Maybe start by not conflating privacy with concerns about censorship.
Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.
As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.
It would really be great if privacy and anti-censorship advocates could solve the problem of extremism! Seems like a bit of a tall order, though.
What you're really proposing, IMO, is this:
Privacy and anti-censorship advocate (PA): I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we're trying to curb extremism by requiring messaging services to police their users. The problem is real, but the methods being used to address it are completely antithetical to the fundamental principles of free societies. I want to let people talk to each other on-line without anyone listening in on them or stopping them from saying whatever they want to say.
You: OK, you can do that if you can make sure no Nazis can use your service to further their agenda.
PA: That seems impossible, given the goals I've stated. Furthermore, this is precisely what I meant with "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
IOW, I don't think there's a technical solution to be found here. This is a fundamental ideological divide, and needs to be dealt with as such.
"Please try harder, you make Nazi's look reasonable in comparison" breaks the site guidelines badly. Please see my other reply to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908329.
Not a great holiday season, solitude and painful realisations for Christmas. Delete or cut into my posts if that makes sense to you, I can't edit them anymore.
You seem to have trouble understanding even your own arguments. Above, you asked for "an example of a country that hasn't had to use violence to exit a communistic regime".
So, pray tell: how exactly were East Germany's political prisoners instrumental in...ending that very regime imprisoning them?
This sort of ham-fisted attempt to shove your specific fascination with a two-hundred year old food fight that became irrelevant thirty years ago at the latest is a good example of what's wrong.
FWIW there have been both communist and fascist/autocratic regimes that ended in violence and those that ended without. There have also been countries either self-identifying as socialist or being labelled as such by people sharing your convictions, which still manage to uphold civil liberties and economic success just as well as more market-oriented economies. etc. etc.
The quickest way to autocracy is pretending there's no difference between it and democracy.
This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.
Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens not to be corrupt: why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?
That may have been true in the past, now it’s one more fiction. The real three powers are: the rich (which decide laws in the background), the politicians (gov+parliments that use the existing institutions to push laws decided by the rich) and the media (that create and drive public opinion and chose the politicians). The first two classes are not truly separated anymore, and one may pass from to another (best example is being France’s president Macron).
That argument is trivially true for most any civil liberty: the promise of a fair trial is protected only by the next higher court's fairness, etc.
To categorical discount the value of the rule of law, and to apparently consider that idea to be so obvious that just about half a paragraph of argumentation is given for it, strikes me as... just scary?
There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".
And, fwiw, technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary. The internet was praised as the killer tool to empower the individual against censorship. And yet there still is no technology that makes accessing Wikipedia in Shanghai as easy as it is in Billings, Montana. Bitcoin was hailed (by the conspiracy-minded) as a tool to overthrow democratically-established institutions. But, as it turned out, regulators were far less interested in shutting down Bitcoin than expected, and did not even break a sweat implementing KYC nad similar regulation across the cryptocurrency universe when needed.
> There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".
I’d be interested for you to cite specific example of this. During the Cold War, the threat of the Soviet domination pushed some countries in the direction of greater equality and equanimity. But they seem uniformly in retreat following its collapse, and retreating on the basis of ever shoddier premises (first the War on Terror, now ethnonationalism). While it’s true that the ranks of the elite have diversified, the material reality and civil rights protections of almost everyone beneath them have worsened in many of these countries.
Eastern Europe? Completely authoritarian during the cold war, now various levels of emerging democracies.
Taiwan? US-backed autocracy during the Cold War, now vibrant democracy with some issues.
In terms of steady improvement, while you're right that there have been some recent setbacks, I think you discount just how authoritarian Western governments were during the Cold War. This is a very difficult thing to summarize in a forum comment, so I suggest you look at something like Freedom House's reports (and yes, I know they aren't completely neutral, still think they're reasonable enough to be worth reading). Here's one:
Freedom House is state-funded, US propaganda that has gone so far as to buttress the white supremacist state of Rhodesia, far right politicians in Latin America, and engage in “clandestine operations in Iran.” They have zero credibility:
Eastern Europe is complicated because of the kleptocratic influence of both the US and Russia in the region, various civil conflicts, again rising ethnonationalism. Taiwan’s local trajectory is better from the KMT days, but is largely premised on elite exploitation of workers and resources in mainland China, which has put the country on a deeply unstable economic and political trajectory. Still not seeing a great record of progress versus reversion here.
So I can understand where you're coming from, mind telling me if you'd consider any country presently in existence not "largely premised on elite exploitation of workers"?
Erdogan is a corrupt fascist and a war criminal (most recently: killing civilians in Syria). But I agree: the coming economic crash is the least offensive consequence of his regime.
I really don't understand how protests became conflated with violence (mostly in the US, as far as I can tell).
Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful.
Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise.
Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.
In the US, very little. That's because there really aren't many meaningful protests these days, because the US has effectively killed the public spaces protests rely on. But the Tea Party movement was arguably influential, and protests were its main tool. Occupy Wall Street was also far more successful than commonly believed: the 1%-vs-99% divide has become a central narrative of US politics, even on the right.
Outside the US? The Arab Spring was nothing but protests, and it did topple something like a dozen governments. Yes, the new ones mostly failed, but that's a different matter.
In Ukraine the protests succeeded. In Hong Kong, they certainly seem to be a major pain for the local government as well as China.
Environmental protests have succeeded almost spectacularly over the last decade or so. Germany's anti-nuclear movement relied on protests as their main method-the Green party was actually founded by a group of people who first met at a protest. Today, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and similar keep climate change in the news week by week. That's the sort of pressure without which the Paris accord would have never been attempted.
Compare any agenda from a G7/G8/G20 meeting a decade or two ago, and you'll notice that issues such as the environment, labor protection, or fair trade have gone from zero to dominating these meetings.
The US-EU trade agreement basically died on the day that half a million people in Berlin protested against it.
Obviously, it is often impossible to unambiguously assign causality. It's a complex system where everything affects everything.
But purely subjectively, I am actually surprised by how effective protests are. Consider Ukraine, where a single protest at a central square toppled the government. In practical terms. a Tiannanmen-style massacre was entirely possible. But the protesters won. Why? How?
One person squarely at the center of this scandal is Boeing's Chief Test Pilot. Here's his bio:
> O’Donoghue’s military experience includes 12 years of active duty as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and test pilot. He flew operational missions in the A-4M, AV-8A and AV-8B Harrier aircraft, and engineering flight tests on the AV-8B and F-14 Tomcat. In 1994, O’Donoghue transferred to the U.S. Air Force Reserve where he flew the C-130, C-141 and C-17. While there he commanded both the 728th Airlift Squadron and the 446 Airlift Wing, stationed at McChord Air Force Base, Wash. In 2005, he retired from the Air Force Reserve at the rank of colonel.
> O’Donoghue holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.
This doesn't seem to conform to your theory that it's "cheaper workers" and business majors that caused these problems: sure, they may have created even undue pressure. But it was an all-American fighter jock doing a lot of the actual lying about MCAS.
To elaborate on the management, not engineering, failure: nice domestic marquee credentials for the most-visible leader, but... How much credence was his input given among other leaders? How high-quality were his lieutenants and the teams they led? This is the kind of issue that only gets flagged from the deep work of your team.
That statement seems wrong in the strict sense, since the "Havlak" benchmark from your link has a more extreme difference between Crystal and Nim and was not included in the article's tests.
The word "bias" has several meanings. One of them is an accusation that those two benchmarks were chosen specifically to produce the desired outcome. Considering the above, and that Base64 and especially JSON parsing are very common, I think it would be fair to allow for the possibility that the article's author chose them accidentally and not with any intent to deceive.
FWIW I was surprised by the article's focus on interfacing with C, something I have not done in 20 years of programming, and was wondering if it was a (possibly subconcious) choice to set up Nim to win.
Then, it'd be great if privacy-focussed platforms would show a commitment to find privacy- and freedom-preserving ways to tackle the very real problem of these platforms overflowing with actual, self-marking Nazis.
As an analogy: if the cryptocurrency community can find ways to curb problems such as scams or the waste of energy with technology, it can avoid the regulation to that effect it so much fears. But every time some cryptobro opines that people really deserve to be scammed if they did not go through each single line of source code their bitcoin wallet depended on, the idea that these communities are sticking up for some larger values and not feeling quite ok with scammers and Nazis loses a bit more of its legitimacy.