The most convincing argument against the commodification of sex is, in my opinion, that such intimacy holds a special enough place in human psychology that even an efficient sex market wouldn't make people happy.
I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.
Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.
> The most convincing argument against the commodification of sex is, in my opinion, that such intimacy holds a special enough place in human psychology that even an efficient sex market wouldn't make people happy.
If you're not doing this bit in a standup routine, you should be. "It's not cheating honey! It's just the commodification of sex!"
And there is that meme again, people fail to understand what socialism is. Social policies or redistribution don't make a socialist state.
Norway is a liberal democracy. The workers don't own the means of production there.
And the Soviet Union was indeed a socialist state. Statism and socialism aren't mutually exclusive, and being both is exactly the point of a dictatorship of the proletariat. That it didn't bring what it promised is just one more tired argument. Scotsmen are never true socialists for some reason.
All in all, Venezuela's woes aren't all to blame on socialism, but you can't really help but point out that it's a direct application of the principles layed out in The Road to Serfdom. The State grew by violating private property to redistribute it, scared off any outside investment, consolidating into an all-in policy on oil. And that investment had to be controlled, which means loyalty became more important than competence to recruit oil industry officials. And the rest was just one market fluctuation away.
Nation owned is still publicly owned, not ran by workers.
This is exactly the same thing that happened to originally collectivist farming in Soviet Russia - it quickly got nationalized or virtually nationalized by centrally mandated quotas.
This is why I wouldn't blame it on socialism per se.
It was the stated goal of the socialist government however to get there. And I'd rather argue that this aim partly caused the outcome.
In fact I feel this is the main miscommunication that causes the "it wasn't real X" debate. People use the term X to refer both to the goal and the method of implementation.
Pretty sure spying on people who just want to play a video game without telling them or letting them opt out ahead of time is not only a bit immoral but also very much illegal, at least in Europe.
I doubt the form they have on their website where you have to know your id to opt out of the spying would hold up in court.
And that's probably why they gladly removed that piece of software - they would risk being fined in long term in Europe, I believe.
Opt-out as someone already noted, is available on red shell company site but I would try to block it in hosts instead of going on site where you can be again tracked. In a nearly ideal world, Firaxis would ask their customers if they agree for this e-life "improvement" of more accurate ads and whatnot else. In a perfect one, they wouldn't bother including Red Shell at all.
How so? The opt-out is sketchy at best. Also, if I fire up Civ VI, I'm not at all aware of this practice. Neither of these suggest compliance; they suggest non-compliance.
We'd just be back to the time where the powers that be demonized the internet for what it was: something they couldn't control or sometimes even understand.
Email is a different beast, being private communication. But Usenet is exactly what you describe, a decentralized forum. And unsuprisingly it had both the best and the worst of humanity in there.
You get one guess as to which of those two got portrayed more in the media.
So I suppose my stance that the benefits of online voting for direct democracy largely outweight the complexity cost of a sufficiently secure solution are equivalent to the older type of objectivists who realize that free market isn't perfect but that it does lead to better outcomes in most cases.
That we can't produce secure voting software is just a testament to how much we suck at software engineering and making safe computers in general, because cryptographically this is a solved problem.
Hell I'd argue that modern implementations like Estonia's are pretty close to an acceptable standard of trustlessness. But that's thanks to open standards and public ledgers. The closed source voting machine was never a good idea, and never will be.
Given the ancap vibe of blockchain in general this is all a bit ironic isn't it?
online voting is a solution in search of a problem. Digital voting just makes it vulnerable to hacking and the general public barely understands how computer works.
Paper ballots are cheap and auditable, and can be understood by anyone that knows how to count.
I know this is a joke (although only partly), but blocklists are honestly part of the problem.
People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.
The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.
There is a fair bit of scholarship that says this is incorrect. Most commonly, people cute the paradox of tolerance as a starting point[1], but there's lots more.
I don't think he's invoking that. That we must be tolerant of intolerance lest we become intolerant ourselves.
I think he's saying that that the ease of which we can cut out any information that challenges our beliefs does more harm than good.
I'm sure you're a fine, upstanding, rational person who will always consider every viewpoint and come to a reasoned conclusion based on the facts every time and won't let emotions dictate any part of your decision.
However, not everyone is so disciplined. Don't consider the rational actor. Consider the irrational. Consider the flat-earther who can personally silence any sources that provide evidence to the contrary. Just stuck in their little bubble of misinformation. Then when something does sneak through their filter, they'll regard it as the anomaly because everything else they see confirms what they already know.
Now, there is some benefit to being able to silence certain opinions. I for one don't need flat-earthers constantly pushing their narrative that flies in the face of facts. But, then again, they feel the same way. I believe I've considered their evidence and their viewpoint fairly and have come to a conclusion rationally. But so do they. I believe I'm right, I'm fairly certain of it. But so are they.
It comes down to believing that personal abuse should be silenced. If I'm just blatantly attacking you or you're attacking me with no other goal but to be insulting, then being able to block each other seems fine. But to be able to silence information just because you disagree with it seems a bit more dodgy.
People misuse Popper a whole lot. The paradox has more to do with being firm on the application of the rule of law as it pertains to violence than a metapolitical discussion.
A microscopic percentage of social media users have even heard of blocklists, let alone use them, but it's the people who forcefully opt themselves out of pointless Internet arguments that are the problem? That's a ridiculous and telling argument.
A majority percentage of social media users have their content catered such that it agrees with their sensibilities. Whether they've heard of blocklists or not, things they don't like are effectively blocked from appearing before their eyes.
Once again: it is hard to understand the reasonable argument that says that a big problem with social media is that people disengage from arguments with random people too much.
Disengaging from random arguments isn't the problem; the problem is living in a world where nearly every opinion you see more or less aligns with your own views, to the point where we've been conditioned to see dissenting opinions as being hostile to us to the point where we instinctively reach for the unfollow/block/mute button when we see them.
It's not about picking and choosing who you engage with, it's about filtering broad-stroke opinions you disagree with out of your life entirely, such that when one sees any trace of an opinion that runs contrary to their own internal narrative, they reach for the block/unfollow button, instead of engaging to find mutual truth, or even just ignoring it and scrolling past it. Just a few years ago, when someone saw an opinion online that they disagreed with, it didn't fill them with the urge to remove that opinion and any chance of seeing similar opinions from their worldview, but that's how we've been conditioned due to social media being used increasingly politically.
You're still not understanding what I'm saying. There's a huge difference between ignoring/not engaging someone saying something you don't agree with, and filtering them out of your reality via mute/unfollow.
Are you really arguing that you have a right to pick a person at random and coerce them into at least seeing what you have to say before making a decision to ignore you?
You're arguing for the personal right to act a certain way as I understand it.
I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.
These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.
It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".
What makes you think it's productive to enable coerced 1:1 political conversations between strangers? That's what it means to lobby against blocklists.
On the contrary, I think there should be far more blocklists.
Opponents of blocklists get themselves wound up over the potential productive conversations that might occur were it not for the overzealous filtering of the lists. But I don't see any positive value in that potential. The overwhelming majority of potential 1:1 political debates never occur, and nobody cares. Why should I then be concerned over potential Twitter debates, which are adversely selected for toxicity?
People who are passionate about the evils of blocklists also have a hard time not coming across like the sea lion from the cartoon.
Yes, the great failure of the internet is that it is lacks of standard mechanisms that exist in polite society to exclude the assholes. Being an asshole is cheap on the web and so you get lots of assholes. IRL being an asshole (at least in some states) has very high consequences and so you get civilization. Fixing the web is just a matter of rediscovering appropriate mechanisms to correct, silence, and ultimately exclude those who have nothing to contribute and no value to add. Google, Facebook and Twitter will inevitably clean up their spaces and new norms will ultimately be enforced. At that point things will mostly return to normal.
Of course the great thing about the web is also that it's so big. We don't need to literally silence the assholes. They should feel free to congregate in various Youtube comment threads and on boards like 4chan and voat.
> the great failure of the internet is that it is lacks of standard mechanisms that exist in polite society to exclude the assholes.
American society no longer has those mechanisms either. They were dismantled in the 50s and 60s under the opinion that they were too restrictive and stifling.
I don't think it's the exclusion of assholes that's the problem.
It's the inclusion.
Before, if you had a really socially unacceptable opinion, you couldn't really voice it without attracting a lot of heat. Now, you can throw your voice into the aether and get back thousands of people across the world who feel the same way you do. Whether if you're into collecting stamps, ancient alien conspiracies, or Nazi furry cosplay.
Everything becomes normalized to a degree. The motto "strength in numbers" becomes the issue.
However, there are some good things that have come from this. Gay people, transgender people, people with various mental illnesses all have a place to come together without having to face the judgment of the people in their communities. It's the largest alcoholics anonymous meeting you could want.
Reddit fitness mods seem to be sponsoring workouts. Instead of doing the methods that work, they are peddling a few select workouts that have questionable effectiveness.
So they ban people for suggesting other plans, which only compounds in resentment. It seems almost daily topics talking about Starting Strength workouts are deleted, but there are too many people that already know about it.
