> “As the Russian government has de facto suppressed its national press and blocked access to foreign media, Counter-Strike has remained as one of the rare channels that allows us to communicate independent information to Russians about real events from the war”https://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-global-offensive/csg...
I've always wondered how this could work in practice. It's hard enough to convince your average American fox news fan that putin might not be a great guy, how exactly are you going to convince a Russian?
Not all Russians are stupid: many (most?) understand that they are being lied to and some (especially the younger generations) are interested in reading independent sources. I think these services are for those people -- facts can be highly valuable (and worth jumping through the necessary hoops).
N=1, but ... a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, I talked to a Russian girl at a party in Germany. She said she "voted with her feet" when she decided to move out of Russia. So she wasn't very Russia friendly. Moreover, young women are probably the most progressive demographic full-stop. Yet when I asked her about Ukraine, she repeated all the standard Russian government propaganda about an alleged NATO threat and stated that she was "neutral" on whether Russia should invade Ukraine. I was pretty shocked. If even young female expats think this way, what do older Russian men think? Perhaps she was a rare outlier. Or perhaps it's not an accident that so many Russians appear to continue to vote for Putin's party.
> Yet when I asked her about Ukraine, she repeated all the standard Russian government propaganda about an alleged NATO threat and stated that she was "neutral" on whether Russia should invade Ukraine.
For a recent emigre from a regime like Russia or Cuba, the mindset often is "things are real bad in the homeland in matters that I can see with my own eyes, but on what I can not see, I tend to believe the official narrative, because it's the only one I had access to." It can take years for a person to do all the necessary reading and research to adjust their worldview.
I don't think you have to listen to Russian government propaganda to understand the NATO threat if you have any cognitive empathy whatsoever. Angela Merkel is on record saying that the negotiated Minsk peace agreement was a complete sham.
"The US and its allies “simulated supporting the UN Security Council resolution” which endorsed the roadmap to peace while pumping weapons into Ukraine and “ignored all crimes committed by the Kiev regime … for the sake of a decisive strike against Russia,” she explained in a social media post on Thursday [1].
Also John Mearsheimer, an American, laid out the case for Ukraine as a massive NATO threat in a public talk many years ago. Available on youtube.
Would the United States welcome Chinese and Russian nuclear capable installations in Mexico or Cuba?
How are you attempting to balance your point of view against the intense western government propaganda that you're exposed to?
The problem is not weapons. The problem for Ukraine is they are still a Soviet-tier army, operating with Soviet-era tactics. It's not productive to ship them thousands of Abrams and F-16s if they do not understand how to operate these systems in a combined arms fight. They do not, and it takes a long time to become competent at this. So, a King of Battle war of attrition it is until either Ukraine can figure out how to do this or something truly catastrophic happens with Russian supply and morale. Or NATO directly enters.
> Merkel sagte der ZEIT: "Das Minsker Abkommen 2014 war der Versuch, der Ukraine Zeit zu geben. Sie hat diese Zeit auch genutzt, um stärker zu werden, wie man heute sieht."
To me it implies that Russian designs on Ukraine were understood quite some time ago, and the "buying time" to make Ukraine "stronger" was the counter to Russia's intention. That supposition about Russia's intentions has since been proven correct.
Russia may feel aggrieved that their goal of re-subsuming the independent former Soviet republics has been somewhat thwarted, but clearly that has been and still is their policy.
Its indeed the information i care about, not the implications for any narratives. Distortions and pollution of the information environment is just shortsighted and counterproductive. If you stop looking at facts in favor of narrative you are making yourself vulnerable for the inevitable self destructive corruption. Which can easily be manufactured, which both China and Russia are aware of.
"Angela Merkel is on record saying that the negotiated Minsk peace agreement was a complete sham."
No she didn't. That is Russian propaganda. Show me the Zeit article. All your sources are astroturfed Russian propaganda.
Your globalresearch.ca link gives you away. Anyone doubting it can go to the globalresearch front page and draw their own conclusions. Its a conspiracy theory site.
I list a few articles to give a flavor of globalresearch's conspiracy bent:
The “Great Zero Carbon” Conspiracy and the WEF’s “Great Reset”
Towards a Failed State under Kiev Nazi Regime
The Asinine Insanity of the ‘Climate Change’/C02 Hoax:
You would have more creditability if you took 2 mins to have found it.
> globalresearch.ca
Is certainly not a good source, linking people the original quotes to read for themselves would show some evidence you are not a conspiracy theory also, I hear there are a few going around.
That Zeit article has her saying the 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy Ukraine time. This is not precisely the same as her saying it was a complete sham; the agreement was a ceasefire and ceasefires are generally understood to provide both sides with an opportunity to lick their wounds; ceasefires aren't peace treaties, they're only temporary stoppages of wars. For Merkle to say the ceasefire was buying Ukraine time isn't a contradiction.
Still, you dug up the relevant article so, vouched.
This is pure strain Russian propaganda, nothing you have shared here backs up Putin's claims that NATO is some existential threat to Russia. Everything since the invasion of Georgia has shown Russia to be the aggressor on the world stage, countries like Ukraine that Putin considers to be owned by Russia are right to run to NATO for defense.
>> I don't think you have to listen to Russian government propaganda to understand the NATO threat if you have any cognitive empathy whatsoever.
NATO is not a threat to Russia by any objective measure. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, NATO countries in Europe were unilaterally diarming themselves. Just compare the size and composition of UK, French or (West-)German military in 1980s and 2010s - reduction in everything by a factor of 5-10x with a continuing downward trend. This is why NATO is struggling to support Ukraine, former powerhouses like Germany have very little left to share. Over the past two years, Russia has lost 20 TIMES more (visually confirmed) tanks than the whole German army fields. And yet we're somehow supposed to believe that such tiny force could pose a credible threat against Russia.
A person with "cognitive empathy" might actually feel that the truth is exactly the opposite: NATO became so weak over time that Russia stopped fearing it, and became increasingly brazen in pursuing its imperialist goals.
We have by far the most destructive war in Europe since the WWII, whole cities wiped from the earth, civilians executed in mass graves, daily terror attacks on cities where millions live - and to this day NATO's response is what exactly? Sending obsolete tanks and wasting months discussing whether Ukraine deserves modern air defense systems to stop terror raids against civilians? Is this the power you consider an existential threat to Russia? Who's the victim of propaganda here, really?
Imho high probability its who ever is reacting to your post. Cognitive warfare today means its highly advantageous to exploit propaganda blind spots by dialing them up to 11 to create dysfunction and make your opponent look bad. Your post has all the hallmarks of being a caricature aimed at creating a reaction.
I am sorry if its your actual opinion, in that case you should consider that giving up on a functioning reality model in favor of narratives is a deeply counterproductive idea. Distortions and pollution of the information environment are ambivalent to the intention of its creation. Its just creating blindspots that get exploited by hostile entities.
You are, evidentially. Since your solution to this problem is WWIII.
You're simultaneously claiming that Russia has last 20x the tank inventory of Germany, and also that Russia is somehow also capable of "pursuing its imperialist goals", which I guess still include capturing Berlin.
This is just not how real politics work. This is the result of bad politics of power players with a lack of understanding. Putin himself even said he might be thinking about joining NATO some day. That is was due to a weakening NATO is an analysis completely detached from reality. This ignores what happened in Ukraine in the last few decades. It is a simple explanation, but most importantly a completely wrong one.
There is a reason why the relation today is much worse than it was 30 years ago.
>Also John Mearsheimer, an American, laid out the case for Ukraine as a massive NATO threat in a public talk many years ago. Available on youtube.
Russia has also been vocal about this for decades. The CIA director summarized it rather well during his time as Ambassador in his "Nyet means Nyet" cable.
People are sensitive when it comes to the sovereignty of their home countries even if they're not particularly fond of their governments. When I lived in China a lot of young, laissez-faire, liberal minded people who were critical of the increasingly repressive culture were nonetheless allergic to any kind of foreign encroachment.
The attitude is largely that, "our government may suck, but it is ours", and when foreign countries are perceived as strangling their development, you'll turn even the most raging regime critic into a reluctant supporter. And of course they don't view NATO or the rules based order or what have you as some benevolent thing, but tools of power.
The idea anyone would attack Russia, with its countless nuclear weapons, is silly. Ukraine obviously wanted to join NATO to defend against Russia, not to attack it.
Is it indeed possible that the whole thing started in 2014 with whole "f the EU" shenanigans and "Biden being in on it"? And that that truth is suppressed here, and perhaps amplified over there?
> The United States is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and that's not Putin's
propaganda; it's just history
Which is obviously incorrect on its face, Putin claimed to invade Ukraine because Ukraine wanted to be liberated and is part of the Russian Empire, wrongly let go of by prior rulers of Russia. It is disgusting propaganda to lie and say the US or the west caused this war - Putin caused it, fullstop, that's it.
If you read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", you'll see it's straight from the US playbook.
Sure, Putin started the war, and that was the whole point, poke and prod until they start a war. Lend money until they can't repay. Keep a country rubbelized so they won't unite against resource extraction. Replace democratically elected leaders with religious nutcases so you can have your way. It's the way of the empire. Ask Iranians, ask Panamanians, ask the people of East Timor.
Is it possible Ukraine isn’t entirely innocent? Sure we assume they are from our point of view, but that’s the nature of propaganda, how do you really know what is reality?
Also, there's nothing Ukraine could have done that would have made Russia's actions justified.
Finally, when you follow the Russian statements for a while, you notice that they are self-contradictory. This lets you disregard their arguments as pure lies - the truth is not self-contradictory.
Not innocent of what!? Even Putin justifies the invasion by saying Ukrainian people want to be part of Russia. That is not justification for invading and killing them. Being skeptical of what you hear is one thing, abandoning reality to say “who knows, anything is possible” is another.
Yes you can. Most countries correct course at some point, whether via election, protest, upheaval, civil war. etc.
The younger generation understands. But I don't buy that Russians, esp the older, simply know the level of control and propaganda that they've been subjected to over the years. Otherwise they would have done something about it by now.
I'm casually suggesting what pretty much every country has done at some point that has been oppressed to unlock a better future for themselves and their posterity.
They could start with, I dunno, maybe not voting disproportionately for more of the same?
How is this hard if, as you suggested, they are aware of the propaganda lol?
ISIS and neo-nazis can host websites on the public internet. What possible reason is there to host it on minecraft instead of as html on the internet? Or on tor if need be?
This seems really, really stupid. (Except for the actual Minecraft building, which seems quite nice)
Authoritarian regimes have lots of infrastructure in place to censor http(s) traffic, and at least China is getting quite good at restricting tor usage. Meanwhile they probably don't have much in place to ban specific minecraft servers, and their deep packet inspection might not cover Minecraft books. There's value in using obscure technologies.
> It's worth noting that this project will likely not benefit the people of China. A somewhat obscure fact is that China has its own edition of Minecraft which cannot connect to servers of the mainstream edition.
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_China
> In-game text content is heavily censored, including but not limited to chat, Book and Quills, Written Books, Signs, Command Blocks, renamed items (via Anvils) and mobs (via renamed Spawn Eggs or Name Tags)
> Censorship also applies to any text in the launcher, such as community posts, comments on contents, and private messages. Rental servers and virtual LAN games are not allowed to have names altogether, instead being referred to by a numerical ID
I guess you don't need any obscure packet inspection if you can just censor the clients and servers directly instead. This feels like the censorship equivalent of the wrench XKCD.
This website/server courts mainstream publicity, so it's not trying to fly under the radar. Blocking it would be trivial to any country that cares to, a DNS block would be effective at preventing most people from visiting either the site or the server.
It seems to me more of an artistic/social statement rather than an actual practical resource. And it is an effective one: interesting enough to become somewhat viral, and the architecture itself conveys a strong message.
You're not wrong but what is it about hackernews comments which focus on debunking the utility of something. I feel like the top comment on most articles I see are observing the ways in which something is useless. It's pretty staggering.
Again, you're not wrong, and I'm not even saying these comments are bad or anything. I'm guessing hackernews commentors tend to be skeptics and are tuned to poke holes? But clearly it was posted based on some apparent merit. Other reactions would be totally normal too, like "oh wow, that's really impressive. I didn't know this existed." Or how so much of the real world has been modeled in minecraft (archival libraries, computers using redstone, etc.). Or noting what works they consider worthy of entry in the library.
There's a tendency on the Internet to default to negativity, skepticism, and cynicism. It seems worse amongst programmers and tech people. I think it's just a way of demonstrating how clever the commenter is: I can see through this! And, less charitably, there's maybe a tendency to tear down the work of others as a way of feeling better about one's own lack of accomplishments: sure, I haven't done much, but at least I didn't do something stupid like this!
Is this project useful as a way of circumventing censorship? Nah, almost certainly not. So consider it a thought experiment. An art piece. A way of illustrating the importance of free speech to a younger generation that maybe hasn't thought that hard about it yet. A browsable museum of censorship, the likes of which no government would build. Maybe an inspiration for people to build better tools.
Or just a neat project for people to spend some time working on, that's more interesting than making a copy of Big Ben in Minecraft.
It seems to be trendy these days to be a "doomer."
It's a mindset where nothing good happens in the world, and no cloud has a silver lining. Skepticism is a default, and earnestness or cleverness makes you naive or a sucker who will get their deserved reality check soon enough.
It must be a horrendous headspace to constantly be in.
I think a comment like the one you are replying to is much more useful than “oh wow that’s really impressive”. It provides a place for other people to explain why the thing actually makes sense.
I too never understood how is this project better than a website and thanks to the dismissive comment and the subthread it spawned I now had a chance to read some reasonable explanations.
Sadly, the internet is entirely filled with "wow that's really impressive" on absolute bunk. So my first instinct is to kill, kill, kill whatever is in front of me.
Right, good ideas have nothing to fear from anonymous online commenters giving overzealous criticism. On the other hand, if there's no time or place for criticism of bad ideas, we're all in trouble.
It is, or rather was (sadly it's been deliberately suppressed by the mods of late), the HN culture. It's a part of what makes this place what it is, and was why this used to be a high-quality site.
I see it more as an art piece. And I think instead of stupid, it's better described as superfluous.
Second thought: since it's Minecraft, a secondary purpose can be that it signals the values not just the supposed target demography, but to all people interested in Minecraft.
Cause random kids and other people have an easier and more fun time hosting Minecraft servers. Makes it go viral more easily and also adds one more way to access it.
No oppressive government has gone through the lengths of blocking access to a Minecraft server. That's why. Many oppressive governments will actively block access to pages that post narrative countering their reality.
You can walkt through the (virtual) halls of forbidden knowledge and hiding text on textures visible in complex game engines can be an effective to bypass censorship using inconspicuous tools.
> “In many countries, websites, social media and blogs are controlled by oppressive leaders. Young people, in particular, are forced to grow up in systems where their opinion is heavily manipulated by governmental disinformation campaigns. But even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world’s most successful computer game is still accessible. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses this loophole to bypass internet censorship to bring back the truth – within Minecraft.”
I visited this server a year or two ago and tbqh I think it's more about the library building (a very large and impressive build) then the contents of the library. The library building so so huge you can spend several minutes walking from one book to the other. If it were just about distributing the books through minecraft they could have created a much more compact library where all the books are within convenient reaching distance.
Basically it's more of an art installation than it is a serious censorship circumvention tool. Still neat for what it is I guess.
Reminds me of the UC Berkeley Minecraft server, where they recreated the entire campus during the boredom of 2020. Maybe they could put real books inside Main Stacks.
It's common for players on minecraft to take turns placing signs next to each other if they want to have a 'private' conversation with another player (which is handy in some competitive game modes), and I've also seen muted players name their pets in-game with messages that they want to communicate.
The kids are doing a lot of impressive stuff. When building together, the owner of the plot leads other builders by literally showing them what and how to build, it’s way quicker than chat, they are very disciplined, repeat the building steps, then stop and watch the owner in order to see if they did it right. Sometimes they need a few iterations but it’s still quicker than chat.
> “The criteria for inclusion is handled by Reporters Without Borders, which ensures the library’s content is accurate, truthful, and sensitive,” reports Cian Mahar.
Whenever I see a project like this, I have to ask: what kinds of true things are censored from the "uncensored library"?
> But even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world’s most successful computer game is still accessible. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) uses this loophole to bypass internet censorship to bring back the truth – within Minecraft.”
For how long? They used to say the same thing about the internet itself.
Exactly. Where is the line between "curation" (or "moderation" in discussions) and "censorship"? If the line is subjective, how do we handle disagreements on that?
Even supposed objective measurements such as "Is this factually true?" can fail because we aren't omniscient, we learn new things and realize what was "true" yesterday is actually false, and sometimes an authority keeps telling us something is "true" and anyone who dissents is "moderated" and "curated" into effective silence.
I would trust Reporters Without Borders more than most, but maybe that's because their biases align with mine and I don't object to their censorship.
Without bias and interpretation omniscients is required. A human mind does not have the luxury of knowing everything. We have limited compute power, and limited time. Furthermore our systems only have capabilities for limited data. We have to filter against junk or our systems get overwhelmed, but deciding what is junk is also a bias.
The best we can do is state our biases, and design our systems to reflect or biases properly. If others don't like those biases they are free to create their own systems that reflect their biases.
That one reality is what I call thermodynamic truth. Now any time someone brings up thermodynamics other statements like arrow of time show up and other issues with informational incompleteness become problems.
Simplified models of reality can quickly collapse in uncertainty in complex situations. Lets say an explosion and subsequent fire at a factory. The people working on the device that exploded where killed, so we only have second hand information on what they where doing. The fire was especially intense so the device expected of causing the explosion was melted completely and only mixed slag remains. The machine was made in the 1950s so other forms of entropy have been involved on information on the metals used in the machine.
There is no simple model of reality that can tell you what occurred with certainty in situations like this. The additional entropy from the fire creates a situation where many possible input situations lead to the same output situation.
We see this kind of entropy in social situations. The game of telephone is a good example of this. You start with "X5W1" and end up with "EXU1" after a few steps and everyone along the way would tell you thats exactly what they heard.
>Unless you consider every viewpoint to be a kind of bias, which is really stretching the term
Not stretching the term at all. Biases exist at all levels, physical processes and mental processes, human and inhuman.
> Simplified models of reality can quickly collapse in uncertainty in complex situations. Lets say an explosion and subsequent fire at a factory. The people working on the device that exploded where killed, so we only have second hand information on what they where doing. The fire was especially intense so the device expected of causing the explosion was melted completely and only mixed slag remains. The machine was made in the 1950s so other forms of entropy have been involved on information on the metals used in the machine.
If I cover an apple with a cup before you have time to look at it, the apple does not disappear nor is there any alternate reality with pear under the cup. It's just a blank space in your knowledge, which you are free to fill with any bias-free probabilistic model.
If you put an atom in a molecular cup and look away, does it stay there? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, yay quantum weirdness.
But even in your example you couldn't even give me an example of a complex system, and instead had to give a simple system that works deterministically and still makes lots of assumptions. Like, how long did you cover the apple with a cup for? If it's a moment the apple will be there. If it's a much longer time maybe when you remove the cup the dessicated rotten remains of an apple come out. Or maybe there was a bug in the apple so when you remove the cup you no longer have an apple, but a bunch of bugs and a pile of feces.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against determinism. If you knew all states of the matter that went into the cup (well and of the universe) you could most likely accurately predict what was going to be in the cup regardless of what time you look in the cup again. Unfortunately for us humans we're stuck in a universe governed by the uncertainty principle. We can't know at the quantum level, and at the macro level there are enough chaotic actions that predictions of complex systems quickly fall apart. There is only the most probable outcome, with the random chance a less likely outcome could occur.
> If you put an atom in a molecular cup and look away, does it stay there? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, yay quantum weirdness.
You are overthinking it. In case of quantum effects, the whole quantum system, including all its parallel states and uncertainties, is part of the single shared reality.
Likewise. I would guess this to be an issue with vocabulary. So more of a "Yes, but ..." then a "No!"
I would argue that reality isnt influenced by the existence or absence of an accurate human-friendly reality model. Thats only relevant for human interaction with reality (which you are talking about), the bias doesnt actually influence reality itself.
While you wont archive a complete model, there is a baseline reality that is indifferent to human bias and understanding. You could simplify the argument as gravity neither being being a social construct nor requiring a complete unbiased reality model to screw with you.
edit: Unless its an actual disagreement, in which case we are arguing Solipsism? So the biased perception actually creating reality. In which case we got to an impasse, if you are creating reality through biased perception, there is no reason to assume you arent also creating me the same way.
Eh, this couples back into 'what is reality' and at which scale are we talking about.
I believe there is an objective causality based reality at the lowest levels of existence. The arrow of time moves forward. And over the entire system entropy increases.
But as you put systems on top of systems, especially in life, subjective thinking can modify local reality at a macro level. That is the subjective experience of a human can lead them to an idea, that they then manufacture into an object becoming objective reality that object then modifies the experienced reality of those around them both subjectively and objectively. The fundamental structure of the universe does not change in this scenario, but human knowledge is expanded and we have a better view all possible states the universe can be objectively manipulated into.
I already largely agreed. Yes, how we think, our models, influences how we act. And how we act influences an existing reality thats too complex to model completely. With the risk of erroneously over relying on ones model as you described.
However, any greater impact of perspective or intention on reality then through your actions gets you to magic and probability lines.
https://www.specularium.org/wizardry
Which still dont disregard the existence of one reality in the moment, just the ability to act in a way to navigate the possible futures.
I only mention it because the existence of one reality unrelated to perspective comes with safety concerns unrelated to intention. Misunderstanding how you influence reality carries risks. Its how the worse in "better or worse results for your reality model" can also look. Your reality model deteriorating too far by overvaluing your perspective due to cognitive bias.
> Unless you consider every viewpoint to be a kind of bias,
Yes.
> which is really stretching the term.
No.
There is an objective reality which we can only perceive subjective. We then get together as groups and agree upon what we're going to call "true", building upon what we've previously agreed was "true". This is bias.
But not all agreed "true" are equally accurate! Not all biases are as subjective as others.
So we can (and IMO should) recognize that we're all biased and we're all subjectively interpreting the objective reality, without embracing some kind of fatalism or post-modern idea that all subjective interpretations are equally valid.
While we can only perceive subjectively, reality is more then just an agreement. Once biased perspective collides with reality, reality wins. There being no hope of getting an objective reality model doesnt change that. Looking at your last paragraph, i dont think you disagree.
Life itself is a biased perspective that, at least temporarily, changes the objective environment around it.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is the number of future potential states is maximized by living and more so by thinking creatures then the future potential state dictated by purely physical interactions such as gravity or chemical bonding. Life can selectively spend energy in one place to reduce the entropy in another place.
Lets look at this in a past/present view. In the past if you got a bad cut, you could die, and maybe if you prayed just the right way or put the right plant you'd avoid the infection and you might not die. Now, we know if you use clean water on wounds and use antibiotics that you and drastically reduce, but not eliminate the risk of infection.
Our view of the problem and solution space massively increased thereby changing how we measured what we thought was true.
If reality can only be perceived through a subjective lens, then that is the only reality there is. Reality as something independent of any observer is just a fantasy. And if you think about it, it's actually meaningless.
Repeatable observations typically simplify assumptions to achieve stability in face of combinatorial explosions. We gain statistical insight on the probability something is true in particular conditions, not that something is an absolute truth.
For example, if you take someone in the medical sciences when it comes to pharmaceutical treatment if they don't tell you there are wide ranging statistical truths that are difficult to apply to individuals, then they are a bad scientist.
Systems complexity leads to subjectivity due to feedback loops inside the system itself. Think of deeply nested IF statements customized for a particular application, but no one bothers to give you the source code.
I agree with your statement in the theoretical. However I disagree in practice because of this:
> If others don't like those biases they are free to create their own systems that reflect their biases.
Those who create alternatives are attacked, chased, banned, deplatformed. Even if a webhost is happy to work with you, the credit card network may not be or their bank may ban them.
Not that the signal doesn't find a way - the good work of Anna's archive and all that - but it's not just "go build your own platform". It becomes "fight at every turn for your basic existence".
The existence of society demands this in practice. This is how humanity has worked at least since the beginning of agriculture, and likely long before that. Step out of line too far, and someone caves your head in. At best we can hope for is that the rock holder is accepting, and not a fascist.
You will find that it is impossible to create a society that does not exist in this manner. Since a society that accepts everybody also means it accepts people that don't accept everyone by means of violence, hence destroying a society that accepts everyone.
You're conflating actual violence and "viewpoints I dislike".
Yes every society will resort to vigilantism to protect itself in the absence of a policing power.
But death threats to someone because they made a tweet you disagree with or abusing your power as a bank to control speech isn't about protecting yourself from violence - though that excuse is often used.
It's a form of denial, of shutting down uncomfortable debate. It's an ideological sort of end, like a dictator who has a pathological need to execute his critics. The "inner ring" of acceptable opinions grows ever smaller - it has to. It's not about making the world better, it's about attacking outsiders and the beast always needs new outsiders.
>But death threats to someone because they made a tweet you disagree with or abusing your power as a bank to control speech isn't about protecting yourself from violence -
It's about causing violence. It's no different than "You happened to say something against our religious book, don't do it again or you'll get hurt".
Outsiders are a useful target because sometimes they are also the monster. This is the effect of existing in a reality with uncertainty. Accept everyone uncritically and you may be attacked by those you accept, this leads to fear, that fear is then manipulated by those that want power. There is no solution here, there is only the attempt to balance between malicious outsiders and malicious insiders.
The market of ideas fails under capitalism. The market of ideas is denominated in votes, but capitalism requires it to be denominated in dollars. The market of ideas also fails under governments and corporations who pay thousands of people to work covertly and overtly to eradicate ideas.
The problem isn't Capitalism. In Capitalism we can simply buy our services and anyone who can fund can play.
What is happening when a bank refuses to do business with someone, when App stores ban a twitter clone and prevent sideloading, is not Capitalism. It's ideological. It's about service to an end outside just capital.
Capitalism is the only system that freedom of speech can exist under. No Communist or Socialist author has ever entertained a freedom of speech concept - it is contrary to a centralized government. Such systems can not even handle mild political dissent and must (both in the theoretical and practical) literally kill or exile anyone pushing against the central authority.
Capitalism can always tolerate disagreement because disagreement is profitable.
>Capitalism can always tolerate disagreement because disagreement is profitable.
Eh, that depends. The US in particular like to 'two party' problems. Capitalism loves two sides in problems, but that is very problematic if a problem is multi-polar and not bi-polar.
You're also confusing socialist/communist with authoritarian. Capitalist systems are completely fine with being authoritarian if its profitable.
>Facts are facts, though omission of facts is also an issue.
Because you are a human, the 'facts' you acknowledge are anthropomorphic. We align our filtering of facts to the scales at which humans and society operates. When we change the scale of what we consider to be fact, then quite often what we consider to be a fact is really just an interpretation of events based on the perspective of the observer. Reality exists in a state of thermodynamic truth, that is if we could reverse the arrow of time you arrive at exactly one state at whichever slice of time.
"Facts" as told by humans do not work this way the vast majority of the time. They are incomplete observations of a system using incomplete information. Time reversal of human facts can lead to situations where multiple starting states can lead to the same factual finding. Causality is uncertain without searching for even more facts, those facts which have been lost to thermodynamic scattering, leading us back to interpretation.
Bias is absolutely necessary to operate on a human scale.
> Bias is only necessary for editorialization or conjecture regarding another's intent.
I'm gonna assume you're taking a hard science approach to bias, then:
It is statistically non-plausible to observe all facts in the universe, so the facts you can observe suffer from the selection bias fact sampling error.
Bias is required in any useful model of the universe to explain the difference between the expected and the observed.
Even assuming a non-plausible, accurate model with no biases whatsoever, such model is very likely to require high variance to encompass all fact observations and models with too much variance are useless.
However, you don't need "many angles". Those are too few. You need all the angles.
Reaching conclusions without observing all the interactions, from all angles, in the entirety of the universe existence is, by definition, biased, so, almost all conclusions reached before the universe ends are biased.
It describes the process (a few different ones, MUSTY, green/yellow/red) but not a lot of concrete facts (what books were "weeded" or which books were suggested but not purchased.)
"sensitive" as a criteria is a dead giveaway they are censors advertising themselves as the opposite. It's an evolved brand of censor; like some types of predator snakes that have evolved to mimic its harmless prey.
Feel free to back up this assertion with examples. I hope you'll come back with something better than 'I couldn't find anything about Hunter Biden's laptop.'
i'm not performing censorship by selecting which files i download from the internet, am i?
> "Criteria for inclusion" and "censorship" are the exact same thing, the only difference between them is how the speaker feels about it.
yes, this is very important, which is exactly why a library like this selecting which works to include is not censorship. now if people intentionally submitted their own works and the library tried to hide or deny the existence of those requests, now that would be censorship
i think state libraries are in a slightly different situation. it is definitely fuzzy though
> i'm not performing censorship by selecting which files i download from the internet, am i?
Yes, because that's an irrelevant activity to this topic.
> yes, this is very important, which is exactly why a library like this selecting which works to include is not censorship.
At least in contemporary liberal culture, words like "censorship" and "ban" are frequently used to label "criteria for inclusion" that the speaker disagrees with.
> now if people intentionally submitted their own works and the library tried to hide or deny the existence of those requests, now that would be censorship
That's one kind of censorship, but not the only kind (see above).
Are you sure? Doesn't it depend on the criteria? What if my criteria is that the author not be Catholic, or that they aren't competing with my son in the pork industry?
that depends on whether your definition of censorship is the prevention of speech or prevention of dissemination of speech, whether books count as speech, whether choosing to include existing books in a library counts as speech
i think it's fairly common knowledge that preventing the publishing of a book in the first place probably counts as censorship, but considering the nature of this library it becomes pretty fuzzy
You made the claim. I suggest you back it up instead of trying to redirect. Lots of propaganda tries to wrap itself in the moral mantle of journalism, I am fine with the curators being somewhat opinionated.
Do you require examples of this library specifically or general examples of this happening?
If you are ok with general, the cases of Monkeypox not that long ago are an evident example. The reality of the matter is that it affected almost exclusively homosexual men, yet since that would have hurt LGBT sensitivities, it was often omitted and even campaigned against.
At least now a country has to ban Minecraft to ban those books, or force MC to drop its encryption and invent a very obscure Minecraft packet inspection technique that players will more easily circumvent some other way.
the sheer overuse of scare-quotes in this article turned me away from it almost immediately. do you really have to quote the word 'items' as if it's that much of a foreign, unprecedented concept
I know what a scare quote is, and their implication could be to "scare" like calling someone "an artist" or saying that you made a "good comment".
But the article isn't trying to imply skepticism or disclaim particular words, it's just trying to distinguish what is in-game for people who don't know what minecraft is.
maybe it was slightly too subtle for me to have used single quotes in my comment and not pointed it out. in this case they would have been more appropriate
it's entirely likely this was just a formatting mistake, but it still feels "off" enough for me to get uncomfortable and stop reading
If you're using the word 'item' to describe a data structure in minecraft, you're not using it in the traditional way, you're using it in a technical way.
i think it's perfectly reasonable for them to have used double-quotes for 'chests' because that is a very gaming-specific item (perhaps not minecraft-specific- looks at every dungeon crawler).
however, something being a data structure or not doesn't really matter when 'items' means exactly what you would expect it to mean within minecraft, especially when said item is a book!
Really? I have a hard time believing that. The concept has been around since the 80's, if not before then. Should we be putting scare quotes around the word "Mouse" when we use it to refer to a computer mouse because it's not a literal animal mouse?
that's like saying people who don't use computers won't understand that text is in a computer even though it has the same meaning as, say, text in a book
Item in plain English means basically anything that can be counted, usually something small. Item in a video game usually means something players can pick up, maybe use, and drop, as opposed to something that's part of the environment. Item in Minecraft has a technical meaning, basically anything that can go into a hopper inventory, as opposed to particles, blocks, mobs, stuck arrows, other entities...
> “As the Russian government has de facto suppressed its national press and blocked access to foreign media, Counter-Strike has remained as one of the rare channels that allows us to communicate independent information to Russians about real events from the war” https://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-global-offensive/csg...