Religion is a monstrous evil.

Russian disinformation bots do express opinions I guess, so you have a point.

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Now I know you’re a Russian shill. What an insane claim.

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In the US, maybe. But that’s considered a flawed democracy and getting worse all the time. Only 8% of the nations on earth are full democracies, a number that continues to fall because of the pessimism and stupidity promulgated by authoritarian regimes.

Anarchy is the rejection of unjust hierarchies, not all hierarchies. Certainly a parent would have authority over a small child insofar as that’s reasonably justified. Similarly, some expert may be elected to a position where they’re democratically authorized to make specific decisions so we don’t have to vote a thousand times a day about specialized matters.

On the whole, anarchism just means a lot more democracy.

Tankies gonna tankie

Since when is piracy bad?

There shouldn’t be “relatively affordable housing on Florida’s coastline.” That ship has sailed. The state is going to flood and get battered by hurricanes until it’s completely subsumed by the ocean. They’ve had half a century to get their shit together and reverse global warming. Florida should no longer qualify for any other federal aid. Surrender that shit to Poseidon.

Pffft. Next up, FDA declines to approve aspirin for headaches. Give me a break. The whole rent-seeking bureaucracy around American medicine is ridiculous.

These are billionaire CEOs, not artists. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about their work, which you can learn all about from the many, many self-fellating autobiographies their ghost writers churn out every year.

I can’t imagine how hard it must be to manage a company as big and complex as YouTube.

To be fair, not at all. Someone in her position would be making broad decisions, such as “should we have a downvote button,” and spending her time courting advertisers and handling the whiny board of directors, who are mostly geriatric babies.

As a cohort, the American gerontocracy is uniquely shitty. You almost have to admire the boomers’ tenacity to destroy everything before they die.

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Violent criminals are a fairly small fraction of total inmates, and a whopping 76% of the Texas jail population hasn’t even been convicted of a crime.

Also, Texas loves rapists and most of them aren’t in prison anyway. Not to mention Abbott just pardoned that convicted homicidal murderer.

To be fair, being smart is famously correlated with getting hit in the head for a living.

I don’t think that’s quite right, because there’s no instruction associated with spreading lies about someone. You don’t have to say “you should attack this person based on this [random lie]” to be guilty of libel. The lie itself causes the bad consequences that now make you guilty.

“As a German, I find myself groaning when I see this discussion come up. Conspiracy theorists are not rational. If fascists could be swayed by facts and reason, they would not believe what even the most minor bit of fact checking would disprove. Allowing them to spew their nonsense freely or join a coalition won’t disabuse them of their notions; it will help them seek and build echo-chambers and become further radicalized.We see the echo chamber effect on every online platform. Whether or not the holocaust happened, for example, is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Making up your own facts is called lying. And when your lies are so malicious and harmful that they actually pose a threat to other people or the nation itself, then yes, that should absolutely be punishable. It’s no different than slander or libel.

“What value is there to allowing holocaust denial? Serious question. And I don’t mean appealing to the slippery slope of how it leads to other worse prohibitions. There’s a lot of arguing for Free Speech for its own sake - that Free Speech is the highest virtue in and of itself that must never, ever be compromised, for any reason, and that this should be self-evident. But I ask, what’s the harm in not allowing holocaust denial, specifically? What is the benefit in allowing it? There is none. Nothing good will ever come out of someone spewing holocaust denial. Ever. You won’t get a thoughtful debate beneficial to both parties. They’re wrong, simple as that. The “best” outcome you’ll get out of it is that you can convince a denier or someone on the fence that they’re wrong. Great. The best outcome involves suppressing it. There are, however, a hell of a lot potentially bad consequences in that their stupidity can infect others and shift the Overton window their way.

“The reason that the majority of modern Germans look at the Nazi flag and feel nothing but revulsion whereas a sizable portion of US southerners actually fly the confederate flag and defend it (Heritage, not hate, or It was about states’ rights, not slavery, or Slaves weren’t treated so bad) is that Germans were forbidden from telling each other comforting lies about their past."

— quote I stole from unknown redditor

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