lmmarsano @ lmmarsano @lemmynsfw.com

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7 mo. ago

encouraging someone to kill themselves

I'm pretty sure that can be ignored without harm. Whether someone elects to kill themselves or not is up to them.

A fundamental right is not really a problem. Expression that doesn't directly harm (defamation, incitement, threat) can be ignored.

steak

stake?

Accepting funding from sponsors responsible for pollution & publishing environmental toxicology studies that disfavor those sponsors was pretty common at the university medical office where I worked.

I don't know, guys. Hatshepsut has a proven track record of breaking political barriers for females, leading recovery from a foreign occupation into prosperity, and commanding prolific building projects including some masterpieces of ancient architecture: she delivers. What has AOC done? Dismissing all that accomplishment would be a mistake.

image of text that people with accessibility needs can't read

very bad

That's probably why Mesopotamians chose them: the convention traces back to them. Measuring angles in degrees also traces back to them.

Still, those numbers/units are quite arbitrary & introduce unnecessary conversions. Radians are dimensionless & require no conversion. Converting seconds to a more natural unit like days involves reintroducing those highly composite numbers that fit better in base-60 than the base-10 system we now use.

Yea I think they’re gonna freak out upon seeing this ballot.

I think you missed the first sentence I wrote:

The ballot is the same for all ranked voting methods.

Maybe explaining what you think that means would clear up confusion?

I can see a bit of strategic voting happening.

Yes, approval voting is indeed susceptible to strategies including burial, which leads to a "chicken dilemma".

The ballot is the same for all ranked voting methods. The method of determining winner from those ballots varies, and some are clearly worse.

For instance, if a candidate would beat all others 1-on-1 (Condorcet winner), then should a decent method always select that candidate as winner? RCV doesn't do that.

Other methods also fail.

This nice table compares voting methods by a wide range of properties. I don't think it hurts to make a more informed decision before backing a method that will be difficult to change. The US got stuck with FPTP through inadequate research, and it'd be great not to repeat that mistake.

While rated voting methods fail the Condorcet winner criterion, by rating instead of ranking candidates they satisfy another set of criteria also worth considering.

Among ranked voting methods, ranked pairs seems most compelling to me. Among rated voting methods, approval seems pretty good (and extremely simple).

Maybe go SI with day as base unit & SI prefixes? Eg, deciday, centiday, milliday.

Gift from ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians love 12 & base 60. They also liked 7. Those numbers recur in their mythology.

Americans have a weird fixation with 💯. Where Americans might use percentages, I've seen Japanese plot values in [0, 1] (ie, pure proportions).

I don’t continue reading

Seems like willful illiteracy & incomplete evidence fallacy. There was literally all the resources on the internet & a quick search to check hastily drawn conclusions before posting them.

Imperial measurements that are not integers are displayed in fractions.

Often, they're not: look at packaging labels especially in grocery stores. Engineers use decimals regardless of unit.

Weight scales in the US don't mark 1⁄3.

Quarter & third likely show up for verbal ease/brevity of naming: saying 250 grams is a bit of mouthful & unlikely for naming anything. I suspect if Americans used metric, they might still use fractions to refer to burgers by weight/mass in kg (like drugs!).

In metrics, fractions are rarely used.

Also convention. Nothing prevents 1⁄3 kg, 1⁄4 kg, and I'd expect to see 1⁄3 kg more often than 0.3̅ kg if rounding were avoided.

In metric, Americans still would get this wrong, because they don't understand fractions despite using them. Or are you suggesting everyone would get the order of 1⁄3 kg & 1⁄4 kg wrong?

Pretty sure fractions are pure math & not metric or imperial.

Americans do be dumb AF, though.

Fallacy accusations.

No one needs to waste their time with someone else's invalid reasoning.

Some of them being also kind of subjective.

Logicians & philosophers would disagree. Fallacies clarify identifying common reasoning errors & save effort overexplaining clearly documented problems.

Was this a valid example or was it a strawman?

Strawman means claiming to refute an argument by instead refuting a misrepresentation of it. Unclear how a question about examples would arise there unless the definition wasn't understood.

Appeal to fallacies

I've seen this misused. An argument from fallacy is a claim that the conclusion of a fallacious argument is false because of the fallacy.

Claiming an argument is invalid (therefore not worth serious consideration until corrected) due to fallacy is not an instance.

Your belief that I don’t understand these ideas or haven’t encountered them is incorrect.

It's more an observation that your position isn't justified well.

I’m saying that a free society must not equally allow every possible expression, and that anything invoking and glorifying Nazism in specific is beyond the pale and must be stopped, including violently when necessary.

You are talking about weakening legal integrity of fundamental rights & committing violence against nonaggressors (violence against peaceful expression is never necessary): that's flat out illiberal & incompatible with free society. Worst of all, you've failed to demonstrate any of it is necessary or sufficient to safeguard the fundamental rights free society stands for: basic logic indicates it does the opposite. Moreover, historical record discredits your position & shows such approaches when attempted are easily abused by authorities, harm society, and end up failing: you remain conveniently mute on this.

Claiming to have heard & understood it all before doesn't mean your position now isn't broken & muddled. "Defeating" illiberal movements in ways that end up defeating free society is incompetent advocacy. I think you're mistaking fighting fascism (even at the expense of fundamental freedoms that define free society) with defending free society.

Anyone who seriously cares about free society needs to oppose illiberalism from your direction, too. I do. Your illiberalism is more insidious than overt fascism, because someone might mistake yours for progressive.

The only positive is there's a better chance of reasoning with misguided people trying to do the right thing than someone who definitely wants to end free society.

they instead exploit the willingness of others to do so (like you’re insisting on here) because it drags them into unproductive conversations and creates feuds (like we’re doing here)

No, this disagreement is real. I cannot support recklessly subverting fundamental rights to score cheap "wins" that ultimately result in loss. Committing to a free society requires integrity to defend all of it consistently.

It's seems to me your "solution" adds to the problem. It's possible to oppose it, oppose facism, & argue for a better solution.

Moreover, it seems to me you're falling for their game. Testing integrity by trying to provoke society to weaken its legal protections enough to punish offensive exercise of fundamental rights is a classic challenge illiberals pose to lure society to attack free society.

authoritarian, but that word means something different to everyone

Advocating for unnecessary limits on liberties is objectively illiberal. Weakening integrity of legal protections for fundamental rights increases their vulnerability to abuse by authorities, which is a step toward authoritarianism.

My original comment about paradox of intolerance is something that person needed to hear.

But it's wrong, your reasoning is unsound, and no one has to agree with it. Your logic isn't compelling.

Germany being the example

Germany is not a great example. Do their restrictions inhibit the rise of abhorrent movements? People still speak & assemble privately. Neo-nazis are still around. AfD continues gaining with its intimations of ethnofascism skirting barely within legal limits. German laws seem ineffective at deterring the rise of far-right extremism, which looks hardly any different in the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Germany has internet patrols penalizing vitriol, insults, & satirical images of politicians showing fake quotes & live police suppressing pro-Palestinian protests as anti-semitic. So, German laws seem effective at helping authorities stifle & penalize online criticism. At least when authorities (following eerily similar rationalizations in the US & Germany) try to suppress pro-Palestinian protests, protesters in the US have firmer legal claims to defend their rights.

intellectual charity

The Principle of Charity means interpreting your words in their truest, likeliest meaning favoring the validity of your argument. It doesn't mean just letting you have the argument.

If you don't want to justify your claims convincingly, that's fine. I'm still going to tell everyone who reads this why I think a free, democratic society deserves better than the deeply broken idea you're pushing.

While I wish you well, too, you and the rest who endorse that thinking seem sorely misguided, and I wish you would think better.

OP felt a compulsion to protect our virgin eyes & ears.

There are better text editors. Swearing by that one is kind of a joke.

We can disagree, but I’m not all that interested in getting scholarly about it - the writing’s on the wall, we have real - not theoretical - fascism headed our way within this 4 year presidency and we’d better be ready to fight.

1. Scholarly: you brought scholarship into this by invoking paradox of tolerance. I had to point out that people whose vocation is to think harder & longer than you on this have drawn conclusions at odds with yours. Therefore, your reasoning is not on firm, settled ground.
2. Realism: your conclusion is not only theoretically challenged. Cracking open a history book reveals it's unnecessary & ill-advised in practice.

The civil rights movement overturned defacto ethno-fascism & advanced equality by using & promoting civil liberties, not opposing them. Freedom of expression & the free speech movement were instrumental.

Even when the threat is real, compromising civil rights to combat it spills beyond the threat & backfires. Read about the Red Scare & McCarthyism to see government restrict civil liberties in the name of security (the Soviets were spying in the Manhattan Project & Federal government), Congress seize the chance to wield a partisan weapon against anyone they flimsily accuse of "Un-American" activities, the lives ruined through rights abuses, the work it took to wind back those laws. Truman criticized those restrictions as a "mockery of the Bill of Rights" and a "long step toward totalitarianism". For his reckless witch hunt against communists, Joseph McCarthy was criticized as "the greatest asset the Kremlin has". Persecution ultimately harmed anti-communist efforts more than help them, and critics argued it distracted from the "real (but limited) extent of Soviet espionage in America".

Read about how basic freedoms like speech & assembly were indispensable for disenfranchised activists to advance universal suffrage as they fought to lift restrictions due to property ownership, race, poll taxes, tests, sex, age.

Read about the considerable work those activists performed using their civil liberties to organize, picket, resist, & act in civil disobedience to gain the expanded freedoms you take for granted today. Look at their work & struggles from the abolitionist movement to black lives matter, and look at the work the activists of today are not doing. Notice how they didn't organize to weaken basic protections whereas people who think like you argue we should.

Arguing to squander basic protections with some wishful thinking that elected authority will reliably fight your causes for you without as easily turning against you

1. is a lazy failure to understand the limitations of authority & its risks for abuse when you tear down protections against it
2. spits in the face of everything past generations of activists fought for.

Like you, I oppose fascists and (more generally) authoritarians, but I'm very clear about why. Authoritarians don't respect limits to authority: they would tear down those pesky rights & liberties that protect free society & stand in their way, and they would readily crush people & everything we hold dear for their unworthy cause.

"Resisting" authoritarians chipping away at free society by chipping away even more is exactly what authoritarians would want. How thinkers like you don't see that is beyond me.

Your prescription is wrong & serves authoritarians: I cannot abide it.

Those new-fangled memes are watered-down trash, though. Vintage memes slapped harder.