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[Reelya]

No there's an equivalence between what I wrote and what LoSboccacc said. He just gave a blanket attack on all Islam as a concept. All Christianity as a concept is equivalent. LoSboccacc did not draw any distinction between normal believers and extremists in what he wrote.

When do Islamic speakers spreading hate get a free pass at American colleges? People promoting Jihad and terrorist attacks are pretty scarce in college speaking engagements in the first place. So an attack on Islam here is either spurious, or a critique of Christian-motivated hate speech is equivalent.

IDK, based on the likelihood that ideas will kill you:
https://thinkprogress.org/you-are-more-than-7-times-as-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-right-wing-extremist-than-by-muslim-terrorists-417f3c3461db
So the first example there is of a guy who did a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing 3, injuring 9. And when arrested he cited phrases from James O'Keefe's doctored film which created a conspiracy theory that Planned Parenthood was secretly selling baby parts. This stuff is actually pretty dangerous, there was that aborted shooting at the PizzaGate place too. I think it's only a matter of time before we see some much larger terrorist attack based on the alt-right conspiracy sphere. And I don't see much soul-searching from the InfoWars alt-right crowd when things like this happen. They're more likely to double-down on verbal attacks on whichever institution was attacked.

[Guardian G.I.]

Human behavior is toxic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for dickery remains a constant.  Need as well as asshattery have followed us to the stars, and the rewards of a bigger e-penis still await those wise enough to recognize this deep throbbing of our common pulse.

Into my sigtext post it goes.

Also, here's something tangentially related to the topic: Mad Dog Mattis being incredibly (and surprisingly) reasonable during his confirmation hearings.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.): Do you believe that allowing LGBT Americans to serve in the military, or women in combat, is undermining our lethality?
Mattis: Frankly Senator, I’ve never cared much about two consenting adults and who they go to bed with…
Gillibrand: So the answer is 'no'?
Mattis: Senator, my concern is on the readiness of the force to fight, and to make certain that it’s at the top of its game, so, when we go up against an enemy, the criteria for everything we do in the military up until that point when we put our young men and women across the line of departure, is that they will be at their most lethal stance.

[LoSboccacc]

No there's an equivalence between what I wrote and what LoSboccacc said. He just gave a blanket attack on all Islam as a concept. All Christianity as a concept is equivalent. LoSboccacc did not draw any distinction between normal believers and extremists in what he wrote.

When do Islamic speakers spreading hate get a free pass at American colleges? People promoting Jihad and terrorist attacks are pretty scarce in college speaking engagements in the first place. So an attack on Islam here is either spurious, or a critique of Christian-motivated hate speech is equivalent.

IDK, based on the likelihood that ideas will kill you:
https://thinkprogress.org/you-are-more-than-7-times-as-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-right-wing-extremist-than-by-muslim-terrorists-417f3c3461db
So the first example there is of a guy who did a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing 3, injuring 9. And when arrested he cited phrases from James O'Keefe's doctored film which created a conspiracy that Planned Parenthood was secretly selling baby parts.

Nov 2015. That article needs a good updating, also, a run with european numbers.

Also you're confusing your ideologies there. Islam is a political ideology not a religion. That'd be being muslim.

[Reelya]

Nov 2015. That article needs a good updating

[wierd]

Reelya:

That looks like grasping for straws.  One cannot ignore flagrant hate speech by one group, while giving zero tolerance and belligerent protests of another, and still be intellectually rigorous.  Assertions of likelihood of effect are apologist in mode of action.

The rigorous approach is to say "Speakers that promote hate are not welcome", which would handily cover dangerous sects of Christianity (like those nice people in the south...), Neonazi groups promoting race hate, and islamic speakers promoting religious intolerance-- all at once, and equally and fairly.

That is NOT what is being done here, and what is being drawn attention to.  What *IS* being done here, is that students are practically rioting at the university because a Breitbart rep was going to speak there. As pointed out, this is CLEARLY *NOT* because of hate speech (the speaker in question never even spoke, AND, there are speakers who DID speak which openly and brazenly advocated hate and violence), and much more of systemic intolerance of an ideology.

With the rigorous approach, speakers from any demographic may still speak, as long as the content of their lecture does not incite hate as a feature of discourse.  EG, the islamic speaker can come and discuss islamic history in a completely neutral fashion. Likewise, christian apologists can come and discuss the crusades in a neutral and brutally honest fashion.

The onerous thing here is that the students PRESUPPOSE what the lecture is going to cover, BEFORE THE SPEAKER EVEN SPEAKS, because of their affiliation.

Again, the claim that this is because of "hatred filled rhetoric" does not follow, because 1) the speaker never even got the chance to speak, and 2) Other speakers that have issued speeches have prominently included hatred and intolerance in their lectures, and not been called on it.  If not this, then what is it, other than flagrant intolerance of disfavored views?

[Reelya]

That looks like grasping for straws. 

Like what?

Nov 2015. That article needs a good updating

Claiming a 1 year old article is out of date when it aggregates 15 years of data is almost the definition of grasping at straws. It's a completely ludicrous argument unless you have some really big numbers that would change things. Which you don't, so the argument is spurious nitpicking. the article is barely 1 year old, claiming it's out of date is idiotic.

a run with european numbers.

^ this is grasping at straws. You can google that data yourself. Similar articles make a similar point to the US and Europe:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/22/rightwing-lone-wolves-islamist-extremists-report-thinktank-rusi

It details the cases of 94 people who were killed and 260 who were injured in attacks by far-right terrorists acting on their own between the start of 2000 and the end of 2014. In contrast, religiously inspired lone attacks killed 16 and injured 65 people.

Sure, those 15 years worth of violence by both right-wingers and islamists are dwarfed by ISIS's 2015 Paris attacks. But I'd argue that ISIS are both a political entity and a religious one. The Paris attacks were a singular event, carried out by a state-level actor (well a political entity which considers itself an independent state), so it might not be legitimate to blame everyone who has some trait in common with ISIS (same religion) as being implicit, any more than we hold all Catholics responsible for the IRA bombings.

Also, Islamic support for ISIS is pretty low. For example, in studies that find 8% of worldwide Muslims "support" ISIS they don't tell you that by the same criteria 7% of Christians in Nigeria say they support ISIS, while 6% of Malaysian Buddhists say they support ISIS. Basically, most of the "support" is just noise by people with no knowledge of ISIS whatsoever, and they can be any religion. A Nigerian Christian is just as likely to state support of ISIS as the "average" Muslim is. More focused research suggests that only 1% of worldwide Muslims actually support ISIS.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-Muslims-support-Daesh-Why

[Sergarr]

Reservations--

On the one hand, our intelligence community HAS gotten terribly, terribly out of control, and DOES NOT serve the PUBLIC interest.

They absolutely do serve the public interest, they guard your state from Russians and Chinese who aim to install tyranny in your country, that alone is a good enough reason to put your trust into them.

If you ask me, here is the short list of things that need to happen:

1) No, IC, you DO NOT get to create PsyOps and propaganda for use on the CITIZENS of the US. I dont care what our dumbshit congress did a few years back, that needs to go away.

Domestic propaganda is a necessary component of intelligence warfare against enemies as devious as Russians. Just look at what the lack of proper media control has done - it magnified the lies raised against the properly qualified candidate, Hillary Clinton, a thousand-times fold and made her seen as "equal", if not somehow worse, than a shady billionaire. Oh, and said "shady billionaire" has been presented as "the worker's candidate" by the same media liars - and this blatant lie has worked, fooling the poor and uneducated people who simply don't have enough free time or attention to discern them, because the IC hasn't been allowed to prevent it from spreading.

2) No, IC, you DO NOT get to use secret court rulings, with secret courts, that use secret laws, to justify your operations. Public courts with sealed documents are adequate, and have been adequate for decades.

That implies that you don't trust the IC on their word. It's kind of impossible to have anything like IC without you having to believe them on their word - they can't operate without secrecy.

I mean, you could use other agencies to try and keep them in check, which is why USA has a good 17 of them - but by their own nature, public has - and should not really have, outside of national election process - no influence, control or oversight over IC.

3) No, IC, you DO NOT get to get around restrictions on spying on citizens by employing foreign intelligence services, and NO, IC, you DO NOT get to trade favors with those agencies with the intel you collected on foreign citizens.

Domestic intelligence is perhaps the most important component of intelligence, as this election has shown us. Without the IC "getting around" the restrictions, USA would still be in the dark towards Trump being in Putin's pocket - because said information came from a British ex-agent.

4) No, IC, you do not get to "just sit" on security vulnerabilities you happen to find, as "tactical resources". If you find a security hole in US infrastructure that puts US Citizens at risk by foreign agencies, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO DISCLOSE IT, SO AS TO PROTECT AMERICAN CITIZENS.

Cyberwarfare is essentially impossible without exploiting "security vulnerabilities". You seem to be asking for IC to secede all offensive cyber-capabilities, and that's pretty unacceptable.

That is because flagrant bias is considered "intellectualism" today.

I would welcome an honest, and upfront speaker from the DPRK--- Why not get it straight from the horse's mouth? I wouldn't agree with much they had to speak on, but I would welcome the speaker, and encourage attendance of the speech all the same.

These days? "Oh, that's THOSE people! I dont want them in MY campus, no matter how valuable hearing outside views is to having a well rounded world view!"

It used to be, kids were taught the value of being exposed to outside ideas, even if you did not agree with them-- These days, kids seem to be getting taught that outside ideas are wrong, and dangerous, and to be feared-- things that you need to crawl into a safe-space over.

They're not 100% wrong about that. Outside ideas are usually wrong, dangerous, and to be feared - just look at modern Republicanism to see the most blatant example of said "outside idea" ravaging an entire country. Same about that DPRK speaker example - communism is a very insidious ideology that has ruined many, many countries, limiting its spread is usually good for you.

I think that our society need to extend the concept of "unqualified to do *something*" further. There are clearly many ideas which require special kind of education/training in order to fully understand them and their consequences and to avoid being subverted by their manipulative components. Unrestricted access of the population to said ideas is slowly, but surely, killing the world - quite literally, in case of climate change denial.

It is commonly thought that if we allow all ideas to spread equally unchecked, something like an idealistic "free market" of ideas, it would elevate the good ones higher, and the bad ones into the dustbin of history. But it has been clearly and obviously proven false by now. The bad ideas refuse to die off, and more than that - they seem to be slowly gaining ground over the good ones through sheer mass repetition and their relative effortless-ness.

A free unregulated market of ideas, just like a free unregulated market of economy, is a failure.

Now, there are many examples in history of attempts to regulate ideas that ended in failure and/or authoritarianism, too. But that doesn't mean that any possible regulation of ideas is bad. Command economy is bad - but proper regulations are important for modern economy to function without blowing up in a firework of monopolies and unpaid debt. There must be a solution that fully keeps the authoritarianism and dogmatism away, or at least does it more effectively than a pure free market of ideas does. And it must be found and implemented, in order to create a truly stable liberal society resistant to manipulative influences both foreign and domestic.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Oh god, whoever broke Sergarr's chip the first time around must have come back. Did anybody save the number the FSB left us?

[LoSboccacc]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/22/rightwing-lone-wolves-islamist-extremists-report-thinktank-rusi

A report that compare political vs religious in a argument about this vs that religion? And I'm the one grasping straws XD

[martinuzz]

Ah. The Puppet Trump has said, in an interview with Wall Street Journal that he is willing to lift sanctions against Russia. Not sure if he only means the sanctions instated for the hacking, or also the sanction for Crimea.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-sets-a-bar-for-russia-and-china-1484360380

sorry for the paywalled article.

[Reelya]

It is commonly thought that if we allow all ideas to spread equally unchecked, something like an idealistic "free market" of ideas, it would elevate the good ones higher, and the bad ones into the dustbin of history. But it has been clearly and obviously proven false by now. The bad ideas refuse to die off, and more than that - they seem to be slowly gaining ground over the good ones through sheer mass repetition and their relative effortless-ness.

A free unregulated market of ideas, just like a free unregulated market of economy, is a failure.

Now, there are many examples in history of attempts to regulate ideas that ended in failure and/or authoritarianism, too. But that doesn't mean that any possible regulation of ideas is bad.

Yeah, it doesn't quite work like that. The selfish gene concept illustrates the problem: a gene only cares about spreading, not whether it improves the life of the organism. I agree with you in general, good ideas do need to be cultivated. It's like a garden where you could just throw seeds around wherever and let weeds grow, vs one that's carefully cultivated. Sure, there are more "possibilities" in the random garden, but mostly the variations are just noise in the data and are going to look the same.

Although in the case of campus censorship, I think it's a bit more unbalanced than that. Around 1990, liberal:conservative was about 1:3 in colleges. So about 25% of all lecturers considered themselves conservatives, 75% liberal. Skewed, but enough from both sides for a healthy debate. Today, it's about 1:15 - 1:60 depending on which school you're looking at. And that 1 conservative per 15 liberal lecturers: they tend to cluster be in non-humanities courses, meaning that the humanities is basically wall to wall with people who consider themselves both liberal and Democrats, which is an even more restrictive group than "Democrats" even.

So basically half the possible field of human thought is immediately excluded from consideration. And one unfortunate fact is that when everyone is from the same faction, they tend to form a further conformity of views, which means excluding half the possible ideas, probably actually reduces your scope for thought by 75% (because you can no longer synegize between as many ideas as before, and people tend to get into conformity mode).

An example of the typical "disallowed" ideas is the dangerous idea that we can think up alternate explanations to the gender gap in tenure than prejudice: e.g. the President of Harvard had to stand down because he was asked to give a talk about the gender gap in science positions and he gave three different theoretical explanations. One of which was that men have a higher standard deviation on ability tests than women do. So women are more reliable (they cluster more at the middle), but more men cluster at both the bottom and top of the tests (many types of tests or measures are like this: equal mean, different variance by gender). So when you take a slice at the very top, or very bottom, you get more men in those samples (more male dropouts but also more male champs), but women cluster in the middle, so they're going to make a higher proportion of the undergraduates, if you're sampling from > 50% of the population. All of which is pretty much what we see in actual enrolment patterns. But pointing this out caused an outrage. So even though it's purely based on solid empirical research, it's a "disallowed" thought.

[wierd]

Reservations--

On the one hand, our intelligence community HAS gotten terribly, terribly out of control, and DOES NOT serve the PUBLIC interest.

They absolutely do serve the public interest, they guard your state from Russians and Chinese who aim to install tyranny in your country, that alone is a good enough reason to put your trust into them.

If you ask me, here is the short list of things that need to happen:

1) No, IC, you DO NOT get to create PsyOps and propaganda for use on the CITIZENS of the US. I dont care what our dumbshit congress did a few years back, that needs to go away.

Domestic propaganda is a necessary component of intelligence warfare against enemies as devious as Russians. Just look at what the lack of proper media control has done - it magnified the lies raised against the properly qualified candidate, Hillary Clinton, a thousand-times fold and made her seen as "equal", if not somehow worse, than a shady billionaire. Oh, and said "shady billionaire" has been presented as "the worker's candidate" by the same media liars - and this blatant lie has worked, fooling the poor and uneducated people who simply don't have enough free time or attention to discern them, because the IC hasn't been allowed to prevent it from spreading.

I disagree with this. There *IS* benefit in not giving all available data to the public, but that is NOT justification for giving outright deception to the public in place of honest reporting about foreign threats, or policies. If the IC does not give the public correct data, the public CANNOT trust the IC.

2) No, IC, you DO NOT get to use secret court rulings, with secret courts, that use secret laws, to justify your operations. Public courts with sealed documents are adequate, and have been adequate for decades.

That implies that you don't trust the IC on their word. It's kind of impossible to have anything like IC without you having to believe them on their word - they can't operate without secrecy.

I mean, you could use other agencies to try and keep them in check, which is why USA has a good 17 of them - but by their own nature, public has - and should not really have, outside of national election process - no influence, control or oversight over IC.

See above. When the IC *BLATANTLY LIES TO YOU* then you CANNOT reasonably trust them, or their practices. When the IC has a KNOWN HISTORY of "vanning" people, YOU CANNOT REASONABLY TRUST THEM.  When trust is betrayed, it must be earned back again. Our IC has betrayed the public trust.

3) No, IC, you DO NOT get to get around restrictions on spying on citizens by employing foreign intelligence services, and NO, IC, you DO NOT get to trade favors with those agencies with the intel you collected on foreign citizens.

Domestic intelligence is perhaps the most important component of intelligence, as this election has shown us. Without the IC "getting around" the restrictions, USA would still be in the dark towards Trump being in Putin's pocket - because said information came from a British ex-agent.

Considering that such actions are LITERALLY denied by the constitution, the founding document of our nation's government, you will forgive me for calling that bullshit. It is NOT unreasonable to expect the government to abide by its own self-imposed restrictions, instead of trying to weasel its way out of them, especially in light of the two items prior.

4) No, IC, you do not get to "just sit" on security vulnerabilities you happen to find, as "tactical resources". If you find a security hole in US infrastructure that puts US Citizens at risk by foreign agencies, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO DISCLOSE IT, SO AS TO PROTECT AMERICAN CITIZENS.

Cyberwarfare is essentially impossible without exploiting "security vulnerabilities". You seem to be asking for IC to secede all offensive cyber-capabilities, and that's pretty unacceptable.

There are any number of ways to attain access to a system that DO NOT rely on technical exploits. This is a false choice if ever I saw one. Protip: I have experience working in information security. Technical exploits are universally dangerous. Spear phishing, social engineering, and insiders are much easier to control, and have significantly less likelihood of being counter-exploited.

That is because flagrant bias is considered "intellectualism" today.

I would welcome an honest, and upfront speaker from the DPRK--- Why not get it straight from the horse's mouth? I wouldn't agree with much they had to speak on, but I would welcome the speaker, and encourage attendance of the speech all the same.

These days? "Oh, that's THOSE people! I dont want them in MY campus, no matter how valuable hearing outside views is to having a well rounded world view!"

It used to be, kids were taught the value of being exposed to outside ideas, even if you did not agree with them-- These days, kids seem to be getting taught that outside ideas are wrong, and dangerous, and to be feared-- things that you need to crawl into a safe-space over.

They're not 100% wrong about that. Outside ideas are usually wrong, dangerous, and to be feared - just look at modern Republicanism to see the most blatant example of said "outside idea" ravaging an entire country. Same about that DPRK speaker example - communism is a very insidious ideology that has ruined many, many countries, limiting its spread is usually good for you.

I think that our society need to extend the concept of "unqualified to do *something*" further. There are clearly many ideas which require special kind of education/training in order to fully understand them and their consequences and to avoid being subverted by their manipulative components. Unrestricted access of the population to said ideas is slowly, but surely, killing the world - quite literally, in case of climate change denial.

It is commonly thought that if we allow all ideas to spread equally unchecked, something like an idealistic "free market" of ideas, it would elevate the good ones higher, and the bad ones into the dustbin of history. But it has been clearly and obviously proven false by now. The bad ideas refuse to die off, and more than that - they seem to be slowly gaining ground over the good ones through sheer mass repetition and their relative effortless-ness.

A free unregulated market of ideas, just like a free unregulated market of economy, is a failure.

Now, there are many examples in history of attempts to regulate ideas that ended in failure and/or authoritarianism, too. But that doesn't mean that any possible regulation of ideas is bad. Command economy is bad - but proper regulations are important for modern economy to function without blowing up in a firework of monopolies and unpaid debt. There must be a solution that fully keeps the authoritarianism and dogmatism away, or at least does it more effectively than a pure free market of ideas does. And it must be found and implemented, in order to create a truly stable liberal society resistant to manipulative influences both foreign and domestic.

The problem is that when one starts regulating ideas, it becomes "politically essential" very very quickly, a-la china, and stalinist russia.

[Reelya]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/22/rightwing-lone-wolves-islamist-extremists-report-thinktank-rusi

A report that compare political vs religious in a argument about this vs that religion? And I'm the one grasping straws XD

But that's not what the conversation was about to start with. Go check what the article I originally cited was about. It was about rightwing attacks vs islamic attacks in America.

Then you asked me to run the European numbers. Which I did, citing a study on rightwing attacks vs religious attacks (which includes islam) in Europe.

In other words you questioned my data on right-wing attacks vs islamic attacks in America, I provided the equivalent data for Europe, now you're shifting the goalposts to an entirely different topic that wasn't related to the post you questioned.

[wierd]

Doublecheck your attributions. I said nothing of the sort.

[Reelya]

Sorry, I got your posts mixed up with Lob's