ggggtez
Born on March 25, 2016•3199 Karma
Sorry about the inconvenience to this guy, but at the same time, it got 14 million views and I'm sure he made some cash. He can probably not whine so much. It's likely an honest mistake by someone overworked.
YouTube banning antivax content is speech.
You want the government to start mandating that a company can't take a stance on important issues of healthcare? Churches spend all day every day taking stances on abortion. You want to the government to tell them they can't take a side?
I can be deeply disappointed by youtube's moderation decisions without suggesting that the company be compelled to allow certain content. as an aside, I find it frustrating to see people constantly swapping between "free speech" as a legal concept and "free speech" as an abstract ideal in these threads. we talk past each other the same way every time the debate comes up. just because the law is written the way it is doesn't mean that's necessarily the way it should be. and even if we can't write the law "just right", we can still advocate for higher principles to be followed.
anyways, I generally agree with the "companies can manage their properties as they see fit" line of thought. but it becomes problematic when our public spaces are increasingly controlled by a small number of huge companies that mostly share the same politics. I'm not really sure what the solution is, but it sucks to watch it unfold.
There is already an established history of requiring certain large communication platforms, to act a certain way.
They are called common carrier laws, and already apply to things like the telephone network.
Sure, they don't currently apply to other things, but the law could be updated, so that they do.
Philosophically, common carrier laws are uncontroversial, and already apply to major communication platforms, so you don't get to pretend like this is unprecedented.
I think our notions on the merits of a free market, and indeed, the very understanding of a free market itself, come from a time before the network effect and the de-facto digital monopolies we see today.
I, for one, want less monopolistic media so that the people can exert viewership pressure; they can get their media elsewhere and the ad money will follow. The content being stopped is not the only loss of people's voices happening here.
Because these "platforms" are in fact utilities.
We have allowed corporations to own and control the common square and bypass rights our forefathers fought wars to establish.
The gov has been all too lenient enforcing laws against these giants because it allows them to censor-by-proxy.
For the left-leaning among, please recall that the definition of fascism is "the merger of state and corporate power".
The biggest companies are basically utilities and that will not change anytime soon. The market has resulted in this condition. The government has to play catchup, as usual.
That, and adding political beliefs to the list of protected classes, is what is necessary to start the US healing processes. Until there is no other option but to talk with the people you despise, neither side will start doing it.
But there's also this two-faced evaluation of Youtube. When Youtube blocks the other side, people say "private company, First Amendment, they can carry what they want". But when Youtube blocks their side, people at least feel the violation of the "common carrier" expectation, and get upset.
So maybe it's time for us as a society to decide: Has Youtube (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Google) gotten big enough and important enough that they should be regulated into some kind of "common carrier" status? Or do we want them to continue as they are?
Corporations are not humans (regardless of the "corporate personhood" doctrine) and thus should not be entitled to the full rights of humans. Semi-monopolies like Youtube are especially not entitled to use their dominance to manipulate public opinion, given how easily it can be abused.
Ask yourself, if YouTube were pushing conspiracy content and suppressing pro-vaccination content instead would the parent poster and those like them still be saying what they are saying? Fair-weather friends indeed.
> "You want to the government to tell them they can't take a side?"
The United States government already can and has in the past; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine .
True, but corporations are just connections of people with shared goals. Should groups of people lose "fundamental" rights when they organize?
> Fair-weather friends indeed.
Yes, I fully support the rights of platforms to do stupid things. Use rumble or whatever if you want. I'll mock those platforms, but I don't think the government should ban them.
> Semi-monopolies like Youtube are especially not entitled to use their dominance to manipulate public opinion, given how easily it can be abused.
So, you think that we should circumstantially limit constitutionally protected rights, for the greater good? Fair weather friends indeed.
According to your logic, you should think that common carrier laws should be repealed entirely.
Think, the telephone company blocking certain political groups, or the only water company in town, refusing to deliver water to certain people who say things that they don't like.
It is pretty similar, philosophically. Common carrier laws are pretty uncontroversial.
So it feels weird for you to be making these types of arguments, when it is already established, that there are major counter examples.
So you'd have to either recognize the contradiction, or admit that your position is at odds with other established, and uncontroversial laws.
I'm admittedly mixed on common carrier laws, I think that they are "impure" in a sense, but I also think the benefits are greater than the costs, even taking into account the potential theoretical erosion of our rights.
I absolutely agree that there are major counterexamples, and I'm overall fine with that, but I'll also freely admit that I'm not a free speech absolutist of any form.
Why, yes, I do. Ask yourself: what was the various civil rights victories and legislation for minorities, women, LGBTQ other than saying "We are circumscribing your rights, including ones formerly interpreted as constitutionally protected, so that these protected classes may be treated equally, for the greater good"? Sounds like you'd argue against that.
(I was about to say that free speech maximalists are a myth but I do recall seeing at least one person on HN advocate such a view.)
And I agree there's a tension between the rights of different individuals/entities but the same tension exists for other civil and human rights. The compromise used for other civil rights seems reasonable here: everyone should be treated evenhandedly and impartially and, the larger the corporation/organization, the greater the responsibility to do so.
Sure I accept this (note though, that the UDHR definition is incompatible with the US constitutional definition, but let's work with this one because I prefer it anyway).
You mention mutually voluntary communication. So the vital question is then: is you posting a video on youtube a voluntary communication with me? I don't see how it is. I can see this argument for email, but I don't see how you can claim that this is the case for Youtube without an apparent contradiction in that even if you and I want to communicate via youtube, Fred over there thinks that the video you posted is spam/inappropriate and should be blocked. That is, if you need mutual consent from all parties, there will always be people who don't want to watch a video, but it is shown to. Therefore I don't think your framing works either way. Either You and I aren't the mutual parties to the communication, in which case Youtube can withdraw its consent, or everyone is party to the communication, in which case Youtube has a responsibility to block the content on behalf of those other people.
> everyone should be treated evenhandedly and impartially
Are you claiming that people aren't? Who is being treated differently? As far as I can tell, the discrimination, insofar as it exists, is based on an idea that isn't specifically called out elsewhere in the UDHR (such as religion or race, in Article 18 or 2).
If you're saying the video is unlisted/private and sent to people on a mailing list over email, that's one thing, but I think you're arguing that YT should act as a distributor as well, and there's no way to "impartially" order search results.
I think we would be in agreement that improvements in search and algorithmic identification of content would be a great thing so that people who don't want to see fringe content can be helped to avoid receiving it in their search results?
This is "just" a choice about how they order search results, but is functionally equivalent to delisting the content. Is that okay? If not, what makes today's ordering "more okay", and broadly, how do we delineate between acceptable search algorithms, and unacceptable ones?
But you are making an assumption that the average worker (probably from India) making $1 an hour, can tell the difference between newsworthy war crimes, and a snuff film.
I don't think anyone is going to get that right 100% of the time. So no, I don't really see it as a problem.
There is money to be made from lying to people. That's why it's being banned. It should have been done last year honestly, but social media companies were afraid to anger Trump. They took the barest actions to add warnings, and no surprise, no one reads them.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.
No we don't. The question we have to ask is whether allowing this content is worse for society than any stifling of moderate voices.
And the answer is obviously yes. Covid-hoaxers represent millions of people who are causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore. Fuck moderate voices who are "just asking questions". They can deal with playing a little less devil's advocate, and getting more in board with the obvious health benefits of vaccination.
This just isn't true, it's never going away and nothing can stop it, this is it for the rest of your life. It'll get less deadly over time but you will get covid at some point in your life and you will get it again and again as it mutates over the years. Same with flu it was initially deadly, now it's just bad but it's never going away.
So, we learn how to live with a new disease without letting fear dictate our behavior.
The promise of safety from infection is not something than any human can guarantee. The COVID vaccine does not prevent infection and does not stop the spread. The desire to force people to take a vaccine in the name of population safety is rooted in fear. Fear leads to the fearful cheering when the police beat someone for not wearing a mask. Fear leads to the fearful begging for a "leader" to keep them safe at all cost. Fear is used by megalomaniacs to expand their power and control. We should not be fearful.
The people didn't act kinder because of Buddhism. The experimental setup primed them to act in a certain way.
WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?
Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...
In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000
Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000
Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent.
As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.
Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France.
I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.
I'm waiting for the follow up study after 520 weeks, where a certain percentage of them become radicalized zealots.
Consider the situation: you want to get an abortion. Or you know someone who does.
I don't think I need to spell out the debate. But the secular world view is producing value for people who don't want to be afraid that they will spend literally INFINITY TIME being tortured. (And arguably it produces value for the religious, who do utilize secular services even when their religion forbids it).
The secular world view offers you freedom from judgement, both mortal and immortal. Many people find value in the freedom to not worry about superstition.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656583.
Be secular doesn’t make anybody free from judgement.
I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure.
But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe.
It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody else's business, especially not the government's.
The government should never require them to carry a pregnancy to term in much the same way that it shouldn't force you to give an organ (and it doesn't).
I am not pro abortion, I am pro choice.
People opposed to abortions are not pro life, they are anti choice.
But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling / opinion. The reason is simple, nobody gets to decide to kill the other person just because he/she doesn't like it. And the existing of the baby is the consequence of the mother's behavior.
The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape, in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior. But I still struggle with this, because the baby does not become less human because it's a result of rape.
I don't think there is a valid choice between someone's life and someone's feeling / opinion. And remember, pregnancy is something totally normal for women to do. And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Also the "nobody else's business" argument is wrong, murder is the government's business.
As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero. Even when it's a embryo, it's a human embryo living in its natural environment, with the full potential to grow to a full human. I also don't see the need of a spiritual concept like soul or whatever.
Typing the above paragraph leads me to think about lab-grown human embryo. Google leads me to this webpage: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02343-7 "Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days." Of course I don't believe humanness changes from zero to non-zero on day 14. Also I don't believe it's ethical to experiment on some human to gain knowledge to save other human.
You are avoiding 100 percent of the actual dilemma. Nobody is OK with murder they disagree on what constitutes a human life. That is as they say the entire ball game which you have neatly sidestepped as if it were irrelevant. I suggest we return to it shortly.
> The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape
This is a profoundly illogical position. It cannot possibly be OK to murder a baby regardless of whether its existence is the result of free choice of its mother. You say you "struggle with it" but how can you possibly struggle with the decision to allow infanticide? If its a person you can't kill it for your convenience.
> And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Many people get kidney stones often multiple times. The fact that its natural doesn't mean that the experience isn't even when planned and desired torturous. Only the mother is in a position to make that judgment. Many people choose to live in small domiciles from which they only but rarely leave. This doesn't mean that for example prison isn't punitive. It is in many ways the denial of free exercise of the will over ones own person that is in fact punitive.
Let us return to the most important point.
At what point do you consider it a child and why? I think a reasonable person would agree that an unfertilized egg isn't a child but calling it a person 2 seconds after conception is very nearly as absurd. Any given egg and sperm has the potential to create life so potential wont serve as a dividing line. Some harking back to pre-scientific understanding would like to set the milestone at a heart beat but no matter how essential it may be to our existence a heart doesn't make you human. A mouse whose neck you snap in a trap to keep it from your larder has one.
There is one singular thing without which all characteristics that make you human are moot the brain. In fact one particular segment of the brain without which you would display zero meaningful human behavior, the cerebral cortex. Prior to the third trimester your brain is less meaningfully you than a squirrel. In the third trimester the surface area of the cerebral cortex increases by 30 times.
https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/fetal-development/fet...
You seem to want to sidestep this once again.
> As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero.
This is a complete cop out. As human beings we deal with situations where there is a continuum all the time. There are reasonable strategies to deal with such. Given a situation where one must pick a hard line in a complex situation where one side of the line is safe and the other dangerous you select a position far enough towards the safe side as to be certain to avoid negative consequences. This is how we are able to hire some, fire others, declare some doctors, others dropouts.
For example if nearly all fetal brain development happens between week 27 and week 38 if you select week 24 as the limit or for example week 14 by which 92% of abortions that are going to happen, happen you won't be offing what we would properly think of a human.
I hold that a fertilized egg is zero on the humaness scale. Agree or disagree? I hold that a baby viable outside of the womb is a 1. Agree or disagree? I hold that a fetus in the 27th week of development is still nearly indistinguishable from zero with a nearly nonfunctional brain incapable of consciousness or thought as we know it.
I believe that it goes from near zero to 1 almost entirely between week 27 and 38 ergo someone taking a pill to stop their pregnancy from progressing at 9 weeks is unambiguously moral.
I think the most interesting statement in your post is the statement
> in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior.
This hints at a moralistic view as opposed to a logical one.
I suggest if you intend to defend the position that life begins at conception without benefit of the fig leaf of the fiction of the human soul you need to beg borrow or steal a different argument than life is a continuum so we can't possibly apply argumentative tools developed over thousands of years to crack that egg.
Also it is important whether it is a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior, because if it is not then the human embryo would not have end up inside her body. So yes, it matters.
Thanks, I am just saying atheist can be against abortion. No more argument with me is needed.
lab-grown full function brain, would it be treated as a human?
lab-grown baby with brain development stopped at day x, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
adult after accident left with x% brain function, would it be treated simply as a pile of meat?
Just use your brain, you will see it is not that easy.
If the baby or the human had a sufficiently damaged or deficient brain it WOULD be a pile of meat. If they weren't treated as such it would be because of an emotional connection as opposed to a logical reason. This is all you've posited in this comment. Emotional situations designed to confuse the issue. I am using my brain, specifically to cut through the fog.
Virtually all the actual brain development happens very late in the game and almost all abortions happen in the first or early second.
Don't forget for a moment that Mark Zuckerberg is a monster. From the start he only cared about one thing: getting your data.