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> This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up." It's not. I
by ratww 5y ago
> This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."
It's not. It's more "these [otherwise very intelligent people] can't possibly understand the law because they haven't bothered to read it, as they're merely reacting to the description of it by another poster" and just posted their first reaction to it on a HN post. This is visible when the answers to their posts is "yeah... the law covers that".
People publicly criticising laws with informed articles (or even people repeating talking points from those) is very healthy, but VERY different from armchair commenters who use their own ignorance about a law as fodder for criticising it and for advocating for their own position (normally to dismiss the law altogether).
We are clearly talking about two very different things here.
Unlike you're implying, I also don't want to censor anything and I'm not advocating for anything. Discussion is healthy, uninformed discussion backing radical opinions is noise.
> Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
I also don't see how this has anything to do with what I'm saying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my first post, but I'm pretty sure I was in my second.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago> We are clearly talking about two very different things here. I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction. And they're not always wrong.
- ratww 5y agoOnce again I ask you: where did I say it makes them ineligible? Why can't I criticise the behaviour?
- AnthonyMouse 5y agoYou're criticizing the wrong thing. Address the specific instance when they get it wrong, not the general idea of being concerned about edge cases, which in many cases actually are highly problematic.
- ratww 5y agoOnce again you are putting words into my mouth. I never said that worrying about edge cases is wrong, nor that discussing them was. The sport of claiming that they aren't handled when they actually are, however, is a pet peeve of mine. I hope you see the irony of claiming that someone having a pet peeve is incompatible with democracy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]