I know it’s not popular to bring politics into things on HN, but… From the outside at least, White House policy sounds like at least as much of a black swan event as COVID.
> I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
I did it a little more than a week following the election, but same. I even sold any ETFs with exposure to the US market I previously owned. People thought I was overreacting selling my VGRO, but the YTD returns for my ex-US portfolio are about 150% of what I could have expected with my old holdings and the peace of mind is priceless.
I've kept about 1/3 of my investments in a non-US index fund for years, basically as a hedge against some unforeseen event in the US (having 100% exposure to the economy that my job is in seemed suboptimal). In 2016, all that really changed was that the event was now foreseen -- my domestic investments still outperformed that portion until this year.
This year is the first time that fund outperformed the rest of my portfolio. Not massively, since I do have some holdings that benefited from the AI boom, but noticeably. Just adding 1 to n here. Thanks for reminding me to rebalance, and maybe find another non-AI-related hedge just in case.
Most professional financial planning would have the equity assets portion of the portfolia you at ~30% investing in foreign assets (good times and bad).
> I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
That sounds pretty black swan to me, I'm guessing you never felt the need sheet any previous election? Being predictable and being unique are different things.
Black swan event: an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now.
I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
> Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
While it is kinda the same direction, it also has two Black Swan components:
1) What he's doing actually matches the rhetoric, e.g. actually trying to kick out illegal immigrants even though they're the (underpaid) farm workers holding back food price inflation.
2) It definitely wasn't on my metaphorical bingo card that someone with multiple felony convictions and who had been impeached twice for trying to interfere with the democratic hand over of power, went on to become the popular choice for president.
If Harris had won, she wouldn't have sent ice to invade cities and kidnap people. She wouldn't have hugely increased tariffs, etc. see also putting political minders at network news places as part of federal sales approvals.
America has two options; either become the slave of China and enter our century of humiliation, or deny Chinese access to free trade by competing in market economics. Protectionism does not balance America's trade deficits, and US citizens cannot compete against Mexican labor (let alone Chinese prison labor). The economics of it genuinely don't get any simpler than this; American manufacturing will be for naught if we cannot compete in a free market. We already have a successfully financialized economy, throwing out Reaganomics for an even more shit deal is peak neoreactionary nonsense.
> Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
I saw the signs of the beginnings of it decades ago (shortly following the Reagan era) but I had zero clue that it would (or even could) ever get as completely mad-house outta-control as it has. I've watched the situation devolve year after year for decades now, and all the while I kept foolishly believing "It can't keep getting worse forever. People are gonna wake up any second now." Well, here we are. Not entirely sure how we got here, or how we'll ever get back, but... This is how it is, I guess. :shrug:
"Rock bottom" is when the last human stands alone in their luxury doomsday bunker just waiting to die and realizes that dying with all the money means literally nothing in the grand scheme of the Universe. They didn't "win" anything of lasting value after all...
True. It must be added, that theres two wrenches in the machinery that transforms information into action currently.
Firstly - The average market behavior is average.
From experience, most people could not imagine anything of what was predicted, would come true. There is a large … debt of intellectual work that is being underwritten, allowing people to sell narratives which do not correspond to reality.
This is a direct result of a captured, unfair information environment.
As a result, the average behavior of the market is not pricing in these things, even if the plans were made clear.
That view sounds like it's coming from a position of a white person, not married to a minority, not an immigrant. That describes me too. Software engineer, more secure economically.
Even people with visas or permanent residency, or who even look like they might be Hispanic are justifiably worried about a random car pulling them over and breaking their window. If you aren't aware or concerned, I call that oblivious or a denial of reality. Or privilege (edit: corrected spelling).
It's different in some ways of course than with covid.
For (services) software people, 2020 was great: work from home, sky-high jobs demand (perhaps Zero-interest related), surging demand and revenue because by people were bored at home. Brick and mortar retail workers were screwed in 2020.
It is possible that 2025 could be the opposite, the software jobs market os already spooky for juniors, and could get much worse with an AI bust - guess what companies will do to show investors they are making up for written-off AI investments? A recession will lead to a drop in demand for online services like streaming, online shopping as people tighten their belts, upward ratcheting of subscription prices will only make the drop worse.
I think with an AI bust we're more likely to see juniors actually start getting jobs at reasonable rates... but only after short-sighted layoffs of a bunch of more senior positions as opposed to dumping AI products that so many companies have already signed year+ long contracts for in advance.
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
Okay, how this changes the core argument? The videos were not taken down briefly because they did not comply with the Turkish law that protects Ataturk from defamation but for the claim that they violated someones commercial interests.
The video wasn't taken down over commercial interests. They were taken down because some old law prohibited insults at representatives of other nations, with whom Germany has diplomatic relationships.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
I think that freedom includes, for example, the right not to be shot dead. When someone is using speech to cause people to be shot dead then we have to weigh which freedom is more important and I happen to think that not being shot is more important. If there not also your opinion, fine, you can go to America where speech is considered more important.
You don't want to live in America because it's dystopic and collapsing? Strange. Strange that there's a correlation between countries that hold your opinions and dystopia and collapse. One might even be lead to think that principles held by dystopic countries that collapse might be bad principles to build a country on. But those who promoter those principles told me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
We have to stop rejecting the evidence of our eyes and ears. Propaganda is everywhere. That is a fact. Some of it is destroying the country. That is a fact. We either deal with it or accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact. Your choice is to accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact.
Blocking RT is a very light reach. If you believe the lightest of reaches is already a severe overreach then you are making it binary and polarized, not me.
The fact that some kids will still find ways to get them would be at least partially addressed by the "education" part of GP's comment. Even then, of course, some kids will still start smoking. Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
> Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet.
IMO that’s the issue.
I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
If you believe nothing should be censored, then you believe child porn shouldn't be censored, so please either square that circle, or weaken the argument to "I believe this thing shouldn't be censored"
Child abuse is already illegal.
Law enforcement tracks down creator? Good.
Court orders website owner to take down material? Good.
ISP preemptively decides what to block? Bad.
CP is often used as an "I win" card in this kind of arguments, as it can stir up emotions in the general public, in favor of ever expanding scope of surveillance and censorship. We should be extra aware of this.
You still haven't answered the question that I actually asked.
I didn't say "should child abuse be illegal?". I said "should child porn be illegal?".
You said it's good if a court orders the website owner to block the material, i.e. censors it, so I assume you're pro-censorship for child porn and likely also support jail time for those who possess it.
In which case, please do not claim to oppose all censorship.
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
the issue is how do you prove the content was written by AI?
> But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
even worse - how do you make sure the definition of such terms stays up to date with changing times?
Are you seriously crying about the biggest Russian propaganda channel being blocked while Russia is engaging in full-blown hybrid warfare against the west?
Not parent but I'm skeptical because normalizing blocking is a very real slippery slope. Last night I debugged an issue with one of my apps for 1h, it turned out one of the Cloudflare IPs my device got were legally blocked in Spain. Not even ISP DNS, but the IP. And this is because of some CF customer hosting a football (soccer) streaming site. This is the new normal, in a democratic country. What the post is talking about in Germany seems similar. And these are democratic countries with many constitutional freedoms. This is not a hypothetical, but happening today. ID verification is already implemented in the UK. Chat control is possibly next.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.
> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
If there's nothing wrong with what is being said, then why should it matter who says it? Does propaganda somehow gain effectiveness because it comes "from the source"?
Shutting down a business = economic sanctions. Blocking domain of a web publication is part of shutting it down.
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
Because the people writing the laws within the EU are also acutely aware that phrasing this ban too broadly constrains freedom of speech. The way the ban is handed is walking the fine line between impinging freedom of speech and denying a enemy state from waging an information war.
Romania had to rerun an election due to Russian inference, this isn’t just a phantom the EU made up to censor opinions it doesn’t like.
If you believe in any kind of system of morality, it's absolutely possible for one's own government to be in the moral wrong and the enemy government to be in the moral right. Censorship means the citizens may never learn that their country is the bad guy in that case.
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
It is not. People are allowed to do what they will, as long as those people are not the outlet itself. The propaganda outlet loses control over it and cannot push the media through, only hope that others pull it from them.
Right, but as long as you wage genocide against non-Europeans then Europe will not only support you, but will go after the people protesting it. That's the morals of European leaders today.
Every person and institution have a limited number of flips to give
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
Apart from the fact that you seem to be equating a whole people with one group, you also seem to conveniently not realize that the government committing the genocide is a non-secular messianic one, with a deep seated belief of the superiority of their own religious group over any other, but particularly feel themselves superior to the people they occupy for decades, who of course despite them being occupied are always supposed to find compassion and understanding for their occupier first, otherwise the occupation cannot end, right?
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
Russia is also not engaged in a direct war with Europe yet we still sanction them because they are by proxy, similar to Israel: Israel's actions in Gaza are creating waves of refugees that Europe has to take in, and then we have the potential terrorist attacks by those people as revenge for Europe's military aid to Israel who see Europe as partly to blame for destruction of their home country.
Israel definitely should be sanctioned till it stops its war crimes because doing nothing will directly affect us.
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to completely ignore the historical context of these two conflicts. There is no question that Russia's war in Ukraine is a proxy war against the West - they say so directly by justifying it as a defense against "NATO encroachment" and making demands that the Ukraine can never, say, join the EU.
Israel should be sanctioned because of the war crimes and the genocide perpetrated by their government, I agree, but that's a different thing.
i would like to remind you that Germany was one of the biggest recipients of russian gas in Europe, and worked actively to keep it flowing despite the war, and didn't try to break away from their dependence for a very long time.
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
There is a difference I think between unpalatable content (that you disagree with, that you find incorrect, and so on) and content generated with the specific purpose of deceiving the reader.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
>I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
> In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
It is similar to the problem of pornography online.
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
Propaganda affects everyone, not just kids. It even affects people with university studies but who have given up thinking for themselves. The problem is that they authorities are banning websites, while social media is riddled with propaganda. They claim to do something which clearly doesn't work.
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
It's really the bots and algorithms are the source of all of that, promoting somebody's agenda. Now AI too. Remember, Tay the Microsoft bot that they put on Twitter and it became nazi the next day? It's that multiplied by the number of stars in the visible universe.
The only safer places are heavily moderated hobby related forums with actual people. Anti vaxxing is not a hobby btw.
>If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
This is as pointless as saying that is my role as a consumer to test the food that I buy to ensure it is not contaminated with shit, so instead of punishing the companies that have contaminated food we should allow them to sell if even if we know it contains literal shit and instead teach our children in school how to use equipment to test the food.
Sorry for the Ruzzian puppets but soem countries are not retarded and they decided to block the toxic food today and not ignore the victims, as I said in the original comments we have laws and the fact that you are from Ruzzia should not put you above our laws, RT shoudl stay banned until they open a local branch where we can apply the fine to them equaly as we apply to our own media.
Also there are a lot of Ruzzian money wasted on social media to spread actual fake shit, priovable fake shit that I think we need to really go further in identifying the source of behind those fake crap and arrest, fine and sanction the individuals behind that shit, no level of education can just make a person intelligent or make them do investigative work to confirm that some information that he really, really loves is in fact false.
And I know some fascist here will claim that trush is not objective, and my response is that a photoshoped document is 100% fake in all natural logic systems. The strategy used in Romanian presidential campaign by the Ruzzian aligned side was to put faked documents or information on social media then have media people share in on social media and then bringt the faked document in discussion on TV.
So don't cry for the regular idiot they still get their conspiracies and faked information from Ruzzia on social media and sometimes even in the mail, as an example they sent people faked official looking letters that they are getting called to military service to go and fight in Ukraine.
So please freedom of media but there must be consequences for external media not only for local one.
I don’t think your porn comparison works because normally what happens is governments set rules about what content can be shown at what times. In the UK, we call it the “watershed”.
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
What you actually need is to have a feature on iPhone / Android (and on the home Wi-Fi) to block porn and that parents can enter a pin-code to unlock that, if you consider this is non-acceptable in your family.
Some broadcasters do already have this feature. For example if you watch adult content (doesn’t have to be nudity, could be violent shows or other content that isnt considered appropriate for children) on SkyTV (UK satellite) then then you get promoted for a pin if its before 9pm.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
Right, so my local TV gets fined if they published something fake, like for example they had a news about some bullshit happening in Romania but they were showing a video from a different country, the TV claimed it was stupidity and not manipulation, they got fined.
So I want RT and other media to respect the exact same laws, if they do not want to respect our laws and continue to publish fake shit we block them until they pay their fines and start respecting the laws.
And trust me there is no communism censorship here in Romania, the TV is terrible still , you get tons of commercial to shitty suppliments and gambling, you get politicians presenting their bullshit conspiracies, you get the hosts claiming that Soros is doing everything that is wrong in the country and this days also Macron and France are big villains (because they upset Putin and the Zeds are super, duper butt hurt )), you can see ladies presenting themselves as "doctors in energy-shit-karma-bullshit" and claiming the vaccines caused a giant number of allergies and other crap that she and her company with ehr supplements will sell.
We still let people to be idiots but we need to not be idiots like a society and let paid and organized attacks on our population to continue, and we need to do more against this state organized attacks. (as I mentioned previously but maybe in other comment faked documents were sent by mail to people, this is clearly a state sponsored action, they had names and addresses, they falsified documents and then paid for physical mail delivery to make it look more authentic )
Clear case of "motive justifies the means". I think in a free democracy, no one should block any propaganda, as it the responsibility of the individual to asses what to read and what not. In a democracy, it is more dangerous to censor and justify the means with motive - this opens the door to unjust censorship.
The best counter-argument I can provide to your wonderful ideal is that people are stupid, and they are vulnerable to being manipulated into believing dangerous peace-disrupting falsehoods by propaganda.
Spinning your thoughts further, you assume that stupidity is not some kind of freedom that you get to enjoy in a democracy. The opposite is true, people are free to be stupid, and if the majority is stupid, the smart people have to give in to the fact that stupid people make the rules (by voting).
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
>The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
What if at the end of the day, that propaganda does work and leaving it unopposed is as much a danger to democracy as censorship? It seems like a scenario where you have to pick your poison now, the last 100 years have shown populations can be manipulated.
Democracy is sneaky refined domination, subtle enough that masses do not see through it, but it is elites controlling the masses.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
It used to be common sense among non-authoritarians, that propaganda just becomes more potent from suppression.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
Your example of moon landing theories isn't an apt comparison because you're picking a fringe group. RT already had millions of international followers on Facebook, YouTube, etc., often more than high quality journalism outlets. I've been online long enough to see RT showing up uninvited in my feeds before.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
Point is, you should be glad the attempt at censoring RT fails pretty bad.
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
"Our" side in that particular context obviously means NATO, the US, the five eyes countries, the west etc. Take your pick.
And yes, I think you have a side, and I think these groups' foreign policies are 1. Very far from being simply "evidence based" and 2. Not in any meaningful sense under democratic control.
Have you ever wondered why so many people actually turn up to vote for Putin in Russia, even though they don't really influence anything by doing so?
I think they have simply decided that it's easier to want what they can have. Learn to like the taste of the only course that's on the menu.
And I also think that attitude is very common in the western world.
> Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.... If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
Sure, they reported that Jewish individuals had to flee Ukraine due to a Nazi takeover and a supposed ongoing genocide. There's no evidence of the fleeing or the genocide happening. This was one of the false narratives cited in the EU court's ruling.
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
It's true, Russia could be said to engage in full-blown hybrid warfare according to some definitions. I don't want to downplay what they do at all.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
> But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
If you think the masses are too susceptible to unapproved propaganda to the extent we have to censor it, it’s not clear to me that you can consistently believe democracy should be your form of government, as opposed to some sort of rule by experts/the rich/the educated/aristocrats/something else. It’s effectively saying the masses get a choice unless it’s the wrong choice.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones. These people are generally easy to reach for populists and propagandists.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
None of these problems are new. The problems have been well-understood since the founding of all Western democracies and we accepted that trade off, as we decided the alternative systems were all worse. You can find this very debate in newspapers and CC notes (in America)at the time, about “false rumors” stirred up by “designing men.”
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
> Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought. But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries. Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
So, if democracy means you have to trust people to make up their mind and decide for themselves, unconditionally, then why is there hardly any system with even elements of direct democracy (in contrast to the parliamentary/representative approach)?
> Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
You are comfortable with the blocking until the politicians start blocking something you care about.
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
Don't worry, nobody would stop it anyway, at least nobody on Twitter and Tiktok. The Kremlin is paying the nazis to scream, shout and create diversions. Then they could justify other de-nazifying invasions. The only ones rallying now are the nazis, screaming and shouting, oh no, cancelled elections.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
It's like handing knives out on a playground. rt.com is handing out propaganda which is meant to influence those who are already distrustful of mainstream institutions.
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
There is abundant factual evidence that the US worked to undermine democracy in Ukraine in 2014 when Ukraine elected a candidate favourable to Moscow. It's not propaganda to draw attention to that.
There's no factual evidence of that, but there is a lot of RT screeching about it, which some individuals believe is the same thing as factual evidence. Thanks for providing evidence, to the other users in this thread, that RT has real effects, so there are real concrete reasons to block it.
As a Ukrainian, this statement of yours is complete and utter bullshit.
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
Not OP, but there is strong censorship. The previous government sent a police brigade to a random dud that said something like “he is a clown” or similar (don’t remember the details). In Germany you have to be extremely careful with what you say, and how you say it, because you can be in jail faster than you think.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
In 2021, Andreas Grote, the minister of interior of the Germany city-state Hamburg was called a dick in a tweet. (Andy, you are such a dick). This led to a police search of the home of the Twitter account owner [1].
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
Here one: translation you can do at leisure. Also there is a sister comment with a similar case. I have a family memver that was also persecuted for hanging a flag saying “the park is for the children “ as they wanted to construct in a park.
"Demnach soll er im Frühjahr 2024 auf X eine Bilddatei mit Bezug zur Nazi-Zeit hochgeladen haben, die möglicherweise den Straftatbestand der Volksverhetzung erfüllen könnte."
The police was sent when he wrote “schwachkopf”. Not before. The association with nazi came much later, and had a pretty good explanation. If you look the coments that guy wrote was CRISTAL CLEAR he was not nazi, and much less antisemitic. Was a clear case of using a law for what it was not intended.
They do educate people to do that already. But the power of narrative is much stronger than the motivation to do the actual work of checking your sources.
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
Exactly. That isn't going to help the argument whatsoever. Blocking stuff without legal basis is an entirely different ballpark from legally mandated blocks after due process and the option for legal challenges.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
I must ask sincerely: do you know of concrete instances where RT has been shown to claim things that are objectively untrue, that they reasonably ought to have known were untrue? Or is this just about them using the same techniques (selective reporting / emphasis on stories salient to particular worldviews, editorialization etc.) that everyone else uses?
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
Who cares. Just make it go away, there's too much noise already. I for one don't care about the arguments of some "news outlet" paid for by the ones who attacked Ukraine. The Global Times isn't banned because the CCP is outlining issues using restraint.
Can't take the "propaganda" and "misinformation" excuses seriously when the German establishment media has been blatantly lying to their teeth about an ongoing genocide, and smearing anyone who stood for an obvious moral cause with 0 repercussion. They make the Israeli far-right newspapers blush.
Anything touching disk, such as reading a bunch of source files is just so much slower on windows right now. From what I hear it improves a little if you actually go through the Linux subsystem, but it just can’t touch native Linux performance.
Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.
Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.
And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.
Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.
Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.
Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
A lot of people really kick back on sortition. I think a good compromise is this: everyone votes like normal. We then take the top K candidates who got more than some fraction of the votes. (Say: greater than 1/9th of the total votes.) The winner is selected, at random, proportional to the number of votes they received. Such a system would really really on having a large number of candidates on the ballot; my preference would be (in party ballots): top 2 (or 3!) candidates from each party, and any person who can get more than T signatures. (Where T is some number like “20000” or “5% VAP”.)
That compromise has all the downsides of both systems without preserving the upsides - it creates a pool of candidates that will be biased towards narcissistic lunatics but no democratic checks so they can get in to office even if there is a consensus that their policies will be destructive.
It isn't a terrible idea; I've long liked that sort of plan as a fallback in very tight elections to randomly decide between the candidates. But it isn't really a compromise with the sortition folk because it doesn't have the properties they're looking for.
“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.
Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.”
The compromise is to defeat gerrymandering. It has the nice quality of being constitutional. Most policies I've seen for defeating gerrymandering don't pass constitutional muster. I say this as someone who worked in the antigerrymandering & redistricting space for 15 years.
Does the Roman republic's tradition of appointing a dictator count? Do "illiberal democracies" with quasi-kings like Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, et al, still count as something comparable, or are these the downside of that spiral? Obviously everything that works, works until it doesn't.
The longer a regime’s power is aligned with the establishment, the less democratic it becomes. There’s no clear-cut distinction between democracy or not democracy.
However, if a leader remains in power for decades, it’s highly probable that the establishment has a firm grip on the reins and is unlikely to relinquish control.
Dr. Devereaux of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has a really nice overview of the position of Roman dictator over at his blog. [1]
The very short version is that 'dictator' refers to two different things. One version is the dictator appointed by the Senate in the early Republic to solve a particular crisis, who had absolute power within their sphere of responsibility and who uniformly relinquished power when their job was done.
The later dictators towards the end of the Republic were Sulla and Caesar. They seized Rome by force, then claimed the long-disused title of 'dictator' to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy.
Appointing a dictator for a period of a year in case of emergency is compatible with democracy. Appointing a dictator for life is not. Mainly because the dictator for the period of a year is, after that year, still accountable. Orban, Erdogan, and Maduro are on various stages of the road from democracy to non-democracy. Regarding the Romans another matter is of course that only a small part of the population has any influence on the senate, so it is in fact clearly not a democracy.
If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
> "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
This seems like it's overfitting quite a bit to the American political system; I've never heard of a definition of a democracy that required exactly these branches before, and it's hard for me to agree with the idea that something with two our four branches (or the division between the branches being slightly different) is somehow impossible to be a democracy by definition.
Democracy is more fundamental than that. It simply means rule by the people. The three branches of government was a later invention, and not all democracies feature it. Political theory surrounding the definition of democracy is more concerned with who has power and how they have it, and has less to do with how it is structured, as much as a US-centric definition may take it to be. Eg parliamentary systems are considered democratic despite a different structure.
That sounds very American though. For example how does the Westminster style system fit into it? While the Prime Minister might be described as the executive, they're actually just the leader of the majority Legislative party.
I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.
Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
At 20mph in a well-designed street, there’s still a lot of opportunity for people to keep themselves safe. Not so much with guns.
On badly designed streets and with bad and/or speeding drivers, on the other hand.
And don’t get me started on the dangers of cars with high hoods. We’ve known for years that to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe, they need to go on top of the car, instead of under it.
Also called freedom from consequences. Free speech makes sense in a free society, freedom from consequences does not. Yet that's what they're calling for.
