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A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation about smoking with someone and they posited this argument in favor of smoking being illegal near entrances and exits after I'd pointed out that the danger from second-hand smoke in an open-air environment was so minuscule as to not exist: The smell offends me.

That went up one side of me and down the other and today I say to everyone using being offended as an argument for anything what I said to him: I do not care.

No, that is not me being an asshole. That is me refusing to allow you to mold the world to suit you at my expense. You have no natural, societal, legal, or God given right to not be offended in this life. And neither should you.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Those, right there, are your chief three rights. It's quite important to note that you do not have a right to happiness but only to its pursuit. Also, the the end of each is precisely located where you would start infringing on the same for anyone else. Taken together with all the other rights enumerated in the Constitution, there is a further right that is very much implicit but I believe should have been explicit: The right to be an asshole. Beyond Life and Liberty, I would go as far as to say it is our most fundamental right.

You're probably thinking I am an asshole about now. Why would I say something like being an asshole is one of our most fundamental rights? It's simple, really; because anyone at any time can call anyone else an asshole for any old arbitrary reason. If this has any bearing on the rights of the person being accused of being an asshole, then they do not really have those rights and never did in the first place. All their rights are subject to sanction or removal by cultural fiat. No due process whatsoever. Only if you have the right to offend anyone, at any time, without fear of oppression are any of your other rights secure.

Large portions of our political landscape have always been made up of unscrupulous bastards who incessantly try to convince you that offending someone is bad or wrong. See this for what it is: an attempt to get you to place chains of your own making upon yourself. They know they cannot force you to behave according to their approval or disapproval, so they attempt to shame you into doing so by being offended. There is no difference today between the puritanical right and the Social Justice Warrior on the left in this; the tactic itself is as identical as it is reprehensible.

So, convince me of your position by logical or moral argument all you like. Tell me I should do or think something because it offends you though? You can jam that right up your shitter and blow some fucking bubbles with it, you fascist asshole.

The long and short of it is, there won't be one. We're pushing it until January due to me and PJ being occupied too much with holiday and Life stuff.

What you can look forward to:

• Moderation Rework

Not a final version and we haven't touched meta-moderation yet but this will cut down on the echo chamber effect, mod bombing, and lay some groundwork for combating spam as well.

• Input vs Output Wackiness

Currently if you put html entities in and hit preview they get transformed into literal characters. There's also wackiness if you try to put double quotes in a submission title. I hate this, you hate this, and it needed to stop so most of the code for it is already done and being tested on dev.

• RSS/Atom Feeds Moving to SSL

There is really no reason to have http links in the rss feed rather than https links, so they're changing. I'm also doing my best to get them to encode only the necessary characters and display properly but it seems like no two readers display the same.

• A Couple New Themes

Occasionally I get bored and do up a theme instead of actually working. This time around we have the VT100 and the OMG PWNIES themes. These are actually pretty easy to do. Feel free to mod and submit your own. All it takes is a custom stylesheet if you're okay with reusing existing favicons/logos.

• Support for Additional Tags

We're adding standard support for sub/sup/abbr/strike tags. We're also adding support for the custom tags sarc/sarcasm and two forms of a "user" tag.

• Additional Minor Bug Fixes

Bunch of minor bugs, some of which you would have never seen because they were on admin pages.

I think that's all but I'm not sure what the last one that went into our point release after the 14.12 update was.

Wow, moderated troll for some honest comments. I was really hoping to see a smaller community like SN somehow work a better more honest moderation system, but what I am are seeing and being subject to is the same old game in a smaller pond, can we not better control ourselves ? It hardly seems worth the effort needed to develop 'another' so-called community if it going to end up the in the same place and straits as the one we left. I always browse at raw -1 because every so often I find good stuff posted by AC's who can't or won't login but I've become disillusioned and am questioning my desire to wade through the muck at "another" site to arrive in the same place still covered in FSCK'n crap...

  http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4521&cid=109411

•Build a more uniformed sense of community throughout the site - Can you actually build a community, it will either form or not based on the quality of those attracted to the place. I would have purchased a sub by now but I refuse to use Pay-Pal, when some other viable option becomes a available I will likely do so, but the intent to build sounds far to structured to hold my interest.

•If possible, try and reach out to other not-for-profit journalist organizations for advice and guidance - Why if possible ? you seem to be over complicating things, just ask for suggestions in an article and send an email to the sites or organizations that seem to be in a place you want to be.

•Identify people who may be willing to work in a journalistic capacity with us - Simply set-up a mechanism for submission of stories and advert that you are accepting such. There are literally thousands upon thousands of people seeking a platform to publish their views, or make local newsworthy events more public. Allow them to submit and then be voted upon for further use, i.e. front-page views. Making sure to credit them for their content and posts. Already stated is the premise that everyone is responsible for their own opinions and views and that SN claims no ownership or responsibility for said items.

Maybe I am oversimplifying things but I do consider myself a rational anarchist and the more control/guidance you seek, the less appealing the place seems to me. More to follow as I have time or develop the desire...

Niagara Celtic festival is this weekend (13-14) in Krull park in Olcott NY. I'll be there with the Sterling Invaders.

Next weekend is Queen City Con Quest - Downtown Buffalo, in the convention center. I should be there one of those days.

A rigid notion of determinism turns it into a mechanical folly and inverts the importance away from higher functions and towards the lowest detectable causal events, it creates a world in which ultimately the smallest and most remote causal interactions are given disproportionate amounts of importance even though such interactions are constantly changing at speeds far faster than the results they are supposed to have deterministically forced into being. With such an outlook it wouldn't be “turtles all the way down” but instead “turtles all the way up”.

By analogy of a computer program the importance according to such determinism is given to the bits flipping between zero and one rather than the higher structures ruling their behavior.

Such determinism remains technically true but becomes devoid of meaning, comprehension, and value[¹], and thus also without importance.

Instead for any given end result determinism acts as a negative feedback loop in relation to its own importance when given enough complexity: a robot operating its algorithms on the basis of what might as well be an infinite number of ever-changing, causal, and mutually connected variables cannot remain a robot, it is forced into random output and/or the beginnings of intelligence where it chooses which output to give and later also chooses the reason why it is supposed to be the correct output or why a different output is more correct.

Hmm, googly eyes or Einstein afro? It makes sense to me…

(Also ¹ looks like a nice explanation of why “pop” determinism and nihilism so often end up as best friends.)

(And another tangential: if it was possible I wonder what an inverse square type of law would look like for each causal step in determinism, the fact that it rained yesterday has no discernible impact on me writing this journal entry (but now it has and thus two points were made rather than one: one about determinism and one about indirect Wittgensteinian word games).)

The focus of this post was really meant to be the part at the end that I made bold.

To me it makes one or two connections in a way that I haven't seen before (and I know about system complexity and emergence and such). In some way it feels a bit more direct and explanatory tying in a correct understanding/evaluation of determinism as well as (possibly the most basic) evolutionary pressure/fitness challenge. In this way it gets very hands on and mucky (conceptually, and also conceptually reducing the challenge of creating intelligence to that of triggering such a first move and then escalating it). Has anyone seen anything similar elsewhere?

P.S. Yet another tangential: a different kind of amusing folly, more entertaining than determinism but maybe not all that different after all?

<OfficialDevHat>
So, I'd given an estimate of "by this weekend" for crypto-currency payment processing. I was pretty close for not even having looked at it or picked a payment processor yet. It's looking like I'll finish Monday unless I find another 3-4 hours of coding in my brain today. I can't really speak to when it will deployed to prod afterwards.

The skinny of it is I went through two other payment processors before settling on Bitpay. It would have been nice to accept litecoin and dodgecoin as well as bitcoin but some payment processor who shall remain nameless had a dev environment that did not mirror their prod environment and all the documentation for the API was for their dev environment, so I killed with fire all nine or ten hours of coding I'd done to process payments with them and went back to looking for another processor. Maybe one of these days they'll update and bring some sanity to their system and you lot will be able to use litecoin and dodgecoin here. Until then, bitcoin payments via Bitpay are currently working from my dev environment but in need of some finishing touches and testing before being deployed for you lot to use.
</OfficialDevHat>

<PrivateCitizenHat>
A quick word about Bitpay. If you ever want to receive USD when being sent BTC, I personally highly recommend using them. Aside from test.bitpay.com not being mentioned in the docs at the time, they were bloody brilliant to code against. As a random code monkey on the Internet, they have my resounding personal endorsement.
</PrivateCitizenHat>

So, mod-bombing is becoming a problem. Where mod-bombing is defined as blowing a bunch of moderator points on one person's comments in pursuit of a personal vendetta. I think we're pretty much all in agreement that this type of behavior is NOT what the moderation system was designed to do and can't be allowed to continue.

So, I, personally, not anyone else on staff or the site as a whole, would like some input to use to further refine or outright change my opinion on how to deal with the matter. Bear in mind that I am not the person who gets to decide this, just the guy who would likely be coding it up.

At the moment my favorite idea is that after N downmods from person A to comments made by person B, person A be presented with a page offering them the choice of removing all their moderations from this set of modpoints or to continue on with the knowledge that an admin WILL be checking their moderations for today with the possible consequences of reversal of their moderations and their ineligibility to receive mod points again for a number of days ranging from 1 through infinity.

What say you, SN?