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What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not "conservatism" in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called "the Gods of the Market Place." We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.
As I think about it, I'm not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn't a "teaching" with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.
It's what used to be called a liberal education.
The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
Bret Stephens's speech warrants a full read. It makes valuable points that we all need to hear, even on SN.
(Score: 5, Disagree) by c0lo on Wednesday September 27 2017, @01:18PM (11 children)
This doesn't make you different enough from any of the two, you are promoting censorship of expression by maintaining that lameness filter.
Case at point, I can't use the words "Dīck nigğεrs" with normal orthography, not even with the purpose of parody.
This in spite of being logged in and not posting anonymously and obviously not spamming the thread.
Are we afraid of some word on S/N?
Yes, I do understand that we hate spamming, but a regex filter is not fighting spam, is just banning some character or a sequence of them, in other words is banning a form of expression. How can you refute a position discussing the "Di¢ĸ nīğgεrs" phenomenon if you can't see it?
What is worse, the current incarnation of the lameness filter has side-effects in banning other forms of expression. The UNICODE Greek letter iota (accented or not) is banned no matter in which context it appears. Try going to the "Know thyself" [wikipedia.org] page on Wikipedia, copy the last letter of the first word using Greek letters (that's the one, it resembles an i without the dot), paste in in a comment and hit "Preview", see what the lameness filter has to say.
Funny enough, the ι entity is not banned. Mind you, you can't kill the Dιcκ nιggεrs without shooting yourself in the foot".
So, my point: Mister TMB, tear down the lameness filter [youtube.com], not only it's ineffective, but it hurts us twice:
- you need to spend time maintaining the filter (and any programmer worth her/his salt knows regex-es are not a solution to filter out meaning even when the meaning is spam
- there are side effects which hurt S/N in other areas
Consider resolving the spam problem in other ways, regex-es are not the answer.
(how's this for something to rationally disagree with? No, I'm dead serious, this is not a troll and definitely it is not spam)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday September 27 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)
At this point all he could really do is make a massive freaking blacklist that had pretty much every pattern of the banned terms in it, with some wildcards and some things to filter out spaces. Might make it more efficient by scanning for strings of 4-7 characters that look like "dick" (for example l33tsp34k |)!c|), checking the next word to see if it matches everyone's favorite racial slur, etc etc.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 27 2017, @06:49PM
Agreed. There are some tricks to keep it sorta maintainable, but it's gonna be massive.
And, to keep it fast enough, I'd look for scanner generators, like ragel [wikipedia.org] - at least the automata could get compi... hang on, rehash is still PERL, ain't it? Forget it then.
(you know what's this:
c? Sorta looks like an E but is a <s>c</s>; resulting in something like niggcrs during regex-ing. I bet I can come with a new daily D/N leaking out of the lameness filter for months)And then... what?
You reckon the "Cunt Whitetrash" sisterhood is not capable of replacing the "Dι̊cΚ nι̊gg૯rs" spam?
Tell ye, the moment you allow UNICODE, you show yourself as a brave soul, trusting the community against the spam - 'cause coding cannot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 27 2017, @07:46PM (2 children)
Get over yourself. I already told dingleberry that the blanket bans on homoglyphs are going away in the next site update. I simply do not have time to write SN code right now (paying work) or they'd already be gone.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by c0lo on Wednesday September 27 2017, @07:56PM (1 child)
Glad to hear, I wish you to recover in the financial position you see appropriate for yourself.
But you still intend to maintain the lameness filter? If so, why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:16PM
Low hanging fruit. The new system's going to be much easier to update and should have approaching zero false positives given our use case.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:06PM (4 children)
Sometimes, you get spam modded for being too right! At least here on SoylentNews!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:18PM (3 children)
Why, oh why, have we not put a +0 STFU mod in yet?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:42PM (2 children)
Cause you realized that you would be flooded with it :D
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 28 2017, @04:18AM
Wow, he really didn't think about what kind of a straightline he was feeding us with that one, did he? Niiiice.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 29 2017, @12:18AM
Oh yeah. That was why. I knew there was a reason.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:18PM
I'm still not convinced that it wasn't all just TMB trolling SN and getting an excuse to implement censorship specifically to bring out this debate. Doesn't quite add up I guess, there hasn't been any real pro-censorship talk around here.