Don't join the army

iufewal · 2019-03-28T16:21:04+00:00

I too am deeply afraid of the British military industrial complex.

Young Brits don't seem to have any awareness of their own country's status whatsoever. Their knowledge of the world is drawn in large part from the American experience rather than a British one, and at times like these, when Britons apologize for their truly ginormous military industrial complex, cracks in that logic begin to show.

iufewal · 2019-03-21T10:26:31+00:00

I suffer from bad teeth issues and I tend to take all my drinks warm / hot as well. Sudden temperature changes basically make my teeth hurt, which is why I take my tea hot.

iufewal · 2019-03-19T13:02:06+00:00

That is simply not true.

You are referring to the British Parliament's vote last week, which boils down to a statement that the British Parliament would never willingly accept a no deal scenario.

Of course, whether parliament accepts it or not doesn't matter from the EU's perspective. Since you've given notice for article 50, the default is that you leave on March 29, regardless of whether you have a deal.

If the UK cannot get an extension from the EU, then they may well crash out without a deal.

iufewal · 2019-03-17T00:14:39+00:00

Am I the only one who thinks that the backlash against Fraser Anning's (Queensland Senator) statement is going to lead to more divisiveness than ever?

He has quite rightfully if tactlessly pointed out that had concerns over mass immigration been addressed by the government more adequately - whether through real policy changes, cosmetic policy changes, or simply giving the anti-migration people a platform on which their concerns could be heard and fairly dismissed - then none of this would have happened.

Why am I not surprised that the Guardian and so many other outlets are ignoring the real point he has made, and instead go for the simple "he blamed Muslims for the shooting" angle? The backlash against the senator, both from mass media and social media, will only serve to further convince opponents of mass immigration that the public as well as the government has no intention of addressing their concerns and in fact seeks to demonize them.

iufewal · 2019-03-17T00:05:10+00:00

I think it's great that we as a species have so much cultural diversity. To me, it seems to be a given that our lives would all be enriched if we spent more time studying the cultures, beliefs, and languages alien to our own; but where an alien culture takes up root within your own lands, that's where I draw the line.

I think of meeting new cultures as something like meeting a friend. You might get along well together, but having them in your room all the time becomes kind of awkward. Having them take up permanent residence in your room while insisting on living in accordance with their own house rules would be downright annoying.

Let me be clear, I'm not saying that one would be justified in shooting non-conforming immigrants; after all, one does not normally take up a gun against annoying friends who stay in your house and disobey your house rules. However, what I am saying is that I don't think an appreciation of the diversity of humanity necessarily leads to agreeing with a policy of mass immigration.

iufewal · 2019-03-16T23:29:40+00:00

My first reaction was that what they were doing was completely disgusting, and should be stopped at all costs.

After having sat down for a minute and thought about it, I realized there may be alternative applications for the same model which they have developed. Currently, what the ADL has (or claims to be developing) is a programme which can pre-emptively sort speech into categories of "hate speech" and "not hate speech".

But who's to say that this programme can only be used for that purpose? Fundamentally, what they really have is a programme that sorts speech into "Category A" and "Not Category A" based on feedback from an actual team of humans.

While the ADL intends to use this technology to block what they define as "hate speech", we could in fact use the same principles to make this "category A" whatever we wanted it to be, and decide what we wish to do with the "category A" comments afterwards. For instance, if we all happened to like "movie B", we could use this programme to find all comments praising "movie B" and use another programme to instantly upvote all of them. This could be applied in advertising and so on, but it could also be used for politics; if you were partial to a particular political ideology, you could again use this to automatically upvote all the comments you agree with in any thread without ever reading a single one of them. You could also, if you were partial to a non-mainstream ideology such as Anti-Vax, immediately create a bubble around your ideology and filter out all comments that disagree with you.

If I understood the function of this machine-learning model correctly, of course.

iufewal · 2019-03-16T23:15:13+00:00

As one of the extremists, I'm not sure if I agree with the analysis of Voat as being a place taken over by Neo-Nazis. I would argue that Voat was a place where a normal, decent userbase grew from shared experiences into what they are now.

Voat was certainly not in its original form full of white supremacists; in fact, I would argue that the majority of its userbase actually came from fairly tame places; /r/fatpeoplehate, and so on. For a long period of time, Voat contained a userbase much like Reddit's, with the distinction being that they held a deepseated suspicion of everything and anything which smacked of censorship. Anything which was "censored" was automatically viewed as "one of us", a fellow victim of an injustice they all suffered, and someone to be welcomed with open arms.

It was in this climate that Reddit began to crack down upon what you call "extremists"; but the Voat userbase didn't see it that way. They saw themselves in these "extremists", not necessarily because they saw a connection in political ideology, but because they saw a shared experience. The treatment which these "extremists" had suffered at the hands of the administration was sufficient penance for any wrongheaded views they might hold, and Voat, the ever-compassionate, would be willing to lend an ear and a voice to what they had to say.

You can almost see why this idea would be appealing even to people who care little for political ideology; it was a chance to demonstrate their superiority over their erstwhile tormentors, while at the same time a chance to spite the very same people by giving a platform to those they sought to deplatform. Had Reddit banned /r/chapotraphouse or any sort of communist subreddit, Voat would have just as eagerly jumped at the chance to the support of the far left. That ship has probably sailed by now, but still, the claim that Voat was / is an extremist site doesn't sit right with me at all. It has always been what it still is: A free-speech fundamentalist site where censorship on the grounds of political opinions (no matter how vile or repulsive) is the first enemy, even before anything else.

iufewal