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From reporting by The Daily Dot.
Conservative psychologist/alt-right guru Jordan Peterson officially announced that he is launching what he calls a "free speech platform" known as Thinkspot.
Peterson insists that Thinkspot will adhere to his principles of anti-censorship so strongly that the platform will only ban or remove users if it is ordered to do so by the U.S. court of law. Because there's no way that could go horribly wrong.
Peterson also mentioned that Thinkspot will have a minimum word count as opposed to a maximum. "If minimum comment length is 50 words, you're gonna have to put a little thought into it," Peterson said to the right-wing outlet NewsBusters. "Even if you're being a troll, you'll be a quasi-witty troll."
Thinkspot is being marketed as a creator-to-consumer payment processor such as Patreon while also serving as an alternative to services such as Twitter and YouTube.
Thinkspot has an intended release date of August 2019.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @08:34PM (35 children)
And what is wrong about this?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @08:45PM (12 children)
Did you miss the part where it said he's conservative? Duh.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:02PM
Exactly. We need crowdsourced propaganda! Trick whole sections of the working class into bartering their political power away to propagandists! Why should the rich leeches pay for their own propaganda when they can get the working class to fund imperialist propaganda with their own wealth?
(Score: 3, Informative) by julian on Monday June 17 2019, @01:12AM (5 children)
Let me show you what "conservatism" looks like online when you allow anything that doesn't violate the law. This experiment is currently being run on a website called Voat [voat.co]. I encourage you to check it out for yourself. The comment sections are especially illuminating. It was established as a censorship-free alternative to reddit.com. Here is a list of the current top post titles:
So that's what completely uncensored "conservative" free speech will look like on JP's website before too long.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Monday June 17 2019, @03:57AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @02:40PM (1 child)
>> Sure, I wouldn't want to read about that stuff either.
Do you mind if I ask why? Just by reading, it doesn't mean you agree with it. I was under the impression that by exposing oneself to various ideas, one can avoid echo chambers and confirmation bias. No?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Monday June 17 2019, @07:34PM
Suppose it were even as the title claims. So what?
People aren't "shaking off" belief in God nor becoming more gullible. It's a wish fulfillment headline.
South Africa wasn't a "white country" in the first place.
In each of these titles, basic premises are broken. No point to going further.
Standard fallacy deployment in the title. No reason to continue.
There's a lot of noise out there. We need to filter it out or it's garbage in, garbage out.
(Score: 1) by Snort on Monday June 17 2019, @02:49PM
Can we use reddit.com/r/chapotraphouse as an avatar for the left and "everything they stand for?" That is essentially what you are doing by simply citing voat.co. That is but one outlet. There many, many more places where people congregate and share ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @06:37PM
Doesn't SoylentNews have a pretty similar policy, though? I'd rather just deal with speech I think is bad than ridiculous, open-ended censorship rules created by mega-corporations.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Monday June 17 2019, @06:50AM (4 children)
Yeah, cuz nowadays the epithet "conservative" is shorthand for "literally Hitler".
Anyone who thinks Dr.Peterson is conservative, let alone alt-right, has been listening to his critics, but has not been listening to him. He's basically a centrist with classical-liberal beliefs, tempered by a pretty good dose of realism.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @01:28PM (1 child)
Then tell me how "centrists with classical-liberal beliefs, tempered with a pretty good dose of realism" managed to get what is basically the most disgusting public figure in the entire U.S. sitting in the oval office ?
Talk is cheap. Actions are what matters. When conservatives talk, they are poor oppressed, misunderstood, and villified victims of the evil liberals trying to take away their free speech (and guns). But when they act, a sexual predator, child molester, egocentric, psychopath, compulsive-liar, megalomaniac, con-man with more than 1300 civil lawsuits against him who's destroyed countless small businesses and ruined countless lives ends-up President of the United States.
If that's what conservative "values" lead to, then every single action and campain aimed at silencing and eradicating them is totally justified, just like chemotherapy is totally justified for eradicating cancer.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday June 17 2019, @02:41PM
Because you aren't the US. Enough people, a near majority had other ideas about who was more disgusting.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @03:12PM (1 child)
You are mischaracterizing Peterson. I had the misfortune of watching and analyzing a two hour segment of his.
Philosophers are in three camps: the mathematicians who rule logically, the insightfuls who can deal with subjectives usefully, and the armchair who make bad claims to stir shit up.
I figure Peterson is only kept as a prof for publicity. In the two hours, he didn't actually make any correct argument. Not one. He made lots of feelie arguments and a few lone true statements, but he didn't argue in good faith. By the end I wasn't even upset or disappointed, as I paused, analyzed, and added to the tallies of flaws in reasoning. I was numb to his bullshit beyond being able to spot the many open flaw in his statements. He is a TV charlatan, a crowd-riler, not a true philosopher.
"a centrist with classical-liberal beliefs, tempered by a pretty good dose of realism." implies coherence. He's incoherent. He's certainly no realist. Not unless you call my drunk uncle who points out that "blacks are in jail more per capita, so they are, literally, more criminal, so it's good that they're targeted by the police" a realist. Having the nerve to speak with confidence isn't the same as speaking truth.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:49AM
I've watched (well, mostly listened on the side) upward of 500 hours of Peterson's stuff, including most of his university lectures. The no-particular-subject talks tend to ramble (and often back-reference previous talks, so you kinda need to be in the loop to know what he's getting at), but the lectures that have a mission are densely packed and generally stay focused, tho you might not realise what the focus is til he reaches the end and pulls it all together. Sometimes he has what I regard as wrongheaded ideas, or is just plain wrong (mostly when he wanders too far out of his field), but you could say that about everyone.
And if he's so incoherent, explain why he routinely packs the house at $200/seat, and everyone listening with intensive concentration. And as to his Youtube channel... 2,090,136 subscribers, 105,016,646 views (some of his univ lectures have topped 200k views). Obviously he's got *something* to say to a LOT of people.
And don't forget he has over 20 years as a professor. He's not some come-lately hired to make admin look smart.
But I can see why he actively annoys today's shallow thinkers: he asks that you truly examine your beliefs down to their core, and it's a rare leftist (or religious fundamentalist, the usual segment who apply the label "charlatan") who ever really does so, given the entire Marx-spectrum philosophy is a matter of faith, by definition not to be questioned. (And I'd say the same about the extreme right, but most who claim that label are, in the light of day, actually somewhere left of Stalin.) And he really annoys the snowflakes, because he refuses to kowtow to their crap.
If you want a somewhat better picture of what he's about than you'll get from some randomly selected talk (which may have been one of his lesser lights), I'd suggest his guest appearance on Honey Badger Radio, or for more depth, any of his university lecture series. Or maybe the video that brought him to general attention, where he stands up to serious harassment from the aggressive-snowflake brigade.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @08:45PM (21 children)
And what is wrong about this?
It is wrong by default. Censorship is always wrong. We should never let the courts or anybody else decide what we can see and hear on the internet. We can do our own filtering at our end. We just need a way around the damage when the authorities try to cut the wire
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @09:58PM (9 children)
Agreed. That is an excellent way of looking at things.
Sadly, federal officers knocking down your door won't think so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:01PM (8 children)
Who, exactly, has had their "door knocked down" by US authorities *only* for expressing themselves?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:06PM (3 children)
Fine, you win. It was UK authorities who knocked down Julian Assange's door, so he won't have a door to knock down when the USA takes custody of him.
He's probably homosexual too!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:19PM (2 children)
I wonder how much it cost the Ecuadorians to fix their door? Oh, wait...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:14PM (1 child)
I could give you the cost now, in €, or we can wait until November 1st and you can have the cost in £.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:43PM
Your choice. Although, given that the Limeys didn't bust down any doors, I'm guessing zero. In any currency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:09PM (1 child)
Well, it was more of an analogy for the praetorians in other countries. Not everyone is as blessed to live in Ruby Ridge - I mean America.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:17PM
Except Ruby Ridge [wikipedia.org] wasn't about free speech:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @07:04PM (1 child)
The US has obscenity laws, free speech zones, national security letters, draconian copyright laws such as the DMCA, FCC censorship, and so on. Not to mention, the US government constantly forces through similarly unconstitutional garbage such as FOSTA, which then takes massive amounts of effort to get rid of, assuming the courts happen to care about the Constitutional on that day. Simply being better in comparison to something else is not good enough.
(Score: 2) by J053 on Monday June 17 2019, @09:16PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:31PM (9 children)
There was a saying in Fidonet "route around the bastards"
Of course it was a different world then. Every byte that came down someone was paying long distance rates for (and that meant something back then..) And the government didn't really play in our sandbox.
Nowadays it isn't connectivity to the data so much as the actual data that those with evil intent want to control, but the principle remains largely the same, and in a way the results are the same.
Google is broken, you get DuckDuckGo
Twitter is broken, you get GAB
YouTube is broken, you get BitCHUTE
Patreon is broken, you get THINKSPOT
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:47PM (5 children)
I'm puzzled, decentralized alternatives like IPFS [ipfs.io] (and its various equivalents) have existed for a while now and yet the uptake just isn't there, even among the geeks. Is it because the issue is only serious enough for whinging in internet boards, but not enough to actually take action?
Heck, I'd be keen to run an IPFS node (or again any of its equivalents) for SN if SN ever decides to go that route.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:17PM (2 children)
The motivation wasn't there because these days tribalism requires political stands. When the alt-right declares itself under siege their tribes will follow.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday June 18 2019, @03:56AM
Yea.. it makes me ponder that engineering and tech should have some form of accreditation body with the single core principle of separation of tech and politics.
Any member mixing the two should be stripped and be labelled an outcast with whatever maximum negative professional consequences society & industry can inflict on said individual.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:53PM
The 'alt-right' left for elsewhere ages ago. Those under siege on the big social media platforms haven't been alt-right for quite some time.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday June 17 2019, @12:15AM (1 child)
If you have to run a "node", you're just asking for trouble. It's not really decentralized, it's more like "distributed". The system has to be absolutely positively transparent, blend in with the noise, catch the wave, hang ten...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday June 18 2019, @03:52AM
Not sure if I agree with your definition of decentralized vs distributed. Something can be distributed but can still have a single point of dependency, like a Kubernetes cluster, the worker nodes can be distributed but they all still depend on the central command & control like the master nodes. Decentralized means you have minimal, ideally no, dependency on a central thing.
IPFS to me is decentralized. The only potential central dependency is during bootstrap it requires to know at least 1 node to talk to to join the mesh - but that isn't strictly a "centralized" entity. There's a "central" registry that makes it easier for automation, but is not mandatory. I can boot a node and manually pass it a list of other nodes that I've validated separately if I want. The whole thing is entirely encapsulated within me and my node as another actor joining the mesh - not on some central thing.
I don't see why me running a node means its not decentralized. This is not a server node, there's no concept of a server vs. client nodes. It is just a node.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:54PM (2 children)
I worked for a networking hardware vendor back in the early '90s.
I was doing some testing on our TCP/IP module and randomly selected an IP address to ping against. I let it run for a few days to make sure we didn't see any issues, and everything worked perfectly.
Turns out the ISP for the customer's IP address that chose charged by the byte. Needless to say, there was one angry Aussie yelling at us a few weeks later when he got his bill.
Oops.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Monday June 17 2019, @12:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday June 17 2019, @12:21AM
Thanks for the reference!
The Coriolis effect is a bitch! :)
I didn't open your link before responding, which may leave me open to a booting! :)
[Please stand by]
Yep. I was right. Whew! That was a big boot!
"In fact, in Rand McNally, they wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people."
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @01:41AM
Ha ha ha. If people hear what they want to hear they won't filter it. It will only reinforce their belief.
Like what you just said........