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from the Garbage-in-garbage-in-garbage-in-and-more-garbage-in dept.
At the The Verge:
Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong's The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 that has since gone out of print. It is a thorough and important look at the intractable problem of online harassment.
After a year on The Verge's staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York Times Editorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah's old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.
[...] The Internet of Garbage provides an immediate and accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and distinguished, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are overwhelmed in fighting it. Sarah has long planned to publish an updated and expanded second edition, but in this particular moment, I am pleased that she's allowed us to publish this interim edition with a new preface.
In that new preface, Sarah stresses that her original text was written from a place of optimism. But the years since have not been kind to internet culture. She writes that the tactics of Gamergate, so clearly on display during the harassment campaign waged against her over the last few weeks, have "overtaken our national political and cultural conversations." That new culture is driven by the shape of the internet and the interactions it fosters. "We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas," she writes.
I hope everyone with a true and sincere interest in improving our online communities reads The Internet of Garbage and contends with the scope of the problem Sarah lays out in its pages. We are making the entire text of The Internet of Garbage 1.5 available for free as a PDF, ePub, and .mobi ebook file, and for the minimum allowed price of $.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. Below, we have excerpted Chapter 3, "Lessons from Copyright Law."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 31 2018, @09:24PM (4 children)
Idiots like J-Mo aren't equipped to handle Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. They are either intellectually or emotionally incompetent to understand the reality that the fewest restrictions up front does *not* necessarily translate to the most freedom for the most people the most amount of time.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @01:37AM (3 children)
There is no paradox of tolerance. Let's recall what Popper actually wrote on the paradox:
Tolerating intolerant beliefs doesn't imply that one tolerates murder in the streets. While there may be ameliorating context outside of this paragraph, Popper commits a serious slippery slope fallacy here that tolerating intolerant beliefs then segues into tolerating physical attacks and such even though by no stretch of the imagination are they legitimate means of discourse, and then equates any flavor of intolerant belief with the subset of intolerance that settles disagreement with violence. Finally, he doesn't consider how this intolerance can be abused. I think we're seeing a taste of it today, where rival beliefs can be declared to be "intolerant" (often without regard for the content of the beliefs) and hence, fair game for preemptive intolerance.
That I think is the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Once you do it, you and your beliefs fall solidly in the category of things against which you are supposedly intolerant. You should be intolerant of yourself and your beliefs! Not going to happen in practice, of course.
Instead a far better approach (one which I might add has been rather successful with respect to dealing with discrimination in the workplace) is to tolerate the belief, but don't tolerate the observable, harmful behavior. That eliminates most of the Orwellian facets of the Popper approach. Often it also means that you don't have to care what people believe. If someone assaults another, it doesn't matter what either of them believed (except perhaps as a means to further demonstrate guilt of the attacker in court).
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday September 01 2018, @01:46AM (2 children)
Oh for fuck's sake, no, he does NOT commit a slippery slope fallacy, he says that tolerating intolerance is a contradiction in terms. It has nothing to do with people misusing or misunderstanding what intolerance actually means.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday September 01 2018, @06:24AM
The obvious rebuttal is:
khallow is black.
I kept getting these uber-libertarian vibes from khallow, the inability to engage in rational debate base on facts and rational principles, but then it hit me, he argues just like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (married to a white woman, so it's OK). Now, at long last, I understand khallow, and I am holding an obvious rebuttal in his honor.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday September 01 2018, @09:17AM
Fortunately, I anticipated this very argument by stating how the fallacy was committed.
When you're assaulting people with fists or pistols, you're no longer engaged in legitimate discourse or merely having intolerant beliefs. There is no logical reason that even extreme tolerance of beliefs implies tolerance of assault. Yet that's the avenue that Popper went down. Hence, the slippery slope.
I see also that you apparently missed the part of my post where I noted intolerant beliefs doesn't mean violent intolerant beliefs. There are three errors here, not just one.
Did I say otherwise? That is the third error of Popper's argument, not the first or second.