The problem is that "jerk" is relative and very sensitive people will tilt the scale. Also, occasionally jerks will have interesting insights that you would miss if you blocked the jerks. It's a problem of whether your platform cares more about having diverse viewpoints or about people being polite to each other.
Very odd article. This author is trying a little too hard to poo-poo the Intercept article but has lost the plot. The reveal here was that the US government has the ability to shape and influence what people think on private platforms. Yes, maybe this has been known to people in the government watchdog space but I highly doubt the average US citizen knows. This has a direct impact on the Democratic process yet the author doesn't think this is even a little bit interesting?
The whole point of this article is that nothing of the sort was revealed. The article specifically and repeatedly falsifies claims made in the Intercept article to that effect, as well as pointing things out like the Intercept citing fuzzy draft printouts of documents that are publicly available to create the impression that they leaked.
Masnick (who I'm not a fan of) was even more specific about this on Twitter, where he claims that literally every factual assertion about monitoring and suppression in the Intercept article has now been refuted. Not most of them, not the gist of them, all of them.
I think you're partially correct but the framing is a bit off. A country's interests and security comes first. We have seen China's values and goals obviously clash with western values so why would the west let them have their way?
Racism as a catch-all term makes for really unproductive discourse. There's a difference between "I deeply hate people of a certain race from the bottom of my heart" vs "I generally hate the behavior I have observed of a certain race because they are different from my expectations." The latter is probably more common and it's because humans don't like things that are different from them. The former is evil and is what used to come to mind when people used the term. I would like to see these two things conflated less.
The dichotomy in popular discourse is even stronger. "I generally prefer to avoid the behavior I have typically observed of a certain race because they are different from my expectations," is also often called racist and evil. In which case, I don't care if I'm a racist by that definition.
I disagree. One is a hatred of a an immutable characteristic (race) whereas the other is a hatred of an action. There is a big difference. This is not a justification of hatred of actions but people seem to conflate the two.
Your comment seems to be gaslighting. The other of those is inexcusable bad behavior whereas the other is a fundamental human survival instinct. Calling that racist is perhaps defensible, but "evil"? Preposterous.
Both cases are very abhorrent examples of racism. Perhaps it is convenient to justify tribalism as a “[…]fundamental human survival instinct” but that’s the same useless lizard brain justification that people use to justify unacceptable behavior, namely sexual assault. We’re so far past being tribal hunter gatherers so there’s absolutely no point in trying to 1. Predict how people behaved back then 2. Use animal behaviors to justify how present day people behave 3. Apply these bad inferences as excuses to the norms we have in place today. All forms of racism are unnatural and prejudices might “seem” justified if you’re an animal, but the prejudices we have were obtained during our modern day lived experiences and not some deeply in-grained natural response. So no, you can’t just say racism is some kind of animal adaptation that we maintained through prehistory.
You're conflating possibly offensive human behavior with clearly evil fascism, thus downplaying the worse evil. That is not acceptable and I think you should stop it.
Is vs ought. It /might/ be a biologically rooted tendency (and there is evidence suggesting this is the case) but that does not imply that is how we should be. After all, humans also have the opposite tendency, i.e. to love what is foreign, or an orthogonal one, i.e. to insist on mutual respect.
Human rights have no ontological basis, but they are a valid marker of any form of human civilization.
Finally, this answers some questions about the madness of the last 5 or so years. Everyone knew this was happening to some degree but the abhorrent part is how politically biased the execution was.
> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs
This is like saying people that like apple pie don't like apple pie. Yes, there are liars and hypocrites out there but those aren't the true believers.
That said, despite the challenges out there, that doesn't mean you just give up the fight for free speech. There will always be bias but the goal here is to even the playing field so we can return to a time where the rules are applied evenly to all players.
Sadly, communication and writing skills takes a backseat to algorithm interviews. I understand the company benefits massively from hyper-focusing on hard skills but quality of life suffers for your average IC mired by the daily failures of miscommunication.
Some extra nuance is that there exists people who's entire lives revolve around work. These people's whole life schedule revolves around work and their social networks revolve around work people because they have no hobbies or other avenues of socialization. These are the type of people who live solely to climb the corporate ladder and only talk shop and office politics. Despite being quite a social person, I can't stand working with these types of people and would rather be isolated at home than be subjected to these types. At least this has been my experience working in large enterprise corporations in Silicon Valley.
I don't think it ever went away. You see people getting massively flagged or downvoted and called "Republican" for going against the grain everyday here on HN.
