The weird part is that everyone has an opinion about everything but we do a poor job gathering that data, gathering references and debating the different perspectives. Finding a middle ground or doing anything practical are alien topics in 2024. Im not suggesting we go back to the duel to the death but it was damn practical :)
Allowing your primary geo-strategic competitor to run disinformation ops within your borders does not increase free speech.
At some point we need to stop being simple-minded and naive about this.
It might be too late - and especially, it might have always been.
The Spanish-American happened during direct first-decedents of the Founding Fathers, and happened because of yellow journalism -- a.k.a false or exaggerated news reporting -- and we conducted a whole war as a result of it. And when the smoke cleared out, it was decided that war is an acceptable outcome and result of the right that Congress cannot abridge freedom of speech OR press.
The first amendment will likely be our greatest strength and flaw, and I'm not surprised if the final nail in the coffin was caused by its upholding.
I agree that sounds like the right thing to do, however it would become a howitzer-sized footgun wielded for ideological purposes. I don’t at all trust enough of our leaders to not break the country, then “fix” it, break again, thrashing. 14th amendment right out the window on day two :)
I have specifically asked Amazon customer support if they could do this (pick up the return) for my elderly parents who have Prime. They never agree and insist on printing a label. They don't have a printer. I have asked them about this at least five times.
That they were harassing and manipulating a lone, unthanked maintainer who had already told them he was dealing with mental issues makes them evil, IMO.
The honorable thing for "Jia" to do after this epic failure is seppuku, or whatever his or her local equivalent is.
Nobody sees themselves as the bad guy, and that’s not the same as “some people are just fundamentally selfish”. There are definitely loads of people that’d feel like the end justifies the means. There are plenty of people for whom a workday involves doing far worse things for the world than cyberbullying one person, and will look you in the eye and justify it. Plenty of that stuff is socially acceptable in many many mainstream circles. “Being mean to a maintainer” is just one that this community is especially sensitive to, because it involves a highly personified victim that they can relate to.
These maintainers add vast amounts of value to the modern world, though most of the people that benefit indirectly from their work can't really conceive of what it is they do.
People like "Jia" are pure parasites. It's one of the best cases of "why we can't have nice things" I've ever seen.
Yeah, they add vast amounts of "value", including (accidentally) reinforcing the status-quo.
It would definitely be interesting to see what would happen if the attack wasn't noticed, but instead people focus their interest on attacking Jia Tan because "wow, that guy is one hell of an asshole, it sure is a great thing that he failed!".
Whether or not this attack was the rare one that failed out of many similar ones is largely irrelevant to people. Quick, discuss this one particular case where we noticed it, news flash and all.
> People like "Jia" are pure parasites
They are "parasites" because they don't do what they are "supposed to"? That's pretty crazy. I guess every person that's doing what matches their interests is somehow a bad person/parasite/etc. Or is that only if what they do is forbidden by some rule book? Do you see what I'm getting at here?
HFT is also harmful, and so are the majority of startups that don't do anything actually useful and just take VC money. Those are just a few examples off the top of my head.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot more technically legal ways to profit that harm society, some of them more nefarious than what Jia Tan did.
Doing things that are bad for the society in a fucked up society seems justifiable. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad person.
People just have a more averse reaction to things that are obviously bad, even if in practice there are way worse things that initially seem innocuous and are actually legal to do. That's just the textbook example of hypocrisy.
That article was written in 2018, since then they have been trashing on a retired admiral: Timothy Gallaudet. They have been disparaging David Grusch, who spoke under oath to the American congress and have undone the work of Nobel laureates trying to edit pages about physics. And yes, they are dominating, a team of editors will beat out an individual contributor on Wikipedia. I don't really care about their position, but they are an open conspiracy, and it's an interesting story.
I'm not sure what exactly you're misunderstanding but this is not how the law works.