can't help but suspect it's simply a desperate attempt to throw more fuel on the divide and conquer bonfire by entrenched political elites so the underclass can be kept at each other's throats over table scraps while the aforementioned political overclass gleefully continues looting the vast majority of global wealth.
But hey, I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist, now continuously rate limited for my evil wrongthink, so whatever.
I'm disgusted with, and tired of this place.
I've been here eleven years now and I've watched the quality, slowly at first, and with increasing rapidity in more recent years, decline and the minds that gather here spew thought terminating cliches in progressively more shrill chorus as time has gone on, and writing this now I realise that I just get nothing whatsoever out of engagement here anymore, so this will be my final post.
Best of luck to anyone who intends to stick around and see if it pulls out of its decade long nosedive, but I'm done.
Glad to hear it. One nitpick: The contraposition of some claim P -> Q is not ~P -> ~Q, but ~Q -> ~P. I hope that you study some logic and biology in your newfound spare time. Best of luck.
Antifa USA 2020 is not the paramilitary wing of a german stalinist party, even if "Antifa in Germany 1931" was one. It is not the same organisation. It is a lifestyle branding sold to left wing youth, like Che Guevara t-shirts.
Now there is an organisation in the USA that has recently started to use the Antifa Branding. It's called Torch Network or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action but that one, too is not related to Germany 1931 or to Stalinism.
It might be news to you, but very few of the people who participated in the successful Russian communist revolution of 1917 were knowledgeable about the finer points of Marxism too. You don't really need that many. The rest can be useful idiots. The few knowledgeable people behind the scenes know and exploit this. 6 months before it happened, BTW, Lenin said in a lecture in Zurich that a revolution would not happen in his lifetime. But a rail car full of German cash helped things along quite nicely. So if you think this can't happen here, you should probably reconsider.
Same with Cultural Revolution in China or Khmer Rouge. Same with Nazi Germany - I seriously doubt Hans Sixpack hated Jews or Slavs all that much. In a way, Fascism was too "lifestyle branding". Germans, down and out after WW1, were sold this grand vision of Third Reich and Lebensraum stretching shore to shore on the Eurasian continent. Oh, and if you're against it, not only you'd get "canceled", you'd get shot by the nearest ditch. We're a few years out from that at the moment. In terms of tangibles outside lifestyle branding, BTW, Antifa at the time wasn't that different from fascists themselves. They wanted a communist authoritarianism, hammer and sickle and everything, while fascists wanted more of a capitalist version. Any sort of "democracy" wasn't even up for discussion.
Same with communism. Why wouldn't a "working class" Ivan Sixpack want to "own" the factory he works in? It did not occur to Ivan to think about what that'd actually mean in practice. 5 years later Ivan dies of starvation, 15 years later his extended family ends up dying in Gulag, for being "counterrevolutionary element". He did not end up improving his condition before he kicked the bucket either: the factory is now owned by the state, and it's illegal to not work there. Ivan was a useful idiot, and he outlived his usefulness. Don't be like Ivan.
You add nothing to your claim that it is the same organization and i will keep refuting that as the nonsense it is.
> The FBI says antifa uses social media to organize, but there’s no specific organization or leadership structure.
To me it looks like a very loose group of "anti-parental-authority" youth on the left fringe, which mostly idiolises fantasy-feelgood-anarchism, mixed with some older anti-klan streams that are special to the USA. You can't just claim that is the continuation of the paramilitary wing of KPD 1931 halfway across the planet, then also claim it is basically Thälmanns KPD, which is basically Stalin himself, because all things loosely related are the same thing. I call bullshit.
Those far fetched stories about how revolutionaries have found themselves abused by some autocratic authoritarian putschists are nice and true, but they do not give any substance to your claim that current Antifa USA is a stalinist organization. Your argument seems to be "all leftist revolution must end in stalinism, therefor they are all stalinists", which is so ridiculous, there should be some Godwins law variant for that.
That democracy you speak of is based on the believe in pluralism, yet you deny the existence of pluralism in the vague field that spans from KPD and Antifa 1931 to todays USA. You somehow completely ignore the 1980s hardcore anarchistic punk scene, 90 years of history, and instead you throw in some "cancel culture" and "maoist culture revolution". You have nothing backing your claim that it is a stalinist organization except matching symbols on anti-capitalist merchandise sold for $5.99 and a generalized red scare.
Now i agree with you on warning about the dangers of totalitarian authoritarianism. On that part we are fine. But you are crying wolves because of a freaking chihuahua! Yes that thing is related to wolves, and it is annoying, but you are the idiot for thinking they are the same. Freedom and Liberalism are not attacked by some rioting teenagers in downtown Seattle. Those who make encryption illegal and want everything on the net monitored by the Ministry for State Security for signs of domestic terrorism, those are the wolves.
>
It stopped being that within a couple of days of starting and was co-opted to advance other goals. It's for "racial equality" only inasmuch as no sane person will argue _against_ racial equality. Same as "antifascism" is also _nominally_ against something that's unquestionably bad, so no sane person will disagree with the core premise.
This is a wonderful theory, but the past couple of years (Centuries, in the case of racial equality) of political discourse in America has shown that it does not match reality.
There are plenty people who have no problem arguing for racism, or for fascism, and thanks to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, those people have gained both a lot more influence and a lot of, to put it charitably, allies of convenience - or, to put it uncharitably, true believers.
google legal frequently shares information with legal departments from other tech companies when it comes to moderating/acting upon content/users. in fact, the big tech companies' legal teams share information pretty regularly as they all deal with the same legal hurdles e.g. users from north korea, cuba, ITAR, etc.
it wouldn't surprise me if there was an informal discussion and a decision by google led others to also take action.
Please explain. In which districts in the United States are neo-Nazis affiliated with Stefan Molyneux, David Duke (former leader of the KKK), and Richard Spencer (who was videoed performing a Sieg Heil) up for election, as challengers or incumbents? I was not aware these men were employed by one of the two major political parties, or even one of the two smaller ones.
If the specific figures being banned are not affiliated with any candidate for election, even under a minor party or for local office, how is this "election interference"?
People doing political things you don't like is not election interference, anymore than some billionaire bankrolling right-wing SuperPACs is election interference.
Elections aren't held in a vaccum. People 'interfere' with them by persuading, spending money, and by choosing to give political ideas access to their platform.
Media agencies 'interfere' with elections all the time, by exercising their discretion for the last point, and by actively agitating on the first point.
And why would de-platforming racist white nationalists interfere with the election, anyways? Is there a racist white nationalist on the ballot in 2020, who will be hurt by this?
> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.
It shouldn't, all social networks delegate banning "hate content" to the SPLC and ADL. It's much more efficient/effective to do things this way, and more importantly, it assures fair enforcement. Otherwise, you'd have the same content allowed on one platform, but banned on another. This approach is much better for the platforms and their users.
Consistency is a big part of fairness, maybe the biggest part. Outsourcing "cancellation" decisions to the SPLC/ADL ensures that people are being consistently banned across all of the major social networks, after a full investigation by non-profits whose entire reason for existence is to do these kinds of investigations. They have, collectively, centuries of experience (and began long before the Internet existed).
Delegating also ensures that cancellations aren't done willy-nilly—the SPLC/ADL are not like a Twitter mob. They have (combined) over a billion in funds to investigate hate speech on the Internet, and to then advise the social networks that they are hosting hate speech—who then make the actual decisions to ban or not ban. Typically, they coordinate and all ban in unison, to avoid weird situations where someone is banned on one (or a few networks), but not all.
Obviously, none of this will feel "fair" to racist Whites, but there are places online (e.g. Gab, Bitchute, etc.) for them to speak freely to other racists where they won't be banned.
This happened a couple years back when they both made some big policy changes related to guns. I'm pretty sure it's just pressure from major advertisers they both share.
Act individually, and each company is dragged over the internet rage court individually, and as a bonus the last one to act will be roasted as "only doing it because all others did."
Act together, and they are accused of conspiracy.
I guess their PR teams decided the latter is less hassle for them.
I detest Donald Trump and everything he stands for and enables, but the idea of banning him from Twitch makes me imagine a world where he didn't get banned from Twitch and instead tried to pivot to being a full-time game streamer, and that makes me laugh at least a little bit.
It’s like the nuclear arms treaty. If one company doesn’t ban these accounts, it can gain all the users who subscribe to these people and benefit. All companies agree to potentially lose these users, so no one profits from doing the so called “wrong thing”.
Same thing with mask use in airlines. Some companies do not want to enforce mask use until all airlines do it, because they do not want customers opposed to masks leaving them for competitors that do not require masks on flights.
The public square is owned by private companies and they're enforcing anti-first amendment principles. One can't even argue that these banned people can move to another platform if they're all coordinating.
Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.
It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.
Today, Reddit banned the Chapo Trap House left extremist group. From someone not involved in either extreme, it appears to me like they're being consistent and banning people for behavior and not politics. I've not heard anyone calling for George Will to be deplatformed, for instance.
Just checking, but you know the standard for "consistent" is not "at least one far left extremist group was banned" right?
That is absolutely not the definition of consistent, so I have no idea why you've tried to square this circle. Consistent means proportional enforcement without political bias, which has clearly never been a priority for reddit.
After all, reddit has repeatedly targeted right-leaning subs with shadow bans and stealth editing including directly from the CEO. Which left-leaning subs have received CEO stealth editing treatment?
I don’t know. Which left-leaning subs, specifically, have violated the Reddit ToS in the same way that the_donald and the various “clown world” subs did and were not treated the same?
People get regularly banned for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and many other kinds of hate, whether their profiles say 'D' or 'R' or something else. If many of their profiles tend to say 'R' or otherwise have similar political views, that's not an indication of bias on the part of platforms.
All people regularly get shot by the police for committing crime and other kinds of violence. Whether they're black white or something else. If many of them happen to be black, that's not an indication of bias on the part of the police.
Just a simple substitution, and now we see that this is just bad thinking.
Absolutely false. It means more of them have been banned, not more of them are participating in that. You're assuming equal enforcement of the rules, with absolutely no evidence to support that.
Reddit after all developed moderation tools like shadow banning and deranking and used them exclusively against right-leaning subs, including stealth editing from the CEO.
First amendment only protects you against the suppression of free speech from the government. It definitely does not give you the right to say whatever you want, wherever you want. Private companies have complete authority over which speech is acceptable on platforms run by them.
but isn't the world of "private property" what the right wants? This kind of world, where there are no longer any public squares, but everything held in private is the world the right asks for. This is the kind of world we end up with. The irony should not be lost on them right?
It's not right-wing as much as a particular kind of very free-market-focused libertarianism. But, yes, I've thought about this discrepancy, too.
In practice, big services like YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, et. al., are going to get heat from all sides of the political spectrum. Right-wingers are positive Twitter is suppressing them, yet left-wingers frequently complain Jack Dorsey is a cryptofascist. Both of them are pushing these theories on... Twitter. And they get thousands of retweets. You would think that irony would not be lost on them, but you would be oh so wrong.
Not quite though. The right -- including libertarians -- often advocate for regulation, just less. You would be hardpressed to find a lot of libertarians disagreeing on whether or not people should be able to protest in privately owned public spaces. For example, sidewalks are privately owned in the United States, but you are allowed to hold a protest on one.
That shouldn't be significant unless:
1. There is a significant serialization/deserialization delay, which I don't think will be the based on my naive understanding of the tech
2. Buffering in time periods even relevant to discussion should really only occur under specific circumstances (like during overutilization)
Luckily I was young and didn't have much to lose. We didn't experience hyperinflation, maybe something like 40-50% change in prices. I was hourly at the time but it took a while before I felt like my purchasing power was back to being on-par with what it was prior. When people started to feel prices were rising, everyone ran out to buy electronics -- tvs, stereos, anything. The hope was they'd be able to re-sell them at a good price. I've learned that inflation is uneven - it doesn't uniformly increase prices everywhere. In the US I just watch the charts of M1.
1. The consequences of having millions of unemployed people with bills to pay and no income are too much for a nation, let alone politicians in an election year. My bet is that the payments will be extended or replaced with something as the alternative is not viable.
2. WFH has already started normalizing, and will shortly become a differentiating perk offered by companies. I don't suspect that may of the people living in tech hubs would choose to continue doing so if they had the opportunity to live anywhere they wanted (of course while considering COL adjustment).
I wouldn't take #1 for granted. The Trump administration is still pushing ahead with the idea of limiting the ability of states to waive the work requirements of SNAP (food stamps), which seems like a bizarre thing to attempt at the moment.
If you're willing to halt people's food benefits during a historic recession, almost anything seem possible.
And you're probably right. Hong Kong's status made it home to a lot of the financial engineering of commerce between China and the west. With it losing its status, I think a lot of the financial machinery in HK is about to come undone. Singapore will likely benefit, to some degree, from this move. The world and China may need to find new markets and suppliers in the short term.
Yes, I would imagine so. HK seemed to be the only conduit through which trade with the west could flow smoothly. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
This is an amazingly ignorant viewpoint, and I'd bet the farmers in Vietnam of the 1960's and Afghanistan of the 2000's would likely care to differ. Insurgencies undermine the advantages of expensive weaponry.
And if we're talking about a civil war or insurgency within US borders: An army fighting on its own soil and against its own citizens is surrounded on all sides and can't maintain secure supply lines.
This, sadly, is so accurate. That, or the fact that as difficulty levels increase, the game just gives the AI opponents crude modifiers - they don't get smarter, they just get cheat codes.
>It's entirely possible to say "we need to work harder, or take a risk, or be bold" while understanding where your colleagues are at in terms of what they need to do that, or what has or hasn't been communicated to them about how that will happen, or how things have been done in the past to change them.
Great leaders, in my experience, haven't asked these questions or pushed performance in this way - they led their reports through soft management to come to the conclusion that it was necessary to increase performance. They framed questions that led people to the conclusions they had already made. Of course, this also requires that the reports are capable enough of being led in the right direction.
For many years, the most popular routing platforms (i.e., boxes built by Cisco) performed IP packet forwarding and management functions on the same processor (often a RISC architecture). In cases where packet rate was high, it was possible for devices to become unresponsive or lose critical protocols responsible for sharing routing information.
In the last 15 years there has been a hard move away from these architectures. Almost no packets are forwarded by the same processors running management and control plane functions anymore. This is mainly because the required traffic rates today need dedicated silicon purpose built for the task (the Broadcom Tomahawk3 can do 12.8 Terabits/sec above a relatively small packet size).
I don't know how things will shake out for the Linux world and x86 packet forwarding given the trend and lack of real performance in the kernel. Right now, your best bet when it comes to Linux and high network throughput/packet processing requirements is to just bypass the kernel entirely with DPDK, a "smart" NIC, or XDP.
> I don't know how things will shake out for the Linux world and x86 packet forwarding given the trend and lack of real performance in the kernel.
That's pretty much settled isn't it? It was settled in the same way the "it got too much for the general purpose CPU" problem always gets settled - you do it in custom silicon, and define a standardised interface.
That's pretty much what happened with 3D graphics where the standardised interface was OpenGL (but now seems to be up in the air). It's also pretty much what's happened in AI with standardised libraries interfacing to custom hardware, and it's what happened with networking.
For networking, the interface standard is OpenFlow. So, if you think it's possible you will need to handle links of about 1Gbs or over in the future, you do your networking using an OpenFlow implementation like Faucet. If it's not much above 100Mb/s the Linux kernel module that implements OpenFlow, called openvswitch, will be fine. Otherwise use some custom hardware.
Openvswitch has been around since 2009 - so it's not exactly a new thing.
I was intrigued by your comment about the Tomahawk3. Turns out there is a Tomahawk4 implemented in 7nm which has twice the performance. Thank you for tipping me off to these devices:
I wonder if there's an economic argument, at useful scales, to using FPGA's in general purpose servers to accelerate network performance. The purpose-built ASICs would win on cost-per-unit every time, but the FPGA would have some adaptability to new protocols or algorithms that the ASIC wouldn't.
Yes, Azure uses FPGAs for networking. Programmable NPUs like Netronome or Pensando are a middle ground that are more cost-efficient than FPGAs for most needs.
I don't know much about the technical details, but the pitch I've heard is that it gives you ASIC level performance with more flexibility to reprogram the chip (not full FPGA).
Yeah, it's an interesting approach. They're basically allowing you to define packet processing with P4 on their Tofino family of chipsets:
https://p4.org/
That said, there's only so much you can do in a chip before considerable tradeoffs are going to be made. They're not going to offer the same level of flexibility you get out of a general purpose CPU, but may not have same the restrictions of most fixed pipeline chips - their product sits somewhere in the middle. Also, P4 seems to sit in a space complex enough to make it unreasonable for most network shops - it's not for your average enterprise or service provider network.
Ive been waiting for mainstream workstation motherboards with this capability for years. Presumably a pci card is how this would be handled in practice for now. My naive take is that toolchains are still too convoluted and bogged down with licensing schemes to deliver the kind of real-time highly integrated adaptability this would require for individual users. Would be great if the barrier to entry has in fact dropped enough that university-sized networks could consider them.
