The Wachowskis themselves pulled from gnosticism, eastern religions etc.
Pahlaniuk used the term "snowflake" to refer to people who were brittle and "not beautiful and unique" (his words from memory). He is/was a left wing anarchist.
Wasn’t it a cake labeled “EAT ME” and a drink labeled “DRINK ME” in Alice in Wonderland? I don’t recall them being pills at all.
> One pill makes you larger > And one pill makes you small > And the ones that mother gives you > Don't do anything at all > Go ask Alice > When she's ten feet tall
I've never read the Alice in Wonderland book, but the Disney adaptation of it from the 50s had cake and a drink I recall, and no pills.
He devised it, but Chuck was pretty clear—Tyler Durden wasn’t the good guy. So don’t take what he said as an endorsement by Pahlaniuk.
When you have to rely on indoctrination and censorship your beliefs lack merit.
Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).
This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.
But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.
It has the same flaws that plague the marketplace of goods and services, but fewer consumer protections.
Perhaps we could jail people who post contradictory ones?
Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.
I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.
One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.
By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.
Taking the knee to say what though?
1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder.
2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people.
I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.
Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc.
Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.
> how much does milk cost
> the count of black people shot by the police
Whoah, hold up: One of these things is not like the others. (♫ One of those things just doesn't belong.♫)
The Prime Minister's name shows up regularly in news stories, and the price of milk is literally in front of you as you buy it...
So why are you expecting anybody to be decent at "estimating" even the easier version of "all people shot by police this year"? It's not like there's a daily figure shared after the weather-report.
Definitely gonna need a citation on that
Pure social pressure. Whereas now everything is completely political pressure dictated from the top down. Idk social pressure seems more organic at least. Biden didn't order that anyone who didn't take a knee will be deported to a torture prison in Guatemala
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.
On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself.
When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.
Insofar as people are actually going over to AfD (and it's not just exaggerated hysterics, the sky is always falling these days...), it's probably got something to do with the issues which are conspicuously absent from your list, which AfD ostensibly addresses, at least more convincingly than the other parties. Namely, immigration. You may not want to admit that as a real problem at all, but that refusal to engage with the issue is the primary reason people line up for the politicians who at least pretend to care about it.
When you tell people their problem isn't real, you'll more likely drive them to somebody else than gaslight them into siding with you.
Their problems might be real, but they sure are not caused by immigration. The Trump administration boasts about having deported 1M immigrants, and yet everything turned to shit, there are less jobs, pay hasn't increased, and things haven't became more affordable.
The first step to fix a problem is to identify it. Failing to do so risks aggravating the actual problems.
the people who are having problems finding work, facing crime, etc, do not actually have a problem with immigration. they are only getting told by deceptive politicians that dealing with immigration would solve their problems. they are the ones being lied to. that's the nature of a scapegoat.
But concerning immigration, you seem to think that people have other (perhaps even real) problems which they are falsely attributing to immigration. Like "Oh I can't afford a big house because of those damn immigrants" when really the problem is a lack of affordable housing, or some other real issue which you happen to agree is a problem. And to be sure, there is some of that kind of thinking going on. But for the most part, I think people who are upset about immigration really are upset about the immigration itself, particularly from substantially different cultures. There is a prominent belief among anti-immigration people that their governments are trying to ethnically replace them. They want to continue living in the society they grew up in, not in New New Dehli. I suppose you might think they're wrong to want this, we're all one race, the human race, etc. Whatever, all that ideological rhetoric doesn't change the way people vote when they begin to feel like foreigners in their own country.
the only problem that can be directly attributed to immigrants is xenophobia. the solution to xenophobia is education.
really the problem is a lack of affordable housing
and that has to do what with immigrants? no, immigrants are not taking away affordable housing. whatever housing policy is responsible for the lack of affordable housing needs to be changed and can be changed in such a way that there would be enough housing for everyone, including immigrants.
I think people who are upset about immigration really are upset about the immigration itself, particularly from substantially different cultures.
as i said. xenophopia. excuse me if i don't take pity with that. the solution is education, to learn about compassion, care, tolerance, build communities, loving your neighbor, which btw, is a deeply christian value, so before people complain about different cultures how about they actually honor their own culture.
There is a prominent belief among anti-immigration people that their governments are trying to ethnically replace them
and you take this seriously? do you really think people are that dumb, to believe such nonsense?
I suppose you might think they're wrong to want this, we're all one race, the human race, etc. Whatever, all that ideological rhetoric doesn't change the way people vote when they begin to feel like foreigners in their own country.
what then is your proposal to address those issues?
i already shared mine: education, build communities, and fix whatever other real problems people have (housing, jobs, etc)
Remember, the context of this conversation is "Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, ..."
> muh education though
Do you really believe tha Germans of all people haven't had enough Holocaust Class in school? Get real. You either have to meet people where they are, or accept that they're going to be voting for people that you aren't comfortable with.
if people fear foreign cultures, then the only way to deal with that is to get them in contact with these cultures and learn that these are nice people too. like therapy. that is what i mean by education. not learning about the holocaust, but learning to get along. there is no other way to address this.
you keep telling me that my approach does not work, but i am still waiting for your proposal how to address the issue.
I had some hope as a millennial youth that we were “evolving” past the conservative mindset. It was insane to me that an ideology that has been consistently wrong from supporting slavery to opposing women’s suffrage would continue to have any support. But here we are still talking about gay marriage again because fucking conservative bigots cannot let anyone live in peace. But I’m sure you consider their “concerns” to be very valid and worth entertaining.
Personally, I consider the chilling effect of such events on freedom of speech and art quite a huge problem. This freedom was crucial to European prosperity.
But the actual short-term jumps in policy are absolutely wild now. That wasn't the case in the 1990s.
GP made the same mistake by putting the AfD on the right and anything else on "the other side that ignores problems". This other side is not the left, its the center or the non-left, which gets good funding too.
The decades of political development were always meant to bolster the current power structures, and i am not talking about pol. parties or the interests of the many and their problems. From that angle, the current political swing is not suprising. Musk and Co are winning their war on the left mind virus, which is much older then them.
How is that my mistake??? YOU came up with "left". I very deliberately did not say such a ridiculous thing, given that any "left" party has never in power.
I would also appreciate if you did not paraphrase what I wrote when what I wrote still is right there, or at least don't attribute your words to me.
I always find it fascinating, and quite disturbing, how people rewrite what other people wrote to base their "counter-"argument on their rewrite.
> On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.
You bisected the political landscape, but not into left and right. I did this and, as you may agree on, the center is shifting right too. An aspect i wanted to bring up by adressing your "problems of the many" and where/why the political focus has been on in the past.
Maybe you are familiar with the whole lefty concept of "capitalism inevitably turning into fascism". The right and the status quo center have more in common, so you can group them together and i called it "your mistake".
If you are left (I am not, but I have observed it) and you agree with 90 per cent of the ideas of some group, but disagree on the remaining 10 per cent, they will turn on you in fury, denounce you as a traitor, hate you more than an actual opponent. Deviation from orthodoxy is a capital sin.
(This is not new, see how Trotskyists were extirpated by their Stalinist comrades 100 years ago. Heresy is simply not tolerated.)
The right wingers of today are a lot more capable of building a bigger tent, at least right now. Personally, I am somewhat rightwing, but very secular, as usual in Czechia. I still get invited to Christian events even though they know that I am not a believer, and they won't grill me to convert.
But...
Orthodoxy (or better: tribalism) is actually stronger on the right, the key difference is, the right has less political complexity to argue over. "Our pure native culture will fix our problems and the other left outgroups must be suppressed" is pure identity politics, which is imo the core of the right.
The left has, tribalism aside, at least identity independent topics like wealth distribution. Which, unfortunately, threatens the existing power structures.
I can confirm the left ostracizing their own. It happened to me too, but i still consider myself left, because my political ideals are based on more than a group membership.
First, there are still religious people there, and this very wing is splintered among several groups at least. Famously, many Catholics including JDVance were in a value conflict with their own late Pope Francis. The actual religiously educated people tend to be very good at writing, because the schools that they graduated from are good at teaching persuasion.
Second, there are libertarians, not very numerous but somewhat influential, especially in tech circles.
Then, there still are some trigger-happy neocons, nowadays marginalized, but they may yet come to the fore in case of a bigger war that directly involves the US.
Then, there are reactionary types like Curtis Yarvin, who dismiss any nationalist ideas as blind alley of "demotism".
Even the practical question of "how many people from which country should get a visa yearly and under what conditions" will hit enormous ideological differences in the right-wing tent.
I think self-withdrawal is more frequent in left leaning individuals for this exact, more unbiased/intelligent/educated reason.
But you are correct again. There is a lot of complexity on the right, if you look deep enough. But this depth does not cause as much infighting compared to the left, because, again: tribalism taking over higher order reasoning.
It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse. When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.
Swedes look at the statistics of bombing and shooting incidents in this century, while Finns look at economic growth, GDP and salary growth in the last twenty years, especially compared to other Nordic countries.
I traveled around most of Europe with a backpack. Former GDR is a dying country, and no amount of subsidies into fixing roads will help it. You cross the border to Poland, nominally you entered a poorer country, but everything is so much more lively there. Poles are so much more optimistic about their future than Germans in general, and East Germans extra.
This psychological difference cannot be appreciated if you only look at GDP per capita tables.
How are these at all comparable? One is a photo op at the Capitol, and one is leading a massive immigration raid campaign full of civil rights violations. Even if you believe these raids are lawful, they are not performative like the photo op stunt was - they are massive operations that greatly affect millions of lives.
If you are making a “both sides are bad” argument then that is a pretty poor comparison.
Plenty of people might disagree but choose to keep their mouth shut.
Voluntary actions including a protest against police brutality ..
> and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.
.. versus the pro-brutality side of the argument. Social media has made it more acute, but the same line runs through e.g. the pre-social-media Rodney King riots. I think people mistook a suppressed problem for stability.
Of course, suppressing problems works quite well for stability. We can see in Hong Kong how having several tower blocks burn down might be destabilizing. There were calls for accountability. Accountability would be destabilizing to the political and real estate elite, so that can't happen and now everyone is quietly agreeing that it was just a tragic accident, no need to investigate further.
Every real problem can be made worse by putting histrionic personalities in charge, and the current digital environment promotes and rewards hysteria.
"I consider myself fairly strong and self reliant."
"Okay well we are going to kick you off of every private website, try to make you lose your livelihood, and mock you relentlessly on most media broadcasting networks!"
"Well, I am going to attempt to stop you from doing those things, since I don't like them. "
"Ironic! You need coddling and aren't strong at all, haha, your ego is so fragile."
It's very tiresome.
Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.
Correcting desinfo is a legitimate goal and if you think there were errors made, well, fact check them.
I dont like this 'agenda' labeling because its the exact opposite of a factual discourse, it implies malicious intent.
In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me?
You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.
And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse.
I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.
The fact is that people were censored based on so-called fact-checkers. It's not as innocent as some jackasses online calling themselves "fact-checkers"... It is so far beyond that, I feel sorry for you for seemingly not knowing. Go start with the Twitter Files as reported by Matt Taibbi.
Perhaps there's so much lying being spread on modern social media that one organization would be end up drowning in work:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]
How do you hold the truth? Even if there was only a single fact-checking organization, and they had no institutional or personal biases, they still wouldn’t own the truth.
Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.
A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?
> To me, it was just journalism in disguise
It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.
That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.
I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.
The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's).
[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/correctiv-verhandlu...
Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...
Do the following exercise.
In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.
Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.
It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.
A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
>A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
Ultimately, fact-checkers are just journalists who attempt to claim a monopoly on truth. Censorship does not work, and can only be tolerated in a free society in VERY limited circumstances, usually after due process. The censorship we've seen during covid and since "fact-checkers" entered public dialog in general is absolutely not acceptable in any way. I don't have a problem with the existence of so-called fact-checkers per se. The real problem is that it's false advertising and a blatant attempt to rally for censorship of wrongthink. If you want censorship, move to North Korea or China, and leave the rest of us alone.
Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.
I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.
This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.
The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight.
The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.
At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.
> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts
Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.
Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?
> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense
I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal.
And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.
Is it so hard to reproduce the entire damn thing so readers can form their own opinion of what it says?
How are we supposed to fact-check this!
You aren’t.
It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
- You trust experts, and the experts are right -> You are right
- You trust experts, and the experts are wrong -> You are wrong
- You do your own research and are right -> You are right
- You do your own research and you are wrong -> You are wrong
Now, if I had to guess, the people who are more knowledgeable on a subject would likely have a better idea on the truthiness of a statement regarding that subject. Your argument appears to be the opposite.
> It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
I assume this is just an anecdote but could you extrapolate on this point a bit?Is there a study you could show me where they tested "do your own research" people's knowledge vs domain experts? What topics do you think have the highest chance of the "experts" being stupid and incorrect?
I did not mean that those 2 choices I mentioned are the only ones. I meant that the "deep legacy media"/"experts" are trying to convince you that only these two choices (listen to the "experts" or not to listen to anybody; "don't trust anybody else, trust me when I tell you that") exist. This leads to the 2 outcomes I painted: being not informed or being misinformed. Everything else that doesn't fit the current official narrative is branded with bad words.
Obviously, this is a false dichonomy and one should do the right thing (educating oneself with different sources, to form a full picture) despite the namecalling.
I don't have any study (I don't know if they exist) and was purely talking about the topic dear to my heart that I have following on for 25+ years: the Finnish expertise on Russia/Putin. It is horrendous. And I am not even talking about crazy expert opinions that one can disagree with, but core problems with logic and basic facts.
It is even sadder because Finland is trying to brand itself as The Russia expert in EU, is succeeding and this incompetence has real consequences.
The quality of expertise in this example is so terrible that we get the incredible situation when not informed people, using only their common sense, have a higher percentage of reasonable/truthful takes than people who are trying to be informed using "homegrown talent". This is an unbelievable consequence!
I am not saying that this is a general trend or that "experts bad". It's just in this particular case I know the topic and have the knowledge to access the correctness of people who are performing as experts on Russia. I have been having presentations on this topic.
Also, obviously, political "sciences" is different from actual sciences.
This reminds me of the Onion's expert panel on Nigeria, with the difference of journalists also being clueless (not their fault, they can't ask critical questions and challenge "experts", if their whole world view also comes from these "experts"). https://youtu.be/Pwom49awRKg
I am sorry but that's how it goes and that's how I see it in my country. Self proclaimed free-thinkers who eat everything that's on FB.
@ doesn't do anything on HN.
Learning without thinking is useless but thinking without learning is dangerous.
I started Ask Me Anything on reddit, does being a moderator in that capacity mean I limited free speech of Americans?
Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard.
The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”.
Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers.
This conversation needs to be had.
Edit: tried to make the tone less frustrated.
EDIT: By unnatural I am referring to not knowing who you are talking to, not knowing the slightest thing about them, our brains don’t process this aspect for what it is, instead we fill in this identity with our imaginations. Perhaps there was a better word for this than unnatural, but to me its especially unnatural because it doesn’t really occur in nature(at least not easily), where as communication across long distances or time happens all the time in nature. TLDR: It’s unnatural that we no longer even know if a comment was written by a human.
EDIT2: I am not strongly in favor of removing anonymity from the internet. I don’t know what the answer is.
Attaching your real world identity to every interaction you have on the internet is no more objectively natural than doing otherwise, and more of a burden than we place on interactions in the real world. I don't exchange my drivers license and SSL with everyone I talk to.
We don't need to have the serious conversation, we've had it, and the false dichotomy you're presenting here is invalid. We don't have to choose one or the other. Anonymity has been well established in every free society as legally and morally defensible and a necessity for free speech and a free state for decades, to the point of including some degree of anonymity from one's own government.
Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable. Anonymity is also acceptable. 4chan can be 4chan, and other places can not be 4chan. Free speech does not guarantee you a platform, much less all platforms. It doesn't require me to put a target on my back, either.
- The updated visa instructions
- we have had this conversation
- Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable.
I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.
Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.
That this was private censorship is no longer acceptable to the current regime, and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.
If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.
If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.
Either way - people have to make that call and build a consensus on it.
It has been had. But you seem to require some objectively correct and universally agreed upon consensus that will never exist.
>Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.
"censorial powers on private platforms" are and have been acceptable since the dawn of mass communications. Even Ben Franklin when he ran a newspaper refused to run stories he considered too libelous (although he just as often ran such stories, exercising personal bias in his decisions.) The entire rationale behind the First Amendment is that it binds the government from interfering with free expression, because that right belongs to the people, implicit as it is in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and freedom of association.
Again, the conversation has been had, and the matter has been settled at least for most people. That the current regime disagrees doesn't prove anything any more than disagreement with anything else. People disagree that the world is round, that doesn't mean the matter is still in dispute beyond a reasonable doubt.
>and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.
If they commit crimes, have them arrested for those crimes. If they violate TOS (even if they happen to be a sitting President), ban them. Otherwise even criminals and traitors have the same rights as everyone else. Again, this is well established and shouldn't be controversial.
> If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well. > If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.
what kind of force is "must" implying here, and how is "well" being defined?
We do have legal frameworks in place intended to do what you're proposing, but people are imperfect and may make mistakes or act in ways you might consider to be in error, without falling afoul of criminality. But that's acceptable. We don't abandon rights because they can't be defined or defended perfectly.
1) The conversation has been had
2) There are people who are making a concerted effort to overturn the status quo
3) They have decreed that content moderation workers are a category of workers which is not to be granted entry to the USA.
You can say the conversation has been had, as much as you want - which is your freedom and right. However some people have decided they don’t like the status quo and want to change it.
You are preaching to the choir here. I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.
That's a different and much more difficult problem, though.
Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war?
Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought?
Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose?
There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong.
I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm.
Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?
People voted based on the information they had. The information system they had has been mapped out. If this were gaming, the “meta” is known. One group played the meta to the hilt. Others lament the failure of the spirit.
I get that people may be hesitant to leave the familiarity of known territory for what looks like malignant chaos. But there is a fight to be had, rules to be learnt and ways to counteract the tendencies you are concerned about.
I am sadly not at the point where I can both raise the issue, and point you to sources of information that are pertinent to the stage of your journey.
There’s actual work on misinformation propagation, efficacy of moderation, the mechanics of how the media environment is being used. Or there are places where you can contribute code and labor to learn/build as you go.
Communication with people half the way across the globe at the speed of light is objectively unnatural too, should we ban that? There's no "we" calling for the end of online anonymity excepts for spooks and people who believe people should be identified and punished for expressing opinions they disagree with.
> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication
I agree. Short bits quick hits and spunk spits lead to epileptic fits from social halfwits and, that's what we produce and consume. More so, when we imagine we are anonymous. The random emotional inpulse spikes that flit across so many of our untrained anonymized minds leads to a noise floor that threatens to completely obliterate any signal.
There is value in anonymity. But I would love to participate in a smaller subset of the internet, where every participant is known, identified and associated with their real-world self. Such that no one feels so obscured and anonymously free to grafitti; where everyone is careful and concerned with their affect on the environment; where publication is a precise responsibility; where effort must be made or authority is lost.
((Kinda sorta like HN, but with blue checkmarks)/s)
Perhaps time to get that wild claim fact checked by yourself.
This is the truth over which I can claim authority. My personal experience, that small portion of objective and infinite reality that became mine, once I'd perceived and diced my tiny slice, stored and explored and retrieved and believed. I know what's true, just ask, I'll tell.
The fact checking I've looked at starts with something like a claim, then dives into context, then lists supporting evidence of either verifying that claim or disproving it, leaning on that supporting evidence.
For fact checking not to be valuable, either the supporting evidence is wrong, the reasoning leading from that to the conclusion is wrong, or something third is wrong.
If that is the case in fact checking, that should absolutely be criticized, and any fact checker with integrity would put up a correction.
For all the vague critique against "fact checking" I've heard, I've never actually seen anyone give examples.
If the critique instead is "they selectively only fact check this and not that", the conclusion should not be that fact checking is bad, but that more is needed.
Snopes is one of the most beloved fact checking services, yet I have seen them make questionable claims. I remember they tried to say once many years ago that snuff videos don't exist. How could they make such a blanket claim? It would have been more honest to say that most of them are fake. Not only would it be possible to make such a video, there is considerable evidence that some have been made. Saddam Hussein and his son are said to have enjoyed watching videos of executions. Now that may be propaganda against Hussein, but he would have been capable of sourcing such material and watching it. At least one murder was streamed on Facebook Live and someone was arrested for it. I'd say that counted as such.
I'm curious about that too. Is there an archive link or something you can provide? I can't seem to find that claim.
This is the funniest example of “Which views exactly? / Oh, you know the ones.”
My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE. Imagine if it was archived and available now?
Have they rewritten/erased all their erroneous fact checks?
If so, is that bad or good?
Are all the fact checks currently on the website valid?
For a claim you are making, you seem to not be able to find a single piece of evidence. How did you ever find out there was an original article that they edited? Is this purely from personal experience?
> My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE.
This is what I am asking about
Almost all ice has mineral impurities in it, and is therefore a mineral. Therefore water is actually lava (molten ice) and should be referred to as such.
Your depiction of ice being merely "frozen water" as a fact, and not emphasizing it's equality with lava is classist and clearly agenda driven. /s
Every day I check Truth Social to find out what I think.
The leader who announces, illegally, that all his predecessors' orders are null and void.
I mean we could go on and on, no?
Ignorance is strength, facts are censorship.
Nothing's true anymore, everything's permitted... And at one point they'll get you to a point where you are unable to tell what's true or false. So you stop caring. And they win; your apathy is what they need.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
Even places with intense security concerns like Israel was better. More intense than the US but less powertripping assholes (no doubt this comment will get me into trouble too given their invasive social media bullshit)
Asking people for their social media accounts is not new, it's a part of the visa application process since Trump's first term.
What's new is that now on top of that, they're asking people for those social media accounts to be public.
But can we please remember that there is a huge huge difference between being asked to provide it optionally, to being required to provide it.
That's been the case since 2019. Before that, asking to hand that info out even voluntarily was widely seen as an overreach. Now, it's required for countries not covered by ESTA and still voluntary for ESTA countries.
(I have family and lots of close friends in the US. I miss them all. But I don't intend to visit given the way things are over there these days. _Maybe_ after the next administration change? Depending on how things change? But I've come to accept I may never visit again.)
You do have an HN account. And it's public! Just don't get caught giving a shit about facts.
To me that seems like a good thing?
But the very carefully placed quotes around censorship in the article makes it seem like it would be unfairly painting activities like fact checking as censorship?
Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?
If the government is going after anyone "censoring free speech", they can pick and choose who to apply that to because there is no clear definition of a civilian censoring another civilian (because legally this does not exist).
I’ll be curious to see this when it finally leaks too
> “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”. To me that seems like a good thing?
It seems like it until you remember that the current party in power considers things like a private business saying “we don’t tolerate hate speech” as infringing on free speech. At this point, the right uses “free speech” as a battle cry to shut down people who don’t agree with them. The government telling anyone they can’t have DEI practices, or forcing compliance with their views on what’s appropriate by withholding budget, or targeting citizens for their social media posts - these are actual free speech issues.
Why is that? We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”.
To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.
In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another.
Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly.
Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.
I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding.
Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.
No "indulgence" whatsoever.
> State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble
Very good example, BBC has criticised the government many times, and even did embarrassing investigations and fought in courts to get to publish them. A very good one is them fighting like hell to publish that MI5 are shielding an informant who is a pedophile. And they got to publish it, and directly say that MI5 tried to stop them via the courts on the grounds of "national security", but the courts disagreed.
So yeah, no.
> Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners
Depends. Le Monde is a French left-wing newspaper (top 2 in France alongside the right-wing Le Figaro), which is majority owned by a holding company majority owned by one of France's premier tech billionaires (Xavier Niel). But everything is structured in such a way that he barely has any control (he can't even sell the holding company without approval from the remaining owner of Le Monde, a representative body of the journalists, staff and even readers). It has full editorial freedom.
Not only are they targeted, but so are many more.
Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:
> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
This is so vague as to be meaningless.
Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.
To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.
(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)
American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it.
On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.
It"s a stepping stone on the way to make it illegal to refuse to publish the "right" sort of lies.
Typical free speech advocate was considering criticism, fact checking and mockery of right to be attack on free speech for years now. Even in HN, you frequently seen the definition of free speech as "dont mind nazi speech and is actively helping nazi when they are in trouble". It never applied to nazi opposition.
Now the nazi are in government and free speech advocates are mostly silent. They focus on criticizing ... anyone except radical right wing.
First, this dates back to MAY of this year. Nothing new.
Second, it is obvious that nobody took the time to research, read the policy and understand it. Most comments are nonsense based on a complete lack of context.
Finally,
The restrictions apply to foreign nationals who are involved in:
- Issuing or threatening legal action, such as arrest warrants, against US citizens or residents for social media posts made while they are physically present on US soil.
So, any foreign official or person who threatens to, for example, arrest a US citizen based on what you post online WHILE YOU ARE IN THE US will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this?
- Demanding that US tech platforms adopt content moderation policies or engage in censorship that extends beyond the foreign government's jurisdiction and affects protected speech in the US.
Someone not from the US who tries to censor you in the US and beyond the limits of their own national jurisdiction will be denied a visa. Or, government officials in Peru demanding that HN prevent you from posting your drivel while in the US (outside their government's jurisdiction) will be denied a visa.
What's your objection to this one?
- Directing or participating in content moderation initiatives or "fact-checking" that the US administration considers a form of censorship of Americans' speech.
Anyone that, from foreign soil, attempts to limit your right to free speech in the US while hiding under the "fact checking" or "content moderation" excuse will be denied a visa. Remember that your constitutional right of free speech in the US does not come with a fact-checking or content moderation limitation. As this thread easily demonstrates, you can post absolutely nonsense, lies and distortions and you would be protected. Fact-checking isn't a magical tool that allows someone to bypass constitutional rights to silence someone else.
What's your problem with this?
Of course, there are nuanced and not so nuanced elements to what constitutes free speech, where and under what circumstances. The key here is that outsiders don't get to mess with it or try to arrest you for this right you have in the US. If they do try, it's OK, they just can't get a visa to come here. Small price to pay.
So, yeah, nothing to see here. This is actually good. It means someone who, from, for example, Poland, acts to affect your free speech rights in the US or have you arrested while you visit Europe for something you posted online while in the US will not be allowed to come into the US.
Stop being lazy and ignorant. Take the time to research, read and understand before forming ideas and, worse, opening your mouth.
I welcome this rule. In fact, I could imagine many more. I don't want people here that don't share our values.
And I don't need people that contradict our values.
What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution.
Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.
(A french judge was cut off by most US servies, because trump didn't like his ruling. One could say trump.... censored him)
In fact, the Executive Order that imposed these sanctions is very broad and gives "immunity" to pretty much everyone affiliated with the US. If the ICC tries to prosecute anyone from NATO or anyone from a "major non-NATO ally" (Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), the current administration will put sanctions on those judges.
So there's 40 or so countries whose governments are effectively "immune" from being prosecuted from the ICC, but the president has authority to add literally any country to that list.
It will, no doubt, be every bit as effective as the "thoughts and prayers" that follow the weekly school shootings that no other nation on earth have.
> He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.
I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too.
I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens.
To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.
What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.
Case in point - full pardon for former Honduran president on drug trafficking, while at the same time they are trying to use drug trafficking as pretext on war with Venezuela.
Same thing with arabs/muslims/immigrants being bad (look at how they were during Mamdami campaign), though literal al-Qaeda members and murderers acting as arabian royalty are "great leaders" and "things (murders) happen".
Even on "simpler" issues like family values - they preach against queers, about "traditional family values", kids, etc. But most of them have 3+ divorces, multiple kids that they don't take care of, imported/immigrant trophy wives, numerous scandals of adultery, while destroying policies for children education/health/food, etc.
Just to be clear, who is diametrically opposed to these values, again?
An interviewer asked Trump in 2016 how people will know that America is great again. He replied: “cause I’m gonna tell em”. :)
Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.
Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.
To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.
> censor (verb): to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable.
> also: to suppress or delete as objectionable
Government censorship is a very notable class of censorship, but the word has a broader meaning.
If we valued banning all censorship we'd make laws banning that. We don't: we value private property and free speech instead. Taking the rights of private parties to control what they publish tramples both of those rights. It's not complicated: you have a right to own your 'press' and do whatever you want with it. You don't have a right to someone else's press.
The 'Network State' fascist bros (Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, et al) are the powers behind the throne of the current regime. They want to dismantle the United States and create modern-day fiefdoms where your corporate overlords dictate your rights. They are serious about doing it.
"You can vote with your feet and leave our fiefdom if you don't like the lack of rights" is literally their stance.
These days the "property" in question is just a fancy telecom system. And it's already an established principle in America that the phone company doesn't cut off your line just because you're talking some political smack.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46156979
98% of current foreign service officers who responded to a survey said morale is lower, plus the administration is laying off 1300 of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/state-departm...
You do know why these laws exist, right? And they are not useless. Many terrible things happened, and tens of millions died, because an extremely hateful ideology was allowed to take hold by assaulting civil society and democracy.
Banning anything related to that ideology is not only needed, not only common sense, but I'd argue the moral duty of the German people. And everyone else who witnessed it (so everyone). And for what it's worth, most developed countries have banned Nazi-related things. The US is an outlier in thinking that Nazi opinions matter, and allowing murderous types to express their desire to murder others is somehow a virtue.
And to be clear, yes, National Socialism is extremely agressive and murderous. One of its core tenets, probably its main one, is violent antisemitism and "master race"-ism, with their solution being exterminating "lower" "races". Nothing useful, nothing good, nothing redeeming. Just pure hatred and genocide.
Nothing good can come out of "debating" a Nazi in the "marketplace of ideas". Goebbels himself said so back in the 1930s, that they do not intend to play by the rules of democracy, but if democracy wants to give them the tools to spread their ideology, they'll happily use it. The world saw this happen and saw the results. Nazis have no place in any civilised society, and anyone espousing Nazi ideology or sporting their insignia deserves to ostracised at least.
(Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)
I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...
Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest.
We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.
Pope is not like Vance, despite Vance pointificating about by values and pope beong christan.
Sad