attacking open discourse as anti-woman and anti-minority is very, uhh, squicky. I don’t have a better way of putting my thoughts down on the matter—it’s just very, very concerning to me. It feels like a Stalinist complaining that we aren’t putting enough bullets in the heads of dissenters
There is no such thing as open discourse any more than there can ever be such a thing as a ‘free’ market. Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
Perhaps what I was saying wasn’t precise enough there. I’m talking about how when a community starts responding to certain arguments by vilifying their proponents, there’s a chilling effect on the discourse in the community.
Openness of discourse is more of a matter of degree than on/off, anyways, much like a ‘free’ market.
There is no such thing as open discourse … Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
What makes you think that this is a functional workaround, as opposed to compounding the problem? The underlying idea seems to be a preference for “safe spaces”—hardly a move towards more openness.
I don’t see anyone pointing at any particular workaround, just someone pointing at the concept-vector of pushing towards outside of a certain set of conditions.
For instance, Omega could give you a box that contains a million utilons iff you pretend within your discourse and marketing that every player is on equal grounds with identical game matrices… but I’m not sure how much that messes with stuff and I’m not in the mood for maths.
Just throwing out there that one may have directed a rebuke at a pile of straw.
Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both.
If I register an anonymous account on a forum than power doesn’t prevent me from speaking. I might get disapproval, I might even get banned but I don’t have to expect repercussion for my daily life from speaking my mind.
It’s not like a face to face conversation where you have serious consequences for speaking against power.
That a bad example given that the user in question wasn’t anonymous. His address was easily found by another person without access to law enforcement resources.
There’s definitely speech that can give you problems if it can be backtracked to your identity. In Western society using Tor and not leaking personal information should be sufficient for protecting that kind of speech.
For some kind of speech you have to think more about protecting your anonymous speech by technical means such as Tor than for other kinds of speech.
The guy in the example had the problem that he didn’t expect repercussion for his actions and therefore didn’t do the necessary protection of his anonymity.
There is no such thing as open discourse any more than there can ever be such a thing as a ‘free’ market. Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.
Perhaps what I was saying wasn’t precise enough there. I’m talking about how when a community starts responding to certain arguments by vilifying their proponents, there’s a chilling effect on the discourse in the community.
Openness of discourse is more of a matter of degree than on/off, anyways, much like a ‘free’ market.
What makes you think that this is a functional workaround, as opposed to compounding the problem? The underlying idea seems to be a preference for “safe spaces”—hardly a move towards more openness.
I don’t see anyone pointing at any particular workaround, just someone pointing at the concept-vector of pushing towards outside of a certain set of conditions.
For instance, Omega could give you a box that contains a million utilons iff you pretend within your discourse and marketing that every player is on equal grounds with identical game matrices… but I’m not sure how much that messes with stuff and I’m not in the mood for maths.
Just throwing out there that one may have directed a rebuke at a pile of straw.
If I register an anonymous account on a forum than power doesn’t prevent me from speaking. I might get disapproval, I might even get banned but I don’t have to expect repercussion for my daily life from speaking my mind.
It’s not like a face to face conversation where you have serious consequences for speaking against power.
That rather depends on what’s on your mind. Example.
That a bad example given that the user in question wasn’t anonymous. His address was easily found by another person without access to law enforcement resources.
There’s definitely speech that can give you problems if it can be backtracked to your identity. In Western society using Tor and not leaking personal information should be sufficient for protecting that kind of speech.
For some kind of speech you have to think more about protecting your anonymous speech by technical means such as Tor than for other kinds of speech.
The guy in the example had the problem that he didn’t expect repercussion for his actions and therefore didn’t do the necessary protection of his anonymity.
Being truly anonymous on the ’net is harder than most people imagine.
I am not sure this is the case. Example.
Oh, and in this context what’s special about a Western society?
Not an example of speech that happens within a forum.
We have a concepts such as guilty until proven innocent with makes it hard to sentence people based on statistical stylometry data.
The interest in censorship is also lower. It’s much easier to simply ignore speech because Western society is more resilient.
It’s an example of someone “using Tor and not leaking personal information”.
“Innocent until proven guilty” you mean?
Yes ;)