8 ms·

So wait, in the first paragraph you're saying that we should stand up for horrible people's rights, and in the second, you're saying he should go to jail becaus

by tomp 12y ago

So wait, in the first paragraph you're saying that we should stand up for horrible people's rights, and in the second, you're saying he should go to jail because he's a horrible person. Which one is it? Personally, my principles are perfectly clear: just because I disagree with someone's opinions or behaviors, that doesn't mean they should go to jail (actually, that shouldn't even be a debate!). As long as he has not physically harmed anybody, he should be a free man. If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). It's better if we (as the society) learn how to ignore the trolls, and give less fuck about what other people think/say/do. Thankfully, that's mostly the problem in USA, not in Europe so much. We don't freak out every time someone curses on TV or shows her boobs. (On the other hand, we have other issues, e.g. xenophobia, gag orders, lack of free speech, ...)

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
> If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). Perhaps we should, then.
- tomp 12y ago
  I didn't think I would need to explain this... The problem with that is that it's a very slippery slope. Everything you do, someone will complain, and be hurt. You're pro choice? You hurt Christians. You're pro life? You hurt women. You're pro immigration? You hurt domestic workers. You're against immigration? You're hurting foreigners living in oppressive countries. Most any binary choice will have some people pro and others against, and unfortunately everybody can pretend they're emotionally hurt, which effectively means you'll be jailing people whose opponents are the loudest.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    "Pretend to be emotionally hurt" If we were just talking about mere offense and hurt feelings (which are still serious), I wouldn't be talking about jail time.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    I'd be interested to know how you would cope with the persistant vicious attacks from people like Weev, lasting many years. And what you'd actually do in that situation, now what you'd think you'd do.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    It is not particularly slippery. In theory, I could also have you arrested because your sleeve accidentally brushed mine in a crowded elevator. "Assault!", I cry, while I flop to the ground like a soccer player. But that's not a big problem because it turns out that legislators and prosecutors and judges and juries are not total idiots. The flopping thing has been attempted, seen as a problem, and generally dealt with. It's also not even a slope. Blasphemy has been a crime in plenty of places, but we're moving away from that. Ditto crimes like insulting the king or harming the state. We move away from it because we get better at discerning actual harm from societally valuable dissenting speech.
  - knowtheory 12y ago
    I'd like to point out that you're trying to execute a rhetorical slight of hand that diverts attention away from the issue. Harassment is real. This isn't about hurt feelings. This is about concerted attempts to ruin ppl's lives. Kathy Sierra's case for example included lies being spread about how she was an actual prostitute (not as an insult). Should trolls be allowed to spread lies about other people? Sure, Sierra legally probably was entitled to sue these trolls, but now it's on Kathy to expend her time, effort & resources trying to identify the trolls to sue them. Even if it's legal, harassment can also be used as a DoS against the victim, which is frankly, still bullshit.
    - tomp 12y ago
      Who's expense should it be then, in your opinion, to pursue (civil or criminal) legal action against the "troll"? AFAIK, if she wins, she can also demand payment of legal fees, so it's really just her time that's at stake.
      - knowtheory 12y ago
        1) you haven't answered the question. Is it okay for people to go around spreading lies about you? 2) As Cory Doctorow put it "Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor." demanding payment of legal fees from someone who has no money doesn't get you very far. 3) The question is whether there is a societal problem here that we should care about at the level of governance. I'd argue yes, but what the remedy should be is way more complicated a topic, and something that i think is probably only worth discussing in good faith. So if you don't think this is a problem, that should be addressed first.
- SCHiM 12y ago
  Indeed, I really don't see how you can defend not being punished for seriously harming others be it physically or physiologically. Especially in this day and age, where mental problems are beginning to get the attention they deserve and it's not longer taboo to talk about them.
  - fphhotchips 12y ago
    Edit: Stream of thought below; sorry if it's awkwardly worded/structured. This is beginning to happen - harassment laws are a thing, and so are anti-bullying laws (the line between the two is different depending on jurisdiction I believe). The question I have is around how far we can go with these laws before we start to impinge on valid civil rights concerns. As your sibling comment explains, it's pretty difficult to establish where the line is - too far and you start to impinge on legitimate comment. Personally, I tend towards the free-speech angle, but it depends on context. For example, I feel that there's a difference between bullying IRL and on the internet, and between Twitter and Email. Perhaps the difference is in the directness of the conversation and the avoidability. For example, workplace bullying laws (and policies) are necessary because the conversation is quite personal and there's great difficulty to avoiding it. Twitter is not necessarily personal, and avoiding those you don't like is pretty simple. But what if your work is on Twitter? What if most of your personal life is there? It's obviously not reasonable to ask someone to abandon either of those things. Do you prosecute the ringleader? What if the first result for your name is a derogatory page on Encyclopaedia Dramatica? It occurs to me that the answer might be found by a creative interpretation of defamation/libel laws.
    - SCHiM 12y ago
      Edit: this turned into a really long comment, only the first part is an answer to the parent post. The second part is more of a personal philosophy of how minds work. I'm far from an expert in law and/or it's interpretation. But I think that it's not too hard to see where the line is. A single comment, or even a string of comments on a specific page does not constitute a "criminal" case of online harassment. Nor does a heated discussion in private over email or IM. However a continuous assault on your presence online, emails or comments on things you say or ED pages about you, do. That's just my opinion on these matters so if anyone disagrees maybe there is a case to be made for vague lines. However I think that in essence this is where everyone would draw the line. More about human behavior in general, not specifically coupled to this thread/article. It's more like my personal philosophy of what human behavior should be like, as opposed to how it is: It seems to me that it's in no way acceptable to voice your opinion in such a way that it is harmful to others, as there is simply no _real_ reason for it. I wonder sometimes why there's so much strife in all the circles of human society. If you really think about it, isn't it strange that we're only able to extend _real_ love to a very small circle of people around us (think family and friends)?. I find it very difficult to articulate exactly how I think about human interactions with each other. In a very high-vantage overview I could try to summarize it like this, slowly building towards my idea beginning with how my brain seems to work: The first idea is made up of two other ideas that I have: The 'human mind model' and 'compartmentalization' First the mind model: I've said this before on HM: The way my brain seems to work (and by extrapolation, maybe yours too) is that you have internal representations of the external world inside your head. When you see a plant, you don't see the _plant_, you could even say that you're not even _seeing_ anything. The photons that hit the receptors in your eyes somehow invoke the image of a plant inside your 'mind'. The things around you, the world that seems so coherent, is really only coherent inside your head. What you see, know, feel about a 'thing' is not what that thing really _is_. It's just the details and patterns your brain can parse and understand. I think there's information and knowledge about things that can't be expressed inside our brains. There's probably more information inside a spec of dust than can be encoded inside the brains of all the people on this earth. Then compartmentalization: To me it seems that the human mind deals with this problem by compartmentalizing everything you think about. If you're a mechanic you don't understand how an engine works. You have a very vague idea about the physics of combustion, and from there the idea of the combustion chamber in the cylinder 'emerges'. From your vague understanding of the interaction between a cylinder and an axle 'emerges' the idea of the engine. But this is not _the_ _engine_, just your idea of what an engine is. When you think of an engine you're not simultaneously thinking about combustion. Combustion is encapsulated in the idea of the cylinder. Just like the vague ideas and knowledge about 'interaction' are encapsulated in the total idea of an something that is solid and the principle of locality, which in turn are 'understood' by understanding space and time. My takeaway from these two ideas is that there seems to be no end in what we could theoretically know and investigate. There's always something more and something deeper just like Douglas Hofstadter shows in the chapter of "Two-part Invention" in his book GEB. My idea about human interaction follows from these two ideas. Like everything else, you don't interact with another human being. Instead you interact with the (flawed) _representation_ of that person in your head. And during the course of your life you build a 'generic template' of what a 'human' is. This is the representation you first begin interacting with when you meet a new person. Unsurprisingly some people have a very bad 'default human' representation inside their mind-world, but really the fact alone that we need approach people through these mash-up jobs of a template seems bad enough. We all know how bad it is to be interacted with based on something that might not be true (super generic statement, meant to capture things like: judged because race, gender, etc, discrimination). But I can't seem to lose the idea that this is basically how we work, and that unless you put some real effort into it, you're predetermined to treat the most people you meet with a very unfitting generic template of 'humanness'. Because really getting to know a person the way our minds work takes time, and we simply don't seem to have that time to get to know everyone we meet. I wonder if perhaps in the future we can change our brains to be more pleasant to each other by default, or more understanding.
jacquesm 12y ago
He got jailed for something in a way that trampled on his rights, he shouldn't have been jailed in that way, a judge agreed and set him free. But the real damage he caused (rather than alerting AT&T in a dumb way that their security sucks) is that he tried very hard to ruin some people's lives, and that he succeeded to some extent in doing this. That he rejoiced in their pain and then tried very hard to pretend it wasn't him is despicable (and makes him a cowards besides being an asshole) and I wouldn't mind if someone directly harmed by him sued him for that and if he went to jail for that. Does that clear it up for you? Ignoring the trolls gets a little harder when they start inciting people to rape you, kill you or violate your personal integrity in other ways, see linked article for your perusal.
wpietri 12y ago
> As long as he has not physically harmed anybody, he should be a free man. This is an interesting theory of law, but I could go quite a way naming crimes that don't result in physical harm. Fraud, theft, harassment, threatening physical harm, rape, slander, kidnapping, slavery, forgery, theft of military plans, obstruction of justice, treason, drugging someone, criminal negligence, impersonating a surgeon, arson, blackmail, trafficking in stolen property, child abduction, and basically attempted anything, including attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, incitement to murder, and solicitation of murder. Setting aside your novel legal theories, you apparently don't believe harassment, stalking, rape threats, and death threats cause real harm. But neither victims nor perpetrators agree with you: often the explicitly stated purpose is to cause harm. The "just ignore the trolls" position is fine advice for a very specific sort of troll, the ones that are motivated by attention. But for the ones who are motivated by harm, it doesn't work. Indeed, it helps them operate by giving them cover.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  A portion of those do cause physical harm, or are virtually guaranteed to result in physical harm, if not inherently implying it. I think you meant to say that they might not leave any physical marks. That's quite different, though.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    I understand that we are all programmers, and so we love to nitpick things. But the point of that list is not to say that none of them ever cause physical harm, but that in the cases where those things don't cause measurable physical harm, they are still often crimes that would merit punishment.
    - matthewwiese 12y ago
      It's not about being "programmers" but rational human beings. You knew beforehand that you were making a generalization and were subsequently called out on it, so to speak. Your clarification here should have been in the parent comment to begin with.

by tomp 12y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

> If we start jailing people for the psychological harm they cause, we would jail a lot of people (including most of the politicians). Perhaps we should, then.

tomp 12y ago
I didn't think I would need to explain this... The problem with that is that it's a very slippery slope. Everything you do, someone will complain, and be hurt. You're pro choice? You hurt Christians. You're pro life? You hurt women. You're pro immigration? You hurt domestic workers. You're against immigration? You're hurting foreigners living in oppressive countries. Most any binary choice will have some people pro and others against, and unfortunately everybody can pretend they're emotionally hurt, which effectively means you'll be jailing people whose opponents are the loudest.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  "Pretend to be emotionally hurt" If we were just talking about mere offense and hurt feelings (which are still serious), I wouldn't be talking about jail time.
- DanBC 12y ago
  I'd be interested to know how you would cope with the persistant vicious attacks from people like Weev, lasting many years. And what you'd actually do in that situation, now what you'd think you'd do.
- wpietri 12y ago
  It is not particularly slippery. In theory, I could also have you arrested because your sleeve accidentally brushed mine in a crowded elevator. "Assault!", I cry, while I flop to the ground like a soccer player. But that's not a big problem because it turns out that legislators and prosecutors and judges and juries are not total idiots. The flopping thing has been attempted, seen as a problem, and generally dealt with. It's also not even a slope. Blasphemy has been a crime in plenty of places, but we're moving away from that. Ditto crimes like insulting the king or harming the state. We move away from it because we get better at discerning actual harm from societally valuable dissenting speech.
- knowtheory 12y ago
  I'd like to point out that you're trying to execute a rhetorical slight of hand that diverts attention away from the issue. Harassment is real. This isn't about hurt feelings. This is about concerted attempts to ruin ppl's lives. Kathy Sierra's case for example included lies being spread about how she was an actual prostitute (not as an insult). Should trolls be allowed to spread lies about other people? Sure, Sierra legally probably was entitled to sue these trolls, but now it's on Kathy to expend her time, effort & resources trying to identify the trolls to sue them. Even if it's legal, harassment can also be used as a DoS against the victim, which is frankly, still bullshit.
  - tomp 12y ago
    Who's expense should it be then, in your opinion, to pursue (civil or criminal) legal action against the "troll"? AFAIK, if she wins, she can also demand payment of legal fees, so it's really just her time that's at stake.
    - knowtheory 12y ago
      1) you haven't answered the question. Is it okay for people to go around spreading lies about you? 2) As Cory Doctorow put it "Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor." demanding payment of legal fees from someone who has no money doesn't get you very far. 3) The question is whether there is a societal problem here that we should care about at the level of governance. I'd argue yes, but what the remedy should be is way more complicated a topic, and something that i think is probably only worth discussing in good faith. So if you don't think this is a problem, that should be addressed first.
SCHiM 12y ago
Indeed, I really don't see how you can defend not being punished for seriously harming others be it physically or physiologically. Especially in this day and age, where mental problems are beginning to get the attention they deserve and it's not longer taboo to talk about them.
- fphhotchips 12y ago
  Edit: Stream of thought below; sorry if it's awkwardly worded/structured. This is beginning to happen - harassment laws are a thing, and so are anti-bullying laws (the line between the two is different depending on jurisdiction I believe). The question I have is around how far we can go with these laws before we start to impinge on valid civil rights concerns. As your sibling comment explains, it's pretty difficult to establish where the line is - too far and you start to impinge on legitimate comment. Personally, I tend towards the free-speech angle, but it depends on context. For example, I feel that there's a difference between bullying IRL and on the internet, and between Twitter and Email. Perhaps the difference is in the directness of the conversation and the avoidability. For example, workplace bullying laws (and policies) are necessary because the conversation is quite personal and there's great difficulty to avoiding it. Twitter is not necessarily personal, and avoiding those you don't like is pretty simple. But what if your work is on Twitter? What if most of your personal life is there? It's obviously not reasonable to ask someone to abandon either of those things. Do you prosecute the ringleader? What if the first result for your name is a derogatory page on Encyclopaedia Dramatica? It occurs to me that the answer might be found by a creative interpretation of defamation/libel laws.
  - SCHiM 12y ago
    Edit: this turned into a really long comment, only the first part is an answer to the parent post. The second part is more of a personal philosophy of how minds work. I'm far from an expert in law and/or it's interpretation. But I think that it's not too hard to see where the line is. A single comment, or even a string of comments on a specific page does not constitute a "criminal" case of online harassment. Nor does a heated discussion in private over email or IM. However a continuous assault on your presence online, emails or comments on things you say or ED pages about you, do. That's just my opinion on these matters so if anyone disagrees maybe there is a case to be made for vague lines. However I think that in essence this is where everyone would draw the line. More about human behavior in general, not specifically coupled to this thread/article. It's more like my personal philosophy of what human behavior should be like, as opposed to how it is: It seems to me that it's in no way acceptable to voice your opinion in such a way that it is harmful to others, as there is simply no _real_ reason for it. I wonder sometimes why there's so much strife in all the circles of human society. If you really think about it, isn't it strange that we're only able to extend _real_ love to a very small circle of people around us (think family and friends)?. I find it very difficult to articulate exactly how I think about human interactions with each other. In a very high-vantage overview I could try to summarize it like this, slowly building towards my idea beginning with how my brain seems to work: The first idea is made up of two other ideas that I have: The 'human mind model' and 'compartmentalization' First the mind model: I've said this before on HM: The way my brain seems to work (and by extrapolation, maybe yours too) is that you have internal representations of the external world inside your head. When you see a plant, you don't see the _plant_, you could even say that you're not even _seeing_ anything. The photons that hit the receptors in your eyes somehow invoke the image of a plant inside your 'mind'. The things around you, the world that seems so coherent, is really only coherent inside your head. What you see, know, feel about a 'thing' is not what that thing really _is_. It's just the details and patterns your brain can parse and understand. I think there's information and knowledge about things that can't be expressed inside our brains. There's probably more information inside a spec of dust than can be encoded inside the brains of all the people on this earth. Then compartmentalization: To me it seems that the human mind deals with this problem by compartmentalizing everything you think about. If you're a mechanic you don't understand how an engine works. You have a very vague idea about the physics of combustion, and from there the idea of the combustion chamber in the cylinder 'emerges'. From your vague understanding of the interaction between a cylinder and an axle 'emerges' the idea of the engine. But this is not _the_ _engine_, just your idea of what an engine is. When you think of an engine you're not simultaneously thinking about combustion. Combustion is encapsulated in the idea of the cylinder. Just like the vague ideas and knowledge about 'interaction' are encapsulated in the total idea of an something that is solid and the principle of locality, which in turn are 'understood' by understanding space and time. My takeaway from these two ideas is that there seems to be no end in what we could theoretically know and investigate. There's always something more and something deeper just like Douglas Hofstadter shows in the chapter of "Two-part Invention" in his book GEB. My idea about human interaction follows from these two ideas. Like everything else, you don't interact with another human being. Instead you interact with the (flawed) _representation_ of that person in your head. And during the course of your life you build a 'generic template' of what a 'human' is. This is the representation you first begin interacting with when you meet a new person. Unsurprisingly some people have a very bad 'default human' representation inside their mind-world, but really the fact alone that we need approach people through these mash-up jobs of a template seems bad enough. We all know how bad it is to be interacted with based on something that might not be true (super generic statement, meant to capture things like: judged because race, gender, etc, discrimination). But I can't seem to lose the idea that this is basically how we work, and that unless you put some real effort into it, you're predetermined to treat the most people you meet with a very unfitting generic template of 'humanness'. Because really getting to know a person the way our minds work takes time, and we simply don't seem to have that time to get to know everyone we meet. I wonder if perhaps in the future we can change our brains to be more pleasant to each other by default, or more understanding.

jacquesm 12y ago

He got jailed for something in a way that trampled on his rights, he shouldn't have been jailed in that way, a judge agreed and set him free. But the real damage he caused (rather than alerting AT&T in a dumb way that their security sucks) is that he tried very hard to ruin some people's lives, and that he succeeded to some extent in doing this. That he rejoiced in their pain and then tried very hard to pretend it wasn't him is despicable (and makes him a cowards besides being an asshole) and I wouldn't mind if someone directly harmed by him sued him for that and if he went to jail for that. Does that clear it up for you? Ignoring the trolls gets a little harder when they start inciting people to rape you, kill you or violate your personal integrity in other ways, see linked article for your perusal.

wpietri 12y ago

> As long as he has not physically harmed anybody, he should be a free man. This is an interesting theory of law, but I could go quite a way naming crimes that don't result in physical harm. Fraud, theft, harassment, threatening physical harm, rape, slander, kidnapping, slavery, forgery, theft of military plans, obstruction of justice, treason, drugging someone, criminal negligence, impersonating a surgeon, arson, blackmail, trafficking in stolen property, child abduction, and basically attempted anything, including attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, incitement to murder, and solicitation of murder. Setting aside your novel legal theories, you apparently don't believe harassment, stalking, rape threats, and death threats cause real harm. But neither victims nor perpetrators agree with you: often the explicitly stated purpose is to cause harm. The "just ignore the trolls" position is fine advice for a very specific sort of troll, the ones that are motivated by attention. But for the ones who are motivated by harm, it doesn't work. Indeed, it helps them operate by giving them cover.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
A portion of those do cause physical harm, or are virtually guaranteed to result in physical harm, if not inherently implying it. I think you meant to say that they might not leave any physical marks. That's quite different, though.
- wpietri 12y ago
  I understand that we are all programmers, and so we love to nitpick things. But the point of that list is not to say that none of them ever cause physical harm, but that in the cases where those things don't cause measurable physical harm, they are still often crimes that would merit punishment.
  - matthewwiese 12y ago
    It's not about being "programmers" but rational human beings. You knew beforehand that you were making a generalization and were subsequently called out on it, so to speak. Your clarification here should have been in the parent comment to begin with.