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> Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give the

> Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power. I think claiming that people "don't care about rights" is being at least a little uncharitable. Things like fake news and disinformation are real problems, but citizens have ceded so much power to ever larger corporations; and those corporations have taken an ever more skeptical eye to the public good (in favor of focusing on shareholder value); that the only practical solutions to many problems may involve the intervention of a government. If you care about your rights, you really ought to want to break-up corporations like Facebook into little-bits, which would then make many of these problems more tractable to being solvable by collective action than government intervention.

jeffdavis 8y ago
It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem. Governments can solve problems, but we should limit their tools such that our rights are respected. If you ask me, a lot of our problems trace back to a lack of identity and culture. When you don't know who you are, you signal that you're part of a group by upvoting lies. When you don't know what our country is about (freedom), you just try to get whatever comforts a politician is promising you. When you don't have philosphical grounding for life, you are easily manipulated.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem. It's also not wise to let a problem fester because you're too unwilling to take any action against it (or all the actions you're willing to take are ineffective half-measures). In this case, I think the best solutions are quite a bit more radical than many powerful people (and their followers) are willing to contemplate, so you get bad ideas like this one because they are the solutions that group least opposes. But I don't think that means the advocates of the idea "just don't care about rights."
  - jeffdavis 8y ago
    You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires solutions too radical to contemplate?
    - CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires solutions too radical to contemplate? "Lying online" is your characterization, not mine. Fake news isn't merely "lying online." And the solution I was advocating was pretty radical: a massive breakup of the tech platforms and social networks that make widespread fake news dissemination much more practical than it ever was.
      - jeffdavis 8y ago
        When you said "radical" I thought you were going to suggest re-education camps or something. So if you aren't going to criminalize lying, what exactly are we arguing about? I am saying we shouldn't trade away rights -- are you saying that we should trade away rights? If so, which ones?

jeffdavis 8y ago

It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem. Governments can solve problems, but we should limit their tools such that our rights are respected. If you ask me, a lot of our problems trace back to a lack of identity and culture. When you don't know who you are, you signal that you're part of a group by upvoting lies. When you don't know what our country is about (freedom), you just try to get whatever comforts a politician is promising you. When you don't have philosphical grounding for life, you are easily manipulated.

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> It's not wise to give up permanent rights to solve a current (and perhaps temporary) problem. It's also not wise to let a problem fester because you're too unwilling to take any action against it (or all the actions you're willing to take are ineffective half-measures). In this case, I think the best solutions are quite a bit more radical than many powerful people (and their followers) are willing to contemplate, so you get bad ideas like this one because they are the solutions that group least opposes. But I don't think that means the advocates of the idea "just don't care about rights."
- jeffdavis 8y ago
  You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires solutions too radical to contemplate?
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > You are saying that lying online is a problem so severe that it requires solutions too radical to contemplate? "Lying online" is your characterization, not mine. Fake news isn't merely "lying online." And the solution I was advocating was pretty radical: a massive breakup of the tech platforms and social networks that make widespread fake news dissemination much more practical than it ever was.
    - jeffdavis 8y ago
      When you said "radical" I thought you were going to suggest re-education camps or something. So if you aren't going to criminalize lying, what exactly are we arguing about? I am saying we shouldn't trade away rights -- are you saying that we should trade away rights? If so, which ones?