The profound issue here is that Alex Jones' supposed rule violations are far more tame than many things that liberal leaning individuals have shared on Twitter against Trump, Republicans, etc.
There is not equal application of the rules, they are applied in a biased manner.
What I've seen is that typically a banned conservative will do something like target someone without the resources to defend themselves (for example, Alex Jones calling children that are victims of a mass shooting "crisis actors"), whereas hordes of liberal citizens voicing their distaste of Trump is just How It Be To Be President.
I would love to see evidence contrary. I report violent comments no matter the target and Twitter is good about sending a message back about action taken, and I've yet to notice a trend.
Jones never even said that, that's the problem. The media created a false narrative and spread it. He specifically said that people who were interviewed after the shooting were crisis actors.
Who cares the specifics of what he said though? It's distasteful, but if distasteful speech is grounds to ban someone then most of Twitter should be banned.
And the evidence is that James Woods, Alex Jones and others have been banned because of political speech while similarly high profile Leftist commentators who post inflammatory things have not been banned.
He repeatedly argued that not only was the shooting a hoax, the victims (who include people interviewed), were crisis actors. He did this so much that the victims were getting stalked and receiving death threats.
I'm sorry, I'd love to participate in this discussion with you but "similarly high profile leftist commentators (who?) Who post inflammatory things (what?) is just not enough evidence to convince me of anything.
Find the video of Jones saying that. He doesn't say what the BBC claims he does; BBC doesn't include video of him saying those things because such a video doesn't exist.
It's not his fault the victims received death threats. He did not advocate for deranged people to send death threats.
Just off the top of my head, Peter Fonda: "We should rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles..."
Both apologized. Sarah's were taken out of context.
>“We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done … her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers,” The Times said in a statement. “She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.”
Though as I guess someone on the left side of the political spectrum, I would be as offended to be associated with antifa as a fiscal conservative would be to be associated with Alex Jones.
Her tweets were taken out of context? No. She tried to justify her racism by saying white people had done mean things to her on the internet in the past. That's an incredibly broken mindset and accepting her attempted justification just perpetuates racism. But it's against white people so I guess that's not a big deal.
Also I said prominent, the conservatives I mentioned each had around 1 million followers. That Antifa student group, orders of magnitude less.
Well, I don't have an answer for you for why prominent "leftists" (we may disagree on definition of this term) do not violate the Twitter ToS at quite the frequency of conservatives.
Google, Facebook, Twitter etc are profoundly different from any information medium that has existed in the past. As such, we must define new ways of thinking about their behavior, of considering the legality of their censorship.
What's especially insidious about censorship online that forces us to think differently about it is that when users do a Google search, they generally don't expect political bias to influence search results. People are aware of the biases of different media outlets and can tailor their consumption of such media accordingly, but the black box of social media and internet search means the bias is invisible and we can't monitor it the way we can when we read the New York Times or watch Fox News.
Yes these are private companies, but they monopolize what has become the public square and we must not allow the public square to be arbitrarily controlled by private entities.
You could make the same argument about television broadcasts in the 70's, radio in the 30's, and newsprint in the 1900's.
The medium of communication doesn't make speech suddenly exempt from the first amendment - especially when the government is actively questioning if the speech in context is legal because they don't like the search results they see.
Newsprint, Radio and Television are completely different for two reasons. First, they never had the monopoly control over information that Google has.
But a more important distinction is this: Google has control over what content produced by individuals is seen by other individuals. Television, radio and newspapers are much more limited in scope, in that they are private groups which produce content that I consume. Google, Twitter and Facebook instead provide platforms for individuals to share their own content, which is what makes them part of the "public square", and which is why - combined with their monopoly control of the internet - their politically biased attempts at controlling what we see is censorship and cannot be tolerated.
>First, they never had the monopoly control over information that Google has.
Google does not have a monopoly. Market dominance with accessible competition != monopoly. Having a consumer preferred or superior product != monopoly.
>Google has control over what content produced by individuals is seen by other individuals
And the television networks didn't? What you're describing is not different at all.
CNN is exclusively supportive of the Leftist and Liberal agenda. They are absolutely a fair game comparison to Fox.
CNN has spent over a year covering the Russia investigation, breathlessly accepting any shred of hearsay that could possibly maybe implicate Trump in collusion, however it seems now that there has been no collusion whatsoever and the entire issue is fake. CNN has been pushing nonsense this entire time!
In fact I've watched both Fox and CNN my entire life and Fox seems to me much less biased than CNN as of late.
"Prejudice" and "Hate Speech" are necessarily subject to interpretation. Whoever gets to decide what is and isn't prejudice will necessarily inject their personal biases, political or otherwise, into the decision. Recognition of this during the Enlightenment fueled the political philosophy behind the First Amendment in the American Constitution.
It is a dangerous day when a monopolistic corporation like Google can casually insert their own biases into search results, because they feel they know best.
Is Google a private company, and do private companies have the freedom to do what they want? Generally yes, but in the case of companies like Google that act as the gatekeepers of information to billions of people, the values of free speech AND free thought must supercede the the freedom of private Enterprise.
It's not going to be the sort of thing we "grok", at least in the traditional sense. Human minds can fully understand relatively simple discrete logical steps in a system but massively parallel interactions like the genome are fundamentally beyond our ability to "grok".
In order to make sense of and manipulate things like genetics we will need to develop machines that can do those things for us. While that's unsatisfying because we generally like the feeling of fully understanding things, such machines will still yield progress and results, which is all we can really hope for here.
I don't think a human in 500 BC had the intellectual tools to understand a modern CPU or computer program. An electronic circuit would have been absolutely inscrutable to them. A time traveler might be able to talk them through it, but a time traveler would have the benefit of future intellectual tools not available at the time. It's one thing to teach what is already understood (to you) and another to comprehend for the very first time in history.
I've thought for many years that there are new intellectual tools waiting to be discovered here that will be as big as arithmetic, calculus, or logic. There was a time when humanity had no idea what mathematics -- the whole field -- was, and today there are probably whole analogues to mathematics waiting to be discovered.
Unfortunately we are still in the phase of trying to attack this problem with old ways of thinking. We probably won't even try until we finally come to terms with the fact that the tools we have at our disposal right now do not work to truly understand the genome. This will take a while as humans become emotionally attached to their tools and cling to them. Try debating a programmer on OSes, languages, or editors to see a simple example. :)
Bonus is that once we understand the genome we'll probably understand a lot of other unknown unknowns we didn't even realize we didn't understand. Maybe this is why physics seems stuck. Maybe the cognitive tools we have right now are simply not up to the task of understanding the whole thing.
Edit:
I actually think Stephen Wolfram's doorstop A New Kind of Science was groping in this direction. The book was problematic because of Wolfram's almost comical narcissism (Wolfram sort of tries to take credit for a lot of things he didn't invent), and the techniques it discusses don't seem to have delivered much fruit in and of themselves. Nevertheless at the "meta" level the notion of trying to invent fundamentally new intellectual tools is absolutely what we should be doing. We will of course fail a lot, but that's what happens when you try to do something new.
> I don't think a human in 500 BC had the intellectual tools to understand a modern CPU or computer program. An electronic circuit would have been absolutely inscrutable to them.
I'm pretty sure they could learn to write programs. The had algorithms.
They could if it were explained to them. I doubt they could figure out a more complex sort of algorithm if they were given the artifact with no explanation. Doubly so if the algorithm involved things like calculus and modern number theory.
We do not have aliens or time travelers to walk us through genomes and fill in the missing pieces of our understanding.
If your are referring to the physical CPU itself, then you are correct as they would lack the technology to even see the circuit paths (much less measure current).
But, if you are suggesting a smart human from 500 B.C. couldn't grasp 'The Art of Programming,' I'd respectfully disagree. Logic and reasoning haven't changed in recorded history. The ancients were no more or less intelligent than the moderns.
Whenever I'm tempted to think otherwise, I sit down with my Euclids Elements and see how far into it I can get before I reach the "WTF... How did he figure THAT out!?"
An even better cure -- although more recent -- is to see how far you can get through Newton's Principea.
Everything seems obvious and easy in hindsight because we are viewing it with those intellectual tools deeply embedded into our understanding. They are all over our culture and we pick up bits of them as children through osmosis even before we study them formally.
I think getting an ancient Greek or Roman intellectual to understand a large integer factoring algorithm, a proof of work block chain, or an OS kernel would be pretty painful. It would take a lot of tutoring to first teach a lot of things that were not understood in that time at all.
You can sometimes see this today when you see older people in rapidly developing nations trying to learn advanced concepts. They can do it but it takes a while.
My point is that all this assumes a tutor who knows and can explain. For levels of understanding not yet reached by any human, there is no tutor to teach us how to think about the problem.
Two of your three examples consist of algorithms that take a large number of steps. Without an ability to perform a large number of steps in a short amount of time, there wouldn't be the need to think about such things. That is, your tutoring of the ancient would consist of explaining an algorithm that might take 100,000 calculations. He would grasp it, but shrug and say "so what? It would take years to perform that algorithms. Let me show you a different way that results in a damn good approximation that requires nothing more than a compass, straightedge, stylus and a piece of string."
In short, you are confusing reasoning ability with algorithms designed for a particular form of technology.
Take neural nets. Would someone from the 1970s understand the benefits of a convoluted net vs. a simpler form? Perhaps. But, without the technology to perform millions of training calculations, the lack of comprehension would come from your pupil wondering what the point would be of trying to understand an algorithm that, with his technology, could never be demonstrated, used, or tested.
There's no way that anybody could possibly understand a modern CPU all at once. What allows us to create them is that we've inserted various abstraction barriers into their design to break them up into comprehensible pieces that can be understood one by one. Evolution doesn't have the same need to insert abstraction barriers for comprehensibility, so its designs may be truly incomprehensible - at least to being with a working memory as small as a human's is.
Censorship is no longer anathema to the values of Google and other tech companies, indeed neither to the values of the ideological Left in general.
The Communist Party sets its censorship standard at anything that would denigrate the Party. Google, Twitter, etc. and ideological sympathizers set their censorship standard at "Hate Speech", which is an impossible term to rigorously define leading to political judgements in enforcement by necessity.
The modern political and ideological Left have far more in common with the Chinese Communist Party than I think even they themselves realize.
The arbitrary whims of the powerful can never define what political thought can and cannot be said in the public square if we wish to preserve freedom and justice.
The process of English becoming the global language has taken over 150 years. Massive cultural and economic forces have been at play to make English global.
It's not a simple thing, and what will likely happen is language balkanization for a significant period of time before any seismic shift from English to Chinese which is unlikely to happen for a number of reasons regardless.
But none of what it takes for Chinese to posibly overtake one day is in place. Schools aren’t mass teaching chinese, chinese movies, music and authors aren’t captivating people’s mind, and there is already a modern latin (english), so learning chinese isn’t going to fix a problem people have, other than communicating with Chinese nationals who do not speak english.
> chinese movies, music and authors aren’t captivating people’s mind
Cixin Liu's "Three-Body Problem" sci-fi novel is pretty popular and is being made into a movie[1] this year. And some Chinese musicians, like Faye Wong, have been well-known in the the west for many years.
So while American, Japanese and Korean entertainment is much more dominant, I don't think that's an entirely fair statement.
I am sure you can name a handful more movies and bands. But compared to the tens of thousands of US and British movies, bands and writers that have influenced western culture (and beyond), this is still nothing more than annecdotic at this stage.
More people are learning German in the EU now, and now there is also Brexit, which removes English as an official language there. Simultaneously, the role of the UK as a trade hub will be heavily diminished. I would not be surprised if in 50 years German surpassed English in the EU.
China is heavily investing on Africa, so I would not be impressed if Africans start learning Mandarin more actively than they do now. African population is the one experiencing the fastest growth at the moment.
In the Americas, I would expect things to remain more or less the same.
Historically, the Chinese have been very hermetic when it comes to foreign policy. Chinese yuans (RMB) are not as liquid as dollars, and that seems intentional as they want to keep tight control of their currency value. But they do seem more expansive recently... opening overseas military bases in Djibouti, etc.
I am not sure where you saw that German is the most popular language being learned in the EU.
The following report from the French ministry of education from 2014 (in french unfortunately) [1] states that in Europe, 94% of the students study english as a foreign language (high school and university). Then comes French (23%) and German and Spanish (19% each).
As for Brexit, I don’t think english is used as the main working language in the EU because of the UK’s infuence, just because it is the foreign language most people speak.
Only if you count the recent wave of a million illegal immigrants, otherwise German remains difficult and not so popular to learn. If you disagree, please provide a source.
From my own experience (I speak/write in 5 different languages and live in Germany since 2011), it takes between 5 to 10 years to learn German minimally. Other Western European languages are simpler to learn and more popular: Spanish, English, Portuguese, French.
Much of the difficulty is not at knowing the German vocabulary and pronunciation. It is simply that the language is very strict in its written and spoken form. By comparison, other western languages had global exposure over the centuries and today are fitting like a shoe to the native speakers of other languages, so the learning curve is far less steep.
Linguists don't really believe in objectively easy or difficult languages. Subjective difficulty depends on your interests and what languages you already know.
As a Norwegian, I found German far easier to learn than English, French and Spanish.
Hmm. It seems clear that where you start from plays a role. At the same time, it seems obvious that Latin grammar (3 genders, 6 cases, 4 verb conjugations, 5 noun declensions, multiple moods etc) is more complex than Italian... or am I wrong?
It also depends on where you are going. If your goal is native fluency including clean pronunciation and grammar I find most languages equally hard. (Have mastered or had runs at 7 other than English.)
To your second point, Latin inflections are for the most part very mechanical, even for verbs. Latin is difficult to master due to the fact that it's for the most part only read. It's far easier to gain fluency if you develop an active vocabulary through speaking and writing.
If you are looking for objectively hard things to master I would pick German noun gender or Japanese Kanji. They both require rote memorization of thousands of items. Both have relatively weak patterns to cut down the amount of cases you need to memorize.
Linguists don't really believe in objectively easy or difficult spoken languages. Written language is a different thing, and the difficulty of learning Chinese characters will be a drag on international acceptance in the scientific community.
Everyone thinks thier language hard, with strict rules and pronuciation. Those who teach english, or any language, always focus on rules. In reality, rules matter little to anyone outside classrooms. The ESL students in my class always pointed out my "mistakes", only for me to point out the same techniques being used by the great speakers and writers of history. During years of learning english nobody told them that if you speak well enough, you can do as you wish with rules.
Actually neither of them has English as their "official" language in the EU because you only get to pick one, and they both want to promote native languages (Irish and Maltese) instead.
It started with the rise of the British Empire. Pax Americana just helped solidify it. Even without an English speaking US, English would be about as popular as Mandarin: there are a billion Indians.
That is true... but only 10% of Indians can speak English. It might appear higher because visitors are likely to remain in urban or tourist-y areas, where the percentage of English speakers is much higher.
English still has a lot of influence over India, though. I think this thread is confusing influence with supremacy, English has had a huge influence on other languages and cultures for centuries.
I would absolutely not say that. The British Empire encompassed more than a quarter of the population, and in the 1870s the US became the world's largest national economy.
I think what you're thinking about is when English supremacy started, that can probably be dated to the post-WWII world when the US economy was far ahead of everyone else for decades.
The influence started with the rise of the British Empire. Obviously English wasn't dominant at that point the way it is now, but still internationally influential.
What's tragic is that millions of poor children are being raised in households considered poor because there is only a single earner. We have to address the cultural issues leading to the epidemic of single parent households.
That will do far more for the children of the future than anything else.
That is one part of the problem, but I think you are being hyperbolic in describing it as the key. In many countries single parents (or single income families) are not automatically poor. Having a single income (at minimum wage) be above the poverty/food stamp line would be a start. Sick/carers leave and subsidised childcare also have huge impacts in allowing mothers to retain higher paying jobs.
The real question is: why won't America care about children?
Because the American philosophy is that people who make good decisions should not have to subsidize the poor decision making of others.
America has a significant social safety net, but should responsible citizens pay for the upkeep of someone who has multiple children out of wedlock before the age of 20 without any means to support those children? Absolutely not.
People must take responsibility for their own actions.
Well, the grasshopper's parents couldn't get a bank loan because they were PoC so they had poor investment options, missed out on promotions for similar reasons. Grasshopper got arrested for standing on the street while black and spent 2 months in jail because he didn't have a spare $10k for bond, and lost his job, even though charges were dropped. Ms grasshopper got sick while pregnant and had to pay $30k in hospital fees with an expensive loan. Loss of income meant they couldn't service the loan and they declared bankruptcy. Now they can't get credit for decades. Meanwhile the ant went to college and gets a good job, maximum access to tax breaks, social mobility etc.
So yeah, the poor choice to be born disadvantaged. Seriously, go back to your troll hole.
Well jobs absolutely are the solution for the 85% of Americans living above the poverty line. That said...
The article completely ignores the major cause of Vanessa's struggles: she is a single parent trying to raise three children. Where is the father of her children?
If you are not married, do not have children. Just going by the statistics, I suspect Vanessa's children were born out of wedlock.
Also, if you are very young (still in high school) and not on financially sound footing yet, do not have children.
Remedying these problems alone would massively reduce poverty.
Children are a massive financial and time sink, yet according to the Brookings Institute [1]:
"...more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage."
Many of these children are raised by single mothers and fathers. Sure, married people get divorced, but the number of children raised in single parent households is far less among those born to married adults than those who are not.
It's been clearly shown that the average child raised in a single parent household has worse outcomes than the average child raised in a two parent household.
Cultural issues must be addressed in this country, but everyone seems unwilling to do so because they worry about "blaming the victims".
Well in this case, poverty is clearly being perpetuated by poor decision making on the part of individuals and cultures which perpetuate this poor decision making. The "victims" are at fault.
Culture can be changed, but we must identify and talk about the problems before that change can occur.
There is not equal application of the rules, they are applied in a biased manner.