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Messages - mellowautomata

#1
Off-Topic / Re: Corrupt-A-Wish
June 29, 2017, 01:59:35 AM
Quote from: Names are for the Weak on June 29, 2017, 01:35:49 AM
I wish I were the strongest man in the world.

Granted. Hopefully you won't feel too lonely with nobody else in it, though.

I wish to crack open a cold one with the boys
#2
Quote from: milon on June 27, 2017, 02:05:41 PM
If we ban political discussions, then it's because we think it's doesn't need to be discussed (or at least, not here).  If we think we don't need to talk about it here, it's because we think it's unimportant.  If we think it's unimportant, it's because it has no impact on us personally.  And if it has no impact on us personally, it's because we're both privileged and disconnected from the non-privileged.  And I think that's unacceptable for any community of people.

Let me provide some reasoning, as a person who has wasted so much of my life into this stuff. This post is long as you can see and I hope that you can bear with it. There's multiple of points I'm going to make. The main argument is that there are other reasons to ban political discussions than to say that they are not important. But, as for actual points I'm trying to make, they will be about why political discussion in contemporary western world might not be all you hope it to be.

So, do these political debates actually do anything? According to my experiences, no. They're absolutely trash and useless. I know this sounds outlandish — I mean, most of us live in supposedly democratic countries and the leading principle of democracy is that people have more or less rational discussions with each other and, you know, mutually come to conclusions at the end of the discussions, be they friendly debates or whatever. But I can tell you right now that somewhere along the way, we got off from that path and never returned.

These political debates far more often than not are malicious in their nature, especially ones that touch actual lives of people that, you know, are unhappy about stuff. You see, it's not at all about understanding and relating to others, now it's all about imposing your worldview on others. A person who lived in poverty will probably be concerned about poverty in future, a person who didn't, is far less likely to be concerned about poverty in qualitative terms. They don't really understand whats it like and it never will get through them. Some petty political discussions about poverty will not change this, they still won't get it. They're going to give that good 'ol talk about how it's a matter of choices you make and, in the end, you need to be content with the outcomes they give.

Or lets say me. Am I really concerned about how tragic it is for a rich person to pay larger amounts of taxes even in relative terms? Not really, I don't care in the slightest, I can't even begin to imagine what on earth could be so horrible about that. If they say, for example, that they are going to move into another country unless the taxes get lower, I'll just regard that as their petty attempt to make threats to public so that they could remain in their overly privileged positions. I don't really care whenever there's any legitimate concerns about them being taxed more. Now to avoid offtopic: I don't care about debating this at all. My point is, it's about imposing your worldview on others, not about relating.

Okay, that aside, there is more to debates obviously. A lot of people, after all, agree that for example we should have less poverty no matter how terribly they understand poverty in the first place. And as luck would have it, we can always present facts to each other and convince each other. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, you can prove pretty much any position you want if you know how to navigate in google (or google scholar) with proper keywords. Because there will be plenty of facts that go either way really, especially when they are statistical. So how it actually works is either that one of us will post a statistical fact and then, the other one will either counter that by accessing the methodology used to conclude at that statistic or question the interpretation of that statistic, question the data of that statistic, question the assumptions required for the inference et cetera or... just effortlessly google to come up with a countering fact. Maybe question the authority? Maybe appeal to authority? Oh and let's not forget that I've encountered endless amounts of people who just seem to not understand that forming an opinion based on statistics always involves an interpretation of the statistics. So there are loads and loads of people who seem to think treat their venerable opinions as facts, because they base them on statistics.

Really, you can go endless, seriously endless amounts to this. There will always be something. I've literally argued with members of Ministry of Finance in my country, only to have them admit, that they really don't know "but what else can we do?" in regards to their research and methodology being terrible and in particular that they don't admit it to the policymakers because else wise they would hesitate far more if the researchers were honest in terms of how reliable their research is. As if some Mayans arguing that human sarcifices may be terrible, but it's the best we can do.

There's even one stellar example, Rogoff and Reinhart controversy. I'm not going to go through it, you can read about that here. However, I am going to say that despise that controversy going public and being a huge embarrassment to the duo, nothing happened. Nobody apologized for basing policymaking with completely biased research. They are still influential, despite the fact that their "mistakes" were rather too grave to be just accidental humane mistakes. And as that article states, their result was bit too convenient.

But just like the bosses in Dark Souls, this isn't all there is to it. There's two more modern trends that are going to make things even "better" for us. One is fakenews and one is clickbait news. I think most of us knows what fake news are. Certain news outlets that are all about promoting certain ideology with no slightest regard to journalistic integrity. They do not use any kind of legitimate sources for their claims. Debating with people who rely on these is the best thing ever. Ask for a source, you get a source that's bullshit. Point it out and tell them to try again. You get another source that is equally bad. And the endless cycle continues.

The way fake news operate is simple: they allow practically anyone to write content in them and their content has no other standards than that it has to conform to certain ideology. They don't really care about truth, because they already know what the truth is and hence they're out there to spread the good word with disregard for anything else. And because anyone can write, there will be endless amount of content and hence, endless amount of sources for people who buy into it. These people won't even read whats in them, they just click on it, copy the link and that's all. And best part is? At worst, these sites don't even pay for their content creators, they just literally hire anyone who fits the bill to write whatever they want, because there's no shortage of young activists who want others to understand the truth.

There's also another kind of fakenews, let's say, a more liberal variant. This one is harder to explain shortly as it requires some more nuance. Lot of this actually is about that previous theme where you obfuscate facts with opinions because, hey, there are statistics out there.

Clickbait news? We all know about them too. But the thing is, it's not only normal news outlets. A lot of popular science is ridden with this and it makes searching for science related news at times way too difficult. Most often they operate by highly exaggerating finds of some study that found some correlation of almost insignificant magnitude between two things. Heck, sometimes the study doesn't even have to do anything with your clickbait. A study may say that positive attitude can benefit patients with chronic diseases. And common wisdom may say that men like seeing breasts. Bingo. (Exaggerated case, sure, but basically anything that doesn't resemble a peer-reviewed journal has a huge risk to contain this sort of journalism, no matter how "sciencey" it appears to be. To say that this sort of journalism doesn't care about what is true or not, is an understatement. It's also good to note that many news outlets actually practice both variants (fakenews and clickbaiting).

All in all, I'd say there are absolutely no prospects for political discussions or debates to be had. Saying that this kind of content is not the kind of content you want in a forum, for example, is not categorically equal to that of saying that political topics are not important. They might very well be, but we've already lost our ability to deal with them. I really don't know how people in ancient Greece managed to debate, but then again, empirical science and free will wooery wasn't what they were about anyway. They had the luxury of discussing through mythology and interpreting it and we can only envy the simple brilliance of that. The privilege aspect needs not to apply here if the actual reasoning isn't just a simple "we don't care". Ask yourself: how many times you have participated or witnessed a political discussion that was fruitful? Sure, maybe you feel like you've seen that at least a couple of times. But then ask yourself: how many times you've witnessed them overall? If that is significantly higher amount than the fruitful ones, then you know where the issue lies in.

Saddest thing is? I have merely merely scraped the surface here.

EDIT: Okay, obviously I am a pessimist. Maybe there are future prospects to be had, but this post is me casting huge doubts on that based on personal experience, personal observations and general accounts of how things are in realm of science that relates to policymaking which, in the western world, dominates public debates about policymaking, as values are seen meaningless; it's all about facts.
#3
Quote from: DaemonDeathAngel on June 28, 2017, 07:48:28 PM
Not at all, because if you have an obscenely retarded opinion, I tend to drop the discussion, or ignore you, specifically when it pertains to polotics or religion.

See, to me it sounds like you're saying that OP proposition is bad because hey, you can just drop the discussion and ignore it. That's kind of pointless reasoning given that OP didn't say that political discussions shouldn't be allowed because you can't personally avoid them. That's not the reasoning that was given by OP. Let me quote:

Quote from: Fluffy (l2032) on June 26, 2017, 07:10:57 PM
Given that the subject of politics more often than not leads to a discussion with neither end nor merit, it's much simpler for everyone involved to just blanket ban political discussions. There are many forums on the internet devoted to these discussions, and gaming forums aren't (or at least shouldn't be) one of them.

And I for one agree with this. I've read and participated on countless of debates in countless political topics. This is exactly my experience of them. No end nor merit.




#4
Quote from: DaemonDeathAngel on June 28, 2017, 06:59:10 PM
This entire thing boils down to this. If you cant keep your cool, and refrain from being a whiney little asshat when someone else has a differing opinion from you, then you need to leave the internet, or society in general, until a point which you can be respectful of others rights to their own opinions, and can have an open discussion involving somethig which effects everyone, calmly.

Be an adult, not an entitled little nancy boy/girl/what ever the fuck you are.

Sounds to me like you're having a hard time with people in this thread who have an opinion that differs from your own opinion
#5
Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 06:14:24 PM
Do you really want us to count and classify topic which do not have a explicit relation to
a)video game
b)Rimworld/Ludeon
c)Ludeon game
Here? Isn't it the whole point of an OFF-TOPIC forum?

...and are political in nature. Which most of topics right now as I'm checking in offtopic, are not.

Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 06:14:24 PM
Private Message do not let new persons join in the discussion and doesn't let other people just read it and learn new point of view. That's why we create all sort of topic here and ignore all other topics that do not interest ourselves like we do all the time.
But if you still notice a problem to difficult to ignore? Well yes the Report function is useful, in fact I would say it's all that's needed:
Step one: Identify the problem making you annoyed by (say) political discussion
Step two: click report, explaining concisely the reason it make you want to quit the forum
Step three: Let the Moderator decide if there's something wrong.

I did it myself, and it did work. I would do it again but from me it might look biased.

I'm not going to report anyone just because their topic is completely political when it's not explicitly stated, that political topics are not allowed. I might think the post is made by a cryptofascist promoting his ideas in obscure way (which is very often the way they do it), the moderator might also agree with this, but the moderator can't legitimately just ban the person and/or delete the topic / post on those grounds. If political discussions are banned all the same, then there's no real need to wonder whenever it's a cryptofash promoting hatred against humanity in obscure way, because it's still political.

And as for people not being able to join the discussion, well, that's why you wanna do that discussion elsewhere then. There's numerous of places where you can have political discussions freely to your hearts desire. This is a forum for an audience of a specific game. There is no innate need to allow completely political discussions here that are irrelevant to the game, it doesn't really limit anyones freedom of speech because, again, this isn't the necessary place for such discussions. Of course, that is left to the discretion of the people who actually get to decide what this place is or isn't, but there is no principal issue here with not allowing political discussion.
#6
Off-Topic / Re: Immigration discussion
June 28, 2017, 06:36:02 PM
At this point I've stopped reading what you have to say, because I'm only interested with links. And now we have Zerohedge?

I got this theory that maybe he has a whole roulette not only for rhetorical fallacies that he spins to get randomly names to use, but he also has another roulette for wooery sites. We move this time from white supremacist sites to sites that are run by people who are really into Austrian economics. Then again, honestly sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two (given how Murray Rothbard, for example, supported nationalism) and that American libertarian ideologue stems from the concept of American exceptionalism (which is not as prevalent ideology as it used to be, but still does outline a lot of the political rhetoric in contemporary US).

Either way, I'm seeing here once again, that no proof has been linked about Sweden (or UK, or Germany, or any other country) instituting laws that make critique of Islam illegal. Because that never happened. And the contents of that article in zerohedge is also nothing special: nobody here or anywhere else has claimed that Sweden is a perfect country or had a perfect immigration policy. Sweden aims at integration (which has, by the way, been far more successful than France which aims at assimilation) but the actual issues with Sweden have a lot to do with how they house immigrants into certain areas. Malmö & Rinkeby being two notorious examples of this. Of course these people aren't integrating well into a society if they can't even participate in the society if they are segregated from the rest of it. I also did mention earlier in this thread, in first page, that there are qualitative differences between countries and immigration policies they have. Alt-right likes to present it as black and white "Either immigration will end up like in Rinkeby or there will be no immigration", which again is simply bullshit. In Finland we do not have Rinkeby or Malmö and our immigration policy works well. EDIT: It's not perfect, we do have challenges of our own. But we don't have heavily racially segregated areas with that much tension. Even closest one, Varissuo, is already being dealt with.

This however, obviously is not a discussion I care to go on forward with in here. It's an interesting issue, but I'd much rather talk about it with sensible people than people who consider Infowars, Breitbart, Zerohedge etc sources as legit sources.
#7
Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 05:01:38 PM
Just like there is lot of difference between what "political discussion" people will agree to see bannedmoderated away and what they will find frustrating to not be able to mention.

As I said earlier, I do not think that this will be a significant problem because there already exists communities which fare just fine (such as KVR example). It's much easier to consider general categories with some quantifiable measure than it is to consider completely qualitative categories. And, there is no need to not allow game related talk that might touch politics one way or another. That talk should be still about the game itself, not about politics. The immigration topic for example, has obviously no relation to this game, to Ludeon, to gaming industry. It's just one person who is seeking inflammatory political debates with a clear purpose. It's very easy to distinguish such a topic from a topics that clearly are about the game, for example.

Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 05:01:38 PM
Moderators don't have the time to check if any discussion is getting too political and if they did it would risk being too overbearing, leading to complaint if no one can't even discuss the news between person who are mature and rational enough to appreciate it.
Report function is useful here to direct their attention where it's due. And if these rational people want to discuss politics, then there's always PM's and other forums where they can do that.

Also let me make it clear: I do not think that you have to enforce the rule with a heavy banhammer. Topics can be deleted only, temporary bans that last for 1 day can be given and after multiple attempts, these bans could extend more. Some games, such as Path of Exile, have (mostly) good policy for muting for example: first offense you will be muted for just one day. Within 6 months, if you get muted again, that will be extended and the period again resets (so within next 6 months, if you get muted again, that time will increase and it will reset again et cetera). 6 months sounds kind of steep though, but even 1 month period will probably be enough.
#8
Off-Topic / Re: Immigration discussion
June 28, 2017, 05:18:38 PM
Quote from: mumblemumble on June 28, 2017, 04:56:01 PM
I cannot find the exact thing he said, but it never indicates he was threatening of inciting violence, just "hatred". Seems to me like he was arrested for criticizing Islam, but if you want to cite any sources saying this dude said otherwise... go ahead.

You sure have a nice tendency of pulling up these sources that have no relation to topic. Just like in that other post (where you still couldn't prove that Sweden does not allow criticism of Islam), you're still pulling up sources for your claims that do not have any kind of proof about your claims. Unless you know the actual comments that man made (which do not have to be shared by newspapers), you're as clueless as you ever were and you're working on your prejudice. Much like Fluffy, I must say, this stuff only is interesting to me to present a countering view to your BS. I think however that, by now, most people probably have a clear understanding that there's something wrong with you since you can't post anything relevant to back up your wild claims that isn't by Breitbart and other similar sources (which, again, do not actually contain any legit sources for their outlandish claims).

Start posting the sources that actually back your claims up or otherwise don't even bother.
#9
Quote from: DaemonDeathAngel on June 28, 2017, 06:16:42 AM
I would like to state, WoW administrators dont give two shits about political discussion. Have you ever payed attention to trade chat for any length of time? Give it 10 to 20 minutes tops, and theres a political argument, nothing comes of it

That depends on whenever it is reported or not. And it is different at times — I do remember that back before presidential elections in US, /2 was full of political stuff and nobody seemed to get banned. But I've also seen guildies getting banned for engaging into them at other times.

Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 03:10:00 PM
Discussing politic isn't bad, letting some person believe it mean "I can call for hate against people I don't like", that is bad.

Problem with this approach is that there will be likely lot of differences between what people think should be moderated and what not. So by moderating specific messages will likely not work out well because others will interpret arbitrarily however they want. To some degree, this risk also exists with moderating political topics completely, but it's still much easier in comparison to moderating only certain kinds of replies that belong to the category of "political".

Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 03:10:00 PM
You do not want to discourage someone making a topic about a Game with politically oriented context (or say criticizing a game for its cheap/bad use of politics)

Honestly, I doubt that there is much of a danger to this. It's game-related discussion. Take in for example a forum I am a regular user of; KVR forum. As I mentioned earlier in my first post to this thread, they have an actual subforum for political topics, "Hyde Park Corner". Does that mean that they do not have political topics at all outside? Quite on the contrary. For example copyright laws are often discussed there, critiqued or defended and so on, outside of Hyde Park Corner. Despite the topic being political, it is very relevant to music production, hence it's allowed elsewhere. Same principle can be used here: political topics that belong completely to offtopic and have no relation to Ludeon themselves, could be prohibited.

Quote from: Kegereneku on June 28, 2017, 03:10:00 PM
The Moderator have the same jobs as always, no matter the topic: keep the discussion civil and fun for everybody.

This might sound nitpicking, but rules have this exact function and they can be changed if it seen that changing the rules serve the community better.
#10
Quote from: Kegereneku on June 26, 2017, 06:33:39 PM,
Discussion (of any sort) aren't the problem. Beside it would be hard, if not impossible to ban a specific range without encroaching upon good topic.

1. It's not impossible and has been done before. Check the second post by Fluffy, which already gave two examples of biggest gaming communities (Steam and WoW).

2. Talking about only costs while ignoring benefits is pointless. There are benefits of not allowing political topics at all. For one, moderators would likely have easier time after people adjust to it and for two, some of these topics deal with issues that touch people personally and that might disencourage those people from, say, creating good topics in these forums. And let's give a third as well: this sort of stuff can lead to degradation of reputation of a gaming community in general. I've seen some people here writing certain posts that kind of make me wonder what would happen if they were far more vocal.
#11
Quote from: DariusWolfe on June 27, 2017, 10:26:02 PM
I am generally in agreement with your proposal to ban political discussion; My only caveat is as noted: Where the discussion of politics is actually related to Rimworld.

Also, I agree that speech is speech (and writing, and recordings, films, TV, movies, etc); Spending money may be a statement, but it is not itself speech, and shouldn't be protected in the same fashion; Nor do I think corporations should enjoy the same freedoms as actual citizens, given that the whole point of a corporation is to limit legal liability to persons. A corporation should enjoy some freedoms of speech, but not the same as actual citizens.

I also learned a while ago that there are people I try to limit discourse with, on any topic.

Edit: Hell, to be honest I'd go even further and propose the removal of the Off-Topic forum entirely, though I doubt that'd get any traction.

I'm pretty sure honestly that the moderators are capable more than enough to discern between legit, game-related talk and between posts that have clear intent for becoming political. Also, I support this proposal 100%, although I fear it would probably mean ridiculously much more work for the moderators.

I'm going to put it out here as well that one option is to do just have "political" subsection in offtopic which would be locked away completely from people who have not reached past a certain amount of activity in forums (measured by amount of posts). Biggest issue with that, that I can foresee, is that it might encourage even more political talk which means even more content that likely requires absurd amount of moderation.

But if only options is to not have political discussions vs. status quo, I'm completely for non-political discussions only. And this is coming from a person who engages in them often (mostly because I read some woo which I must correct) and enjoys them. There's better places for political discussions IMO and, keeping this as friendly as possible to what seems like constantly growing audience, will probably mean that this issue has to be dealt in one way or another.
#12
Off-Topic / Re: Immigration discussion
June 28, 2017, 03:48:11 AM
Quoteits simply disapproval and criticism of Islam.

Can you direct us to some real world examples where a person got prosecuted for hate speech for legitimate criticism of Islam in western countries? All the examples I know in Finland who have got prosecuted for that have pretty much deserved it. Most moderate out of all these people that I know of, Jussi Halla-aho, referred to all muslims as parasitic lifeforms and also implied that they're pedophiles and that people of Somalia have genetic disposition to robbing and living off taxpayers money. This is the most controversial account in Finland where someone got a sentence for a hate crime. And to me, it doesn't look controversial at all, he should have gotten it and he did.

Quotebut then would you agree that YOU should be jailed for calling me a bigot? [...]

Sorry, you have to draw a line somewhere and that line happens to be above calling people as bigots. If you have a problem with people calling you as a bigot, you might for once want to check whenever the issue is in those people or in your own actions.

QuoteBut back onto what you said : you must give an example of something I said, or something someone arrested in europe said to remove someone ELSES right

Now, I'm a different person, but I just did give an example (the Jussi Halla-aho one). It's a great example of writing that inspires hatred among other people which can materialize at worst as violence against certain groups of people and thus threatens their rights to, you know, not be victims of physical assault or worse.

Quoteand honestly many people in europe already hate muslims as much as him

You might as well be arguing that NSDAP was actually the right party to win the elections, because you know, it got more support than the other parties.

Quotethen I will have no problem

Good for you. I also hear that some people don't have problems when people physically assault them, so make that legal too.

QuoteSo lets be clear : you say I am alt right because I agree with someone on the alt right.

They were saying that you're using the very same arguments that most alt-right people do. And FWIW, I also think so.

QuoteIts a medical term, and I'm very much against moving the goal post and renaming things every 5 years. Retarded, mentally ill, brain dead, stupid, ect : all fit the bill for what is described

There's a problem. The medical definition of "retarded" is that your measured IQ is under 75. You will not likely be using internet or writing series of complete sentences or arguing at all in internet. So categorically, calling your opponent as "retarded" is always wrong by the medical definition, unless you're physically trying to argue with such a person. The medical definition for "mentally ill" is... nothing. In medicine sciences they do not use that term at all for research purposes or anything like that anymore. Even for juridical purposes this term is now obsolete. There is absolutely no way to come up with a definition of "mentally ill" that would stay coherent AND not include every single person on the planet in it. Same goes for "healthy person"*; you can't come up with an actual definition for a healthy person that could describe even a single adult out there. The medical definition for brain dead is that your brains have lost all of its functions and that they cannot be restored back. So calling opponent in the internet as "brain dead" is kind of weird, unless you really somehow think that you are arguing with a person who has lost all of its brains functions. Medical definition of stupidity is... yeah, doesn't exist. Not sure if it ever has existed, but heck, maybe it has in history.

So what I'm trying to say is, you're going to make yourself look like a fool if you're arguing that using mental illnesses as a derogatory term is somehow justified for being "medical term", or any other terms you have provided, for reasons I've explained.

*To be honest, some organizations have actually definition for a "healthy person", such as WHO and it had this exact problem. You can read more about this problem in here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1463144/

QuoteApparently people who are patriotic, are for free speech, and voted for trump are all "white nationalists" is this what you are saying?

That's not what they were saying. They were saying that alt-right is a term that extreme right white nationalists came up to describe their movement with that sounds just so much more socially acceptable than, say, "national socialist" or "neonazi" or anything like that. This sort of tactic is pretty old one and it's really just standard kind of populism but with a really atrocious end goal.

There's no moving of goalposts here. Seriously, I'm starting to think that you have a roulette in your home filled with rhetorical fallacies which you spin to get randomly a name of a fallacy that you'll input whenever you can't come up with anything better.

QuoteI'd like to know why you figure any group is white nationalist

A good place to begin with would be racism. And boy is infowars, Breitbart etc full of that. Take this as an example: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/stephen-bannon-facebook-group-racist-material-obama-death-threats/

QuoteThe most extreme stuff I can find that is serious is someone saying they are worried about the declining ethnic European population percentage, and the Muslim invasion of European homelands. But thats not anymore white supremacist than black people who want to visit africa and preserve it for blacks are BLACK supremacist.

I think this quote sort of delegitimizes everything you have said in this thread. If you are seriously going to say that that is the most extreme stuff you can find, well, right about now if I didn't care about the chance of being banned, I'd say a couple things directed at you which you would not likely enjoy.

Basically, this is you admitting how much of a bias you have. Have you heard about Breivik? Yeah, that one guy who killed 77 people (most of which were children) after he wrote a manifesto about that whole "muslim invasion" stuff. And Breivik has had so many sympathizers after the fact, that you can't anymore deny the fact that we're talking merely about one isolated case. Many people have been arrested for planning similar things with sympathies for Breivik and countless people online have defended his actions (because those kids happened to be children of democrats).

"the most extreme stuff" my ass. Sadly it's not up to me, but if it was, that comment would have granted you at the very least a week worth of ban, hopefully resulting into you considering how far you want to go to defend hatred against humanity. I'm gonna skip mostly the rest apart from couple things just to make a clear.

Quotehttps://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/18116-new-swedish-law-criminalizes-anti-immigration-internet-speech

There's something  funny about that article. It first uses a source( http://pamelageller.com/2014/04/sharia-sweden-swedish-newspaper-hacks-discus-goes-commenters-homes-cameramen.html/#sthash.3jsuIsrj.dpuf ) that doesn't have anything to do with the topic. I know about this case and in fact, I know that this article is bullshit. Expressen did not use hackers for anything, the hackers were leftist people who then released the information to the news. Want to know in particular why people loved that case? Because unlike the common claim that alt-right and fascists and whatnot make, they were the "vocal minority" themselves. Majority of those hateful comments were actually made by a very small group of people. This is what the hackers wanted to find out and it is, indeed, what they found out. It was extremely demoralizing to the far-right of Sweden, because it was then in public that they were actually very small group of people in the internet. It was literally so bad that about 10% of the commentators were making over 60% of the actual comments (most of which were hateful).

More about your article. The second source is very funny. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/swedens-hate-speech-law-condemned-at-un-human-rights-commission

That is from year 2005 (and to nobodys surprise, that source doesn't have any sources in itself for its claims). But... in year 2014 (the year your article was written), UN actually asked Sweden to intensify the fight against discrimination of black people in particular: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=49547

Do you really even bother to check the sources your links use?

Quotehttp://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/06/sussex-police-imprison-man-speaking-radical-islamic-hate-violence/

Oh sorry, I didn't know "put Muslim on the top of a bonfire" is actually legitimate criticism of Islam. Of course, how terrible it was for me to assume otherwise. You know, I actually understand now; when he suggested "bomb a mosque day", this was actually obscene critique, where this person merely wanted to draw out the Big Other of everyone to reflect the gruesome realities of PC culture, by positing himself in such a predicament *sniff*

This has absolutely nothing to do with UK criminalizing critique of Islam. It has to do with UK sentencing a person who has wrote atrocious things in facebook. If you think that is legit critique of Islam, then you have some serious issues with your worldview. Like really serious issues.

Also, to end this post, here's a picture. People don't want to criminalize critique of Islam, people are just getting tired of assholes who have nothing better to do with their lives than spreading their hate online through the protection of anonymity or pseudonym:


#13
Off-Topic / Re: Immigration discussion
June 28, 2017, 02:13:20 AM
Quote from: Fluffy (l2032) on June 27, 2017, 08:54:41 PM

The ideology of national socialism (a neo-nazis in particular) has very little to do with socialism.

Actually, this isn't necessarily entirely true. Don't get me wrong — I'm a socialist myself who has complete dislike for any kind of national socialism. But, strasserim technically would have been socialism with the obsession on races. However more interestingly, certain countries that contemporary liberal socialists hold in high regard as examples, have actually had quite a twisted past that flirts a lot with fascism. I only know that Sweden and Finland are such examples. The concept of the welfare state that emerged in these two countries actually stems from Rudolf Kjellen (Sweden was first with Folkhemmet which had highly nationalist undertones, Finland followed as Urho Kekkonen got inspired by Sweden). While no clear historical evidence of this exists to my knowledge, but Rudolf Kjellen seemed to inspire the domestic policies that Hitler pursued by a huge margin.

However, in practice, capitalists of Ruhr didn't seem to complain about what they got and indeed, the means of production were certainly not controlled by the working class. Likely most people will disagree with the statement that it was "more capitalist than socialist", but likely most of these people also think that capitalism is about free markets (which becomes an issue with semantics). It's safe to say that most people who identify as "capitalists" these days would not support policies that were implemented in Nazi Germany (even though same policies did benefit capitalists in there).

With this being said, I have no issues with your reply in itself. Just thought this might be interesting thing to point out.
#14
Off-Topic / Re: Immigration discussion
June 27, 2017, 02:18:01 PM
Quote from: milon on June 27, 2017, 01:48:08 PM
About stopping the political discussions, I don't step in as a moderator unless someone is violating our rules.  Free speech, ya know.  ;)  But we're definitely keeping an eye on this one and some folks are quite close to losing their posting privileges.

In case it ever gets bad, one thing you folks can do is to consider having a subsection in OT for political discussions. Personally I like the way that KVR forums did with the "Hyde Park Corner" section. It's a subsection of OT, but you can't even see it unless you are registered and you cannot post there until you have certain amount of activity in your account. The advantages probably aren't huge but at least this sort of mess stays away from more popular sections. Might cause other issues I'm not aware of (since I've never done  community management)
#15
Off-Topic / Re: Immigration discussion
June 16, 2017, 11:55:00 PM
Quote from: mumblemumble on June 15, 2017, 09:18:28 PM
This is how discussion works, and when you take the approach you do, of walking off in a huff when someone doesn't side with you, then it only makes you look bad

See, if people stop talking to you, it's not categorically because you don't side with them. I've spent plenty of my time talking and arguing with people who, for example, deny that holocaust ever happened. I've went through all the gritty details. When for example that one person is brought up who tried to claim that there had to be more chemical traces than there actually were (of zyklon b), I asked a friend who actually studies chemistry about the topic and got all the answers. When the alleged "human made soaps" were brought up, I checked all the sources and found out that actually nobody ever claimed that they were mass produced and there were evidence that such a project did exist until it was scrapped for not being economically feasible. I've spent countless of hours on that kind of stuff.

The result? There's always something else, a loophole or whatever, that the arguing person will use to just continue without even giving a slightest thought to the idea that maybe if there are dozens of debunked claims, the roots of these claims might not be so honest as one would imagine.

Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has observed such behavior (in fact, I wouldn't even say that I'd be personally immune to behaving in such a way). And knowing that, the logical conclusion is to start looking for "warning signs" of such behavior and just stop it there. There's no reason to continue the discussion that will never be productive.

For me, personally, reading Breitbart is a warning sign. It's a media outlet that is directly meant to indoctrinate its readers with ideas, that is, to transform these ideas into readers without ever making them wonder why they should believe into them. They do so by presenting shoddy evidence of crazy (and to some folk, appealing) ideas that are central to the ideology that they're trying to spread. It's really common behavior these days with media in general actually (it's just that Breitbart doesn't  really have any other kind of substance to begin with). And I personally am not interested in dissecting this any further to you. If you're quoting journals which openly admit that their source is a source that they have to use google translate to understand to begin with, then there's something very, very wrong. It's not that google translate is bad, it's just that it occasionally gets things wrong. And to trust a _whole article_ that gets translated? Yikes.