IGI-111

Poor folks must live a constant emotional rollercoaster reading this site.

I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.

Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.

In fact I feel this is the main miscommunication that causes the "it wasn't real X" debate. People use the term X to refer both to the goal and the method of implementation.

Norway is a liberal democracy. The workers don't own the means of production there.

And the Soviet Union was indeed a socialist state. Statism and socialism aren't mutually exclusive, and being both is exactly the point of a dictatorship of the proletariat. That it didn't bring what it promised is just one more tired argument. Scotsmen are never true socialists for some reason.

All in all, Venezuela's woes aren't all to blame on socialism, but you can't really help but point out that it's a direct application of the principles layed out in The Road to Serfdom. The State grew by violating private property to redistribute it, scared off any outside investment, consolidating into an all-in policy on oil. And that investment had to be controlled, which means loyalty became more important than competence to recruit oil industry officials. And the rest was just one market fluctuation away.

I doubt the form they have on their website where you have to know your id to opt out of the spying would hold up in court.

This is so self referential it should be called Brandolini's paradox.

Email is a different beast, being private communication. But Usenet is exactly what you describe, a decentralized forum. And unsuprisingly it had both the best and the worst of humanity in there.

You get one guess as to which of those two got portrayed more in the media.

That we can't produce secure voting software is just a testament to how much we suck at software engineering and making safe computers in general, because cryptographically this is a solved problem.

Hell I'd argue that modern implementations like Estonia's are pretty close to an acceptable standard of trustlessness. But that's thanks to open standards and public ledgers. The closed source voting machine was never a good idea, and never will be.

Given the ancap vibe of blockchain in general this is all a bit ironic isn't it?

I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.

These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.

It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".

People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.

The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.

Not sure why, I blame total ideologies that prescribe the personal being political.

You're free to think that it's all bunk and tyranny of the majority is just fine. Many people do.

I'd just like it to be clear to everyone that such an opinion is being against free speech. Because what greatly annoys me is when people try to claim that they advocate a "reasonable" version of free speech when they simply oppose it. Or indeed try to claim that their censorious position is a liberal one.

Which I am not at all accusing you of incidentally.