It ultimately depends at what scale. I think most people to be fair are talking about building a clone of what was present back in the mid 2000s. You could build a twitter clone that could handle a few hundred users in a few weeks with modern tech stacks.
The fact that there are at least 3 twitter clones that are less well put together with a decent amount of users handling in the load proves that it is possible.
“A few weeks” sounds a lot longer than a weekend, and I’d also consider the history: Twitter itself was built quickly using a modern stack. Rails was highly productive, the problem is that the concept of the service makes scaling non-trivial. We have more RAM and SSDs now so you could get further but those aren’t magic.
Twitter was down all the time for hours after the launch. I don’t think I have an issue coding something that goes down when it overloads with functionality twitter had when it launched in a weekend. Most work for that kind of project goes into interpreting the specs/your business colleagues and fixing the mishaps; here you don’t have that.
Don’t forget that you’re talking 2006, so you need to be doing a lot more infrastructure work: no containers, shared hosting environments are less stable but bare metal costs a fair amount to get started, you’re using something like cfengine instead of Chef/Ansible if you aren’t setting everything up by hand, you have 10% of the RAM and no SSDs, CDNs are an expensive premium service, etc. Then think about what that means browser-wise: you can do a bit on the client side but server side rendering is a necessity and you’re still going to be burning time on browser compatibility to an extent which can be hard to remember now. HTML5 hasn’t happened yet so you’re building more stuff yourself, too.
I’m not saying there’s nothing they could have done better, just that there’s an awful lot they couldn’t have avoided at least without building a very different app.
Yes, I agree with that. Containers though, as far as some of the advantages; we have been using chroots for deployment since the early 2000s which is not the same but deployment/compatibility wise it was pretty good. It allows you to have the same small Linux image and deployment everywhere as well and you could move most zipped images from machine to machine with vastly different kernels. I still use chroots now on my Pandora handheld which has an ancient kernel but I run modern software on it in a chroot. No overhead too.
I think what they could have done better is rails; it was not good enough then. Php would’ve been far less hassle. But he, they made it!
I used chroots, too, and it was useful but much harder to maintain than a container. Automation wasn't impossible, of course, but that was also complicated by concerns about bloating each chroot with copies of all of the system libraries & config files.
I used PHP in that era. It could be faster but then you're in the classic developer productivity tradeoff between, say, hand-coded SQL calls versus using an ORM, etc. The PHP frameworks which were comparable productivity-wise to Rails were also a lot closer to Rails performance-wise since they also had heavy abstractions, and they tended to have even more creative ways to create security holes. (I am feeling very old remembering arguing against enabling register_globals circa 1998)
Hahah yeah ; I did a lot of hosting then and everyone insisted on register_globals. I still run stuff for clients that depends on it to this day.
And maybe the rails perf was comparable to the larger pho frameworks in some cases, but php was really much easier to scale in our experience. We hosted millions of sites and the python/ruby ones were generally dramas when they got serious (for that time) traffic.
You could still write bad code, of course, but deploying mod_php sure was easy. People could still write bad code (thinking here of someone who processed a database join in a foreach loop rather than learning how to use a WHERE constraint) but I do miss that level of install simplicity, at least until I remember what it was like dealing with incompatible versions or reconciling configuration in multiple places.
I am not a fan of these things. Much like big JavaScript frameworks whenever you need to do something outside of the mechanisms they provide things become very difficult very quickly and you still need to use JavaScript, HTML and CSS anyway as others have pointed out.
That's why I like StimulusReflex (and Hotwire). Stimulus offers a very nice pattern for adding the small bits of additional JS you need without ad-hoc JS spaghetti, while letting you push the vast majority of the rest to the backend.
Small bit of additional JS defeats the point of doing it at all. The moment you end up having to go outside one of these things you end up with one problem or another. The fact of the matter is that you will always have to deal with HTML, CSS and JS somewhere and you can try abstract it out and it always breaks down near the edges.
Also as a bit of an aside and it is a bit of a moan.
Coming from someone that can write everything from scratch and doesn't need framework. All of these things are horrible to work with (I've had to work with a bit of Blazor) and they just make it incredibly difficult to actually find out what is going on (especially when stuff doesn't work as advertised) as they just obfuscate what is going on.
Every job requires you to know some horrendous framework these that has about 10 layers of Rube Goldberg madness in there for one reason or another. People will be surprised what can be achieved with `document.createElement()` a few classes and a pub / sub class.
"So they do deny freedom of speech and freedom of expression to people that the government doesn't like "
Of course they do, every state on earth limits freedom of speech. In germany regarding certain topics even more so. But nazis are still allowed to express their ideology. This is a difference to a time, when also this was forbidden. (for example in the NS area)
You don't think, there are limits to the things I should be allowed to say about you? Or about the things I think other people should do to you?
(are you aware, that there is a difference btw. between literally killing people and people dying of starvation because of incompetence? Apparently not.)
But I actually do think, the limits should be as small as possible and for all I care, the nazis should be free to have their swastikas Tattoo to their front head.
> You don't think, there are limits to the things I should be allowed to say about you?
No.
The only concession I would consider is a call to violence if there is an real and immediate threat. Not internet death threats.
The second I may concede would be defamation under a very strict standard e.g. You were claiming someone broke a law.
> Or about the things I think other people should do to you?
People can say anything they like to me or about me. What they cannot do is vandalise my property, take my property or assault me.
> (are you aware, that there is a difference btw. between literally killing people and people dying of starvation because of incompetence? Apparently not.)
If you are talking about the Communists. The communists killed and imprisoned a huge number of people. Also some of the famines were entirely predictable and in some cases were deliberate.
"People can say anything they like to me or about me. What they cannot do is vandalise my property, take my property or assault me."
So can "they" openly say, that they think, you deserve to be robbed and assaulted? And for the sake of it, let "them" be a famous antifa influencer, so you can expect that other people do as their influencer told them is the right thing?
I don't think so. This is the line I mean, which is not at all clear.
"The communists killed and imprisoned a huge number of people."
You claimed they killed more than the nazis. Which is a claim, I heard before quite often, but usually without proper sources.
But you do not have to tell me about pol pot, gulags and co. I am certainly no fan of them either. And like I said, I am not in favor of banning swastikas. Not so much, because some poor nazis are then not free to express their ideology, but because the symbol is way older and was not invented by the nazis, just missused. So I agree, that by the same logic, you would have to ban the hammer and the christian cross with it. Still, the death chambers and the holocaust was very unique in its quantity and quality, so I cannot really stand nazis whining about oppression. I live in a hotspot of them.I know they do it a lot. I also know, they are the first, to supress anything they do not like, if they are in a position of power.
> So can "they" openly say, that they think, you deserve to be robbed and assaulted?
Yes
> And for the sake of it, let "them" be a famous antifa influencer, so you can expect that other people do as their influencer told them is the right thing?
If people are likely to assault someone because someone else told them over social media. They would have probably done it anyway.
> You claimed they killed more than the nazis. Which is a claim, I heard before quite often, but usually without proper sources.
That page is what I would definitely not characterize as a proper source. From the page itself:
> Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist regimes depends greatly on definitions, and the idea to group together different countries such as Afghanistan and Hungary has no adequate explanation.
There doesn't seem to be a real consensus on what actually should be counted or not. But I'm ok with taking the widest, most encompassing definition. One should wonder then, what number would we get if we apply the same definition to pro-Western/capitalist countries?
> That page is what I would definitely not characterize as a proper source
Obfuscate the discussion with numbers when it entirely misses the point I was making. So I will spell it out for you.
It is totally okay to bring into question the numbers and whether it happened when it comes to the crimes of the communist regimes. However if you deny the holocaust that is too much and must be criminalised. That is a double standard.
Either let everyone deny any event occurred or don't let them deny any genocide. If you are going to denounce Nazism and essentially make it illegal, you must also do the same for Communist, Jihadism or any other extremist group. But it is only done for Nazis because they must justify curtailing your freedoms by pointing to the very small amount of people that still think the Failed Austrian Artist with a Charlie Chaplin moustache might have had some good ideas.
> There doesn't seem to be a real consensus on what actually should be counted or not. But I'm ok with taking the widest, most encompassing definition.
Whether or not the Communists regimes killed more or not doesn't really matter. The problem is that there is a double standard. That wearing a Nazi Swastika is somehow beyond the pale, but waving a communist flag with Che T-Shirt is somehow acceptable. Both the Nazi and Communist regimes committed atrocities.
BTW Far-right apologists do the same. Try to obfuscate the issue by talking about numbers and whether the numbers were true. I've been to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. I know what I saw there.
> One should wonder then, what number would we get if we apply the same definition to pro-Western/capitalist countries?
I am essentially a Anarchist (I don't like putting labels on myself, but for most intents and purposes that is what I am). So I am completely on board with criticising the state's wars done in the name of "spreading democracy and freedom". I was against the Iraq War, The War in Afghanistan, Drone Strikes. People bring this up as some sort of gotcha. I don't support any War other than one of purely defence.
"the very small amount of people that still think the Failed Austrian Artist with a Charlie Chaplin moustache might have had some good ideas."
Small amount?
He is still admired worldwide. Just not so much openly in most places. Just look, how many Hitler documentaries are still made and that you can still buy Mein Kampf worldwide.
In either case, communist organisations do regulary face prosecution in the west, as well as islamist groups.
The only "unfair" thing would maybe be, that way more symbols of nacism are forbidden and so more possibilities to prosecute - but they just have substitutes and nothing really changes.
But - the difference between communist and nazi ideology is, that communist want a better world for everyone. Nazis only for a certain race, while enslaving the "lower" races. This might be a reason, why che is more accepted (despite being a sociopath on closer look) and hitler is not.
And the holocaust is still very unique in its significance. So they quite earned their special treatment. And they are still very much alive and organizing in the underground. This is why the rules will not soften in the foreseeable future. And I do not really feel like fighting for nazi freedom, despite being more tolerant in theory. But just for the reason alone, that those hypocrites can no longer present themself as victims, I would let them legally have all their symbols, flags and conspiracy theories.
Yes. There is a small amount of these people in the Western world. I would estimate it as less than 1% of the total population.
The state and the media want you to believe they are just waiting to crawl out of every crevice and take over the world again to justify taking your rights away.
> He is still admired worldwide. Just not so much openly in most places. Just look, how many Hitler documentaries are still made and that you can still buy Mein Kampf worldwide.
In the Islamic world maybe. Not in the Western world. You are delusion if you think that lots of people genuinely admire Hitler in the Western world.
Reading a book doesn't mean you support it. I have books from all sorts of people that were / are awful and it doesn't mean I believe it. I have a copy of Mein Kampf, I am not a nazi though (though I am sure some people would like to smear me as one).
Lots of people watch Hitler and WWII documentaries because quite frankly they are easy to make (lot of archive footage) and it was the first mechanised large war that encompassed the globe and Historically it had many iconic people involved in position of political and military power.
> In either case, communist organisations do regulary face prosecution in the west, as well as islamist groups.
Good. They are both evil. Many people have died because of both groups.
> But - the difference between communist and nazi ideology is, that communist want a better world for everyone. Nazis only for a certain race, while enslaving the "lower" races. This might be a reason, why che is more accepted (despite being a sociopath on closer look) and hitler is not.
This myth needs to die. Communists do not want a better world for everyone. Many of the communists that aren't students are the ones wishing they were the ones in power. All communism is, is theft justified by the thief.
Communism violates private property rights (which almost all other rights are obtained) and once they are eroded individual rights are next. They have no good intentions. In fact I think the Nazis were better, they are at least honest about their intentions.
> And I do not really feel like fighting for nazi freedom, despite being more tolerant in theory.
I would not expect you to. I would expect someone to fight for theirs. By protecting everyone's individual rights, you protect your own and other marginalised groups and unfortunately that includes odious people like Neo-nazis.
"The state and the media want you to believe they are just waiting to crawl out of every crevice and take over the world again to justify taking your rights away"
Yeah well, or the opposite.
We had an underground nazi terror network in germany doing terrorist attacks.
Only discovered by accident, because a bank robbery went wrong. The police was assuming it was all gang related crime and the secret service knew nothing, even though they were indeed quite close, or rather, well connected to the terrorist. And now we have networks in special forces and police who plan for day x. National revolution.
And they do try to creep in everywhere, usually in disguise. I had quite some encounters with them, from early on in schools to later in alternative, ecological and spiritual groups. Where they target suitable, meaning vulnerable recruits.
Now with corona and many antivaxx people getting desperate to seek shelter from the "poison system"? They have vast growth.
No it isn't the opposite. Again the last 2 years has shown me by how government and media have responded to recent events proves it. I have seen rioters burn down a cities in the US and call them "peaceful protests" while other normal people just simply protesting in Europe and Australia because they literally can't go to work or run the businesses be labelled far right.
So save me this gas-lighting that you and many others do where you literally telling me things didn't happen and I know they've happened.
> Only discovered by accident, because a bank robbery went wrong. The police was assuming it was all gang related crime and the secret service knew nothing, even though they were indeed quite close, or rather, well connected to the terrorist. And now we have networks in special forces and police who plan for day x. National revolution.
Sounds hard to believe.
Even if it was true, the number of people involved would be tiny percentage of the population (as I said earlier) and you are literally falling for the same old crap that the white nationalist uprising is happening any minute.
> And they do try to creep in everywhere, usually in disguise. I had quite some encounters with them, from early on in schools to later in alternative, ecological and spiritual groups. Where they target suitable, meaning vulnerable recruits.
No they don't. My step brother is a Neo-nazi and people like this and they tell you exactly what their beliefs are. They do not hide it.
> Now with corona and many antivaxx people getting desperate to seek shelter from the "poison system"? They have vast growth.
Some people are anti-covid vaccine (due to them being novel), covid vaccine hesitant (like I was so I waited) and are anti-vaccine mandate. This is not the same as anti-vax.
Almost nobody is going to join the Neo-nazis from any of the groups above. The media wants to conflate all the groups as far right when they aren't. Most are normal people that disagree with the consensus. You are doing the same and just repeating the same old lies that is told on media.
It is pretty obvious you have fallen for a lot of the propaganda that is in the news after talking to you and many others. I used to trust the news, media and government as well. Until they were caught constantly lying about things.
"It is pretty obvious you have fallen for a lot of the propaganda "
Sure thing, thats what I've heard from right or left winged "anarchists" and other self declared woke or enlightened people countless times.
" I used to trust the news, media and government as well"
Reality is, I stopped doing this long ago, when I was 15 or something.
So I think I now can evaluate quite neutral, the validity of nazi sources, government sources, anti vaxx sources, chemtrail etc. and I do not have to bend reality around my ideology. I can take a truth, no matter where it comes from. But there is not much truth coming from the nazis for example. Truth was never a concern for them. Power is. (I read Mein Kampf, too). And lies feed their twisted power. From the beginning - they even made a propaganda ministery.
In either case, my personal observation, from many direct encounters with them, is:
There are still lots of nazis around today. Only the very simple ones do not hide themself. Most of them wear suits today.
But no, they are not strong enough, to take power. If they could, they would. They do it everywhere local they can. Terrorizing anyone not white.
But I never said, I support special government restrictions to those poor oppressed racial freedom fighter. (normal criminal code is sufficient). The fact that you assume I do, because I explained why those special restrictions have popular support, shows how much you think in fixed patterns.
If removing threats of violence is considered censorship, then the word "censorship" has no meaning. Think about it: how does censorship really occur? Do governments cast a magic spell that makes it so that the words can't come out of your mouth? No. They threaten violence[0], in order to punish you for saying the thing you don't want to say, which creates a chilling effect. This is no different than what Nazis do - they threaten violence against people whose speech they don't like.
At that point, the choice is not between "freedom of speech" and "censorship". It's "censor the Nazi" or "let the Nazi censor everyone else". You must choose the option that preserves the most freedom of speech.
And this goes for every other entity that threatens violence - not just Nazis. I'm only mentioning them because we're talking about the German legal conception of freedom of expression. Nobody says "I'm going to kill you" for the sake of it; they say it to terrorize other people into doing things they want, including things like not saying words they don't want spoken. This also goes for threatening violence against groups of people rather than speakers of certain words, and political speech that proposes using the state as a means to do the above. All of that is censorious, and as far as I'm concerned a definition of freedom of speech that does not include freedom from threats of violence is incomplete.
That being said, censorship by terrorism should be construed narrowly. One might have thoughts of, say, radical Islamic terrorism while reading the above paragraph. This would be an example of censorious speech. However, ISIS, Boko Haram, and/or the Taliban making use of censorious threats does not mean that the entire religion of Islam is guilty of the same thing. Same thing for Nazis or neo-Nazis - they don't make Christians or neo-pagans valid targets of censorship just because they happen to belong to the same religion.
[0] Or at least, some long chain of escalating legalistic rituals that we call a lawsuit, which is backed by the government's monopoly over violence within an area. This is a distinction without a difference.
> If removing threats of violence is considered censorship, then the word "censorship" has no meaning. Think about it: how does censorship really occur? Do governments cast a magic spell that makes it so that the words can't come out of your mouth? No. They threaten violence[0], in order to punish you for saying the thing you don't want to say, which creates a chilling effect. This is no different than what Nazis do - they threaten violence against people whose speech they don't like.
Denying the holocaust didn't happen isn't a threat of violence. It is saying that something didn't happen.
Also a threat of violence has to be credible.
> At that point, the choice is not between "freedom of speech" and "censorship". It's "censor the Nazi" or "let the Nazi censor everyone else". You must choose the option that preserves the most freedom of speech.
This is a false dichotomy.
> And this goes for every other entity that threatens violence - not just Nazis. I'm only mentioning them because we're talking about the German legal conception of freedom of expression. Nobody says "I'm going to kill you" for the sake of it; they say it to terrorize other people into doing things they want, including things like not saying words they don't want spoken. This also goes for threatening violence against groups of people rather than speakers of certain words, and political speech that proposes using the state as a means to do the above. All of that is censorious, and as far as I'm concerned a definition of freedom of speech that does not include freedom from threats of violence is incomplete.
Your conception of freedom of speech isn't freedom of speech. It is "freedom to hear things that aren't too unpleasant".
As for the the chilling effect might work with some people. It won't work with others. With me it wouldn't work. I would tell them to "fuck around and find out". I won't live in fear.
> Germany has literally criminalised thinking the wrong things, and denies people to associate freely based on the things that they happen to think.
Yeah, like "all jews should be killed". Good thing.
> It doesn't stop those people thinking those things and it doesn't stop people from associating with each other.
It prevents such things from being normalized and makes it harder for them to be put in action.
Yeah, I know what you learned in school that this is worse than actual mass murder, and that everyone should be allowed to advocate for mass murder so that they can be disputed in the "marketplace of ideas".
In reality, what you get is echo chambers that lead people to believe that they're part of a majority who thinks that mass murder (of the right groups, of course) is good, and then some of them start to think that it's up to them to just go and do it.
In reality, criminalizing thinking certain clearly defined wrong things protects the freedom of everyone.
> Yeah, like "all jews should be killed". Good thing.
Do you think it stops them from thinking that? Because you made is illegal.
It doesn't.
> It prevents such things from being normalized and makes it harder for them to be put in action.
This gets trotted out all the time and it is nothing but a sound bite. I haven't met anyone hear about an atrocity and genuinely say it was a good thing.
> Yeah, I know what you learned in school that this is worse than actual mass murder, and that everyone should be allowed to advocate for mass murder so that they can be disputed in the "marketplace of ideas".
No I didn't learn this in school. I have no memory of this ever being discussed at school.
I read lots of books about things like maintaining political power, how the state works and economics and I came to this conclusion myself.
> In reality, what you get is echo chambers that lead people to believe that they're part of a majority who thinks that mass murder (of the right groups, of course) is good, and then some of them start to think that it's up to them to just go and do it.
That doesn't happen. In fact the opposite happens. If you stop people from talking freely what happens is that they will only talk with people that they believe to be on their side.
> In reality, criminalizing thinking certain clearly defined wrong things protects the freedom of everyone.
It literally doesn't. Because it allows other less odious things to be criminalised when it is criminally expedient. That is because the precedent has been set.
> Do you think it stops them from thinking that? Because you made is illegal.
No, it does not stop people from thinking that (and of course that is not what is made illegal). It stops them from publishing and spreading those thoughts, because that is what is actually made illegal.
> This gets trotted out all the time and it is nothing but a sound bite.
So you don't actually have an argument against it?
> I haven't met anyone hear about an atrocity and genuinely say it was a good thing.
Then be happy that you haven't met such people. They most definitely exist:
> No, it does not stop people from thinking that (and of course that is not what is made illegal). It stops them from publishing and spreading those thoughts, because that is what is actually made illegal
No it doesn't stop that either. They just distribute it more covertly and use coded language which then the government justifies to take away more rights and ban things like E2E encryption.
> So you don't actually have an argument against it?
Sorry that is backwards. You need to show me that it is happening if you are trying to justify taking away people's rights. Repeating a sound bite that is repeated by politicians and journalists isn't an argument or evidence. BTW I've heard many of the arguments present and the "research" and frequently they were found to be lacking.
> Then be happy that you haven't met such people. They most definitely exist
So your examples are extremists which is a small number of people by definition. This is not representative of the whole.
> That is exactly what is happening all over the internet. You have to wear pretty big blinders not to see it.
No it isn't. You think it is because you go looking for it. This is known as cognitive bias.
> And those aren't gonna be a lot of people, so they won't be able to recruit others easily, and they won't start to think they're majority.
They can't recruit others easily because most people recognise immediately that these are nasty people and they want nothing to do with them. This is fantasy that a significant percentage of people will be sold on the "Hitler did nothing wrong" idea. It is a meme on the internet because people were making fun of internet neo-nazis.
> That slippery slope argument is so silly. There is no country on earth that has ever had absolute freedom of speech. Including the USA.
It isn't a slippery slope fallacy when we are sliding down the slope in the UK with people being arrested for "offensive tweets" and "posting offensive song lyrics".
So don't gaslight me about this. The fact is that we have been sliding down the slope in the UK for years now and people like you tell me erosion of speech rights isn't happening, when it has been clearly documented to happen in the UK. The same happens in Germany as well, I have spoken to ordinary Germans (not neo-nazis or extremists) that have found themselves in trouble for basically jokes.
As for the argument "the USA doesn't doesn't do it perfectly that it is okay to deny people of free speech somewhere else" isn't an argument. Also I am in the UK, not the US. I don't care about what happens in the US. You seem to be hell bent on throwing your liberties away.
> Germany has had very clear, well-defined hate speech laws since 1960, and it's ranked higher than the USA in the Press Freedom Index.
Telling me that the laws that curtail freedom of speech have been around for a long time and are well defined isn't an argument to whether they should exist or not and just because something has been done for a long time doesn't mean it should be done.
Don't care how great the freedom of speech is for people that in the right club (in this case journalists). It has to be for everyone including odious people.
As for hate speech that is a made up concept to curtail speech rights and has been used against ordinary people in the UK (not neo-nazis or extremists just normal people).
-------------------------
I am so fed up with people (like yourself) who constantly gas light about these laws and tell me civil liberties haven't been eroded because of these laws, when they literally have and you can find example after example where this is the case.
More generally I was out of work for 9 months because of my government's response to COVID. It depleted me of most of my savings and I am now in debt which will take me like a year or two to pay off, I had zero debt before the COVID lockdowns. SO I don't trust the government to tell me the truth, I don't trust them to be able to do anything competently and they certainly shouldn't be able to legislate what can and what can't be said.
Banned groups largely stop recruiting and killing. But then, in a different universe, maybe they would have stopped recruiting and killing even without the ban. How would you know?
Well, it's impossible to prove that no murders were committed for this reason as opposed to any other reason, so you're going to stay unhappy.
But I looked up what individual liberties it curtails, and there's something that may interest you.
The individual liberty curtailed is this: If something's banned, and someone sets up a replacement organisation, then merely being a member is punishable. The prosecution has to prove to a court that the new organisation is a replacement for the banned one, and any factual or dejure leadership may go to prison for up to five years, any other members for up to three.
The bit that will interest you is that this is quite similar to other laws. You don't have to kill anyone to have your liberties curtailed in this manner, mere economic crime will do. If you're convicted of economic crime, that may curtail your liberty to be Geschäftsführer etc.
It's ok because the thoughts they ban are not novel, they had their time and were thoroughly executed on.
You'll have hard time convincing anyone that thought "Jews are inferior race and should be exterminated" should have the same right to be considered as any other. When we already thought this thought extensively and even based our actions on it and it led only to unprecedented nhuman suffering.
> It's ok because the thoughts they ban are not novel, they had their time and were thoroughly executed on.
"Because it is not new it is okay". Sorry that isn't very convincing.
The issue is that if you ban one set of ideas you have set a precedent to ban other ideas that aren't as odious.
Using the same justification you can criminalise believing in the Earth is flat or any other fringe idea.
> You'll have hard time convincing anyone that thought "Jews are inferior race and should be exterminated" should have the same right to be considered as any other. When we already thought this thought extensively and even based our actions on it and it led only to unprecedented nhuman suffering.
I am not saying they should be considered equally. I am not saying that those ideas are equal. I am saying that someone shouldn't be criminalised for thinking or expressing such ideas.
> If you the idea is crap and it proved that it's crap by leading to genocide why would we award it any protection?
Lots of communists say that the Soviet Union wasn't "real communism". Yet I never hear the same outcry against that.
I am not saying it should be "protected". I am saying that individual liberties should be protected and one of the most important (after private property rights) is the freedom to speak you mind.
> Do tou think next time around, it will lead to something beneficial to mankind?
No.
> It did not lead to genocide. The first time it does I hope it's banned to hell.
When people questioned the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe people were punished for such ideas. So that has kind of already happened.
Do you really want people to stereotype all Germans as Nazis and Holocaust deniers? Because I'm pretty sure this is what would end up happening if the German government did not go to the trouble of explicitly banning these things, regardless of how few people actually advocated them. It's practically a free boost in optics and national pride that benefits pretty much all Germans at basically zero cost, because it's only banning the most obscenely offensive and pointless idiocy. (Yes, Holocaust denial is idiotic - the evidence of it in German archives and elsewhere is utterly overwhelming. The remaining question wrt. history is whether Hitler and the Nazis actually planned even worse genocides than what they ended up doing, and the most likely answer is yes, they absolutely did.)
> Do you really want people to stereotype all Germans as Nazis and Holocaust deniers? Because I'm pretty sure this is what would end up happening if the German government did not go to the trouble of explicitly banning these things, regardless of how few people actually advocated them.
No it wouldn't. This is a ridiculous argument.
> It's basically a free boost in optics and national pride that benefits practically all Germans at basically zero cost, because it's only banning the most obscenely offensive and pointless idiocy.
The cost is individual liberty. Which BTW if you haven't been paying attention has been eroded severely all over the globe in almost every western country over the last two years. So no it is not zero cost.
What about the average German's liberty of not having his country publicly badmouthed due to the actions of a few crazy nutcases? It's hard to seriously argue that this wouldn't happen, given Germany's post-WWII history. (Also I'm not sure why you're bringing up the 'last two years', the prohibition has been in place for far longer than that.)
You are advocating for throwing the baby out with the bath water.
> It's hard to seriously argue that this wouldn't happen, given Germany's post-WWII history. (Also I'm not sure why you're bringing up the 'last two years', the prohibition has been in place for far longer than that.)
The German government (not the German people) are the ones that are giving themselves a bad name by denying people their individual liberty. Those liberties include (and are not limited to), the right to speak freely even if that speech is unpopular.
Regarding the last two year. During last two years we have had individual rights eroded all over the western world due under the guise of controlling the spread of COVID. Just like we had our rights eroded due to the threat of terrorism at the hands of Islamic extremists.
Personally I was unemployed for 9 months because of the economic uncertainty caused by lockdowns and it depleted me of almost all my savings and almost killed my business. I owe about £25,000 (bank loans and credit cards etc) and it will take me another year to pay it all off at least.
It has been in a nose dive for "everyday" people. But there is a whole section of society where they are treated as minor celebrities. The number of those people are shrinking (thankfully) but they are sizable enough for some journalists to break out and make bank through their substacks e.g. Bari Weiss is bringing in 800,000K a year via substack.
Bari Weiss falls into the category "homogeneity creates rewards to heresy" in the article.
Bari Weiss is heretical to mainstream journalism because she has pushed back against CRT, mask mandates, etc.
Because she's a sane-sounding lefty that is voicing some concerns that the left-wing media is afraid to touch, she has found a great market for her content, just as the article says.
Maybe. I get your point. I saw the clip of her on Bill Marr's show that has been floating around. She has pushed back when it was safe to do so. The tide was already turning on that.
> This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here.
You and I don't think of them as high status. However there is a proportion of people that do pay attention to writers, these maybe TV, films, media, politicians that are all within the "Cathedral". You see this a lot of Twitter. Politicians pay a lot of attention to Twitter and tbh I doubt many normal people ever pay attention to what people see on twitter.
Those writing jobs are seen as high status because you can be influencing on "important" things. If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on. Many of these are writers for smaller publications that are safe enough i.e. inside the Overton window to present "balance" or be presented as "experts". Simply being on TV for a few minutes is seen as a big deal (especially to older people 50+).
>If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on.
Both individual reporters and TV show producers develop a go to list of people who at least seem to know what they're talking about, usually don't have too much of an axe to grind, are presentable in the case of TV, etc. And, yes, to a lot of people they can't really imagine being invited on a TV show so someone who is "must be a real expert" which often isn't the case.
I am not sure what happend to twitter. However if you just want to browser twitter you can use a nitter instance (there are quite a few public instances).
> Preaching to the choir! I'd be surprised to find anyone on HN with an argument against writing your blog/book in markdown with vim.
Time. Wordpress for the most part is WYSIWYG. With any of these static site generators I have to learn the conventions, work out how to install and edit themes and generally there is a lot of faffing.
> Now what I'd be interested in seeing is an argument for traditional publishers or WordPress users to switch to this sort of stack.
There isn't one. It doesn't scale. There is a reason why companies typically use some sort of CMS system. It isn't just ease of editing. You can control when, where and who can publish content to the site. You can localise content. You can version control content. You can have stakeholders review content before it is made public.
Doing that with vim, git and a static site generator and some bash scripts is a faff and will frustrate non-techie people that just wanna copy and paste content from Word.
One of the problems with text files and the philosophy of chaining little tools together to do something is that what usually happens is a rube gold-berg machine of little dependencies you have to manage to keep things working.
I could spend time working out how Jekyll works, writing a script to deploy the changes and managing changes with git. Alternatively I could just spin up a wordpress instance on a VPS in minutes and start publishing content.
Sometimes the "unix" way isn't the simplest way. Sometimes having a product that already built for that task that is paid for is simpler and a better use of your time.
I like git, markdown files and pandoc for docs and might even use hugo for really simple sites and use some bash / powershell / batch scripts. However if you work with anyone than yourself you will have to document how it works otherwise they will most likely be clueless as to what you have done.
Even in dev circles. Most "dark matter" developers are reluctant of using a command line and only learn what they need to learn to get by. Many just do everything in the IDE and are completely lost outside it.
I do agree with the author, that you should use the simplest tools you can get away with, but (text-files + jekyll + this + that) isnt just text files, as you say its a precarious stack no less complex than some software package or whatever.
I guess if you do just want the truly simplest tool for a website, html is probably better than text files, even if it is a bit less ergonomic to write with
> I do agree with the author, that you should use the simplest tools you can get away with, but (text-files + jekyll + this + that) isnt just text files, as you say its a precarious stack no less complex than some software package or whatever.
They are advocating for sellotaping tools together to build a workflow near the end of the article.
> I guess if you do just want the truly simplest tool for a website, html is probably better than text files, even if it is a bit less ergonomic to write with
Writing HTML when you are trying to write content is pretty painful. Way back in the distant past I used to charge about £100 a HTML page. I ended up learning Perl (and later PHP) so I wouldn't have to write HTML.
As I understand it, you still need to identify yourself in countries without such an id, like the US or UK, for a lot of reasons, like when opening bank accounts, interacting with the state, etc. But without a national id card, this can become complicated, and these countries often use a lot of defacto ids "replacements" like birth certificates, driver's licenses and so on, which increases the bureaucracy for citizens/customers and potential for fraud.
So while I see a lot of pros about national ids, what's the "horrid" drawback of ids?
> As I understand it, you still need to identify yourself in countries without such an id, like the US or UK, for a lot of reasons, like when opening bank accounts, interacting with the state, etc. But without a national id card, this can become complicated, and these countries often use a lot of defacto ids "replacements" like birth certificates, driver's licenses and so on, which increases the bureaucracy for citizens/customers and potential for fraud.
There is a big difference between having it being compulsory to carry identification and being required to show identification when my identification need to be verified.
When I am buying my lunch. I don't need to verify who I am. If I am going to the bank they need to verify who I am.
> So while I see a lot of pros about national ids, what's the "horrid" drawback of ids?
Because I shouldn't need be required to carry a piece of paper/plastic card to go outside of my house. The idea of it is bonkers if you are in the UK.
If the identification isn't compulsory and is voluntary I have no problem with them. However from what I understand many places in Europe they are compulsory.
As a UK citizen, I'd rather that we didn't need a universal ID for those things.
If we assume that driving licences are a sane system for safety reasons, I'd prefer a system in which I can show that I am the person that took the driving test, but not that this is the same person that lives at 74 Fake Street or that has bank account number XYZ.
So basically, I'd rather it be rowed back. Why would I want to be required to carry identification when wandering about outside? What possible benefit could that afford me? From my perspective it's a pure negative, I generally try to avoid things that fall into that category.
Generally I'd say "less information if at all necessary".
There are obviously situations in which people need to be identified.
If I use my car to smash into someone and then do a runner, and so the police need to find me to punish me, I want that to be a process that's governed by controls e.g. they can run the licence plate and find out it's my car, but only when they have real reason to do so and not just because road tax receipts will increase by a marginal amount if we blanket all of the roads in automated cameras and send fines to everyone.
It's not really complicated, at least in the US. Nearly everyone has a driver's license, which is accepted as ID in all but the strictest scenarios. If you don't have a driver's license, every state offers a non-driver ID which looks nearly identical. I suppose where it might get complicated is some states require you to identify yourself to a police officer when asked, some do but only when there's articulable suspicion, and some don't require you to ID yourself unless/until you're actually arrested. Even some states that require you to ID yourself when asked, without any suspicion of a crime, allow you to just give your info (name, dob, probably social) if you don't have the physical ID on you. But I think that falls into "knowing the laws of the jurisdiction you're in" more than any complications around a national ID process.
The US at least just doesn't need a national ID for anything. Nearly everyone has a birth certificate and social security or other federal ID number. Those who don't would likely not have a national ID in any such system either. Anything achieved by a national ID can be achieved by current documentation.
I remember hearing a lot about new "voter id" laws, and how they are supposedly meant to suppress the vote of poorer minorities, who often do not possess a driver's license (or a car) - especially affecting the older generations of poor minority people most likely to vote.
I think all sorts of id laws, whether for voting or other purposes, puts a requirement on the government to ensure that everybody has as few obstacles as possible to getting an id.
From what I understand, many states with voter id laws didn't do that, and in some cases only accepted forms of id that poor or black voters were less likely to have.
>From what I understand, many states with voter id laws didn't do that, and in some cases only accepted forms of id that poor or black voters were less likely to have.
When I was earning minimum wage when stacking shelves I managed to sort out an ID fine. This idea that Black people or poor people can't get ID is just the bigotry of low expectations.
I personally think it is extremely racist to assume that Black people aren't capable of filling out the required forms for Identification or being able to front the cost of an ID.
It means legally speaking you can't even go for a run or to a supermarket without one.
Of course, it turns out you absolutely can if you're not 'suspicious'. A colleague of mine is short, bald, and wears a keffiyeh. He gets stopped for identity checks from time to time. I am never stopped (obviously, this does give away my skin colour and the fact that I have an unassuming or conformist appearance).
As a step to combat racial profiling the police here in Oslo, capital of Norway, will likely soon[1] have to give a receipt[2] if they randomly stop you on the streets, documenting who was searched, by whom and the reason for the search.
While I can see some of the objections, it seems reasonable that a temporary restriction of freedom like that gets documented.
> While I can see some of the objections, it seems reasonable that a temporary restriction of freedom like that gets documented.
Any temporary restriction will become permanent. They always tell people it is going to be "temporary" and "there will be protections put in place". All it does is normalise such restrictions and then when anyone objects to people will say "Well it been in place now for a while, it is normal, most people are fine with it, you must have something to hide".
The same thing is done time and time again and nobody becomes any the wiser.
I meant temporary in the sense that police stopping you and asking for your ID is, for people with an ID, a temporary restriction of freedom. You can't just go saying you'll miss the bus. As such I think it's good that the police have to leave a paper trail.
It was quite controversial when it was introduced in Netherland too; it reminded a lot of people of the mandatory "Ausweis" from the war.
I certainly do not have ID on me all the time. Though I do try to remember to bring my driver's license when using the car, and my passport when leaving the country.
The fact that there are at least 3 twitter clones that are less well put together with a decent amount of users handling in the load proves that it is possible.