In all seriousness, television has almost certainly harmed some not-insignificant fraction of our population. Nothing is more toxic than a bad idea, a malmeme, and some of them can be so subtle that they go unnoticed for years or decades. Ironically, music is probably less pathogenic, there's just less bandwidth for these memes to make use of. Lyrics, moods, and a single picture of album art? Compare that to a half-hour time slot with complex depictions of social interactions that humans model their own internal mental state from.
Everyone on every point of the political spectrum claims that the basic principle is true. That we can be manipulated to believe untrue things and to behave inappropriately and in maladaptive manners. We just tend to disagree on which media and which content does so.
>The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back.
I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce left in the United States, and will be less of one by the time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was happy at how many of the young men there had come from farms and were familiar with using/driving heavy equipment, how many knew some welding, etc. Then after the war, that translated right back into mnufacturing there these now older men were familiar with "making things". They could do actual labor. How well will the part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers and Dollar General shelf stockers do on the assembly line?
>if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave.
If we could bring back manufacturing, then we would need to restructure our society such that those jobs lesser/menial jobs could go undone (or be automated). But we can't really bring it back, and they will bring in others on any number of weird visas no one has really heard of to do the lesser/menial jobs which are the only ones left. The people who set this in motion aren't even just retired, they're already dead of old age and there's nothing anyone can do about what's coming.
People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers because there aren’t other jobs available, and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.
There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.
It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.
tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
>and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
Possibly. But they can't change the attitudes that created them from childhood up. The barista that complains on r/antiwork that their manager is a douche and that they're taking another mental health day because standing upright is too challenging for an hour at a stretch isn't going to like mandatory overtime spot welding or manning the torque wrench. Can they be taught to do it? Yeh, probably, theoretically at least. Supposing they don't get out because they'd rather be scrolling on a phone.
I can foresee this, it's not prophecy... just common sense. But I suppose other people need to run the experiment and see the results for themselves.
Out of high school, I must have worked 4 or 5 factory jobs (even in the early 1990s that was drying up), and so I have some idea what this is like. It's not a long-form media article for me. I don't think it's menial. When I use that word, I'm talking about the person at the cash register at Dollar Tree, or the job where you scrub the toilets at Wendy's.
>I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce,
Maybe. But I'm not understating its size, or the demographic projections that say it's shrinking quickly.
>and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
They'd be great. But you can't just make a magic wand and have them appear, and if you could you'd never fill the positions.
>but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[
What would be gained if they didn't "go easy on racism"? Would we all start singing kumbayah and love each other, hippy-style? Or would people be just as racist even more remote corners of the internet/world, and then slightly-left-of-center-minded individuals could pretend that all the world's problems were solved and it could continue for another 100 years?
>There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation,
While true, the few people who do have something to contribute to a conversation simply can't do so on a highly-sanitized, heavily-moderated forum. The things they'd say would be too upsetting to a status quo, and the status quo will win. There is a real difference between something truly insightful and flat earth theory, but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.
Wait until you're banned without appeal from some place because you called it the master branch out of 15 years of habit then get back to me if this moderation thing is all its cracked up to be. 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums, and humanity would be ashamed of that if it wasn't the root cause.
> but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.
Spez once compared these people to a landed gentry; they are not unlike domain squatters. Notably, 4chan is basically identical in this regard. I’ve been banned from /lit/, /trv/, and /his/ for posts that the janitors of each board have decided were off-topic, even though they were plainly related to the board’s subject. There are potential structural solutions to this incentive problem, but the easiest solution is to take your ball and go home when a platform demonstrates that they don’t want you there. The big issue is that the global audience has consolidated onto a few sites, so there isn’t a lot of meaningful competition for the users that do leave.
> 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums
Hacker News is superior by almost every metric. Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected. The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent. The true problem is how to keep the network effects in play when moderators abuse their position as stewards to censor others due to motives of pride or self-enrichment. Federated networks might be the solution here.
In the most narrow of topics, it's semi-superior... and because of bizarre circumstances that aren't easily replicated. We can't do politics here (though that erodes every day, looks like), which keeps the worst shit-shows out of here, but anywhere else that wouldn't ever happen. dang is some sort of minor saint, had this been reddit that would have morphed into "we can't do politics except those I like".
Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
>Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected.
Sure, for a brief period as the reddit population was ramping up, but before ever slack-jawed imbecile showed up thinking it was the new Facebook, it was pretty good. But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
>The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent.
...
>Federated networks might be the solution here.
Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other. Have you checked out Lemmy? The first and biggest instance was a bunch of Stalin-esque commies who camped out on it with the intent of dominating the entire system. See, with reddit, no one quite understood that it might become big, and so no one was eyeing it with the intent od a landgrab. But once it failed, everyone was on the lookout for the next-big-thing, and if there was even a chance of it they set up shop. No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
I would really like to see some exploration of alternative site structures, ways to design new social media sites with better systems of incentives, for users and for mods. There is very little diversity in how social media sites are driven by users and moderated by admins (engagement or vote driven post recommendations, opaque administration decisions). I think a small fixed cost per post paid in XMR has potential to significantly improve post quality for anonymous platforms. Moderation is trickier, especially if the owner doesn’t take a back seat and rein in the mods occasionally, but more transparency into moderators and their moderation decisions (public ban log with detailed justification, pseudo anonymous account tracking per mod) with some accountability from the user base e.g. meta discussion board around site policy with engagement from mods and owner.
> Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
This line might exist, but I have yet to see it. I have seen users on this forum advocate for eugenics and murdering CEOs, and not obliquely.
> But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
It was around the time they banned /r/TheDonald. There was still a ton of good discussion going on there until that point. The new app also brought in a ton of casual users who didn’t fit with the site’s historical demographic of cerebral young men.
> Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other.
That’s the problem I haven’t figured out. In theory you could have a branching moderation authority that could be forked if the moderator starts abusing their power, but the issue is that most users won’t notice anything is wrong until years after the problem arises.
> No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
Would you not consider a shift back to personal networking a technical solution to the problem?
No moderation is still worse. It means that -- especially with 4chans activity-based thread sorting -- the most "engaging" (read: rage-inducing) content gets bubbled up without fail. AND that you can drive away all reasonable people with, e.g. gore or absolutely reprehensible political views. Views that are not only explicitly racist but genocidal. The board is called /pol/, but it doesn't actually discuss politics, it discusses racist or otherwise hateful worldviews. There's no serious policy discussion going on here. Let's not kid ourselves.
I was a regular in 2007-2010 on /g/, /sci/, /mu/ and /fa/. The boards had their share of trolling then, but were mostly alright. I cannot recognize the boards anymore. They are full of vile garbage. Nobody is interested in discussing the interests that the board is there for, they're just posting the most outrageous thing possible. It's slop for the brain just as much as any social media feed is.
Whatever communities I found on 4chan have managed to survive outside of it, and none of us go there anymore. I don't use reddit, but it is still 100x better than 4chan.
Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say things that are against the status quo, but that's a good thing.
Is conspiracy to commit murder an unfairly persecuted thoughtcrime that we should permit on the off-chance that punishing it would lead to Orwellian outcomes?
I've never seen conspiracy to commit murder of individual people on 4chan. That would violate U.S. law and thus is banned from the site. There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups of people, but while that's totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored, no more than it should be illegal to propose blowing up the sun.
Because it doesn't harm anyone. If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide, it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
Anyway, your argument, whether intentionally or not, is a kind of motte-and-bailey fallacy. You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views". In many circles, that description would include views like "Women shouldn't be allowed to play in men's sports" or "Young children shouldn't be allowed to have sex-change surgery". That's the "bailey". But rather than defend that, you fall back to the "motte" of things like conspiracy to commit murder. In some peoples' views, abortion is murder, should we censor talk encouraging abortion? Of course not; that would be me countering your motte-and-bailey with my own motte-and-bailey.
The fact is, private companies shouldn't be allowed to choose what we can talk about. We DO have people allowed to choose that; they're called legislators, and if you dislike the things people are saying on some website, you should take that up with your legislators, not with the website.
Threats don’t harm anyone physically. Similarly, conspiracy to murder isn’t an actual murder until the murder is carried out. Calling for a genocide isn’t an actual genocide, but it’s hard to see what purpose it serves other than being the first step to enacting a genocide. There are plenty of other examples of speech acts rising to the level of criminality that no ordinary person would consider to be Orwellian.
> If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide, it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
By this logic we shouldn’t have any laws, because people will always find a way to circumvent them.
> You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views"
You are quoting a different user. My chief contention is that the sort of material you can find on /pol/ often rises to the level of incitement and that there isn’t anything wrong with prosecuting people for it. The same logic used to justify the criminalization of threats can be used to justify the criminalization of hate speech. The meta then shifts to inventing new or redefining existing categories of violence, sure, but this is just a slippery slope fallacy which assumes that there will be an endless tolerance for bad faith interpretations of an existing law. Outlawing murder has not led to the definition of murder becoming so expansive as to prohibit the general public from discussing the death penalty, for example.
Rwanda wasn't well-known for its expansive internet forums. The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors. That no one could easily monitor. If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.
There is a natural human inclination to want to listen to and read the words that you're not allowed to listen to and read. If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
> The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors.
This isn’t true. Radio played a huge role in coordinating mob activity during the Rwandan genocide. Several radio hosts were prosecuted for the role they played in inciting the genocide.
> If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.
The catharsis of venting about racial minorities doesn’t lessen the inclination to vent about racial minorities, it just creates an hedonic treadmill which rewards further radicalization.
> If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
Can you point out any historical examples of this occurring?
>There's no serious policy discussion going on here.
Presumably leftypol is underrepresented on /pol/ because it's overrepresented everywhere else. Additionally it crucially relies on favorable moderation, so it really opts out on its own.
It's not. Get a usb-serial cable. Open it up, attach that, load Tasmota firmware. Takes a little bit of fiddling to figure out which gpio goes to which relay sometimes, but once you've gotten the pattern you can upload it so others don't have to figure it out next time.
And just what process is due a person under risk of deportation? People say "due process" quite often without even giving any thought to what the term means, and I doubt that 1 in 4 could give a casual definition.
One might think that the only process due to such a person would be the opportunity to contest that they were a citizen and to provide evidence to that claim. Was he denied this? Did they slap a muzzle on him as he tried to scream "but my birth certificate's in the sock drawer, just take a look!"? If the agents who detained and deported him ran any sort of check that would have discovered his citizenship in time to prevent a deportation (had he been a citizen), this seems about all the process that could or should be due.
PS Am I the only one that notices how the news media always describes him as "from Maryland" when he wasn't born there, didn't attend school there, etc?
> They should have the due process to prove they are here legally.
This sounds like a nonsense statement. Non-citizens are only ever here legally at the pleasure of the United States. If we allow them in for 2 weeks, or 3 months, or whatever on a visa... we can change our minds and cancel it early.
The idea that they can have some absolute temporary right to be here ignores what it means to be a non-citizen. You have no right to be here, just a temporary privilege that can be revoked at any point for entirely arbitrary reasons.
>And yes, they were denied that.
I've heard no evidence that this was the case. "Due process" rights are, in many cases administrative. No trial, no judge.
>Even if you imagine due process is for citizens only,
I did not say this, and I do not imagine it. I just happen to know what due process rights actually are.
>you can't prove citizenship status without due process,
Was he denied his opportunity to prove citizenship to the agents who detained him? Did he try to get them to look in his wallet for papers, but they ignored that? Did he beg them to just look in his closet and see his birth certificate? That would be denial of due process.
>Otherwise, nothing's stopping ICE from just claiming you're not a citizen
So you claim. But it's absurd to think that will happen. If you believe it will happen, then just wait and sound the alarm when it does. I'll be genuinely surprised.
Really? The things that are happening now are so absurdly insane that nobody could have imagined them just a few years ago, and you are still gullible enough to say something as silly like that...
> sound the alarm when it does
The loons will just move the goalposts yet again. So what would that achieve?
> It's absurd that people who aren't citizens would be sent back to their home countries
I’m obviously referring to everything the current administration is doing not this specific case.
> common ground with the left
I’d consider myself a moderate centrist. Maybe mildly center-right.
> Do you even know why you want
If the only way of stopping them from coming is to surrender democracy to an authoritarian government staffed by exceptionally deranged and incompetent individuals, well.. let them come then..
> I contend that there's no chance of me ever being deported
Probably. As long as you don’t burn down any Teslas or say nasty thing about the president it’s very unlikely..
> of unease you feel right now continues until 2029 and beyond.
So you are willing to give up democracy and the rule of law (and economic stability for that matter..) just to get rid of some immigrants you don’t like?
If we don't have due process, in that, you can't go and defend yourself in public court, nobody here is really legal or not. It doesn't matter if your birth certificate is in the other room. Without due process it's whatever the ICE agent that's bagging you feels like. What are you gonna do? You don't get due process, you get no court hearing, you get the pleasure of getting onto a plane and flown out to a slave labor prison in El Salvador. Also Garcia had full legal permission to be here but it shows they never checked it and thus he was whisked away like we can expect other's to be if things stay on the current path.
>If we don't have due process, in that, you can't go and defend yourself in public court
That's not due process. Due process rights do not guarantee you any sort of court hearing or trial. It does not require a judge. 90% or more of due process is administrative in nature. The bureaucracy infringes your due process rights when they don't "go through the motions" of how to handle a particular situation. How should they handle deporting someone? By checking that they're not deporting a citizen. If they failed to check, if they failed to give him the opportunity to prove citizenship, they denied his due process rights. Did they do this?
>It doesn't matter if your birth certificate is in the other room. Without due proces
You miss the point. I wasn't asking if his birth certificate was there or not. I'm asking "did they give him the chance to claim as much, and did they follow up and make sure it wasn't there". If they didn't give him the opportunity to make the claim, if they ignored such a claim, this is a denial of due process.
And there was no denial. If you had more than a second grader's understanding of due process, you wouldn't be so confused here.
> What are you gonna do? You don't get due process,
"Look Mr. ICEman, you're making a mistake. We can clear this up in minutes, pull my wallet out and take a look at my identity documents, some of which indicate I'm a citizen. It'll only take two minutes to reveal me as a liar if that's not the case."
And if they refuse, then my due process rights have been denied.
>Also Garcia had full legal permission to be here
He showed up without such permission, then weaseled his way into getting contested permission after the fact. Which was always the case under previous policy, there was no practical way to send them back if they made it 100 yards across the border.
You keep saying other people have no idea what due process is, and you keep implying that asking a police officer really nicely not to arrest you is due process. Due process is given via the judicial system. The executive branch doesn't have the authority to be judge, jury and executioner. The police don't get to determine your rights, the courts do.
>and you keep implying that asking a police officer really nicely not to arrest you is due process.
I didn't imply this, in fact if you go up a few comments, I specifically say that due process rights are often administrative in nature. If the bureaucracy lets everyone file paperwork and processes it the same way every time, but when you show up with your paperwork to file it they throw it away without looking at it and say "we're already rejecting it"... that's a due process rights violation. In fact, that's pretty much the textbook definition of it. It's not that hard to understand. The "but he didn't even get a trial!" whiny-assed ijits don't seem to get that, or you. The "police officer" has already arrested you (though not in this case, because it wasn't an arrest, and not a police officer). They're allowed to do that, that's their job. Even when they do it to the wrong person.
Did the police officer check if he was a citizen or not? When (if?) he protested that he was, did they double-check? If those things didn't happen, no due process was skipped, ignored, or infringed. You don't know what due process is either... it's just this phrase you've heard and read from time to time in popular news media without ever thinking about it.
> The executive branch doesn't have the authority to be judge, jury and executioner.
Since these aren't criminal cases, they don't get a judge, jury, or executioner. They get a deportation. And by law, the executive branch really does have this legitimate power and authority. Deportations aren't penalties for crimes.
>The police don't get to determine your rights, the courts do.
This is a strange, distorted view. The courts aren't used to create new rights, only to determine the correct interpretation of rights when there is a dispute. It won't go your way at all. No matter how many times the media calls him a "Maryland man" despite being from El Salvador.
>He's married to a citizen which gives him an avenue towards legal residency and full citizenship.
You seem as if you're trying to leverage that to actual citizen rights... "look, he could be a citizen someday, so that means he has these same rights reserved to citizens". But it does not work that way.
>there is effectively nothing stopping them from doing it to full blown citizens.
Be sure to raise the alarm when they do. I'd be curious if it ever got that far. I think that some on the left worry that it might not, because if they don't have the absurd slippery slope argument then many people would never be concerned about this at all.
Doesn't meet the criteria of what people typically call a conspiracy theory. It's easily verified or debunked by amateurs with publicly available information, it doesn't seem absurd on its face, and it makes no claims other than those of association (certainly none of blatant felony, coup, or world domination).
> Doesn't meet the criteria of what people typically call a conspiracy theory.
You mean that you find it credible. But we need evidence; human intuition of truth has led to 9.x thousand years of pre-science.
> It's easily verified or debunked by amateurs with publicly available information
If there was a specific factual claim - about who and what associations - it would take a mountain of research to explore it across the very many people involved. But there's not a specific claim - like most conspiracy theories.
And the implications, the only things that matter here, are unspoken conspiracy theories - again unspecified.
> it doesn't seem absurd on its face, and it makes no claims other than those of association (certainly none of blatant felony, coup, or world domination).
You know what claims it implies; otherwise it would be meaningless.
Yeah but that’s how modern conspiracy theories work. They have evolved beyond the old staples like flat earth and moon landing stuff which make clear statements. They instead just insinuate. And that’s enough to achieve the intended effect: to move your predispositions, while remaining immune to debunking because they haven’t made any specific claim.
>Yeah but that’s how modern conspiracy theories work. T
That is indeed how modern conspiracy theories work. They make outlandish claims that aren't supported by scientific fact, that some shadowy group controls the world through improbable means, and offer no evidence.
"Hey, these two groups are awfully cozy together" just isn't even close to being anything like a conspiracy theory. You've stretched your fallacious counter-argument too far.
Everyone on every point of the political spectrum claims that the basic principle is true. That we can be manipulated to believe untrue things and to behave inappropriately and in maladaptive manners. We just tend to disagree on which media and which content does so.
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