What are the contemporary moral considerations for who gets to ‘own’ ancient artifacts like these?
The government currently controlling the surrounding land? Ethnic tribalism? Genetic essentialism? Protection of the artifact? Exposure/accessibility of the artifact? ‘Feelings’-based reasons like ‘spiritual’ significance or paternalistic rich nations graciously returning things to the poors?
These are all perfectly reasonable points that archaeologists, anthropologists, and preservationists are currently dealing with as part of the broader movement to repatriate artifacts.
They're more qualified to answer these questions than I am, but my layman's opinion is that a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient. There are, doubtless, exceptions.
> a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient.
Wouldn’t this boil down to a might-is-right approach in almost all cases? Don’t really see how a contemporary government annexing the land by force is much different than a foreigner simply taking the artifact. Other than that it might evoke more ethnic/tribalist gripes from people.
But less flippantly: it's no more "might-makes-right" than the original theft/"sale" was, and is arguably less so, given that national museums tend to survive regime changes (usually for nakedly political reasons, such as the incoming regime lashing its legitimacy to the country's heritage).
And on the aesthetic side: all things being equal I, a mostly disinterested Westerner, would rather see artifacts in their regional and cultural contexts than in a dimly lit room in the British Museum.
>it's no more "might-makes-right" than the original theft/"sale" was, and is arguably less so
Clearly the specifics matter, but it gets more interesting when these 2 ‘sides’ have equally tenuous claim to the artifact, as IMO is quite often the case.
I suspect like in most ambiguous situations we’ll get a lot of politics/feelings based decision making. But again I don’t know, which is why I’m interested.
To what end? Say that they tell me that they hate my kind, now what? Am I allowed to mail them because they’re a bigot? I expect you would say no to that. So then, to what end? So I can ban them from my private property?
You would rather not be able to tell who is and isn’t racist in your society?
If someone is prone to racist remarks that should be noticed and their thought process/moral failings should be addressed. If you simply threaten reprisal in advance you not only don’t address their core issue, but you also hide it from sight!
>By silencing others you’re simply depriving yourself of your own right to hear them out.
Why do we need to hear racists and bigots out? Their garbage opinions are neither novel nor of value to society, and the groups they target are well aware of the prejudice exists against them.
What is “racist” or “bigoted?” My family is Bangladeshi on both sides going back to time immemorial. But white people would consider much of what my mom would have to say about Bangladeshi culture “racist.” In the last decade, I’ve watched white people’s fear of being called racist force them to adopt basically a “noble savage” view of developing countries and as indigenous communities, where they’re forced to think of every problem in those societies as being caused by white people, because it’s taboo to talk about those societies’ flaws. That has real world negative effects—it chills honest discussion and empowers opportunists who realize they can amass more power railing against British colonialism than fixing social and cultural problems.
As someone from the developing world, the most important question to me is how did Britain colonize Bangladesh instead of the other way around—despite our head start? What are the things that make a people prosperous? You can’t have these conversations anymore. As a result the entire field of social sciences academia has been overtaken by ideas like “decolonization” instead of thinking about cultural innovation.
Would you run a startup that way? Trying to remove Apple or Google cultural influences from your organization?
I’ll decide what’s ‘novel’ and ‘of value’ for myself thanks. Which will require the right of ppl to express their conscience. Don’t need Boris Johnson’s (or anyone else’s) govt deciding this for me under threat of jail time.
Except it doesn’t. Go onto the street and hurl racist abuse at the nearest minority in a way that can be considered “calling for imminent harm” and you’ll find out quickly if there are consequences, legal or otherwise.
Sounds kind of racist to imply minorities will attack me with street violence if I say words they don’t like.
I’ll have to report this to the authorities mate, hope you’re not a big football fan.
Edit: you stealth edited your post to include the “imminent harm” part. Sorry bro I’ve already sent the evidence to your friends Boris Johnson and the police who you trust to vet what is and isn’t racist.
The courts, and a jury of peers, decide what is and is not considered hate speech. In the USA the courts have decided that calling for imminent harm on someone (racially motivated or otherwise) is illegal.
Therefore the USA doesn’t have free speech and you live in a totalitarian police state nightmare?
Lol what did I say that was ‘heated’? Your first reply to me was a defense of street violence against me.
Threatening violence is a whole different topic and these laws encompass a lot more than “imminent violence” so not sure why you’ve brought that up.
Whoever makes the legal decision, I hope you have a good lawyer because the police should be knocking on your families’ door abt your racist post soon now. Cheers, I’m about to get rate limited by HN so might not reply.
Threats are prosecuted as intent to commit another crime, not ‘u said a naughty word.’ That’s why slogans such as “kill all men” would never lead to legal conviction in the US (they might in the UK!)
More importantly, the laws in this article are not about threats. Myself nor any freedom of conscious supporters I know of would claim verbal intent to commit a crime should be protected from legal consequence.
So unless you can name any, this is not only off topic but also a straw man.
So in conclusion you agree that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, and the USA law also agrees - “Yelling fire in a crowded theatre” etc.
Which is the point of discussion you started when you said “it does precisely mean there are never any legal consequences for saying anything”.
It is legal in the US to yell fire in a crowded theater. It is not legal to intentionally create a false emergency situation, verbally or otherwise.
Similar to threats, it’s not the speech that is illegal but the intent to commit a crime. Like any other criminal trial, your words can be used against you.
Not sure what more you’d mean when you say “freedom from consequences” (or how this relates to the article) but youre arguing against a point no one is attempting to make it seems. None of what you’ve mentioned is what’s meant by ‘freedom of speech’.
> It is legal in the US to yell fire in a crowded theater. It is not legal to intentionally create a false emergency situation, verbally or otherwise.
Thus one could conclude, and stay with me here because this is complex, that the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater does not… prevent you from facing legal consequences for yelling fire in a crowded theater.
You could take this understanding and you could reduce it down a snappy, easy to digest form: Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.
What precisely was the point of your original post then? To assert a concept that has nothing to do with the article and that no one disagrees with?
One possible reading is you were actually intending to defend the laws in the article (not threats), and then had to stealth-edit your racist post to be about threats after I called you out. Now you’re stuck in that position.
Glad we seem to agree the speech in this article should be legally allowed unless it is genuine physical threats.
> One possible reading is you were actually intending to defend the laws in the article (not threats), and then had to stealth-edit your racist post to be about threats after I called you out. Now you’re stuck in that position.
Please don’t get heated again. Silly comments about contacting the prime minister and deflecting by calling racism detract from your argument and make you seem quite immature.
It’s both sad and telling how you read “minorities will violently attack you in the street” from that message, rather than “people will call the police on you and you may loose your job or face other societal consequences in response to your speech”.
> One possible reading is you were actually intending to defend the laws in the article
Of course I am. To me it doesn’t make a difference if you’re legally allowed to say something but then immediately face legal consequences from saying that thing, and just not being legally allowed to say something. It’s one and the same.
And the laws are good. I’m ok with them. Unlike the US the UK has a very healthy and diverse press, despite having no constitutionally defined freedom of speech, and the courts are robust and generally sensible.
So whatever, you’ve got to face consequences of your actions. If you want to go and send racist stuff to footballers then you’ll be banned from football. Cool. 100% down with that.
> > One possible reading is you were actually intending to defend the laws in the article
>Of course I am. To me it doesn’t make a difference if you’re legally allowed to say something but then immediately face legal consequences from saying that thing, and just not being legally allowed to say something. It’s one and the same.
Then why deflect for several posts to talking about threats?
I get that you’re probably trying to cover for any legal consequences to your racist post (yes it was racist, tell it to the judge) We could’ve had a more fruitful discussion about the laws in the article otherwise. But my attention span is strained.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. That’s the post you’re replying to. There are lots of examples of this, even within US law, some of which revolve around threats. If you’re new to this site and if you have a limited attention span then you can just press the back button to review the conversation you’ve been having, it’s not ephemeral.
“Fire in a crowded theater” was a metaphor for protesting the draft during a war. We absolutely should have the right to do that, and we do; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States was wrongly decided and substantially overturned.
Legislation that has existed for decades for the purpose of making football stadiums a safer place for all people to attend, and to cut down on hooliganism. People who would get several years' worth of bans if they used their hate speech in a stadium will now get the same bans from sports venues if they are caught doing that online too.
Or, as it usually happens in these cases some algorithm suspended the account because too many users reported something and it got flagged and it's not some exciting intervention of the deep state.
That is pretty unlikely and not what was proposed. Pretty sure this would not happen to accounts that are deemed reputable sources. Also I guess there are exclusion lists for prominent people that are not beholden to the TOS.
>The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but...
Then you'll be disturbed to learn that members of the team are literally government operatives lobbying for more censorship on Facebook:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625
Note the author's subtle toggling between denying a phenomenon exists, and then smugly implying that it does and should.
>The Economist cites the case of Colin Wright, a post-doctoral student who had difficulty finding a job after publishing a series of essays “arguing that sex is a biological reality” (TERFese for “trans people don’t exist”).
> after publishing a series of essays “arguing that sex is a biological reality” (TERFese for “trans people don’t exist”)
I ... what? I'm supportive of trans rights, but that is an absolutely risible mischaracterisation of the utterly banal truism that 'sex is a biological reality'.
For one, no one is denying that trans people exist. As for the biological reality of sex, that's neither here nor there for the transgender movement – which, as the name suggests, is about gender. And doesn't deny at all that 'sex is a biological reality', which statement is absolutely undeniably true and uncontested by anyone.
This article has some true and insightful parts, but it seems to be using the old trick of mixing in true statements with shockingly false and spurious ones, in a bid to make the latter appear more credible.
By these arguments nearly every sizable city in the country should be its own state.
>DC doesn't want to be part of Maryland (they like being independent and feel that Maryland's concerns are not theirs) and Maryland doesn't want DC (they feel it would move the centre of gravity of the state even further towards the DC suburbs, making it worse for the further-flung parts of the state).
> By these arguments nearly every sizable city in the country should be its own state.
I think that's worth considering. It would get rid of a lot of the left/right gridlock at state levels. Cities would be mostly free to do as they wish without rural areas holding them back and rural areas would be free to do as they wish without cities holding them back. This would also greatly reduce the amount of BS that needs to get done at the federal level because a ton of that stuff is not interstate issues but an end run around the fact that the blue team and the red team can't do what they want at the state level so they try and get the feds to do it to the whole country.
And before anyone says "but money" I would like to remind them that freedom isn't free.
I mean, maybe? Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin are Länder (the German equivalent of states). You could certainly make an argument for, say, NYC being its own state; it'd be bigger than Delaware. But a lot of these things are historical accidents: West Virginia only exists because of the Civil War, California would certainly not be one state if founded now, while DC isn't a state at all. And given that the boundaries of the states are entrenched by the constitution there's a heavy status quo bias as to what might happen in the future.
Berlin is a state because (esp West-)Berlin kind of had to be one in the restructuring after WW2.
Bremen and Hamburg both were Free Cities in the Holy Roman Empire. More importantly, they were among the very few Free Cities that retained this status until and past the end of the HRE (1806). Being in the Hanseatic League helped establish their importance, but the League wasn't actually a major concern at that time anymore, and hadn't been for over a century, but they certainly played to that history (and e.g. added "Hansestadt" to their names, long after)
I think honestly when the 3 largest cities in the us each have more people than the entire United States did at independence it is worth asking what sort of political reforms are possible
Which strikes me as a good idea. Particularly since DC retrocession and merging low population states (also elegant) have no legs.
Every metro with population above median or average of existing US states should have the option of forming a new state. Seems to work for Berlin/Bremen/Hamburg in Germany, and various metros in other countries.
China treats its major cities (and the nearby area) at the province level: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. So it's not unprecedented among governing systems. And given the size of those areas, it is a pragmatic approach.
Twitter also annoyingly crops image previews.
Car appears to be the same if you click.