Want to know why they 'stormed' that capitol building to peacefully petitition for redress of grievances while armed? Because Right-leaning protestors have noticed something Left-leaning protestors are studiously ignoring: When a crowd has the means to return fire, the police are very loath to fire indiscriminately into that crowd!
Hah, no.
White protestors have noticed that the police are very loath to fire indiscriminately at them no matter what. Black protestors know that if they bring a gun to a protest, they will be immediately shot and killed.
However it is important to remember that a lot of the examples you are seeing of cops being good are, I'm afraid to say, nothing but photo ops. Activists are reporting that hours or even minutes later, those same cops are dispersing crowds with force.
To expand a little on this, and include a very important addendum, I'll share the thoughts I posted for close friends on Facebook recently:
I would suggest that if you think you're going to get everything you see right now all neatly sorted out in your mind, with everyone's motivations pinned down and perfectly organized into boxes of how much you approve or disapprove, and what's legitimate and who's an "agitator" or an "opportunist" and how much each contributed to what, and so on and so forth... then you may have misunderstood what a riot is. And if you let it distract you from the obvious white hot burning core of what started this and brought thousands of furious people out onto the streets in the first place, you're going to end up on the wrong side of everything.
(This message is not at all directed at activists and organizers on the ground dealing with individual specific situations where they are organizing - but to those of us observing in the macro, some of whom might already be refining comfy little mantras of "well of course I agree, but..." and are going to be presented with many more tempting prefab ones in the coming days)
The important point, though, is that a riot is what happens when unaddressed problems have reached and surpassed the breaking point. It is an explosion, a collapse, a firestorm. It is a smack to our face as a society to tell us we have failed
Expecting everything that happens after that point to stay within some sort of boundary is futile. That doesn't mean everything that happens is "good" - but it means we have to stay focused on the root of the problem, and not wring our hands about which direction every brick is thrown.
I see. So when Biden says "[Facebook] is propagating falsehoods they know to be false" he is being intentionally misleading in a number of ways, because not all content propagating on Facebook is falsehoods they know to be false, nor do all falsehoods they know to be false propagate, nor do they know all falsehoods to be false... right?
You are being purposely misleading and you know it.
No, I think you came into this conversation expecting an extremely basic level of 1A analysis by people who had never thought about it before, and are now being tripped up by the fact that most of the people here understand it quite well and are able to process that statement for exactly what it means.
The First Amendment does allow people to post false statements. The fact that some false statements are exempt does not change that. I'm not sure why you struggle so much with that. Is it that you think speech is presumed unprotected until a court finds that it is protected? Because the opposite is true.
You seem to think that because it does not protect all false statements, that makes Joe Biden correct and this post wrong.
I think you need to take a breath, stop being so mad, and give what Biden said and what we said another careful read. Biden is completely wrong about what section 230 does, and you are getting arrogant over a completely correct statement about the first amendment.
And yet, it is still the First Amendment that allows people to post false statements (and everything else they are allowed to post) on Facebook. It is the root from which all free speech stems.
CDA 230 is a rule about properly assigning liability. It has nothing to do with what people are or aren't allowed to say.
Mike you should give up the charade, you don’t think defamation lawsuits should exist period.
And here we see how this barrage of bad SLAPP suits has begun to normalize itself in people's minds.
You think suits like this are characteristic of defamation law, and well within its intent. They are not. You think that opposition to the majority of defamation suits involving public figures indicates opposition to defamation law entirely. It does not.
Remember that public figure defamation is an edge case in the law. Its main purpose is to handle disputes between private individuals that are not of any particular interest to the public. If you have a personal enemy and they call up your boss and tell him a bunch of lies about how they saw you smoking crack and beating your spouse, and get you fired, then by all means sue them for defamation. It just won't get any news coverage because nobody else cares any more than they do about a dispute with your neighbour over the height of your fence.
Most book stores won't kick you out for flipping through the book before buying it.
But that implies that if book stores - which are totally independent entities from the writers/publishers - decided to change their practices and put all the books behind glass, then they could, by their actions over which the writer/publisher has zero say, turn a book into libel even though it wasn't before. That's a very problematic legal situation.
Similarly the NYT does not intend for anyone to "only read the headline", or to take the headline at simplistic face value when they haven't read the article - so while they may know that people do that, they have no control over it. So how can something they have no say in be the determinant of whether or not they committed libel?
Lessig clearly said that "If you're going to take it, take it in secret" doesn't apply to Epstein
I think "clearly" is quite a stretch - I honestly don't read it that way. He says it shouldn't have been taken at all, but that if it is taken, it should be secret. He even doubles down on this in his update, which reads:
I’ve argued that “IF” a great university takes type 3 contributions, then they should be anonymous. That conditional has been heard by some to mean I support the idea of a great university taking Type 3 contributions. I do not. I believe a great university should say, absolutely, it won’t take money from criminals. My only point was that MIT had apparently decided to take Type 3 contributions. “IF” they do that, then of course the contributions should be anonymous.
This is kind of splitting hairs, of course, because I do agree the overall thrust of his piece is at least slightly misrepresented by the NYT headline. But I also think it's entirely fair of someone to feel the opposite, and to focus on the message that is summarized in the NYT headline, because that message was absolutely present in the piece. And so this is not a libel issue - it is a difference of opinion.
Re: Re: Re: A chilling reminder that no one is infallible
Ooookay. A lot to unpack here. Let's see what we can do.
Re: the NASCAR driver. I don't know enough about the specifics to offer much of an opinion, but based on your description: yes, sometimes spectacle can really throw this whole equation out of whack, and a NASCAR crash is a high-octane brand of spectacle. The majority of people don't know a damn thing about Cup titles or the relative success of dirt tracks, but a gruesome NASCAR crash is front-page news. I can definitely see how this might result in some unfair legacies - but it's pretty far removed from the subject at hand, so that's all I'm going to say about that one for now.
Pete Rose - again honestly not my area of expertise, and so I'm basing everything I say on a glance at his Wikipedia page. But it seems to me that your description "a stellar career overshadowed by placing bets on games as a manager" is fair enough, and there's no real problem with that. Personally I don't really know or care much about the careers of baseball managers - whereas I am at least somewhat interested in famous cheats. And I expect there are dozens of stellar managers who I don't know about - but far fewer stellar managers who were banned for dishonest gambling. It's no surprise to me he's remembered for the latter, and since it's a great tradition (and especially but not exclusively an American tradition) to kinda love a clever scam artist, I gotta say, I think he might have actually lucked out on the legacy front.
Janet Jackson - Is that honestly a stain on her legacy? Sure, she suffered some negative consequences - in part because our culture's attitude about sex and women's bodies is completely insane, and also in part I assume because "willingness to do something unscripted and controversial at a show as large as the superbowl" is a black mark in the books of a lot of fastidiously risk-averse producers. But as for her legacy, when the histories are written, it will be just a chapter in the story of her career (and, okay, maybe the book jacket photo) but not even close to the only thing she's remembered for.
Benedict Arnold - Okay c'mon man, whatever. Even his corpse is gone by now. What, is his dust spinning in his grave? I'm not gonna stress over this one. Plus that show Turn portrayed him at least semi-sympathetically at times.
Charles Lindbergh - I've thought of him first and foremost as "nazi sympathizer" since I learned that a long time ago, so I forgot about that, but you're right - he deserves more criticism than he gets. Though he's also remembered primarily for a famous kidnapping to some people. Between the kidnapping, the incredible complexity of the culture's postwar handling of Nazi sympathizers and expats, and the cool airplane stuff, I'm going to chalk that one up to "unique situation" and move on...
H.P. Lovecraft - That's an interesting example because we are right now in the middle of a sea change on that front. For a long time you were correct, but now the subject of his incredible racism has bubbled up to the mainstream. (Incidentally, one of his stories that just became public domain this year is a possible source of inspiration for our public domain game jam but... well, let's just say it offers some challenges on exactly the front you mention, and I hope that if anyone chooses to work with it they have thought carefully about that.) So now we've got Jordan Peele in charge of the upcoming Lovecraft Country series on HBO, among several other recent and upcoming examples of projects taking on Lovecraft's racism. In the case of someone who held views as vile and odious as his, I tend to have an attitude of "we should take the valuable things they created away from them and make them our own, and when possible even specifically put them to work for purposes he would have hated in the hands of creators he would have looked down on". Because I dunno, that feels like a way to achieve justice without throwing out the things we might as well enjoy despite (and to spite) him. And again it doesn't really matter because he has spent the last 80 years in a grave that is little more than the subject of a funny story Patton Oswalt tells that I can't find a convenient link for right now.
Dr. Seuss - I have a big book of Seuss's WW2 cartoons with an introduction by noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman. It's been a while since I read it so maybe I need to take another look, but I don't remember it being predominantly racist. I believe there are a few cartoons that do indeed fall into racist caricature territory in terms of their visual depictions, but the overwhelming thrust of the comics is committed antifascism and advocacy for America to oppose the Nazis.
So look, yes: legacies are complex. And nobody has control over them. So no, I will not respond to this by saying "Lessig was a libel troll and nothing else". But it'd also be nice if Lessig v. New York Times doesn't become the autocomplete for everyone who gets halfway through typing his name in a search box.
"this is what I thought in the past, and this is why I was wrong to think that way."
Not really. He stands by the assertion that if you are going to take it, take it in secret - but ultimately concludes they shouldn't have taken it at all in this case.
See, you're offering up a totally valid favourable interpretation of his piece; Bowles offered up a totally valid unfavourable interpretation of his piece. And it's not even so much a difference of interpretation as just a different choice of which part of the message to focus on. And the courts are not the place for a fight between totally valid interpretations/focuses.
But if I may make a counterpoint, must we define someone by their faults and bad decisions instead of the good that they have done? I’m NOT excusing Larry’s recent behavior in the slightest, but we still shouldn’t forget all the good things he has done, such as pushes for copyright reform, helping establish the Creative Commons, etc. Perhaps a bigger philosophical argument than the one Lessig was making is if we should regard someone’s legacy as the bad or good things they do, and I’d argue that we remember the good.
But what if it's not up to us, and a person's legacy is defined by which of their actions has the most lasting, regularly-visible impact on the world after they are gone?
Right now for Lessig that would probably be Creative Commons.
After this, it may well be Lessig v. New York Times getting cited in every libel case - either because it's a terrible anti-free-speech precedent that allows people to sue their critics, or because it's a stark example of a pathetic SLAPP suit getting brutally smacked down by the courts.
if something you write is misconstrued by another writer, is it ever a valid response to sue
If the writer who was misconstrued is a public figure (which, at least for the limited purposes of the subject at hand, they almost certainly are by simple virtue of having published a public piece of writing on the subject) then a defamation lawsuit requires them to prove that the person who misconstrued them didn't just make a mistake, but rather said something deliberately false or with reckless disregard for the possibility that it might be false.
On the post: Let. The Motherfucker. Burn.
Re: Hypocrisy and bias
Want to know why they 'stormed' that capitol building to peacefully petitition for redress of grievances while armed? Because Right-leaning protestors have noticed something Left-leaning protestors are studiously ignoring: When a crowd has the means to return fire, the police are very loath to fire indiscriminately into that crowd!
Hah, no.
White protestors have noticed that the police are very loath to fire indiscriminately at them no matter what. Black protestors know that if they bring a gun to a protest, they will be immediately shot and killed.
On the post: Let. The Motherfucker. Burn.
Re: Swallowing pride can go a long way in healing
However it is important to remember that a lot of the examples you are seeing of cops being good are, I'm afraid to say, nothing but photo ops. Activists are reporting that hours or even minutes later, those same cops are dispersing crowds with force.
https://twitter.com/karaokecomputer/status/1267393445603115008
On the post: Let. The Motherfucker. Burn.
Re: Re: Burning OK..
To expand a little on this, and include a very important addendum, I'll share the thoughts I posted for close friends on Facebook recently:
On the post: Let. The Motherfucker. Burn.
Re: Burning OK..
The important point, though, is that a riot is what happens when unaddressed problems have reached and surpassed the breaking point. It is an explosion, a collapse, a firestorm. It is a smack to our face as a society to tell us we have failed
Expecting everything that happens after that point to stay within some sort of boundary is futile. That doesn't mean everything that happens is "good" - but it means we have to stay focused on the root of the problem, and not wring our hands about which direction every brick is thrown.
On the post: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: You Are The Rats In The Walls
Re:
It's an RPG Maker thing
On the post: This Week In Techdirt History: January 26th - February 1st
Re: "Five years ago"?
whoops, dunno how I managed to do that... fixing, thanks!
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re: Re:
I see. So when Biden says "[Facebook] is propagating falsehoods they know to be false" he is being intentionally misleading in a number of ways, because not all content propagating on Facebook is falsehoods they know to be false, nor do all falsehoods they know to be false propagate, nor do they know all falsehoods to be false... right?
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re:
I don't think Biden would openly endorse your translation of his words as "enhancing free speech is bad" but what do I know.
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You are being purposely misleading and you know it.
No, I think you came into this conversation expecting an extremely basic level of 1A analysis by people who had never thought about it before, and are now being tripped up by the fact that most of the people here understand it quite well and are able to process that statement for exactly what it means.
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The First Amendment does allow people to post false statements. The fact that some false statements are exempt does not change that. I'm not sure why you struggle so much with that. Is it that you think speech is presumed unprotected until a court finds that it is protected? Because the opposite is true.
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You seem to think that because it does not protect all false statements, that makes Joe Biden correct and this post wrong.
I think you need to take a breath, stop being so mad, and give what Biden said and what we said another careful read. Biden is completely wrong about what section 230 does, and you are getting arrogant over a completely correct statement about the first amendment.
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re: Re: Re:
And yet, it is still the First Amendment that allows people to post false statements (and everything else they are allowed to post) on Facebook. It is the root from which all free speech stems.
CDA 230 is a rule about properly assigning liability. It has nothing to do with what people are or aren't allowed to say.
On the post: Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence
Re:
Yup, this post sure seems embarrassing after you read the first paragraph of that Wikipedia page.
I wonder... did you read the second paragraph?
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re:
Mike you should give up the charade, you don’t think defamation lawsuits should exist period.
And here we see how this barrage of bad SLAPP suits has begun to normalize itself in people's minds.
You think suits like this are characteristic of defamation law, and well within its intent. They are not. You think that opposition to the majority of defamation suits involving public figures indicates opposition to defamation law entirely. It does not.
Remember that public figure defamation is an edge case in the law. Its main purpose is to handle disputes between private individuals that are not of any particular interest to the public. If you have a personal enemy and they call up your boss and tell him a bunch of lies about how they saw you smoking crack and beating your spouse, and get you fired, then by all means sue them for defamation. It just won't get any news coverage because nobody else cares any more than they do about a dispute with your neighbour over the height of your fence.
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re: Re: Re: Paywall IS important
Most book stores won't kick you out for flipping through the book before buying it.
But that implies that if book stores - which are totally independent entities from the writers/publishers - decided to change their practices and put all the books behind glass, then they could, by their actions over which the writer/publisher has zero say, turn a book into libel even though it wasn't before. That's a very problematic legal situation.
Similarly the NYT does not intend for anyone to "only read the headline", or to take the headline at simplistic face value when they haven't read the article - so while they may know that people do that, they have no control over it. So how can something they have no say in be the determinant of whether or not they committed libel?
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re: Re: Re:
Lessig clearly said that "If you're going to take it, take it in secret" doesn't apply to Epstein
I think "clearly" is quite a stretch - I honestly don't read it that way. He says it shouldn't have been taken at all, but that if it is taken, it should be secret. He even doubles down on this in his update, which reads:
This is kind of splitting hairs, of course, because I do agree the overall thrust of his piece is at least slightly misrepresented by the NYT headline. But I also think it's entirely fair of someone to feel the opposite, and to focus on the message that is summarized in the NYT headline, because that message was absolutely present in the piece. And so this is not a libel issue - it is a difference of opinion.
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re: Re: Re: A chilling reminder that no one is infallible
Ooookay. A lot to unpack here. Let's see what we can do.
Re: the NASCAR driver. I don't know enough about the specifics to offer much of an opinion, but based on your description: yes, sometimes spectacle can really throw this whole equation out of whack, and a NASCAR crash is a high-octane brand of spectacle. The majority of people don't know a damn thing about Cup titles or the relative success of dirt tracks, but a gruesome NASCAR crash is front-page news. I can definitely see how this might result in some unfair legacies - but it's pretty far removed from the subject at hand, so that's all I'm going to say about that one for now.
Pete Rose - again honestly not my area of expertise, and so I'm basing everything I say on a glance at his Wikipedia page. But it seems to me that your description "a stellar career overshadowed by placing bets on games as a manager" is fair enough, and there's no real problem with that. Personally I don't really know or care much about the careers of baseball managers - whereas I am at least somewhat interested in famous cheats. And I expect there are dozens of stellar managers who I don't know about - but far fewer stellar managers who were banned for dishonest gambling. It's no surprise to me he's remembered for the latter, and since it's a great tradition (and especially but not exclusively an American tradition) to kinda love a clever scam artist, I gotta say, I think he might have actually lucked out on the legacy front.
Janet Jackson - Is that honestly a stain on her legacy? Sure, she suffered some negative consequences - in part because our culture's attitude about sex and women's bodies is completely insane, and also in part I assume because "willingness to do something unscripted and controversial at a show as large as the superbowl" is a black mark in the books of a lot of fastidiously risk-averse producers. But as for her legacy, when the histories are written, it will be just a chapter in the story of her career (and, okay, maybe the book jacket photo) but not even close to the only thing she's remembered for.
Benedict Arnold - Okay c'mon man, whatever. Even his corpse is gone by now. What, is his dust spinning in his grave? I'm not gonna stress over this one. Plus that show Turn portrayed him at least semi-sympathetically at times.
Charles Lindbergh - I've thought of him first and foremost as "nazi sympathizer" since I learned that a long time ago, so I forgot about that, but you're right - he deserves more criticism than he gets. Though he's also remembered primarily for a famous kidnapping to some people. Between the kidnapping, the incredible complexity of the culture's postwar handling of Nazi sympathizers and expats, and the cool airplane stuff, I'm going to chalk that one up to "unique situation" and move on...
H.P. Lovecraft - That's an interesting example because we are right now in the middle of a sea change on that front. For a long time you were correct, but now the subject of his incredible racism has bubbled up to the mainstream. (Incidentally, one of his stories that just became public domain this year is a possible source of inspiration for our public domain game jam but... well, let's just say it offers some challenges on exactly the front you mention, and I hope that if anyone chooses to work with it they have thought carefully about that.) So now we've got Jordan Peele in charge of the upcoming Lovecraft Country series on HBO, among several other recent and upcoming examples of projects taking on Lovecraft's racism. In the case of someone who held views as vile and odious as his, I tend to have an attitude of "we should take the valuable things they created away from them and make them our own, and when possible even specifically put them to work for purposes he would have hated in the hands of creators he would have looked down on". Because I dunno, that feels like a way to achieve justice without throwing out the things we might as well enjoy despite (and to spite) him. And again it doesn't really matter because he has spent the last 80 years in a grave that is little more than the subject of a funny story Patton Oswalt tells that I can't find a convenient link for right now.
Dr. Seuss - I have a big book of Seuss's WW2 cartoons with an introduction by noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman. It's been a while since I read it so maybe I need to take another look, but I don't remember it being predominantly racist. I believe there are a few cartoons that do indeed fall into racist caricature territory in terms of their visual depictions, but the overwhelming thrust of the comics is committed antifascism and advocacy for America to oppose the Nazis.
So look, yes: legacies are complex. And nobody has control over them. So no, I will not respond to this by saying "Lessig was a libel troll and nothing else". But it'd also be nice if Lessig v. New York Times doesn't become the autocomplete for everyone who gets halfway through typing his name in a search box.
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re:
"this is what I thought in the past, and this is why I was wrong to think that way."
Not really. He stands by the assertion that if you are going to take it, take it in secret - but ultimately concludes they shouldn't have taken it at all in this case.
See, you're offering up a totally valid favourable interpretation of his piece; Bowles offered up a totally valid unfavourable interpretation of his piece. And it's not even so much a difference of interpretation as just a different choice of which part of the message to focus on. And the courts are not the place for a fight between totally valid interpretations/focuses.
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re: A chilling reminder that no one is infallible
But if I may make a counterpoint, must we define someone by their faults and bad decisions instead of the good that they have done? I’m NOT excusing Larry’s recent behavior in the slightest, but we still shouldn’t forget all the good things he has done, such as pushes for copyright reform, helping establish the Creative Commons, etc. Perhaps a bigger philosophical argument than the one Lessig was making is if we should regard someone’s legacy as the bad or good things they do, and I’d argue that we remember the good.
But what if it's not up to us, and a person's legacy is defined by which of their actions has the most lasting, regularly-visible impact on the world after they are gone?
Right now for Lessig that would probably be Creative Commons.
After this, it may well be Lessig v. New York Times getting cited in every libel case - either because it's a terrible anti-free-speech precedent that allows people to sue their critics, or because it's a stark example of a pathetic SLAPP suit getting brutally smacked down by the courts.
On the post: Dear Larry Lessig: Please Don't File SLAPP Suits
Re: valid lawsuit possible?
if something you write is misconstrued by another writer, is it ever a valid response to sue
If the writer who was misconstrued is a public figure (which, at least for the limited purposes of the subject at hand, they almost certainly are by simple virtue of having published a public piece of writing on the subject) then a defamation lawsuit requires them to prove that the person who misconstrued them didn't just make a mistake, but rather said something deliberately false or with reckless disregard for the possibility that it might be false.
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