jollybean (u/jollybean)

jollybean commented on Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door web.archive.org/web/20220... · Posted by u/ColinWright

michaelmrose · 3 years ago

It doesn't help to address claims nobody is making specifically dressed up to serve as fallacy. The normal claim is that police are killing black individuals unnecessarily. The claim you have offered is just that claim dressed in dramatic clothing.

Meanwhile transgender sacrificing children would be a falsehood wholly invented to smear a group that already frequently suffers violence and harassment and with the blatant intention of promoting and justifying further violence and harassment. The statement is in effect part of the process of harassing, harming, and ultimately killing people. It ought to be illegal in the same way that breaking into a home to commit rape is also illegal and liable to be punished more harshly itself than if the burglary was part of mere trespass.

I also take issue with drawing a line between a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal than setting a fire that burns down whole housing development. The punishment may be harsher but its ultimately the same crime. It's also not a slippery slope AT ALL.

Passing on a falsehood that the individual knew or should have reasonable known was false is not at all like parsing the difference between police arbitrarily or unnecessarily killing black people. We can forgive trespasses where the truth is a matter of opinion, phrasing, or debate while trivially punishing people who blatantly lie or spread harmful nonsense.

If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on.

jollybean · 3 years ago

"The normal claim is that police are killing black individuals unnecessarily. The claim you have offered is just that claim dressed in dramatic clothing."

This is plainly false.

Claims that police arbitrarily kill people, or are 'killers' etc. are all over the web..

That you would blind yourself to the radical populism in some corners because maybe you don't want it to exist is not helpful.

Here's a completely random example:

"cops are serial killers. paid, protected serial killers who believe their jobs entitle them to take human life. over and over. they lie. they kill. they lie again. repeat. "

This is one of literally millions of such Tweets.

How could you possibly suggest that such language does not exist when it's rampant?

If that example isn't specific enough for you, then just Google a bit and you'll have your examples.

"a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal "

Again, utterly false.

So plainly wrong, that I'm sure you can't have actually thought it through.

Do realize this Orwellian implications of governing speech to the point wherein saying something that is 'non factual' is tantamount to a crime?

It's not even a 'slippery slope' it's already ultra authoritarian.

Again: hop on to Twitter, right now, by your logic, millions of people would be charged with crimes, daily.

"If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on."

You seem to have a wilful lack of understanding of what is happening in pop culture and in the commons, and yet want to enact vicious authoritarian violence on people for arbitrary words?

I wonder if you realize that you're a fascist authoritarian?

You are exactly what we are afraid of.

People can believe what they want to believe and say what they want to say, unless it really starts to damage others, and that's a high bar.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/sheerohero666/status/127598615903...

jollybean commented on Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door web.archive.org/web/20220... · Posted by u/ColinWright

theprincess · 3 years ago

I understand why you'd worry about this, but I see no other way forward. Alex Jones' lie caused families who lost children to be harassed by the nuts to watched him. Because he had his own publishing platform it's pretty easy to convince people that what he did was wrong and that he acted irresponsibly. The problem is that in the age of social media everyone can cause the same harm that Alex Jones did without owning anything. They can just spread a hateful lie, it can go viral, and then we're left picking up the pieces as a society. You could only investigate misinformation that already went viral I suppose since then it becomes more equivalent to being like Alex Jones and Sandy Hook. I don't know. It just seems obvious that something has to give because all the free speech absolutists have no answer other than to keep burying their heads in the sand as hateful lies spread like wildfire and drive more and more people over the edge: Mosque shooter in New Zealand, Grocery Store shooter in the USA, etc....

Maybe a private/social response will prevent disaster. I'm unsure. The closest historical parallel I can think of to this is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (a popular document that helped encourage Germany to liquidate Jewish people) being printed and distributed around the USA by Henry Ford. Luckily Henry Ford didn't manage to convince the US population that Jewish people were plotting to enslave them, but the Germans weren't so lucky which is probably why they're so wary of letting it happen again.

jollybean · 3 years ago

I don't think you grasp the implications of what you are suggesting.

Basically, you're suggesting that 'being wrong' about something, is effectively a crime.

That's one hell of a slippery slope.

Alex Jones has an audience of 400M people.

You and I do not.

You and I absolutely should be able to say 'Sandy Hook children were actors'.

Maybe one of us is a total idiot and actually believes that. Is that a crime?

Proportionality etc. matter.

Also - you are hugely downplaying how much censorship Twitter enacts (I'm not saying this is good or bad, but they do it).

Just like the regular police keep a lid on crime, as in, if they were to disappear all hell would instantly break lose (in Montreal the cops went on strike and immediately there were mass bank robbing etc) - Twitter keeps the total insane hate speech and death threat people off the platform.

In 2020 - the 'Protocols of the Elder's of Zion' - should be hugely and widely disseminated if it were powerful. But it's not. Why? Because we have controls. Google, Twitter etc. tamp that stuff down.

We probably need 'some' laws, but we ought to be very, very careful about it and I suggest it probably be limited to inciting violence and medical misinformation.

jollybean commented on Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door web.archive.org/web/20220... · Posted by u/ColinWright

theprincess · 3 years ago

It's pretty simple really. Saying you don't like transgender people or some specific race makes you a jerk but shouldn't be illegal. It's just an opinion. Saying that transgender people are sacrificing children to Lucifer and someone should put a stop to it is clearly intended to move someone who feels they have nothing to lose to murder some random transgender people to "save the children from Lucifer." That should be investigated because it can and will result in real world harm.

jollybean · 3 years ago

So if someone says 'transgenders are sacrificing children' should be illegal, does that mean 'police are arbitrarily killing unarmed blacks' - should that be illegal? Because I think the material reality could be demonstrated that the later is false as well.

I think your argument demonstrates a slippery slope.

I think probably claims should have to be more specific and inciteful to be considered illegal.

Also - I think proportionality matters as well. Saying 'the kids who died at Sandy Hook were not real people but actors' - on a personal level should be legal. But if you have an audience of 400M people and scream that nonsense, I think this might be a problem. Right now it's handled in civic courts, but we could think a bit about what that means.

It's very hard, and there are a lot of slippery slopes. Risky.

jollybean commented on Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door web.archive.org/web/20220... · Posted by u/ColinWright

nxm · 3 years ago

Who deems what a lie is? That vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid? That corona originated in a lab? Should people have been prosecuted for saying that?

Are there two genders? Should I get arrested if I say yes? Should I get arrested if I say no?

Horrible approach that Germany is taking against a fundamental right to free speech. Gestapo like

jollybean · 3 years ago

'Who deems what a lie is'?

Are you saying we can't agree on what reality is?

If you provide bullshit medical advice to people you should go to jail frankly, for example.

But misinformation, when it's applied broadly, does have consequences and that will have an effect.

Right now we actually do contend with it i.e voting machine lies, lies about Sandy Hook children - but we handle that in civil cases where people sue each other for 'damages' in which case we have to arrive at some truth. Point being - we legally identify 'damages' there.

But the government is responsible for protecting people from 'damage' as well, in which case we could feasibly have the DoJ take people to court for civil-ish kinds of things, or, find some way forward.

I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't have to be entirely strict or all encompassing and may have thresholds for proportionality etc. or even depend on the integrity of institutions.

We already draw a lot of boundaries around medical information and could do the same. For example, there could be a requirement to indicate lack of authority / seek a doctor's opinion when discussing health matters. Like I like Joe Rogan, but absolutely detest when he starts yapping about vaccines etc. as his position de facto amounts to misinformation which actually can cause harm. If he were required to consistently remind people "I am not a doctor. This is entertainment. Please consult your doctor for advice concerning COVID." (He should have done this without being asked), then I think those kinds of things can help.

And probably we should err on the side of freedom of expression.

But there is a huge risk in getting into an authoritarian situation as people want to regulate others opinions, and yes, as you say, declaring that there are 'only two genders' is considered 'hate speech' by some and they will push hard to stop others from saying this, which is scary.

I'm wary that our governments have the ability to split hairs on these hard issues.

jollybean commented on Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door web.archive.org/web/20220... · Posted by u/ColinWright

theprincess · 3 years ago

It seems like Germany's approach here or something like it, maybe more streamlined and less heavy handed, is the only way forward in the long run. It's too easy to spread inflammatory lies right now and it's already spurring people into violence. How long before angry mobs are burning down Children's hospitals and killing doctors under the false idea that four year olds are being given sex change operations for instance? It's too much strain on society to live with this constant low level threat of violence from made up information.

There's literally an infinite space of inflammatory but believable lies for bad actors to pick from and only a very small space of equally viral true information. The asymmetry is too much in favor of the bad so something has to tip the scales back toward sanity. It may seem trivial to police what someone's racist uncle says on Facebook but it's not one racist uncle, it's 10 million racist uncles who own firearms (in the US at least). Eventually some of them will decide they have nothing to lose and go on the hunt.

jollybean · 3 years ago

Yeah, no this is authoritarianism in action.

People are not burning down Children's hospitals, moreover, the kinds of 'misinformation' you're alluding to generally fall way, way within the boundaries of 'hate speech'.

Twitter is a private company they can mostly do what they want.

Some companies rise to the point of 'kind of public service' and therefore we might need basic regs (i.e. at least guaranteeing that Twitter act consistently within their own stated rules).

The bar for hate speech out to be very, very high.

Calls for direct violence have always been illegal.

'Disinformation' is absolutely another issue altogether. Lying about moon landing conspiracy theories is irrelevant, but lying about school shooting victims being 'actors' is something a bit different, as is lying about the effect of vaccines during a pandemic, as is lying / providing medical advice without any kind of appropriate designation. Free speeches probably don't like it but those things do have an effect, and proportionality matters: if you want to say something to your neighbour, fine, but if you're going to go in front of 400M people and broadcast it, and it causes serious harm due to direct minsinfo ... most us don't want that. I don't suggest we have the answer there but I bet if we think about it we can find a reasonable way for the insane idiots to be among each other and for them to not scream non-factual things.

jollybean commented on Pessimism is a barrier to progress bigthink.com/progress/pes... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

foldr · 3 years ago

>Marc Benioff spends the entirety of his time virtue signalling about how he is saving LGBT refugees from this or that, while superficially that's nice, it's ultra narcissistic PR and self aggrandization to use those people as tools for corporate branding. Nobody calls him out.

I don't think this sort of cynicism about LGBT rights activism is helpful. If we want to make progress in this area, we need support from all sectors of society. That definitely includes people who aren't saints and who don't act from wholly disinterested and pure motives. Whatever his motives (and I can't read his mind – can you?), Marc Benioff did something substantial to support LGBT rights when many other CEOs did not.

There's no objective content to the accusation of "virtue signalling". It's a zero-effort means of objecting to whatever kind of activism someone doesn't like. Instead of making a substantive criticism of the activism itself, just jump to uncharitable conclusions about the person's inner motivations.

jollybean · 3 years ago

Virtue Signalling is absolutely a thing.

Hollow and performative support for an issues that services only to engender the supporter with social points.

Supporting Ukraine doesn't bring anyone brownie points because it's not so much a moral position.

Corporations 'supporting' BLM, especially with donations, which is a totally corrupt charity - this is a problem. Corporations even throwing up the word 'equity' is a bit of a start, but not really there. Corporations making money off of it (Nike) is evil. Corporations doing something thoughtful and material about it, now that's not 'virtue signalling'. If they want to humble-brag about it in some non aggrandising way, then that's fine but it should not be part of company branding.

jollybean commented on Pessimism is a barrier to progress bigthink.com/progress/pes... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

PeterStuer · 3 years ago

You might want to click through a few times on this. Basically this is WEF propaganda saying how billionaires are good for the world, and urge you not to get in their way with criticism or be labeled a doomsayer, negative Andy or 'pessimist'.

jollybean · 3 years ago

That is definitely not what this article is.

jollybean commented on Pessimism is a barrier to progress bigthink.com/progress/pes... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

jollybean · 3 years ago

Just the opposite, I see empathetic, gushing, ridiculous cotton candy optimisim all over places like LinkedIn and the corporate world. Everybody Smile!

There isn't nearly enough contention, questioning, satire (notice how SNL never really goes for that) etc..

Marc Benioff spends the entirety of his time virtue signalling about how he is saving LGBT refugees from this or that, while superficially that's nice, it's ultra narcissistic PR and self aggrandization to use those people as tools for corporate branding. Nobody calls him out.

On the contrary, I see a lot of dour young people, with kind of a 'lack of faith' in the general sense, which is really odd, and I suggest maybe a new concept in the west.

When I was very young we had the 'Cold War' with nukes starring right at us and we were full of ... gumption, positivity, pride, goodwill, hope etc..

Finally - I don't think positivity/pessimism matters that that much - you have to be a 'strong believer' in some capacity to innovate, the rest is head games.

jollybean commented on Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us? yarn.pranshum.com/... · Posted by u/pranshum

WalterBright · 3 years ago

Rather bluntly, a central bank is central economic planning. Central economic planning always falls short of what free markets do. The idea that a central bank is able to control the financial markets better than free market forces is shown to be false (with actual data) by Friedman in "Monetary History of the United States".

> The 'government' does not print money, the Central Bank does.

I said "print money" as a euphemism for what the Fed actually does, which is the same thing, it just doesn't involve doing the old fashioned way. They do it by issuing debt with no collateral.

jollybean · 3 years ago

Rather bluntly, this is just not true.

I think there is an erroneous understanding/implication in your statement, which is likely leading you to erroneous conclusion.

The Fed is not 'Central Planning' so much as it is actually trying to make the market more 'neutral' in normal cases.

We'll get to the 'crisis' cases in a bit.

If we just had a hard currency, like Gold (which 'feels' neutral) we'd get into trouble, because of deflationary issues. People would treat it like Bitcoin, and as prices fell slightly would be oriented a bit towards 'store of value' as opposed to currency.

The Fed 'targets' just a 'bit above zero' inflation by policy. That is basically 'neutral'.

That is not really 'central planning', it's more like 'central neutralization'.

As for 'crisis' situations, i.e. when the Fed does start to 'intervene' and does things which you might argue are 'central planning' - well - the government in many cases can absolutely do it 'better than free markets' because only the government has the scale to do it.

For example, 'free markets' could have not have created and executed the Highway road system of the 1950s. It was of a scale and scope far, far beyond any economic actor. That required 'strategic vision' on behalf of the government. Now - private contractors actually did the 'building' - which is how we want it because the government doesn't need to hire individual workers. But it's a government project by virtue of scale and other things.

The meltdown of 2008 was a very scary time - if the government did not intervene, the banks would have collapsed, and it would have taken down the entire economy.

It would be like a human having a 'heart attack' - the heart stops - everything stops.

So the government put together a plan and intervened. A lot of it had to do with 'confidence signals' and other things, extra regulation, but it worked.

There is of course the 'Too Big To Fail' argument i.e. moral hazard i.e. banks take on more risk knowing the 'gov will save' us - that said, the worst actors did definitely lose a ton of money. Also - the problem was not just the banks, it was a systemic failure in a number of sectors.

Basically - the US had an economic cancer and no individual organization was going to be able to contend with it.

So -> intervention. Much like a war, or pandemic.

Having a fiat currency allows that opportunity. If it were a 'Gold Based Economy' it would have fallen down like a house of cards.

Like a brick building during a rare earhtquake: brick 'feels' strong like Gold, but an earthquake will ravage it, which is why you need steel reinforcement - the steel can bend and absorb different kind of tensions.

Milton Friedman is wrong.

Yes, when there is hyperinflation, it's probably because some stupid government is printing too much money, but inflation is not just a function of money printing.

jollybean commented on Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us? yarn.pranshum.com/... · Posted by u/pranshum

WalterBright · 3 years ago

> They don't print money.

Oh, absolutely they do. That's why currency is called "banknotes". The banks printed them. Each bank printed their own banknotes. You can find their images in numismatics books.

In 1914, the government took over the function of printing banknotes. But the banks still print money. We just call them "cashier's checks", "money orders" and "travelers' checks". But more normally, they simply credit your account with created money.

> If stuff is harder to make or is more rare, prices will go up irrespective of money supply.

That isn't inflation, because extra dollars are not being created. For example, tomatoes going up in price in the store because of crop failure isn't inflation, because more money doesn't appear in your pocket to pay the premium. What happens is you wind up with fewer dollars in your pocket, meaning you buy less of other things, and with the annoying Law of Supply and Demand, the prices of those other things drop.

jollybean · 3 years ago

Listen, you are really confusing yourself and others here.

That banks used to print notes in the past is not relevant in this discussion, when we talk about 'printing money' what we are referring to is how money comes into circulation. Physical bank notes are barely relevant to the equation as it makes up a tiny portion of the money supply, and of course, they are only printed by the Central Bank.

Money comes into circulation when the Central Bank 'buys' TBills off the free market. That's when the Central Bank 'creates' money.

Then, through fractional lending, a considerably larger amount of money ends up getting into the system by way of accounting.

Finally, the 'credit market' - which is really 10x bigger than even money in circulation, and which is the real thing that matters in business, develops like a bubble on top of that.

"That isn't inflation, because extra dollars are not being created."

Yes - it is 100% inflation and you are absolutely spreading false information at that point.

The 'result' could be as simple as 'less of that product is bought' - meaning, we use 'less gas' when gas prices rise - while every other aspect of the economy remains mostly the same. That is 100% inflation.

Aside from 'buying less of the product with price increase' or 'buying less of other stuff' we can also borrow, use savings, buy on credit etc. to adjust for the price inflation - so it's not going to necessarily work out to be some kind of net price levelling in the economy.

Increasing prices = inflation [1]. That's it. It's not necessarily related to money supply.

And finally - as the economy expands, more money needs to be introduced into the system just to keep prices even. This is an example of where there is more money supply and it does not change prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation