* Posts by khanfisher

14 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2021

Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies

khanfisher

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

They use GNU-licensed software, but they'd still rather everything were permissively licensed. Contrast how intel took MINIX and used it in their inbuilt spyware chip:

https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/cucklicenses

The title's a bit cringe, but the article does the job.

khanfisher

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

Parroting what the media tells you to do is the smart thing if you don't actually care. When you're a scientist in stalinist russia, you praise comrade stalin and get back to the lab work.

khanfisher

Re: Who can spot the hypocrisy?

>the label has to fit

I disagree. I've seen plenty of people who aren't something be labelled as that thing in order to ostracize them. Or does the label of 'witch' have to be accurate for witch-hunting to work? Well, she has to be ugly and have a wart and be a social recluse, I suppose, that's good enough, burn her.

The amount of nuance people will accept has gone way down as a result of the desire to be able to cancel people. You can fit any label on to anyone if you squint enough, or cherry-pick what they say, or just don't read what they said; or if they ever said anything contentious, or that could be read in a poor way out of context. There goes 99% of the interesting, nuanced speech about any topic anybody actually cares about, there goes any consideration of the viewpoint of The Enemy, because people on twitter are blind- willfully or not- to nuance, as that gets in the way of doing what's fun- burning people on a crusade.

khanfisher

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

It's pretty highly correlated with intelligence, though, and with general life success; and with the ability to quickly adapt and climb social hierarchies, with exceptions for intelligent autists.

Just because the people at the top are miserable doesn't mean people aren't striving to get to the top, or that smarter people aren't better at that.

khanfisher

Re: Oh how the woke wimper

Clearly, obviously, he means something different when he says "freedom of speech" than you do. The "freedom of speech" referred to in the first amendment is something separate from the law itself, a pre-existing ideal, like "freedom of movement". My movement can be blocked by you being in the way. This isn't necessarily illegal, but ideally I'd be able to move anywhere, and generally we'd like people to be able to move around without undue consequences.

The principle of freedom of speech calls for charity towards those who offend with that speech.

When someone kills a cartoonist for drawing Mohammed, they're infringing on their ability to express themselves without undue negative consequences- unless you think that consequence was due, given what was expressed. We can keep ramping down the viciousness of the retaliation, until me deciding personally not to associate with you, or even saying I didn't like what you said- which infringes on your ability to speak without consequence, but almost everyone would say those particular consequences were fair. The disagreements of the "free speech" crowd are twofold:

1. The consequences imposed by cancel-mobs (social shunning, being fired from jobs, permanent tarring) are often disproportionate, hypocritical and unfair

2. The practice of large-scale ostracism is itself unhealthy, and often dishonest and motivated by vindictiveness.

You obviously disagree with the grandfather on those points, and on which consequences are due. But please don't act like there's only one possible definition of such a broad phrase, and that anyone who disagrees on the definition of a contentiously interpreted phrase is just clearly some kind of gibbering idiot who couldn't possibly just be speaking a different language than you. Taboo the phrase 'freedom of speech' and make up two new phrases to refer to the two different principles, like 'freedom from prosecution for speech' and 'freedom from persecution for speech', and then argue about those.

khanfisher

Re: Is there anything more pathetic than the self appointed offence takers?

>Saying "I won't work with him" is free speech. Are you prepared to defend that or is it just misogyny that needs protecting?

Of course that speech is also worth protecting.

In terms of what to spend effort protecting- that speech thankfully already seems to be protected (and greatly amplified) by the current dominant social order, in a response to past orders.

khanfisher

Re: Oh how the woke wimper

The 'woke' called themselves that, and the term is used sarcastically by their detractors.

A major part of the complaint by the anti-woke is that the woke don't do what you say. According to the detractors, 'woke' people don't listen to the people whose lives they try to ruin, or apply any measure of charity. The complaints are the the 'woke' are themselves highly prejudiced against people who disagree with them, and that a significant segment of the 'woke' take vindictive glee in causing or encouraging harm to those deemed acceptable targets.

A big part of this is just how mob justice works; it latches on to visible targets and tries to bring them down. And as 'woke culture' is socially relatively powerful, and potentially useful to take down people you don't like, you'd expect a lot of sociopaths and other bad actors to come and join in under the banner, mouthing the party line for the chance to take someone down- perhaps a rival, perhaps someone they have a grudge against, perhaps just for the rush of getting someone fired.

It feels good to SWAT people, it feels good to dox people, it feels good to troll someone, it feels good to get someone expelled from their school, for the same reason it feels good to beat up one of the other kids on the playground with your friends. If you can then say you were doing good, even better!

Aside from outright malevolence, there's a danger of a feedback loop/purity spiral culture of fear. Nobody wants to be *ist, genuinely being *ist is actually bad, and some people are *ist. More importantly nobody wants to be branded as *ist, and a great way to show you aren't *ist is by accusing someone else of being *ist. The more people get fired or kicked out of things for being (seen to be) *ist, the more incentive people have to demonstrate they aren't. This leads to a widening of the terms, where ideas and statments that last year would have been fine, and that on the object level might be important to solving problems in the world, are labelled *ist and become socially toxic. Eventually, any idea or person that isn't directly in line with the mainstream is *ist; *ist just means 'heretic'.

If we are in a purity spiral- well, they're like bubbles; eventually they crash, as it becomes common knowledge that *ist doesn't mean *ist anymore. And 50 years later kids wonder why people saw communists everywhere.

The problem isn't necessarily moral fashions in and of themselves- you can't get rid of fashion- but the viciousness involved in the modern incarnation.

khanfisher

Re: Who can spot the hypocrisy?

Let him in, the more time he spends in our DOTA clan, the better for north korea.

khanfisher

Re: Who can spot the hypocrisy?

It just seems like that leaves an obvious route to excluding people. If I want to be exclusive, I label someone as one of the acceptably-excludable groups- racist, misoginyst, irish- and exclude them based on that. Or rather, I expand the definition of the *ist and *phobe terms as far as I can, making the group less inclusive, because what I want- my human instinct- is to exclude people I don't like, and the broader those terms are, the more people I can selectively enforce Popper's move on and exclude.

khanfisher

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

The people claiming to want a kinder, more inclusive world, and using this claim to justify excluding particular people, might do well to temper their own public expressions of scorn. It isn't a good look.

khanfisher

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

Quickly adapting circumstances favors the social and intellectual elite. More intelligent people are more adaptable. The average IQ is higher among programmers than manual laborers; you have to learn more new things faster (that new javascript framework won't research itself) to do well in the first job than the second. As society gets more technically complex and more jobs are automated or become higher-complexity, this ostracizes the less-intelligent.

There's something similar for social mores, taboos and morals. They have their own shifting fashions, and those higher in 'social intelligence' and spare time- slack- can adapt faster, keep up with the newest buzzwords and faux pas. This all serves as a form of social barrier between the elite classes and the proles.

Perhaps, when free resources dwindle and competition rises, people become more cutthroat about maintaining strict social divisions like this, and so the rate of taboo evolution increases?

khanfisher

Re: Oh how the woke wimper

There is such a thing as social power, and social power dynamics mean that freedom of association can end up oppressive and socially deleterious. This is what people complaining about 'cancel culture' are worried about.

It seems pretty uncharitable to call the people being 'deplatformed' and marginalized by the powerful- credit card processors, banks and social media sites- pathetic wimps and cowards. You're right- the weak are pathetic!

When others demanded their right to free association, it was legislated away because collective dynamics led to less-than-good outcomes. That's what's happening here, with mob justice slowly building a culture of fear, with creeping definitions of 'racist' and 'misogynist', the movements and terms being co-opted by social climber sociopaths and used to bludgeon competitors and opponents.

All of this together is deleterious to the wider culture. It's witch-hunting that feels good, but fails to solve bigger problems. Rule through fear doesn't convince people, they'll just pretend to go along with it, and as soon as the social deadlock slips or people think they aren't being observed and judged their true opinions will come through. All this is doing is breeding generations of crafty liars, as in the soviet union.

Time and brainpower spent on not getting socially ostracized is time not spent actually solving problems, or breaking up the banks and monopolies, or trying to counteract oligopolies or whatever. Why do you think big companies love 'woke' stuff so much? Elites can keep up with moral fashions easily, proles don't have to and so will definitely never challenge the elite, and the middle class can only do so desperately, with it taking up so much of their time they have a harder time rising up and competing with the elite.

And on the whole, the anglosphere and countries strongly influenced by it are constricted and contorted, and less productive and less innovative for it, and people are still dying on the streets and people are still living in misery pumped up on opioids and the banks and wall street and venture capital are still eating and concentrating the wealth, and cheering on the blue-versus-red culture war as they do so.

khanfisher

Re: want to control what everyone is allowed to say or think.

Plenty of 'opinionated and bigoted' places with high have much lower crime-rates than 'woke' cities. "I have my house, you have yours, we live relatively far away from each other, don't mess with me and I won't mess with you."

Your characterization of the rest of the world seems pretty hostile. It reminds me of Trump's 'shithole countries' quip.

If we're going down that route, it might be noted that the U.S. has been a better place to live than poorer or more violent countries for a while- since long before woke culture starting taking over.

In practice, this is just another episode in the long random-walk of history, and just another religious revival with its own purges and witch-hunts, a manic fashion flare-up of a dying empire.

khanfisher

Re: Let this be a warning to all decent people

It's definitely funny that Google's head of open source is one of the signees of the petition to get him kicked off. There's an obvious ulterior motive for a big tech employee in charge of embrace, extend, extinguish shutting up a vocal free software advocate.