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Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects, has announced its Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. This initiative involves Mozilla "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called 'fake news' online."
Although the announcement from Mozilla claims that the "spread of misinformation violates nearly every tenet of the Mozilla Manifesto", this initiative does raise some concerning questions. Should a web browser vendor be actively patrolling content on the web? Is such patrolling of content harmful to a truly open web? Is this merely the first step toward web browsers censoring or controlling the dissemination of information available on the web? Would the resources expended on this initiative be better spent improving the performance and efficiency of Firefox?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday August 12 2017, @02:52PM (7 children)
I see you've been uninfected by Facebook. Some of the unbelievable shit people fall for, like "on [date] Mars will appear larger than the moon, or on April 20 the moon will turn green. Most people are REALLY gullible.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday August 12 2017, @08:03PM (6 children)
You have seen the base problem, now face the implications. If so many people will fall for such easy things, imagine how easy it was for the The Party to spin out The Narrative, carefully interlocked across platforms; news, entertainment, pop culture, education, etc. Doesn't it make you feel like you are in safe hands? For no matter how much effort you put into being informed and voting wisely based on that effort, your voice is going to be drowned out by those same "marching morons" from Facebook; Facebook just lets YOU see. Mozilla, along with the rest of the SJWs are only mad that others have butted into their efforts at herding the morons and most important that they are being herded to different political ends.
Universal franchise democracy is the root of almost every problem we are facing in the world now. Yet almost everyone has a faith in it that exceeds any level of religiosity outside the Islamic world... who believes democracy is wicked. Even a stopped clock and all that?
One King / Dictator or even ruling committee was proven defective and deadly in the 20th Century, looks like the 21st is shaping up as the one where we finally run the Democracy experiment to destruction enough times we finally admit that everyone voting only gives different failure modes, usually leading right back to Socialism and a Dictator. The American Founding Fathers designed us a Constitutional Republic in the belief it had sufficient design safeguards to prevent a collapse into the universal franchise democracy they could see was fatal from both their history books and the live example playing out in France. It failed to escape the cycle of history.
We need to be thinking of alternatives because it is clear America as it exists can't blunder along much longer without a major collapse. Rotating back to a dictator would be lame now that we finally understand the cyclic nature of history, and we understand the root causes [anonymousconservative.com] that drive it, we should be able to reason ourselves off this treadmill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @08:42PM (1 child)
It is strange to see crazies like yourself actually believe your opinions reflect the majority. Keep that head in the sand jmo!! Not to mention the conservative agenda is way more guilty of your accusations, but being a partisan hack you can't see/admit that.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday August 12 2017, @09:33PM
Reading is fundamental.
I wrote a post explicitly denouncing running things based on the opinions of the majority. Denouncing the concept of Democracy itself in no uncertain terms. Wow. Just wow.
And if you read my posting history you will know my equal disdain for Conservatism. It can't win because winning is explicitly forbidden by Conservative doctrine. Read Kirk's The Conservative Mind and it is laid bare, from Burke to Reagan, Conservative thought holds that having a goal is not Conservative, only reacting against Progressivism to retard its march is proper. The Alt-Right is the only Right that fights. It is the only Right that can win because it is the only one that WANTS to win, the only one that is even trying to define a goal to fight FOR.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:00AM
What do you think about the Switzerland Federal Constitution with the options for voting directly on specific issues?
The failure mode of current system seems to be partly rooted in lack of education of power issues and subversive media.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:23AM (2 children)
I think democracy *could* work. But not in its current form, that is evident around the world by now. The key to making democracy work is education. Real education - critical thinking on top of a broad knowledgebase, rooted in practical experience and observation. Only when people can see our career politicians and their parties for what they really are, can democracy again become to be for the people, by the people. Of course, having at least one side of politics constantly undermining education funding seriously acts against that ideal, and the reasoning is obvious.
Short term progression after indirect democracy? I'd be willing to attempt random appointment from the full citizen base. You know, like jury duty. In all their ignorance (including mine), I'm pretty confident they would not do a worse job *for the country*.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 13 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)
Universal franchise democracy (i.e. everyone votes) could only work at Lake Wobegone, where all the kids are above average. The problem really is that bad. Almost by definition most people in society are going to be "Have Nots" while only a few will be "Haves" so unless you can think out the long term problems and have the time preference to postpone gratification of desires, the idea of voting to seize and redisribute wealth is going to be a winner. Socialism makes sense, as it is the enlightened self interested move, from a game theory perspective unless you are capable of thinking long term and postponing gratification to an extent not typically seen. Most people are, by definition, on or close enough to the middle to not matter for this discussion, the left side of the Bell Curve and inability to think long term, desire for instant gratification and other negative traits will cluster on the left side, as those traits are generally what relegate one to the "Have Not" status.
If you use a population of humans as they actually exist, you will fail with democracy. Even if you buy the worst of the "race realist" theories and build a "White Utopia" it fails, because it failed. America had already ceased to be a Constitutional Republic before blacks or any significant numbers of other "non-Europeans" were voting in numbers that mattered. Without the black / brown "coalition of the ascendant" base of the current Democratic Party they would be farther from their Final Solution but the Progressives achieved all of the preconditions for the final collapse to Socialism except universal healthcare around the turn of the 20th Century with a very monochrome voting population.
Unless you have a way to restrict the franchise to the right side of the Bell Curve without quickly failing into an Oligarchy, we are still looking for a government model that could work. "Could work" being defined for my purpose as "without an obvious defect and likely failure mode."
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:21AM
Aye, there be a reason why the call democracy the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I really wish I had a solution, but short of everyone being a lot smarter, more engaged and less self-serving, the most efficient and able-to-progress-humanity form of governance does seem to be the benevolent dictator. Ironically.