On January 15th, 2018, World Socialist Web Site reported that users are unable to share a promotional video for a January 16th online meeting, "Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship."
Facebook has blocked users from sharing a social media video promoting the January 16 online meeting "Organizing resistance to Internet censorship," featuring World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. The initial post of the video, uploaded Friday, cannot be shared by any user. Those who attempt to do so receive an error message that seems to imply a technical failure.
Users reported, however, that upon clicking "If you think you're seeing this message by mistake, please let us know," they were presented with a notice that clearly indicates the content had been blocked in the name of keeping Facebook "safe."
WSWS published an open letter about internet censorship and net neutrality on November 25. The FCC repealed net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017.
In this AC's opinion, Facebook is certainly within their rights to refuse to host any content for any reasons they choose. However, for many people, Facebook is the internet.
Should we worry about entrenched services such as Facebook and Google using their positions to suppress information? Does the presence or absence of net neutrality change one's analysis of the situation?
Related Stories
Facebook reveals 25 pages of takedown rules for hate speech and more
Facebook has never before made public the guidelines its moderators use to decide whether to remove violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network until now. The company hoped to avoid making it easy to game these rules, but that worry has been overridden by the public's constant calls for clarity and protests about its decisions. Today Facebook published 25 pages of detailed criteria and examples for what is and isn't allowed.
Facebook is effectively shifting where it will be criticized to the underlying policy instead of individual incidents of enforcement mistakes like when it took down posts of the newsworthy "Napalm Girl" historical photo because it contains child nudity before eventually restoring them. Some groups will surely find points to take issue with, but Facebook has made some significant improvements. Most notably, it no longer disqualifies minorities from shielding from hate speech because an unprotected characteristic like "children" is appended to a protected characteristic like "black".
Nothing is technically changing about Facebook's policies. But previously, only leaks like a copy of an internal rulebook attained by the Guardian had given the outside world a look at when Facebook actually enforces those policies. These rules will be translated into over 40 languages for the public. Facebook currently has 7500 content reviewers, up 40% from a year ago.
Also at MarketWatch.
Related:
Facebook Reports BBC for Reporting Child Porn Images Found on Facebook
Facebook Blocks Users from Sharing World Socialist Web Site Promotional Video
Facebook-Owned Instagram Removes Opioid-Related Posts
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:01AM
Since you hired me to be in charge of the security of your dry, dry, dry, dry, dry sack, I intend to take this job seriously. As such, I've hired that kid who papoohies all over nutsacks to guard your nutsack as people worship its dryness. He knows the most about papoohies, so he should be able to stop anyone who might want to papoohie on your sack...
Wow, what is that thing! It's a fuckin' papoohiesack! Where did your dry sack go!? Everyone is leaving in disgust, claiming it was a scam all along. Someone must have tricked into such that papoohied on sack. It's true. Check your sack. Do it right now. This drippin'ness this minuteness is driving me insanyoly! Ugh! Just check your sack already!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:01AM
Suprised I am at nasty capitalist bastards censoring truth and justice, for more profit. I recollect much the same going on during the Black Death in the 1300's.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:11AM (22 children)
Look while I hate socialists as much as the next anarchist. but there is a lesson here.
DON"T DEPEND ON CAPITALISTS TO GET YOUR MESSAGE OUT
Facefuck is a plague go back to songs and human contact FFS it is drop dead simple... except no action can be taken without the tubes. what was that saying again ACT LOCALLY? think globally something like that taken from the dark ages wen we all had myspace accounts...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:29AM
MESH NETWORTHS IS THE ONLY WAY TO DRIVE THE SHARP STAKE OF DEATH INTO THE HEART OF CAPITALISTM.
MESH!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:34AM (8 children)
But I assumed we were relying on SoylentNews, a syndicalist-anarchist collective with Libertariantard adjuncts. Am I wrong? I mean, if there are Capitalists here, I am out. I don't count khallow, since he has no capital, just ideology. And Runaway is a wage slave. No pension, since he believed Republicans and hosed his Union. And The Migratory Buzzard I expect will find a nest in Poland, soon, after they kill all the socialists. jmorris, as we all know, has no economic influence or impact, since he doth dwell in the dungeons of his mother, and sucks the essence of her internets via the wifi. Poor jmorris. Poor TMB. Poor khallow. Runaway can go suck Donald's dick, like he wants to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:41AM
Soystain is a corporantion in the pubic interest. Right, like I believes that fucking lie.
Give ALL YOUR MINEY to SoyCoin because its worth it!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:40AM (6 children)
I like Poland quite a bit but they've got too many too-cold-to-fish days per year, so you're stuck with me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:25PM (5 children)
Too cold to fish? You need to discover ice fishing. Drag a hut out on the lake, saw a hole through the ice, watch TV and drink beer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:37PM (4 children)
Unfortunately there's a span in between "not too cold to fish" and "cold enough for ice fishing" where you freeze your entire ass off.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:43PM (1 child)
WTF do you use your ass for, anyway? To sit on, right? So, just make yourself a new chair that doesn't require an ass.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:49PM
Or maybe a prosthetic ass... Another twenty years and I'll need one anyway. Might as well avoid the Christmas rush.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:05PM (1 child)
Oh. For that, insulated waders.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:06PM
forgot--whiskey, too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:39AM
But I thought capitalists would sell the rope used to hang them?
(Score: 1) by Pax on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:36AM (10 children)
um.. you do realise that Anarchy is an offshoot of socialism?
i suggest yoiu watch "No Gods ,No Master" and learn a little
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5bmvVXFtCA [youtube.com]
" rel="url2html-3763">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfrHjMyVS5E
" rel="url2html-3763">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywElAYrcxgI
you're welcome!
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:27PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:42PM
Would you like some wolf's nipples, or perhaps a Tuscany fried bat with your whiskey, sir (or madam)?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:27PM (6 children)
If you go by what Karl Marx wrote, socialism is the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Communism is technically anarchy, because after people have learned to live with communally owned means of production the need for government will disappear.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:16PM (3 children)
It's been awhile, but that sounds about right. By Marx's standard there's never yet been a communist government. But he was wrong.
Communism is one of the oldest forms of government around. Most families use it internally. Of course, you could also focus differently as say most families use dictatorship internally, or differently again and say most families use anarchy internally.
Still, communism is one of the primitive forms of government. It works quite well in the appropriate circumstances. The problem is, it doesn't scale at all, and it depends on a level of altruism not usually seen outside a circle of close relations (and not always there). Charismatic leaders can get it to work in groups of up to around 100 people, but since it depends on a charismatic leader it usually soon falls apart.
Please note that democracy doesn't scale well either, though it scales better than communism. It can work well in groups of 500 people without the need for a charismatic leader. In larger groups, however, it tends to decay into some form of Oligarchy or into Tyranny (in the Athenian sense of the word). Republicanism isn't a form of government, but rather an set of rules that can be attached to one of the other forms of government. Monarchy is an inheritable form of Tyranny...though it comes in lots of variant forms. Theocracy isn't a form of government, but is rather usually Tyranny with the responsibility for bad results fobbed off to some spiritual cause. It could equally be an oligarchy, but I'm not aware of any examples.
What I'm basically doing is classifying the variety of government by how the power is dispersed. If it's concentrated in one entity, I'm calling that a kind of tyranny. If it's shared among a (relatively) small group of competing entities that are in basic agreement as to what the formal rules of competition are, then I'm calling it an oligarchy. If it's dispersed generally among all the people (except, possibly, for some groups) then I'm calling it a democracy. So the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Athens was a democracy (except when it was a tyranny). Etc. And note that no existing or historic government is a pure form, there's always an admixture of all the other forms in varying proportion. Now communism is an economic system, not a governmental system. It talks about wealth being shared equally, but Marx's theories about how the power to cause that sharing would happen are so unrealistic that nobody has ever even tried them beyond the scale of an extremely small village who are all closely related. And on that scale they can work with a charismatic leader.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
You've made the observation of Dunbar's Number, a.k.a. The Monkeysphere.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:16AM
Pretty much, yes. Democracy can work a bit beyond Dunbar's number, but after that it has a tendency to decay.
The other respondent commented about Switzerland being a counter-example, but I believe that it's a "representative democracy" rather than a democracy. Athens was able to make actual democracy work with numbers slightly higher than 500, but as it got larger it started splitting into factions, and they basically lost it even before the war with Sparta. Actually, they lost it more than once. The laws of Solon are from one of the earlier times that they lost it.
I don't know much about the Swiss system, but it seems likely the cantons are small enough that the candidates are actually known by the people who vote for them. If so, then the cantons could have a democracy even though the country didn't.
OTOH, don't make the equivalence between democracy and good. Democracies are often less tolerant of deviant individuals than are monarchies. Some intolerant bigot wielding the "will of the people" may be telling the truth (though perhaps he shaped the "will of the people"), but that doesn't make him good. He's still an intolerant bigot.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:39PM
Actually, it does.
(You must be a USAian, where your country was set up as an Oligarchy and where the propaganda says it is a Democracy.)
N.B. Public financing of political campaigns would go a long way toward straightening out things.
...and, for contrast, see Switzerland. [wikipedia.org]
Note also that no country other than USA has an Electoral College; elsewhere the one with the most votes wins.
Some places have Ranked Voting to assure that a majority is reached.
Many countries have a "majority rules" paradigm (not simply a plurality) where, if there isn't a majority, a coalition must be formed to get a ruling majority.
USA is centuries behind when it comes to governmental forms.
...and Thomas Jefferson advocated for a Constitutional Convention every generation (every 19 years by his count).
democracy scales better than communism
Your post is a mish-mash of "ideas".
Democracy is a governmental form.
Communism is an economic form.
In fact, Communism requires Democracy (everybody gets a vote and all votes are equal).
It's clear that you have swallowed a whole bunch of Cold War bullshit.
It's sad that Comparative Economics was purged from USAian schools and all that was allowed to be taught is Neoclassical Economics.
You can expand your knowledge base via Prof. Richard Wolff.
The descriptions of the presentations are best at his own site. [democracyatwork.info]
The sample rates/file sizes there are, however, ridiculous for spoken-word stuff.
The file sizes are more reasonable at this Pacifica Radio affiliate. [kpfa.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:39PM (1 child)
Could have sworn it was the other way round, that capitalism would encounter a crisis that lead to the government taking over control of the means of production, thus resulting in communism. Then at some point later, the government would dissolve and leave the workers in control of the means of production.
That said, Marx real focus was on capitalism and its problems. Communism and socialism was just him musing on potential outcome of a serious crisis (something he observed that capitalism had quite often).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:14PM
That has happened in USA, on average, every 80 years:
The Panic of 1837 (till 1842); The Long Depression (1873 - 1896); The Great Depression (1929 - 1941)[1]; the Bush-Obama-Trump Depression (since 2007)[2]
[1] A government jobs program had the economy off its back and growing again by 1937.
Lend-Lease (WWII in Europe) was another uptick.
The Draft, after Pearl Harbor, made a bunch of men "employed".
[2] The Labor Non-Participation Rate hasn't gone below 22 percent.
The "Recovery" you hear about from Lamestream Media is a sham, only benefiting a tiny few; most folks continue to do worse.
"Trickle-down" doesn't.
capitalism would encounter a crisis that lead to the government taking over control of the means of production
That would be the logical thing to do: Get rid of the "business experts" who tanked their companies.
In USA, however, it's done differently.
Here, the government (an Oligarchy) takes taxpayer money and hands it out to the too-big-to-fail corporations in trillion dollar amounts and doesn't even attach any strings.
Economist Thomas Piketty wrote a 696-page book examining 250 years of Capitalism and he concluded that Capitalism always results in that kind of Oligarchy.
In Russia in 1917, The Workers got tired of that kind of shit and took a different approach.
N.B. USA, Britain, France, Japan, and a bunch of other Capitalist nations immediately invaded USSR, with Japan not exiting until 1922.
For 7 decades, USSR was forced to redirect resources into military defense when that would otherwise have gone to food and housing and such.
(They never skimped on spending for education, however.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:49PM
IF, as you say, anarchy and socialism are related, then you have things kinda backward. Anarchists had their thing going long before Karl Marx wrote his shit. If you're referring to the ages old communal kind of living, that has damned near nothing to do with today's socialist governments, or communism. Today's socialists are far stricter authoritarians than capitalists, or right wingers, or anything else I can think of.
You don't believe me? Alright - maybe you can inform us how many people defected from WEST Berlin, to EAST Berlin? If socialism, or communism are so sweet, there must be hordes of documented defectors being shot near the wall.
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:46AM (3 children)
Somehow, they appear to have been successful in uploading it....
https://www.facebook.com/wsws.org/videos/10156264653039684/ [facebook.com]
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:48AM (1 child)
Links to facefuck! It dies it does! Kill the main streamer!! Death!!! Dearth!!! Dick up its ass!!!!!!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:11AM
I will post other links when I find them... but the story was claiming they had failed to upload the video. When I got the video to play on their site, I captured and posted the URL it was coming from.
Now, personally, I think if they know they are posting video contrary to the siteowner's positions... best not ask that siteowner to host their video - best sneak in a link, and hold their content out of his control.
Typical Streisand effect... tell me that some multibillionaire is pissed at some little guy's video - enough to pick a fight over it, and you have my curiosity aroused enough to see what all the fuss is about.
By corollary, damn near anything the Government does NOT want you to see is probably worth taking a look at!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:06PM
I've never seen Fake News on the World Socialist Web Site. Because I don't look at that site!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:00AM (43 children)
... so it's a moot point. It doesn't matter what the plebs experience; it only matters what the rest of us experience.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:09AM (40 children)
World Socialist needs to recruit gullible youths through social media because World Socialist is a scam to attract college socialists before they graduate and become Ultra Capitalists.
Only our OriginalSodomite is stupid enough to continue following the false teachings of socialism well beyond the college years and into elderly old age.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:21AM (32 children)
"Gullible" youths? Or "Disenfranchised" youths?
Socialism will spread amongst a poverty stricken workforce like flames spreading amongst oil soaked rags.
Just the time the elite think they have things all under control, have 99% of the populace obedient to them, they rise up and the 1%'ers find themselves outnumbered 100 to 1, not only that but the people who service the infrastructure that supported them is amongst that 99%.
I guess that's why they teach history in school. The thing works just like a "relaxation oscillator". The frequency of this oscillator is quite dependent on the driving force and the restraining power of the thin blue line.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:49AM (30 children)
Capitalism creates wealth; socialism destroys wealth.
As capitalism implies voluntary trade, it must be the case that every government is inherently anti-capitalism.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:38AM
Nothing like ignorance to cement an ideology. Good talking point you have there, very solid and simple. The best point.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:42AM (27 children)
Oh, look. Another nitwit.
Big hint: Stalinism wasn't Socialism.
N.B. Stalin was a Counterrevolutionary and an Authoritarian.
The first thing he did was get rid of those who he suspected weren't loyal to HIM.
Sound like anybody in recent news reports?
Socialism is simply another ownership model--a more distributed model.
Socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production by The Workers.
Socialism is Democracy in the workplace.
If you're against Socialism, you're against Democracy.
.
Let's play '"Name that system".
Example 1:
You go to work and someone else has decided what you will produce.
Someone else has decided how you will produce it.
Someone else has decided where it will be produced.
Someone else has decided what will be done with the profits.
Example 2:
You go to work and you and your coworkers democratically decide what you will produce.
You and your coworkers democratically decide how you will produce it.
You and your coworkers democratically decide where it will be produced.
You and your coworkers democratically decide what will be done with the profits.
N.B. Every worker's vote is equal to any other worker's vote.
...and the reason it works this way is because there are no non-worker owners|stockholders|board of directors.
In fact, it would be accurate to say that The Workers (and only the workers) collectively own the means of production.
.
In the 1st example, TPTB could
- have you doing things in an unsafe way
(West, Texas fertilizer factory (exploded); Union Carbide's Bhopal plant (leaked poison gas and killed thousands and thousands))
- have you dump poisonous coal ash into the nearby river because The Ownership Class doesn't live in the community where the production is done, so they don't care about that community
- export your job because they found cheaper, more exploitable workers
- pay the workers as little as they think they get away with and cut benefits each year
(Under Capitalism, workers have repeatedly made concessions but got canned anyway.
Welcome to the post-Thatcher/post-Reagan era.)
In the 2nd example, workers who own their own company would tend NOT to
- do things in a worker-hostile/dangerous way
- poison the air, water, soil, and people of their own community
- export their jobs
- cheat themselves WRT compensation [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:05AM (14 children)
Say... WHAT? Careful with that logic down the stairs, you may end in breaking it badly.
Would you have said: 'If you are against Socialism, you are against Democracy in the workplace', that would be correct. Otherwise it's like you are saying: "if you hate cats, you hate all four-legged animals"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:27AM
Capitalism exists even in places with the most repressive of governments.
Capitalism is completely government-agnostic.
Now, if ALL decision making is top-down (Authoritarian) where you are, you will never have Socialism there.
Socialism is Democracy -extended- to the workplace.
...and for this, even the veneer of Democracy (as in the Oligarchical USA) is good enough.
...and your analogy stinks too.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:43AM (12 children)
My young paduwan, if you are against democracy in the workplace, you are against democracy in the marketplace, and you do in fact hate all four-legged animals. Please do not let your personal experience under a Marxist-Leninist Stalinist dictatorship blind you to basic truths, even though such a bias is completely understandable.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:40PM (11 children)
Mmm... Bias you say.
Imagine an academic setup for a workplace, University of some kind. How would you like a democratic (as opposed with meritocratic) decision process in regards with the choice of curricula? Wanna take the risk of 'your ignorance is as good as my knowledge.
The old definition of socialism needs patching for workplaces where the biggest value is located in wetware rather than hardware. Happens a lot in software engineering - just look a Linux and imagine where will it be with a democratic governance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:42PM (6 children)
Well ideally the knowledgeable person will be elected to lead the project. The carpenter leading the framing crew, the electrician leading the wiring crew, the accountant looking after the books and the software engineer handling the software, with the one the group agrees is the best being the lead.
Unluckily the ideal comes against human nature where likes and dislikes can be more important then actual skill, which is also a problem in current (representative) democracies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:14AM
You have a better grasp of human nature than the woo-woo thing that c0lo has.
The Workers that I have encountered want to get the stuff done in the best way, get their compensation, and move on to the next task.
Putting the most-able guy in charge expedites this.
Thinking that Socialism queers that notion rather than bolstering it is simply a demonstration of prejudice.
(Reading Dilbert regularly will give you plenty of examples based on real life experiences, showing that the common rigid Authoritarian workplace model is very likely to give bad results.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:33AM (4 children)
Like in: ideally the best prepared person gets to be elected to push the strategy/tactics required for the best governance of USofA population... and yet you finish with the Orange Clown at the head.
While this (by the number game) needs not** to end in the demise of USA , in the conditions a business (with lower resources than a country) or a project the failures due to mismanagement tend to be more frequent. For every Mondragon success there are hundreds of other cooperatives that failed.
Agreed.
It boils down to: human nature does not guarantee the success of socialism - even if it does not guarantee its failure.
---
**even if the survival result is still not guaranteed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:21AM (1 child)
...for the best governance of USofA
...when you have a media whose job it is to inform the public.
When you have the Lamestream Media that USA has, whose job it is to maximize profits for The Ownership Class, you get Drumpf.
I've mentioned the statement by CBS's CEO numerous times.
They knew perfectly well what they were doing to the country--and they didn't care.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:49AM
I hope you'll agree that's necessary but not sufficient.
E.g. an informed public is absolutely useless if that public is only able to react based on "The Truth" that was fed to them, with no thinking of their own (one would contrast "education" vs "indoctrination/taming" as concepts here?)
Which does show that the condition to reach the the status of ideal are far from trivial. With the immediate corollary: the more necessary condition, the less probable the ideal status.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:08AM (1 child)
Nature itself does not guarantee the success of anything. Lots of failures in new businesses in any system and even the forest outside sees only a few trees succeed after millions of seeds start out.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:29AM
But it does. Entropy, for instance, will ever be higher as the time passes - uninterrupted growth is how one usually define "successful", right?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:55PM (3 children)
look [at] Linux and imagine where will it be with a democratic governance
You mean like Debian, which has adopted systemd?
N.B. In contrast, elsewhere in the (meta)thread, I have linked to Switzerland's brand of Direct Democracy.
There, a decision made by "government" can be rescinded by popular vote.
As for the Linux kernel, so far, I'm just fine with The Benevolent Dictator for Life.
The old definition of socialism needs patching for workplaces where the biggest value is located in wetware rather than hardware
...or perhaps not.
Swedish Worker Cooperative Software Development Company Has No Boss [soylentnews.org]
...and you, as so many others here, have made the mistake that Socialism and Democracy are different things.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:52AM (2 children)
Another remarkable and somehow singular example of success - just as Mondragon (yes, I know, there are other successful cooperative, but the proportion of them warrants the "somehow singular" characterization).
As I said somewhere else, intrinsically socialism and democracy aren't bad - just they don't guarantee the success (much less optimality, whatever way optimality is defined).
---
It may appear as strange idea, but I'll say it anyway: the same way as money, the means a production (and their ownership) are also a mean not an end**.
If you like a SciFi projection, imagine a post-energy/material-scarcity society as sorta depicted by StarTrek (replicators and teleporters available) - you still think the "ownership of production means" would be relevant to that society? (in a minuscule scale of it, today we see the - pale - situation with "on demand fabbing" - inexpensive 3D printers and/or CNC machines).
--
** I'll let you ponder what could be that end. That is, if you accept the idea as a hypothesis at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:49AM (1 child)
The page lists others.
Your hyperbole has fallen flat (as usual).
just as Mondragon (yes, I know, there are other successful cooperative[s]
Had you not had your head stuck up a dark orifice so many times, you would have noticed the DOZENS of times that I have mentioned the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of worker-owned co-ops in northern Italy.
I've also mentioned The Marcora Law [google.com] which seeds that.
Boston and Quebec are getting to be co-op hotspots.
Madison, WI has been for some time.
I'm expecting Oakland to really ignite any day now.
There are numerous places all over the globe with great ideas. [google.com]
Meanwhile, USA.gov (and UK.gov and AU.gov) are stuck on stupid with Oligarchy and NIH.
.
replicators and teleporters [...] 3D printers
Who is building them and fixing them?
Where do the inputs come from?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:47AM
(note: mate, I expect better from you than foul language. Please behave and we can continue to have a dialog. Otherwise, I'll relegate you in my personal "don't care" category.
Pay attention to my posts, those that aren't grinning at least, and see that I value cooperation more than competition, the social more than the private, etc. But I'm old enough to know that nothing is perfect and those I already mentioned here aren't sufficient)
Would you be so kind to compare the number of people involved into coops with the number of people that are not?
Because you must admit that "thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands" could mean just as low as 8000 people or even less (if the same person is part of more than one coop).
Mate, I never said that coop-style economy is impossible. Nor did I say coops are shit.
I only said that coops aren't the guaranteeing a success and optimality by themselves. There's something more that need to get into their chemistry than the simple "we are a coop, wooohoo, now we're set for life".
Pretty much the same apply to the direct democracy in Switzerland - you simply don't wave a fairy wand and coops are magically successful.
I'll let the reader imagine what else is necessary - (I hate answers and The Truth, even when they are my answers and my truth, because they have the tendency to kill the thinking. You can imagine my feelings about the answers and "The Truth" of others)
Don't know about other places, but the community and cooperation spirit is not as dead as the rumors are exagerating.
First of all, I wasn't depicting a reality, I only set up a mindframe (this is why "If you like a SciFi projection") in which "ownership of production means may become irrelevant". In this context (pure speculative), here are the answers:
- presumably, building and fixing is done by whoever is qualified to do it and is trusted by those around it that it will do it properly. Potentially even a specialized maintenance robot may do it.
It's not like, in a post-scarcity world with replicators and teleporters, a part which is required for repair/maintenance cannot be asked for someone that operates another replicator (and transported by teleport).
- Where the inputs come from? Pure energy, available at so low cost in the post-scarcity world that it wouldn't matter. Picard ordering a cup of tea from the replicator doesn't seem to care too much about E=mc2
Just in case you really don't know about the "maker movement", pay a visit to reprap.org [reprap.org]. It's not the only site, you'll be able to find many other sites supporting the makers (even if just by presenting the designs or knowhow).
Yes, nobody is making (yet) stepper motors and what not at home, but:
1. they are cheap nowadays, much cheaper than the computers were at the beginning of the open-source movement. And don't tell me that you scorn open-source movement because it uses paid-for and personal computers
2. it's a start (has been quite a long time ago).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Lester on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:14AM (6 children)
Example 2:
Company goes to bankruptcy because it's poorly managed.
That's a real world outcome. There are cooperatives that work, but there are also a lot of companies took by workers that were finally sold.
I don't mean that it is a the only outcome. Private business go also to bankruptcy, but a cooperative has the same problems that a private company, but in addition its own problems, one of them management.
If workers are wise enough to delegate decisions on a qualified and honest staff (in a tacit way or in a explicit way) , things may work. If non qualified workers use power to impose decisions about things they don't understand, bad. If workers begin to ask the same wages for everybody, you run into problems, you spend more time in committees, meetings about internal issues than doing real work.
Personal ambition is a problem, but it is also an important fuel of society improvement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:59AM (1 child)
If you think just because the board of directors names Joe MBA to be CEO of a private company, or because some idiot decided to manage his own business and he's a "job creator" now, then the capitalist management issue is gone I hope you are happy in the world you wish for. Speaking of which, how close to insolvency are you if you don't get your next pay check, o great economy teacher?
But hey you KNOW cooperatives have an extra unsolved problem vs private companies. You heard it in that "greed is good" movie. We'll just call it personal ambition now ...
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:43PM
Did I say that cooperatives should be banned?
If cooperatives do it better, perfect. I just think that cooperatives need conditions that are not always met. And for me, the proof is that there are much more private business than cooperatives.
I won't rise any objection if you gather a group of people and start the producción of software, or hardware, or the new SuperHD, or cars, or ships, or chairs, or pencils, or LED bulbs, or whatever you decide. Nobody is stopping you. Just do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:01PM (3 children)
Mondragon has been doing the co-op thing since 1956.
They started out with 6 worker-owners.
They're now have over 100,000 worker-owners in 40 countries on 5 continents.
In the (meta)thread, I linked to the compensation for the worker-owners of the Suma Cooperative.
They're also doing great--making all of their own decisions thank you very much.
A co-op will try to promote from within.
Places often have folks who have taken business courses, gotten degrees, worked in management at other places, yada,yada,yada.
When they can't find the skill set they need already within their own ranks, they can hire people, farm out work, or bring in new worker-owners.
They can also send their worker-owners to school to get extra skills before those are needed.
Oh, and the differential in pay between top management and workers in Capitalist operations in the USA is, on average, 349:1.
At Mondragon, the largest pay differential is 9:1. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
Private business go also to bankruptcy
With CxO compensation based on stock valuation, short-term thinking in Capitalist operations is common.
Stupid non-productive shit like stock buy-backs is what you get with Capitalism.
Capitalism is on its deathbed.
"The Recovery" is bullshit.
While "the paper economy" looks good, it's not actually producing any new goods or services; production isn't expanding.
The 1 Percent is just shifting cash from one pocket to another.
Nothing NEW is being produced.
Capitalism is a notion whose time has come and gone.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:25PM
But it's also true that coops can succumb to bad management. I know of one example that worked well for about 60 years, and then elected a board that was expansionist, and went bankrupt within a decade, even though it still had lots of community support. You *DON'T* take a low margin business and try to make it more profitable by rapid expansion...but these professional managers did.
Now it's true this was a consumers coop, not a workers coop, but the same general rule applies.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:02PM (1 child)
And I have several examples of the opposite. Maybe Mondragon is the exception, not the most common case. Can you point more cases?
Well I wouldd't say smartphones, Internet, modern computers etc are nothing. They were created by private companies, not by cooperatives.
Private companies are producing Drones, facial recognition, AI, electrical cars, better batteries, autonomous cars, new, more efficient solar cells, windmills, etc.
Perhaps you expect breaking, revolutionary invention. Well that is something rare, but accumulative small improvements create new things. In a smartphone, in a hand, you have a computer more powerful than any 15 years ago desktop. You have GPS, phone, mail, calendar, clock, radio, camera, video, image editor, video editor. 15 years ago that was science fiction. Forget the mantra "everything is invented already".
Well, well, well...
Capitalism is going to be here for ever, because it is in our DNA. Cynics that think that "Man is wolf to man" are wrong, and those who think that "man is born good and society turn him bad" are also wrong. In our DNA is the spirit of cooperation and the spirit of competition. As soon as the group is safe, competition appears brights, when group is in danger cooperation brights. Stalinism, i.e. just replaced some masters for others. Why? There are a few only competitive people and few only cooperative people, and most people in the middle in a bell curve [wikipedia.org], you acting as if have exterminated the right side of the curve is the worst thing you can do. You can exterminate the right curve remove a group of people. The people remaining has the same curve
There is a crisis, sure. Perhaps that level of unregulated capitalism is going to change and be more regulated. Or perhaps the opposite. But the idea that the natural and unstoppable trend is going to a new and more equal and happy society is naive. Ask Mafia what they think about. Ask warlords what they think about. Ask corporations moguls what they think about. We are more likely to go to a worse world than to a better world. There is a queue of bad guys waiting to take over the ruins of a society. The best way to avoid it is to be realist. Accepting that personal initiative is import and that not everybody is cooperative is a good beginning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @12:29AM
There's a region in northern Italy [wikimedia.org] that has them by the THOUSANDS. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
Those account for about a third of the region's economic activity.
The Marcora Law, [google.com] which seeds that, is something I've mentioned here MANY times.
After the boom-and-bust Capitalists fail and lay off workers, those workers can pool their unemployment insurance payments in a lump sum and start their own worker-owned cooperative.
The program is wildly popular.
If you haven't heard about it, that's because you have shitty sources of "information" (Lamestream Media).
N.B. Following the Russian Revolution, Italy had a notable Socialist movement going which (typical of movements by The Workers) was crushed by The Capitalist Class.
The Marcora Law got that going again, starting in 1985.
.
smartphones [...] modern computers
...produced in China.
You're not doing well at all at supporting your point.
batteries [...] solar cells, windmills
China again.
...and "intellectual property" is more of "the paper economy".
Where are the USAian workers producing NEW goods|MORE goods?
(Factor in USA's already-exported manufacturing capability and USA's already-exported jobs and you get a net loss; USA's trade deficit continues to grow.)
Wanna see a western country that is getting it right? Look at Germany.
you expect breaking, revolutionary invention
Not necessarily.
I'm looking for EXPANDED PRODUCTION i.e. more USAians working.
I'm looking for ACTUAL INVESTMENT IN NEW JOBS FOR USAians.
...not stock buy-backs.
...not CEO pay going from 335x to 349x of workers' pay.
Note also that The Workers are also consumers.
A Capitalist economy requires ever-increasing growth (consumption)--and with USA's Labor Non-Participation Rate not going below 22 percent for years and years and good-paying 1960s USAian jobs being replaced with part-time, minimum-wage jobs (or not replaced at all), the economy (USAians producing and consuming) is going in the opposite direction.
Capitalism has failed. Neoliberalism has accelerated that.
Capitalism is going to be here for ever
That's what they said about slave economies.
...and Feudalism.
Both are now anachronisms.
Nope. Capitalism is just 1 more inadequate system that has been tried and has failed for the majority of humans.
What is needed is a system that respects The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (of which USA is a signatory).
FDR proposed an Economic Bill of Rights. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
Socialism (or even Communism) is the system best suited to meet its provisions.
The USAian "middle class"[1] which began with The New Deal of the 1930s has been eroding--in particular since Reagan; more than half of USAians are now in The Precariat. [google.com]
[1] I hate that term for a vaguely-defined income strata.
There are only 2 classes: The Proletariat and The Bourgeoisie.
[Capitalism] is in our DNA
Your weak mind has allowed you to fall for The Capitalists' propaganda.
The expansion of "the middle class" was largely due to unions and The Communist Party of the US, particularly in the 1930s & 1940s.
Left to The Capitalists, you would still be working 6 days a week, 16 hours a day--alongside your children.
In our DNA is the spirit of cooperation
Yes. I've been saying that worker-owned cooperatives are the way to go.
and the spirit of competition
Again, the propaganda of The Capitalists is messing with your mind.
Competition doesn't require Capitalists.
(Mondragon regularly eats the lunch of Capitalist operations.)
Capitalism is you working to maximize profits in order to make The Ownership Class rich(er).
A Socialist worker-owned cooperative where there is no separate Ownership Class to siphon off profits without performing any labor is a much better notion.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:33PM (2 children)
You're conflating socialism with communism. Communism is the "democracy in the workplace" you're talking about. Socialism is the intermediate step where the state is directing production because the proletariat is still suffering from the false consciousness they were indoctrinated with under capitalism. The state, led by enlightened individuals who understand the Marxist project, is there to teach everyone a new way of producing material goods. Once everyone understands and has internalized collective ownership, then socialism will naturally give way to communism because the need for government will have melted away of its own accord.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:27PM
I don't think this can or will ever happen. Humans simply do not work this way. I would be very surprised if even one in fifty humans were "angelic" enough to make something like that work.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:49PM
Communism is the "democracy in the workplace" you're talking about
In your dissertation, your description of the forms is good.
At this point, we just disagree on the terms.
I would call Mondragon "Socialist":
"The collective ownership of the means of production by The Workers".
I would not call it "Communist" (where everything is owned by everybody).
Trying to think of the thing as being nationwide or worldwide all at once can muddy the picture.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by iru on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:45PM
> Not real socialism
I have the feeling I’ve hear that before.
(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:27PM
While I understand and support your ideals, but there is a phrase like this commonly associated with Stalin: "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."
Capitalist systems tend to slide into a corrupt oligarchy. You only need to look at human history to see it. It's inherent to the system. But socialism has its own degenerative tendency, and it's to authoritarianism. You only need to look at human history to see that too.
Until someone can make a compelling argument that their new form of capitalism/socialism/anarchy/whatever has some type of fundamental advantage over all forms tried before, I have to assume the best possible situation is a socialist and capitalist hybrid such as is practiced in Scandinavia and Germany today. Still far from perfect, but better than the rest of the world.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:25PM
Did even one single neuron fire in your frontal lobes while you typed that, or was it straight from your ass to your hands without involving the ol' wetware?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:56AM
Well, they teach a version of history.
It would be a whole lot more informative [google.com] if the material included that of
Howard Zinn [google.com]
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz [google.com]
Oliver Stone [google.com]
Naomi Klein [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:14AM
Can you be the slightest bit specific?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:51AM (5 children)
If you’re not a socialist before you’re 15, you have no heart. If you're a socialist after 15, you have NO BRIAN. -- Albert Einstein
Dr. Jackson says my Heart & Brain are in excellent health!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:02AM (1 child)
Don't know where you got that attribution[1], but it's complete nonsense.
(Einstein died a Socialist and was one through much of his working life.)
[1] ...or the "quote" that's not a quote.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:23AM
Indeed. Everyone knows that quote is properly attributed to William Shatner.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:20AM (1 child)
I had a friend named Brian when I was a kid....what does that do for me?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Funny) by dry on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:53PM
Did you sing "Look on the Bright Side of Life" when he was crucified?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:34PM
I traded all my Brians for three Phils and a Bob.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:25AM
What a silly thing to say... If you live in a democracy, the opinion of the majority will decide the laws of your country. Even if you don't, social customs will be shaped by the majority. And how do you ever expect the poor and the uninformed to improve their condition if they don't have access to proper non-propaganda information?
We must kill Facebook to save the world. Do your part today and delete your account if you have one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:24PM
20 years ago, AOL wasn't the internet.
Today, I give people the same advice I gave them 20 years ago, substituting 'Facebook' for 'AOL'.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:17AM (3 children)
It is just like the SoylentNews Editors, in their alt-righty bias, refusing to accept any of my submissions (see my sig, taken from IRC #editorial). But we find ways to make them pay, when they post real right-wing nut-job stories (from Fox News, or Brietbart, or worse), by mocking them mercilessly. In fact, the the fact they let this one fly suggests to me that they feel guilty, and instead of actually posting any unbiased news, they post an article about how some other internet organization is doing what they do! Not enough, eds! Only reverse whataboutism! How about some balance, and some aristarchus submissions? For great justice.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
One must always consider the audience she is writing for if she wants articles to be accepted. Many of your submissions I see in the queue, while amusing, also contain an incendiary tone. Seems you've backed away from the homophobia, which is appreciated, but IANAEditor so that's just, like, my opinion, man. Point is, I may miss something important you were trying to say if I get lost in the weeds and tripping over what I perceive as homophobia and what right-wing readers here may perceive as an attack on their masculinity. Pull those weeds. :)
There's very interesting information you're submitting. Try to be more objective in your presentation of it. Be diplomatic and help the reader find common ground in your presentation of the article.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:29PM
Is he attacking their masculinity, or is he shining a spotlight on how freaking fragile it is and then poking it a bit to demonstrate? There is a difference. It's not nice, but neither are they, so...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:37PM
You forgot. When you get old, you forget a lot. But you can touch your name, you can touch SUBMISSIONS. And it shows the ones they accepted, which are a lot. The one about the trans bots, the one about my beautiful THERMONUCLEAR tweet (thank you!) and many more.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:51AM (6 children)
Anyone associated with RT is on Joe McCarthy's list these days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:24AM (4 children)
In late October, I submitted something on that brilliant guy.
Google Escalates Its Censorship, Blacklisting Journalist Chris Hedges [soylentnews.org]
I made another submission about the sites being blacklisted.
That submission was also rejected but, some days later, I worked into a comment a link to that and a bias|factchecking site's opinion of the veracity of those sites.
Evidence of Google's Blacklisting of Left, Progressive, and Anti-War Sites Mounts [soylentnews.org]
I have repeatedly noted here that what's available outside of the Lamestream Media's elite-friendly propaganda has viewpoints that are worth seeing.
The list in that 2nd link is useful for those seeking wider sources of information.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:21AM (3 children)
Does that diminish your burning love for google, even a little bit?
google is an evil megacorp, probably the most dangerous ever
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:24PM
I use what works best for me.
When something comes along that's within an order of magnitude of Google's search engine, I'll give it a go.
So far, everybody's still several orders from the mark.
I have a bookmark that I can edit which includes the sites that I like with Boolean ORs.
When I remember that I saw something on 1 of them but can't recall -which-, I can usually find it again.
Google degrades the pageranks of those in the overall results but it still indexes their stuff.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
Odd, I'd vote Amazon for that title.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:48PM
I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he bought the Washington Post as a toy and to have political influence, and I gotta tell you, we have a different country than we used to have. He wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it. Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise. He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed. That's not right. And believe me, they have problems. They're going to have such problems. When they write PURPOSELY NEGATIVE and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.
But if Google wants to buy Amazon, I'll vote for that. Bring that one to my desk and I'll sign. I have pen in hand!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:37AM
Apparently Alec Salmond is on RT these days!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:59PM (2 children)
However, for many people, Facebook is the internet.
Should we worry about entrenched services such as Facebook and Google using their positions to suppress information?
Maybe those people should stop thinking Facebook is the internet, when it isn't. If this simple fact is too hard to comprehend for people, then they don't really deserve freedom from censorship.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:38PM (1 child)
The problem is, they may not deserver freedom from censorship, but *we* deserve their freedom from censorship. The acceptable rules of behavior, laws, etc. are all shaped by what the mass of people believe.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:44PM
The mass of people doesn't believe privacy is important, otherwise Facebook wouldn't be as popular as it is now. Therefore, the acceptable rules of behavior are to ignore privacy issues.
(Score: 3, Informative) by meustrus on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:54PM (4 children)
This kind of censorship is inevitable when the communications medium is controlled by a single provider. The real problem here is that tons of people picked convenience over all other concerns and came to rely on a fundamentally biased and unreliable communications medium.
We can demand that Facebook cut this out, but it will not work in the long run. Instead, we need to solve the hard problem of getting consumers to avoid inherent problems like this based on their own long term self interest. The free market is powerful, and corporate structures like Facebook are extremely efficient at delivering convenient products, but we must ensure that we are in control of these tools, not the other way around.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:52PM
The free market is indeed powerful, but the problem is that the majority of consumers are too stupid to pick things in their own long-term self-interest, which is why we have this situation with Facebook. That's why we generally need government regulation, to correct this problem, but even this doesn't work so well when the voters are stupid (since they're after all the same people as the dumb consumers too stupid to make choices in their own long-term self-interest).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:11PM (2 children)
controlled by a single [private] provider
Wilson, NC and Chattanooga, TN each have an ISP that is a public utility in every sense.
Those are owned by all residents of the city, in common.
If the service strays from the path of righteousness, the voters can select new people to set things back to right.
There's no particular reason that this paradigm couldn't be expanded to other services.
...even beyond the city level.
...if we had an actual democracy working in the USA.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:19PM (1 child)
Practically speaking, a municipal ISP is an acceptable compromise in my opinion. But that's because the municipal scale is small enough that if democracy breaks down, you can just move away, and the alternative is more market consolidation at a larger scale.
If you were to scale it up to the state level, or God forbid the national level, we'd be dealing with politically-motivated surveillance and censorship at a far more serious level than we already are.
Liberty requires having meaningful choices, not having the choices available be of higher quality.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @10:46PM
the municipal scale is small enough that if democracy breaks down, you can just move away
...or vote the bastards out.
...or impeach them.
There are better solutions than turning tail and running.
Step 1: "This is MY town. MY government needs to represent ME."
(On his weekly radio show, Ralph Nader notes repeatedly how few people it takes [google.com] getting off their butts to affect change.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:56PM (4 children)
Facebook is full of socialists who regularly suppress alt-right viewpoints.
This one time, a socialist gets suppressed because the video is about bypassing facebook's suppression. Boo hoo.
Want my sympathy? Support freedom of speech for me too, your arch enemy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:34PM (2 children)
I'm not a big consumer of Facebook, but that's not the impression I get.
"Authoritarians" might be closer to the mark.
"Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship" doesn't sound like Socialism to me.
It sounds much more broad-based.
socialists who regularly suppress alt-right viewpoints
"Alt-Right" is a term meant to deceive about their agenda.
They're simply White Supremacist Nationalists.
NeoConfederate or KKK Wannabes or NeoNazi would be less deceptive.
They're still just Skinheads who've let their hair grow out and have learned how to dress like businessmen.
Support freedom of speech
The courts have decided that all speech is not equal.
Big Internet is trying to restrict extremism, in particular, hate mongering.
When your "socialists" have started saying "Gather in this place; bring your weapons", we'll have a starting point for a discussion.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:42PM (1 child)
The "NeoConfederate or KKK Wannabes or NeoNazi" types are at least somewhat socialist, perhaps with exclusions for disfavored groups. They certainly aren't alt-right.
The alt-right is probably 1/3 of America. They are the hard-core patriotic types who rejected Rubio and Jeb! They tend to be fairly capitalistic and free-market, but only to the extent that this serves American citizens. The desire for a capitalist and free-market economy is limited by a desire to avoid open borders and giant trade agreements that might put Americans at a disadvantage. They have internal disagreement over the proper role of Christianity and Judaism and atheism in our country, but almost universally hate Islam. They favor gun rights and free speech. Mostly they are tolerant of adults choosing to be LGBT.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:30PM
Using "socialist" incorrectly just makes you look stupid.
Here's Socialism:
The collective ownership of the means of production by The Workers.
That has zero overlap with violent nationalist racists.
It's sad how much Cold War bullshit USAians have swallowed.
patriotic types
"Make America White again" is NOT patriotism.
They tend to be fairly capitalistic
Capitalism and Socialism are opposites, bozo.
avoid open borders
You don't understand Socialism in the slightest.
Marx envisioned an international brotherhood of The Workers.
Christianity and Judaism and atheism [...] Islam [...] gun rights
None of that has anything to do with Socialism.
Does it hurt to be that stupid?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:11PM
Capitalists are the only enemy.