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> explanations of the truth Mass purveyors of disinformation are thieves of the time of the rest of us, and should be treated accordingly.

unknownaccount 4y ago
Should we persecute every author of fiction novels too for wasting peoples time with their disinformation?
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > Should we persecute every author of fiction novels too for wasting peoples time with their disinformation? People read fiction novels voluntarily, and the authors don't lie about their work being fact. (Also: You mean "prosecute," I think.)
EarlKing 4y ago
God forbid anyone should have their time wasted. Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights and should be treated accordingly.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights 1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. 2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    1. My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. 2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
    - dctoedt 4y ago
      > My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
      - EarlKing 4y ago
        [flagged]
        dctoedt 4y ago
        Ah, I see you've emerged from cover.
    - dctoedt 4y ago
      > Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
      - EarlKing 4y ago
        ...and that act remained wrong despite it not being stopped. 1 + 1 != 3 just because you want it to.
        dctoedt 4y ago
        1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right. Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers. It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
andirk 4y ago
Freedom of speech has its downsides, yes. My only point is to _add_ to the discussion, not _delete_ discussions. We have laws in place for defamatory speech and plenty of other exceptions. Saying false things about climate change or how "democracy" works can often be countered with basic facts. People will often still choose to believe fallacies at will and that is their right as an American.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  > countered with basic facts You're disregarding the key distinction: Malevolent actors are (in Steve Bannon's words) flooding the zone with shit, which they're able to do at trivial cost. The rest of us shouldn't have to put up with that, forced to spend our time digging through the shit spread by those who, for their own purposes, want to sabotage our societal decision-making processes.

unknownaccount 4y ago

Should we persecute every author of fiction novels too for wasting peoples time with their disinformation?

dctoedt 4y ago
> Should we persecute every author of fiction novels too for wasting peoples time with their disinformation? People read fiction novels voluntarily, and the authors don't lie about their work being fact. (Also: You mean "prosecute," I think.)

EarlKing 4y ago

God forbid anyone should have their time wasted. Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights and should be treated accordingly.

dctoedt 4y ago
> Purveyors of Prior Restraint are thieves of our natural rights 1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. 2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."
- EarlKing 4y ago
  1. My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. 2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > My words are not a fist, and your eyes and ears are not your nose. If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - dctoedt 4y ago
        Ah, I see you've emerged from cover.
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      ...and that act remained wrong despite it not being stopped. 1 + 1 != 3 just because you want it to.
      - dctoedt 4y ago
        1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right. Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers. It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.

andirk 4y ago

Freedom of speech has its downsides, yes. My only point is to _add_ to the discussion, not _delete_ discussions. We have laws in place for defamatory speech and plenty of other exceptions. Saying false things about climate change or how "democracy" works can often be countered with basic facts. People will often still choose to believe fallacies at will and that is their right as an American.

dctoedt 4y ago
> countered with basic facts You're disregarding the key distinction: Malevolent actors are (in Steve Bannon's words) flooding the zone with shit, which they're able to do at trivial cost. The rest of us shouldn't have to put up with that, forced to spend our time digging through the shit spread by those who, for their own purposes, want to sabotage our societal decision-making processes.