Last I checked, Reddit was hosted on private servers. Hence, what you can say on their site is dictated by their TOS. The Internet is not a place where you can "say anything you want". It's a collection of servers. If you want the ability to say anything you want, start your own server. Reddit is not the government; it is not their obligation to protect free speech.
I didn't claim it was my Constitutional right to say what I want on reddit. I just find it abhorrent that free speech is being attacked on Wired, regardless of host. And there are plenty of places on the Internet - large, small - where there are very liberal speech policies. That they are making mountains of molehills on reddit is frustrating.
The bigger an internet entity is, the harder it is for them to maintain free speech purism. The places with very liberal speech policies are small, niche places, sometimes mostly-abandoned places.
Nor do they have the obligation to protect the delicate sensibilities of any person on the internet who feels "triggered".
The conflict here is that most of Reddit's users want Reddit to support free speech, while advertisers don't want to risk their brands by juxtaposing them with hate speech. Of course it's not about "rights", but Reddit's struggles are largely motivated by the fact that they're trying to keep everyone happy when that is an impossibility.
"trying to keep everyone happy when that is an impossibility."
This is something I think we can all agree upon.
There's no need to denigrate people who may feel triggered or are offended, though. Reddit just needs to decide what's most important to them. If they want to give a platform to anyone, regardless of how vile their speech, that's totally fine! But, they should not also expect widespread adoption of their site. Most people are not vile and will be happy to move along to less hateful pastures.
> There's no need to denigrate people who may feel triggered or are offended, though.
I think that's a misrepresentation of my opinion. I have nothing against people who feel triggered or offended. Frankly, a lot of the jokes on Reddit offend me. What I think is ridiculous is to try to force people to change what people are allowed to say just because you're offended.
Re: triggers: at a point in my life, there were certain sounds and words that could trigger me. But what I did was I fixed it: I got therapy and I avoided situations where I was likely to experience those things. I didn't go around trying to force everyone to participate in the treatment of my illness.
There are people who have immunodeficiency diseases that mean being around other people without a mask is dangerous to them: a sneeze could kill them. But we don't make everyone everywhere wear face masks to keep them safe, even though they have a much stronger argument for protection: a trigger word at worst causes you to go into mild shock or have a panic attack, while an infection is likely to kill someone with an autoimmune disease.
Of course there are places where it makes sense to limit free speech to inoffensive material. Rape support groups are a good example (and there are subreddits for that). But at least in its heyday, Reddit was a platform of communities, and that's most effective when you let those communities choose their own rules.
> But, they should not also expect widespread adoption of their site. Most people are not vile and will be happy to move along to less hateful pastures.
...like most subreddits?
This is what I really don't understand about this discussion; I feel like 99% of the people arguing about how bad Reddit is have little or no experience with Reddit. Most subreddits don't allow hate speech.
If you host on someone else's servers, you need to follow their TOS for what you can and can't host. For instance, lots of places don't like hosting porn.
I don't know Amazon's TOS very well, nor am I implying it comes in to play here. I just remembered seeing some posts about Reddit being hosted on AWS.
This statement surprised me. Is it really true? It appears that there is conflicting precedent:
"The first approach is from the 2nd circuit "The Subtractive Approach" (Altai, Nichols) and the other approach is "The Concept and Feel Approach" (Ruth Greeting Cards, Krofft)"
> I am curious to know what would happen if someone decided to clone the exact level design of a game but changed all the audio/visual assets.
This actually happened quite often in early generations of computer games and consoles. Super Mario Bros had quite a few clones where all that changed were the visual assets.
More recently, there are many examples of this happening on the iOS App Store and other venues with a low barrier to entry.
I seemed to recall such Mario clones as well. Nintendo is quite protective of their IP, so I have to think that they must have threatened legal action. Does anyone know? Is there precedent for legally protecting the layout of a level?
I think the clone I'm semi-remembering was a PC game. Regarding your second question: There were very many unlicensed Nintendo games. I don't know how many of these Nintendo fought. They very famously battled Tengen over this issue in the courts.
I'm all for correcting oversimplified news stories, but I don't understand why you call this "significantly less direct". As far as I can see, it's exactly one step less direct, i.e. as close as you can get without killing them directly. As you say, milkweed is essential for them. It's literally the only plant this species lays its eggs upon.
It's significantly less direct because Roundup has no effect on the Monarch butterflies. The issue is the way it's being used by farmers. If it were not being used to eliminate milkweed, there would be no effect whatsoever on the butterfly populations. We would have the same problem with absolutely any other herbicide.
Or if milkweed were replanted in other areas still within the Monarchs' path but not mixed in with the crops. Many towns have butterfly gardens, but something on a larger scale would work too.
I wonder what kind of scale you would need to make this work? I'd be curious to see numbers on it, and whether or not it's feasible; definitely a great option if so!
>Does this impact Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans not owned by Anthem?
>Yes, BlueCard members are impacted. The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association's BlueCard is a national program that enables members of one Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plan to obtain healthcare services while traveling or living in another Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plan's service area. The program links participating healthcare providers with the independent Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans across the country and in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide through a single electronic network for claims processing and reimbursement.
Blue Cross/Blue Shield used to be separate hospital/medical insurance providers that were in many states. In some cases (New York until recently) they were partially owned by the state.
Ignoring all the other things that affect cancer rates, a difference between Argentinian and American beef does come time mind: I believe that grass fed beef is still the norm in Argentina, whereas most US beef is grain fed.
They did comment on the issue in their discussion: "We examined whether age was an important factor in producing the baseline differences we observed by comparing the three youngest practitioners with the controls and found that the mean age difference between groups is unlikely the sole factor responsible for this baseline difference. Moreover, hours of practice but not age significantly predicted relative gamma activity during the initial baseline period."
Actually I'm sure that elites feel a sense of moral duty, for example to their family members and friends. That's a problem we all have: Extending our ethical intuitions to everyone. It's much easier to act ethically with respect to the person right next to you, harder to act ethically to the person on the other side of the planet. But consider also that an egalitarian ethics is a much easier sell to working people, whereas an ethics of nobility is a more natural fit for the ruling class. There's a lot of power to that old idea that economic conditions determine systems of beliefs. Anyway, my point is that it’s not that elites don’t have morals, they just have different ones.
