Nova Scoti to waive fees for residential school survivors and their families to change their names. I hope other provinces follow suit. cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/…
@Frank That's an amazing business idea. Instead of simply creating a media product and selling it, create the media, upload it to torrent sites, sue everyone who downloads it, and make money from settlements
Trump's Twitter rant from today is quite special again
> or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1000/24th), as your President, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!
@GnomeSlice I think it's less he thinks the media is going to spin what he says, and more that he doesn't like being constrained to say things a certain way.
That, and he has a huge issue with anyone telling him what to do.
> President Donald Trump told Xi Jinping that the US would mute its support for the anti-China protest movement in Hong Kong in exchange for re-opening US-China trade talks, according to a report by the Financial Times (FT).
The newspaper, citing several unnamed sources close to the talks, said that the agreement was made around the G20 summit in Japan last month.
Shortly after, the two countries announced that they would restart talks to end their ongoing trade war.
Michelle Carter told her boyfriend to kill himself, so he did—now she wants to be a free-speech hero thepostmillennial.com/…
What a trash human being, KFC
> Did Michelle Carter cause Conrad Roy’s death in urging him to go through with it? He phoned her from inside his truck during a suicide attempt, and when he got out of the truck, she told him to get back in. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and is currently serving a term of 15 months in a Massachusetts prison.
I mean they're probably right that her just saying that once is free speech, but that's not what she did
There have been a few of these cases and she is the most awful of them, IMO
Just 100% horrible person. Her appeal will definitely not succeed and she should serve every minute of her sentence, because she's not even remotely repentant about what she did
Yeah, I think what she did was a lot more than involuntary manslaughter but I guess convincing a jury definitively of something more might have been a challenge
My dad said something at dinner last night which was really sad. He and my mom are public defenders and he asked her "When do you think DA's first learn to lie?", DA meaning district attorney (prosecutor). Then they were talking about how today he had a trial and a cop was blatantly lying about what he had seen someone doing
> Video was widely circulated online in November of Brett McEachern, a Grade 9 student at Glace Bay High School, who was bullied into laying in a brook near the school. The video showed students walking over him like a bridge, swearing at him and calling him names
> Brett's mother, Terri McEachern, filed a discrimination complaint with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission on her son's behalf in December, saying she was unhappy with the way the school handled the matter.
I want to say, what's wrong with people, but these are high schoolers, with crap for judgement. They should know better, and I sincerely hope their parents made that very clear.
> She said the school only suspended the students who walked on her son for a day and claimed someone from the school called her son a liar before the video of the incident surfaced.
Basically another case where the schools respects the harasser more than the victim
> Jim Ellsworth, the father of one of the bullies, said he thinks everyone who was involved in the incident should take part in the restorative process.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice is a thing (generally contrasted with "retributive justice", which is what Frank is advocating here) and does generally require the participation of the victim(s) as part of the process of determining what actually counts as restoration and confronting the offender(s) with the results of their actions.
@ToxicFrog Interesting. I didn't know that was a thing.
Biggest concern I'd have with that for this case is the bully's parents pressuring the victim to accept something meaningless. If there are others there beyond just the core group, though, that's likely to be a non-issue.
@ToxicFrog It's a thing, and can be a good thing, but often it's just about trying to legally cover a companies ass while not helping the victims at all.
And if the victim wants no part in it, they shouldn't be forced to or shamed into it.
@puzzlepiece87 Yeah, but where do you draw the line? Thinking about it from the other side, if the majority of people were anti-progress, would it be okay for those advocating for things like living wages, equality, etc. to be silenced?
Speech is a powerful thing. Silencing it because the majority doesn't agree is a scary thing.
You'll be coming from a sturdier place when you're like "I know that the NZ mosque shooters were radicalized because we gave white supremacists a platform on YouTube, but I still am not okay with deplatforming"
@Frank It kind of sounds like you actually agree without realizing it if that's what you think, but have a much different idea of where the line should be.
@Frank [So...each platform needs to pick who and what they welcome?] yes? This is not a new or controversial concept. If you don't choose your userbase, your users will choose for you, and you usually end up with the loudest and most hateful voices drowning out everyone else.
Because the people who don't want to put up with that shit will jump ship for platforms that have actual moderation policies as soon as it's practical for them to do so.
Saying "oh, we don't choose who can use our platform, it's the ~marketplace of ideas~" or similar is just choosing that your platform is for whoever yells loudest, has the most time to waste and has the least to risk, while also not being willing to acknowledge that's what you're doing.
@Frank I still am not hearing any specific acknowledgement of harms already being done - I'm mostly just hearing fear of change. Do you have someone in mind that you'd specifically like to see keep their platform that some have advocated against, something like that?
I always look at reddit as a good example of what happens when there's no moderation. Reddit a racist cesspool, and it's spread throughout a lot of the subs. It's all because the admins refuse to actually moderate anything unless it makes the news.
(this goes double for places like Youtube, where there's both "who gets to use the platform" and "who does the platform proactively tell you you should watch")
@Frank My problem with the line where you've drawn it (which differs only slightly from where I've drawn it, in the words we've used anyway) is that your hard and fast line explicitly encourages people to crowd right next to it.
"As long as you don't explicitly identify as KKK or Nazi in your video, you're good"
@ToxicFrog It actually depends completely on the sub itself. I mean, look at /r/theredpill. It's a sub that's literally dedicated to hating woman, and reddit does nothing about it.
@Frank I don't think it's easy. For example, I don't think you could do it with algorithms. I think it would have to be done with human employees who would also make mistakes.
But definitely just go for it, and these companies can absolutely afford it and should be required to do it legally as part of their citizenship.
In my opinion only, the only way this problem seems like a mountain instead of a manageable hill is if you haven't followed the way this has already played out a million times already, or the writing of great people who have cared about and worked on these issues for years.
Not that my solution is ever going to be adopted or anything, US Congress is never going to pass laws making content platforms hire human moderators.
@Wipqozn right, and my point is, there are other sites that are even worse than that because they are populated by people who were too vile even for reddit.
I can't even remember what the talk was about, or if it even happened; just that everyone that wanted to shut it up was straying into hate speech themselves.
To be fair, I think those that supported the talk were straying toward hate speech, too.
That's my experience with deplatforming, and nobody came off looking good. If you've got an example that doesn't involve an internet mob, I think I might be more comfortable supporting it.
richard spencer didn't stop his "college students, what if ethnic cleansing was good" tour because his ideas were disproven in some abstract marketplace of ideas so
not really an internet mob more of an actual mob but that doesn't mean it didn't achieve a goal
I think we need to read more on this issue, let me open up Washington Post and take a pass at this oped about treating tech platforms like publishers by squints Noted Good Faith Actor Charlie Kirk
They'll probably supplement this by sending ICE agents along with every Census worker or something, I'm not sure they've actually taken the L on a single thing so far
About the Reddit conversation above - honestly the internet in general is so toxic I want to start a group specifically about promoting nonvolatile language on it
it would be best if it had tons of different people with different viewpoints
just going into youtube comments or whatever and just trying to get people to stop using ad hominem as an actual point in an argument and sticking to the issues
lol Barr got up there and told Trump "congratulations" on taking "this effective action", a thing he didn't even come up with and is a complete fold, amazing
Ross was there but they didn't let him talk, probably because he's boring as hell and therefore not endearing enough for Trump's tastes
