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You should disabuse yourself of the notion that concepts like personal discipline, contentiousness, and integrity are somehow "conservative" values. They are not in either sense of the word conservative.

Certainly from a political standpoint, republicans (or their equivalent in other nations) have often used these concepts against women, minorities, and the mentally ill as a means of shirking their obligation to help their fellow human. In my observation, they never make much of an attempt to live up to them in their own lives. (e.g. YOU are a welfare queen, but I am an entrepreneur who needed to take a government bailout).

On the other hand, if "conservative" means "old-fashioned" to you, then there is also no reason to believe that the people before us were morally superior to us today. My reading of history leads me to believe quite the opposite.


> My reading of history leads me to believe quite the opposite.

Hey, if we wanted to go back to real old-fashioned (pre-columbian) American values, then we could have human sacrifice, multi-god-animistic-religion, slavery (the Europeans weren't the only ones to do that), etc.


Just a point, Europeans were the only ones to do _chaptel slavery_, i.e treating fellow humans (even if they are currently slave) as object they own and have every right over them.

Other form of slavery were either topologically or chronologically limited. This wasn't the case for European chaptel slavery: your sons and daughter were also property, and changing localtion did not indure you to another lord, but gave him right to pursue you across the world (also, chains were mostly used during triomphs, but chained slave were in practice extremely rare, even in mines)


This is factually incorrect.

Nah, back then we paid for bandwidth by the kb.

That’s even worse! :)

As a long time ACLU financial supporter, I could not disagree more. 4chan is not and never was a bastion of free speech. Comparing 4chan to the ACLU is like comparing a toddler smearing shit on a wall to art. To practice free speech requires an intent to express a point of view. 4chan had to point of view and was just a shithole.

> To practice free speech requires an intent to express a point of view

Excellent, now we can ban speech we don’t like by just saying it doesn’t actually express a point of view


You can't yell out in a theatre that there is a fire and cause a stampede.

Just in case you're not citing that old debunked free speech trope ironically, please see: "Don’t Use These Free-Speech Arguments Ever Again" by First Amendment expert Ken White (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speec...).

I have no idea what you are talking about, and I am unable to read the article as it is behind a paywall.

https://archive.is/iZC4v

Hopefully, that works. It's the first time I've done an archive like that. It works for me, but it always did because I'm using the Bypass Paywalls Clean add-on in Firefox https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads


So, you can yell "fire" falsely and cause a stampede?

Alex Jones would like a word with you.


Alex Jones defamed families by lying about the details of their children's deaths on his internet show. Courts have decided that his actions count as defamation.

Why did you bring him up here? Do you think his being punished for profiting off of the defamation of school children is a violation of his first amendment rights?


No, just the opposite. It wasn't a violation of his first amendment rights. You can't target the families of shooting victims like he did and claim that it was "free speech".

Yes, because the current supreme court standard is "imminent lawless action".

Alex Jones would like a word with you.

As TFA helpfully points out, defamation is outside First Amendment protection.


Alex Jones lost a civil case to the families of the victims. There was no first amendment issue because the first amendment specifies what the government can and cannot limit w.r.t. speech.

> There was no first amendment issue because the first amendment specifies what the government can and cannot limit w.r.t. speech.

Defamation is by definition unprotected speech, but in the US the legal criteria of what is protected and unprotected speech fundamentally revolve around the First Amendment. The courts, part of the government, enforce civil disputes. The First Amendment applies to civil lawsuits which would directly or indirectly restrict or compel speech.

Alex Jones met the criteria for defamation in multiple civil cases because he spread false statements (conspiracy theories, to be clear), he ignored every indication that his statements were false (in a way that I believe fulfills at least the "reckless disregard of whether it was false or not" branch of the actual malice standard established in Sullivan [1]), and his statements harmed the families reputations (to the point where people motivated by or hiding behind his lies threatened the families [2] and defaced at least one victim's grave [3]).

Disclaimer: I personally believe that Alex Jones knew his statements were false and spread them anyway (the "with knowledge that it was false" branch of actual malice).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones

[3] https://apnews.com/article/alex-jones-infowars-bankruptcy-sa...


> So, you can yell "fire" falsely and cause a stampede?

As the article I linked points out, that trope was (and still is) a hypothetical that tells us nothing useful about first amendment speech rights. The reason the article is so valuable and often cited is when one of those first amendment tropes is tossed into a discussion, it's usually to imply some specific speech which is protected - is not protected. They are often deployed either in error by those who don't understand how very narrow and incredibly rare first amendment exceptions actually are, or as a bad faith rhetorical device by those who already know the first amendment protects speech they wish it didn't.

As a student and fan of first amendment jurisprudence, the fascinating thing about the tropes is that most of them come from old, exceptional cases where the court got it wrong. Cases which were either reversed by later courts or so thoroughly disavowed they've never come back before the court. A long time ago, various eras of SCOTUS courts wobbled around in the long process of figuring out first amendment exceptions and some bad decisions were made - then later corrected. After decades of trying (and failing) to work out a set of rules permitting "good speech" while stopping "bad speech", it became obvious it was impossible.

Over the past 50 years or so, SCOTUS narrowed in on a detailed set of precedents which are as consistent and crystal clear as they are radically extreme - always protecting almost ALL speech - including the worst, most vile, offensive and hateful speech that has no redeeming value whatsoever. Speech I personally despise and wish no one ever said. While I hate the speech (and, often, the speaker), I fiercely defend the first amendment which protects it. Tolerating the awful things people I dislike do with their rights is the price of still having those rights when we need them most. After all those decades of trial and error, in the end, I think SCOTUS finally got it just about perfect.

So the next time you feel like hauling out the "fire... crowded theater" thing, consider instead just saying "The goddamn first amendment fully and absolutely protects this offensive, vile, bullshit speech - and I hate that these assholes said this shit because it's wrong - and here's why..." This would have the benefit of very likely being correct regarding the first amendment and I'd totally respect your feelings and even probably agree with you.


You could more easily have quoted ''Brandenburg v. Ohio'', 395 U.S. 444 (1969) [42]-[44]:

The line between what is permissible and not subject to control and what may be made impermissible and subject to regulation is the line between ideas and overt acts.

The example usually given by those who would punish speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theatre.

This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513, 536—537, 78 S.Ct. 1332, 1346, 2 L.Ed.2d 1460 (Douglas, J., concurring.) They are indeed inseparable and a prosecution can be launched for the overt acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/395/444


Absolutely. Point is we have to judge it in context. People saying horrible things for no reason on a message board is fundamentally different to causing a stampede in a cinema.

I agree that we need laws to make "yelling fire and causing stampedes" illegal. I do not agree that "free speech requires an intent to express a point of view" is the correct way of implementing this.


Imaging dedicating hundreds or thousands of unpaid hours of your life to protect and preserve what amounts to a truck stop toilet. What a total fucking waste.

They should, in fact, give up and use the time for literally anything else.


If gaming is important to you, build a good desktop gaming PC. If you enjoy games casually and don't want the money/hassle of a gaming desktop, get a Playstation, Switch, Steam Deck, or buy a lower-end gaming laptop.

If you enjoy tinkering, setting up Linux or a Mac for gaming can be a fun project, but it's not a good use of your time if your goal is to play games well. You'll jump through a lot of hoops and maybe get something 70% as good.


Linux or Deck setup will actually work out of the box. We have multiple Steam PCs in the house that can all do Steam Link with our tablets and stuff in the house.

The amount of time we specifically use the spare Windows PC as the Steam Link source is pretty low. Most of the time we connect to our media server, which is the Linux machine.

The idea that it's "only 70%" to me is pretty mind boggling. I think there is a lot of the experience that works correctly because of properly supported hardware (AMD)


Per year.

To be fair – when your license is set to expire you do get a limited window (2 weeks before and after it seems per my 2023 copy) to renew at 50% off.

Gotta love the irrational exuberance of Mac users.

I think a couple of things are important to remember in a time like this:

1. This behavior, whether legal or not, is profoundly inhumane.

2. No law, statute, or rule requires us to treat anyone inhumanely. The people behaving this way are doing it because they want to. These are not people you want to have access to any power.


I think your view of gamergate is absolutely fucking delusional. I watched it all go down in real time like many of us did. Saying Gamergate was about ethics in games journalism is roughly as accurate as saying the US Civil War was about "states rights". In that it is kinda sorta technically true if you ignore 99% of what was actually happening.

Gamergate folks are incredibly silent about other “ethics in Journalism” issues…

Same with all those “free speech wing of the free speech party” folks.


You mean you watched people writing misinformation articles smearing people in realtime, or were you actually on the hubs where gamergate was organized? There is a big difference between these things, and no there were not people organizing for "misogyny campaigns" the discussion was 99% corruption and ethics focused. Especially in gaming circles of 2014 which were very progressive.

Quite frankly i find people who think there were actually some kind of organized misogyny campaigns in 2014 to be a form of insane, like something breaks inside a person because they need a bogeyman so badly that it becomes a core of their being even though it's incredibly irrational. At the time journalists would just take random twitter people who weren't affiliated with gamergate and hold them up as if they represented the movement. Reminds of me the tactics used against occupy wall street honestly. It's not a rational or reasonable belief.


But there is a survivorship bias because doing what Wikipedia does is almost impossible.

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