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from the going-to-need-lots-of-volunteers-to-build-the-block-list dept.
Rhode Island is the latest US state to discuss mandatory censorship of web content, at first targeting pornography:
Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the [I]nternet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege.
These proposals fly in the face of the observation that automated pornography filters don't work and that even the manual ones are neither practical, reliable, nor scalable.
Source : Rhode Island proposes blocking all online porn and charging $20 to unblock it. Boing Boing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @07:38PM (1 child)
There's still Mexico and Canada: Redherring.
A group or collection is not an organization: Worse than No True Scotsman; the argument remains unchanged.
No mere law: Straw man. Redherring. No True Scotsman.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday March 09 2018, @10:00PM
The point is that you said "entire continent", but the US is less than half the North American continent by land area and a little under 60% by population. It is far from an entire continent.
Except that it becomes a more correct argument. Words have meaning and such large errors in your argument will detract from its persuasiveness. You do want better arguments, right?
Nuance matters. A legislative body didn't just outlaw beer. It took a supermajority of many such legislative bodies, all of them subject to public election, to do so. That indicates to us a lot more than just a number of "governments" of an "organization" outlawed beer, but that it was a substantial popular movement as well.
And at that point, mass democracy of any sort is susceptible to large scale popular movements destroying freedom. It's not that the US is not free, but that the public has made poor choices, such as outlawing beer, not protesting the internment camps of Japanese Americans, or allowing slavery to continue. Let us also keep in mind that these evils eventually were all revoked. So while the US of the past may not have been as aggressive as we would like with respect to such acts of tyranny, freedom did prevail.
This nuance is very important because the claim was made that US society was not free. But what free society couldn't choose collectively to make bad choices and harm the freedom of its citizens? In other words, how can you distinguish between a free society that occasionally makes bad, undemocratic choices and the US?
Recall that several of the founders emphasized that free societies were not automatic, but required constant maintenance in order to remain free (for example, Thomas Jefferson - "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."). In other words, they didn't expect perfection from the US, but a frequent and inevitable dipping of the toes into various sorts of tyranny against which they asked future US citizens to be vigilant.
TL;DR: There were several glaring errors with what was said which when corrected, will make the argument stronger. Those aren't "red herring" because such errors detract from the persuasiveness of the argument. Yes, it doesn't matter whether the US is a continent or not, but merely correcting that makes a silly problem go away.
Instead, the real problem is that you are simply in error about what a free society is. It is most certainly not a society where everyone is perfectly free. That society can't exist. Any real world free society will have flaws - injustices and occasional tyrannies in it, created from within or imposed from without. The determining factor of whether the society is free is whether in the long run these are successfully fought off or allowed to prosper.