That's one of the most tragic things I've seen in the last decade. Everybody (within epsilon) would support that, but the politicians are not doing it.
In 2012, when Barack Obama was running for re-election against Mitt Romney, there was one political issue that the American people broadly demonstrated that they passionately cared about... and neither candidate took notice. And that was SOPA. The American people shouted with such a loud voice that they were sick of copyright abuse trampling on their rights, so powerfully that Congress had no choice but to take notice. Hypothetically speaking, if Romney had jumped on that, pointed out how the Obama administration had been cheerleading this the whole way, and made it a loud, outspoken campaign plank to push back on copyright abuse, he would almost certainly have won. (Whether he would have done anything about it afterwards is an open question, of course. But he would certainly have had the chance to.)
It was intensely frustrating, watching one of the biggest political events in decades take place and then be ignored by the politicians. I still believe that, if such a person could get nominated highly enough to get the ear of the general public, a candidate running on a pro-Internet platform would win by a landslide. A lot has changed since 2012, but not that.
Also, while DMCA extortion is, sadly, quite legal, what this guy is doing is very much not. If the thug doing the extorting wants payment via PayPal, he needs to provide the victim with an email address for his PayPal account, which will be linked to a backing financial system that makes him personally identifiable. In other words, ObbyRaidz has (or can easily obtain with a bit of playing along) everything he needs to take this to the police and get the guy busted.
The extralegal DMCA takedown process has always been a tool of extortion first and foremost. It shouldn't surprise anyone that YouTube's extra-extralegal system gets used the same way.
This is why we need the Presumption of Innocence and Due Process for user-generated content. Extralegal takedowns need to go the way of the dodo.
Do you realize that, while you said you have to disagree with the factual points I set out, that at no point did you actually disagree with their factual nature, only their relevance?
Oh, are you talking about that yearbook mess? I heard that some governor had got caught with some really bad photos in his past. I've seen the photos, and the controversy; it just didn't particularly register which state he was from. *shrug*
You're saying this as if abolitionist sentiment was a thing that got started at some point along the way. It wasn't; it was alive and well from the very beginning of our nation and even earlier.
To give just one example of many, during the process of founding the USA, Sam Adams (John Adams's brother) wanted to throw it out entirely; he warned that if slavery was permitted in the laws of the land, it would lead to civil war in about a century. (This prediction turned out to be so close to what actually happened that it got cut from the script of the theatrical production 1776, because the writer feared audiences would think it was something clever-sounding he made up!)
Abolitionist sentiment was real enough, and influential enough, from the very beginning that the process of admission of new states to the Union was always kept carefully balanced between North and South, such that the North would never gain enough Senate votes to do away with the institution of slavery and the South would never gain enough to strengthen it.
Again, you're coming across as someone who has not studied history here and is only grounded in very modern, very distorted revisionist theories that are quite ignorant of the past that they're trying to atone for.
Virginia is waaaaaaaay across the country from me. Whatever "recent events" happened there must not be relevant enough over here to have pinged on my radar.
You still seem to be missing the point. It doesn't matter if it's a "statement of opinion, not fact."
Let's establish a few baseline facts first. I hope these simple points are clear enough that no one will find a reason to disagree with them:
The SPLC "stating their opinion" has caused real harm to others as a direct result of people accepting and acting on that opinion.
In most of these cases the SPLC knew--or at least they had no valid excuse not to know--that people would act upon their words in the same general way as what actually ended up happening. (In other words, the harmful effects that occurred were very easily predictable before the opinions were given.)
The SPLC freely acknowledges that their "opinion" being "stated" is not in line with the common understanding of the matters they are opining upon.
These things being true, how do you arrive at a conclusion that it is just to not hold them accountable for the harm that transpired? (In addition to, and not instead of, the people who personally committed the harmful acts.)
It is easy to demonstrate, too: consider a society with total race-based chattel slavery, such as America for long periods of its history. It is actually quite easy to envision periods in such a society where there is virtually no "hatred" of the enslaved race at all, expressed or even in anyone's internal feelings.
And this is the point where you lose all credibility. Have you actually researched any of this? Hatred is not the only expression of racism, not by a long shot. When you look at contemporary discussions of related issues from the antebellum period, what you find instead is disdain and contempt. You see a lot of people saying, in so many words, that the black race was inferior mentally to whites, that they were "less human," that by their nature they were only fit to be beasts of burden and nothing more, and so on. (The publication of Darwin's work on evolution during this same time period was rather unfortunate, as it was used to lend an air of scientific credence to the notion that Africans were "less evolved" and "more bestial" that "proper" human beings.)
There wasn't much hatred, not because there wasn't much racism, but because there was so much racism that they weren't even considered to be worth hating! The shift to hatred in later decades is, somewhat counterintuitively, actually a sign that racism had decreased to the point that they could be acknowledged as real competition, and it's been decreasing pretty steadily ever since.
Ah, I assumed that was a reply to my comment about the meaning of "hate groups", but no it was a reply to my comment about the meaning of racism.
My point works equally well either way.
You're an even dumber, more closed-minded person than I thought if you think societal understanding and definition of complex social concepts should be immutable and unchanging.
Why? Human nature hasn't changed perceptibly in the last few decades.
Please educate yourself on the Shirky Principle, and read up on Fire and Motion while you're at it. A lot of this "evolving understanding" is not new knowledge or organic growth at all; it's a deliberate agenda being driven by people who are so heavily invested in fighting social injustices that they literally cannot afford to admit that they won.
Lobbying rules updated in 2007 require that if an employee spends more than 20% of their time lobbying in DC, they have to register with the government as a lobbyist.
Just out of curiosity, how is "their time" defined? That sounds like there could easily be half a dozen ways to abuse or exploit that rule...
Also... what kind of parent names their daughter after a cut of steak?!? I mean, I've heard people talk about treating women "like a piece of meat," but I always thought it was a figure of speech!
Yes, that much is clear. The broadcasters are greedy. I was asking about the courts, though, and how it's even possible that they failed to take one look at the case and toss the greedy broadcasters out on their collective ear.
No. Taking something that's well-understood and arbitrarily redefining it in a broader context is very much a part of the problem. It's the reason why I mentioned the Shirky Principle in my original comment here. Words have meanings, and the horrifying consequences of the way people twist those meanings around for political advantage was one of the few things Orwell actually got right in 1984.
I still don't see how the Aereo case had any legal basis in the first place. Broadcasters are... well... broadcasting their content. Literally by definition, they are giving it away for free to anyone with an antenna; it's paid for by advertisers, not consumers.
How, then, does any argument predicated upon "consumers aren't paying us for this content, therefore torts and damages and injunctions" not get instantly laughed out of court? The entire case was literally insane from start to finish.
Your assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, "hate group" does have a very clear meaning. As a few people have already brought up, there's an official definition that the FBI uses. There's also the intuitive definition that the general public uses. If you were to ask 100 random "persons on the street" in the USA what a hate group is, at least 80 of them would almost certainly specifically mention, by name, the KKK or neo-nazi skinheads. (Or both.)
When you take something that well-understood, and then say "these people are like those people," that conveys a very concrete meaning to the minds of those who hear it. And as the article points out:
Indeed, in a 2018 Washington Post article, SPLC President Richard Cohen admitted to journalist David Montgomery that it does not matter to SPLC whether the use of SPLC Hate Designations is accurate in terms of identifying conduct motivated by actual “hate,” because its use is part of SPLC’s “effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing.”
The guy directly acknowledged that he's using a loaded term out of context and "it doesn't matter" because apparently the political ends justify the dishonest, malicious means.
It's not naivete at all that brings me to this position. On the contrary, it's experience, of the deeply personal variety. I have a lot of empathy for people who have had their lives ruined by false accusations of racism, because I've been there.
Several years back, my reputation in a certain online community was completely destroyed because one person claimed I was making racist comments about her. It was entirely untrue, and she completely made up several truly horrible things that I had supposedly said, and even when mods looked at the logs and pointed out that there was zero truth to what she was claiming, people still believed her!
And you know what the truly crazy part is? I later caught her in a chat room, (she didn't know it was me because I was using a different handle,) bragging and laughing about what she had done to me. Turns out she didn't care about me either way; she did it because I was friends with a rival of hers who she wanted to discredit by association and she knew it would be an effective way of smearing me.
Getting dragged through an experience like that can be really eye-opening. So now, when I hear people being accused of racism, I give them the benefit of the doubt, I look at available evidence, and I watch for the data that becomes available after the initial story breaks. As they say, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. And what I've found, quite consistently, is that racism in America is as dead as disco. (And I use that term in a very literal sense: it's not extinct yet, there still a few people around with horrible taste who think it's awesome, but by and large the vast majority of people understand that it's a relic of the past that's best left in the past.)
Innocent until proven guilty always has been the only reasonable standard, in this and any other type of accusation.
On the post: YouTube's ContentID System Is Being Repurposed By Blackmailers Due To Its Failings
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That's one of the most tragic things I've seen in the last decade. Everybody (within epsilon) would support that, but the politicians are not doing it.
In 2012, when Barack Obama was running for re-election against Mitt Romney, there was one political issue that the American people broadly demonstrated that they passionately cared about... and neither candidate took notice. And that was SOPA. The American people shouted with such a loud voice that they were sick of copyright abuse trampling on their rights, so powerfully that Congress had no choice but to take notice. Hypothetically speaking, if Romney had jumped on that, pointed out how the Obama administration had been cheerleading this the whole way, and made it a loud, outspoken campaign plank to push back on copyright abuse, he would almost certainly have won. (Whether he would have done anything about it afterwards is an open question, of course. But he would certainly have had the chance to.)
It was intensely frustrating, watching one of the biggest political events in decades take place and then be ignored by the politicians. I still believe that, if such a person could get nominated highly enough to get the ear of the general public, a candidate running on a pro-Internet platform would win by a landslide. A lot has changed since 2012, but not that.
On the post: YouTube's ContentID System Is Being Repurposed By Blackmailers Due To Its Failings
Also, while DMCA extortion is, sadly, quite legal, what this guy is doing is very much not. If the thug doing the extorting wants payment via PayPal, he needs to provide the victim with an email address for his PayPal account, which will be linked to a backing financial system that makes him personally identifiable. In other words, ObbyRaidz has (or can easily obtain with a bit of playing along) everything he needs to take this to the police and get the guy busted.
On the post: YouTube's ContentID System Is Being Repurposed By Blackmailers Due To Its Failings
As I said when this came up in the sidebar:
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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"All I did was pull a trigger. I'm not liable for what the bullet did in accordance with the highly predictable laws of physics!"
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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Do you realize that, while you said you have to disagree with the factual points I set out, that at no point did you actually disagree with their factual nature, only their relevance?
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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Oh, are you talking about that yearbook mess? I heard that some governor had got caught with some really bad photos in his past. I've seen the photos, and the controversy; it just didn't particularly register which state he was from. *shrug*
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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You're saying this as if abolitionist sentiment was a thing that got started at some point along the way. It wasn't; it was alive and well from the very beginning of our nation and even earlier.
To give just one example of many, during the process of founding the USA, Sam Adams (John Adams's brother) wanted to throw it out entirely; he warned that if slavery was permitted in the laws of the land, it would lead to civil war in about a century. (This prediction turned out to be so close to what actually happened that it got cut from the script of the theatrical production 1776, because the writer feared audiences would think it was something clever-sounding he made up!)
Abolitionist sentiment was real enough, and influential enough, from the very beginning that the process of admission of new states to the Union was always kept carefully balanced between North and South, such that the North would never gain enough Senate votes to do away with the institution of slavery and the South would never gain enough to strengthen it.
Again, you're coming across as someone who has not studied history here and is only grounded in very modern, very distorted revisionist theories that are quite ignorant of the past that they're trying to atone for.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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Virginia is waaaaaaaay across the country from me. Whatever "recent events" happened there must not be relevant enough over here to have pinged on my radar.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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You still seem to be missing the point. It doesn't matter if it's a "statement of opinion, not fact."
Let's establish a few baseline facts first. I hope these simple points are clear enough that no one will find a reason to disagree with them:
These things being true, how do you arrive at a conclusion that it is just to not hold them accountable for the harm that transpired? (In addition to, and not instead of, the people who personally committed the harmful acts.)
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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Care to elaborate?
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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And this is the point where you lose all credibility. Have you actually researched any of this? Hatred is not the only expression of racism, not by a long shot. When you look at contemporary discussions of related issues from the antebellum period, what you find instead is disdain and contempt. You see a lot of people saying, in so many words, that the black race was inferior mentally to whites, that they were "less human," that by their nature they were only fit to be beasts of burden and nothing more, and so on. (The publication of Darwin's work on evolution during this same time period was rather unfortunate, as it was used to lend an air of scientific credence to the notion that Africans were "less evolved" and "more bestial" that "proper" human beings.)
There wasn't much hatred, not because there wasn't much racism, but because there was so much racism that they weren't even considered to be worth hating! The shift to hatred in later decades is, somewhat counterintuitively, actually a sign that racism had decreased to the point that they could be acknowledged as real competition, and it's been decreasing pretty steadily ever since.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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My point works equally well either way.
Why? Human nature hasn't changed perceptibly in the last few decades.
Please educate yourself on the Shirky Principle, and read up on Fire and Motion while you're at it. A lot of this "evolving understanding" is not new knowledge or organic growth at all; it's a deliberate agenda being driven by people who are so heavily invested in fighting social injustices that they literally cannot afford to admit that they won.
On the post: The Revolving Door Spins Hard: FCC's Clyburn Now Lobbying For T-Mobile
Just out of curiosity, how is "their time" defined? That sounds like there could easily be half a dozen ways to abuse or exploit that rule...
Also... what kind of parent names their daughter after a cut of steak?!? I mean, I've heard people talk about treating women "like a piece of meat," but I always thought it was a figure of speech!
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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Why?
On the post: Former FCC Official Attempts To Create An Aereo That The Supreme Court Won't Kill
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Yes, that much is clear. The broadcasters are greedy. I was asking about the courts, though, and how it's even possible that they failed to take one look at the case and toss the greedy broadcasters out on their collective ear.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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No. Taking something that's well-understood and arbitrarily redefining it in a broader context is very much a part of the problem. It's the reason why I mentioned the Shirky Principle in my original comment here. Words have meanings, and the horrifying consequences of the way people twist those meanings around for political advantage was one of the few things Orwell actually got right in 1984.
On the post: Former FCC Official Attempts To Create An Aereo That The Supreme Court Won't Kill
I still don't see how the Aereo case had any legal basis in the first place. Broadcasters are... well... broadcasting their content. Literally by definition, they are giving it away for free to anyone with an antenna; it's paid for by advertisers, not consumers.
How, then, does any argument predicated upon "consumers aren't paying us for this content, therefore torts and damages and injunctions" not get instantly laughed out of court? The entire case was literally insane from start to finish.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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Your assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, "hate group" does have a very clear meaning. As a few people have already brought up, there's an official definition that the FBI uses. There's also the intuitive definition that the general public uses. If you were to ask 100 random "persons on the street" in the USA what a hate group is, at least 80 of them would almost certainly specifically mention, by name, the KKK or neo-nazi skinheads. (Or both.)
When you take something that well-understood, and then say "these people are like those people," that conveys a very concrete meaning to the minds of those who hear it. And as the article points out:
The guy directly acknowledged that he's using a loaded term out of context and "it doesn't matter" because apparently the political ends justify the dishonest, malicious means.
On the post: Gavin McInnes Files Laughably Silly Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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It's not naivete at all that brings me to this position. On the contrary, it's experience, of the deeply personal variety. I have a lot of empathy for people who have had their lives ruined by false accusations of racism, because I've been there.
Several years back, my reputation in a certain online community was completely destroyed because one person claimed I was making racist comments about her. It was entirely untrue, and she completely made up several truly horrible things that I had supposedly said, and even when mods looked at the logs and pointed out that there was zero truth to what she was claiming, people still believed her!
And you know what the truly crazy part is? I later caught her in a chat room, (she didn't know it was me because I was using a different handle,) bragging and laughing about what she had done to me. Turns out she didn't care about me either way; she did it because I was friends with a rival of hers who she wanted to discredit by association and she knew it would be an effective way of smearing me.
Getting dragged through an experience like that can be really eye-opening. So now, when I hear people being accused of racism, I give them the benefit of the doubt, I look at available evidence, and I watch for the data that becomes available after the initial story breaks. As they say, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. And what I've found, quite consistently, is that racism in America is as dead as disco. (And I use that term in a very literal sense: it's not extinct yet, there still a few people around with horrible taste who think it's awesome, but by and large the vast majority of people understand that it's a relic of the past that's best left in the past.)
Innocent until proven guilty always has been the only reasonable standard, in this and any other type of accusation.
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