Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action.
On September 03 2019 22:52 Simberto wrote: There are a lot of good reasons for anonymity. Imagine you are a gay youth in some backwater village of saxony which votes 70% AfD. Or just someone that believes in democracy. If you are anonymous, you can talk about the shit that happens in your village online. If you cannot be anonymous, you cannot say anything, because nazi assholes will beat you up.
It works both ways.
What's the scenario for the other way? A village of gay youths beating up a lone nazi?
The weakness of socially liberal societies like the ones we live in is that they openly allow dissent even from minority views, even if that view is harmful to democracy and liberties themselves. Which is why in the first place were were discussing the removal of anonymity from facebook and other media where foreign funded anonymous profiles are able to push said undemocratic and authoritarian views.
lol I suspect "the other way" is nazis utilitising anonymous platforms to organise violence against minorities, not nazi victims. Which is also an important point, if one looks at 8chan and the recent shootings around the world, anonymous platforms are clearly being utilised as refuges for extremists. If you look at the american "free speech" debates, Gab and others are almost exclusively far-right tools.
I'm honestly worried that we in Europe have apparently imported the "crypto mentality" from the anglosphere, where we keep telling ourselves that vulnerable people are best protected if they hide their identity and fend for themselves on the internet. Privacy and 'freedom' shouldn't be uncritically celebrated if they're being used to undermine democratic society.
On September 03 2019 22:52 Simberto wrote: There are a lot of good reasons for anonymity. Imagine you are a gay youth in some backwater village of saxony which votes 70% AfD. Or just someone that believes in democracy. If you are anonymous, you can talk about the shit that happens in your village online. If you cannot be anonymous, you cannot say anything, because nazi assholes will beat you up.
It works both ways.
What's the scenario for the other way? A village of gay youths beating up a lone nazi?
The weakness of socially liberal societies like the ones we live in is that they openly allow dissent even from minority views, even if that view is harmful to democracy and liberties themselves. Which is why in the first place were were discussing the removal of anonymity from facebook and other media where foreign funded anonymous profiles are able to push said undemocratic and authoritarian views.
The scenario the other way is someone afraid of expressing his views publicly in fear of being ostracized and even losing work beacuse of it. I know several Germans from Stuttgart area expressing such concerns (in private when there are no other Germans around). I also know plenty people in Poland working in IT/R&D area being afraid of admiting publicly that they vote for PiS in fear for ostracizm.
I honestly think that this is a difficult problem, and i don't know exactly how to solve it. Everything about it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
Should every speech have your name attached to it at all times? I think that this leads to more problems than positives (and i actually don't know if that it is even possible with the current infrastructure of the internet). On the other hand, i also think that the internet should not be a zone which is free of the law. Threats, hate, scams and so on should be as illegal on the internet as they are on the street.
I honestly am not sure how to square these two problems. But i do have ideas. You obviously cannot have criminal proceedings against someone if you do not know who they are. But that does not mean that everyone needs to always know who that person is. But i am also not a lot more comfortable with the government authorities always knowing who everyone is on the internet. Some parts of the police and the intelligence agencies at least here in Germany seem to have a right-wing problem themselves. So i really would like some checks and balances to that.
Maybe it would help to be able to have a court of law have proceedings against online accounts, with the possibility of sanctions against the account, up to unveiling who the person behind it is and possibly criminal prosecution of those persons. But that still means that that information needs to be saved somewhere, which means that some people can easily access it.
Furthermore, a lot of the really problematic communication does not seem to happen in open forums and things like that, but in private groups that radicalize themselves either through radicalizing the members of the group, or through slowly selecting for more radical members. Which is another complicated problem that i have no idea how to deal with.
I still believe that free exchange of information is a net positive to democracy. We just need to figure out a way to decrease the amount of disinformation. I see this on a vein similar to the difference between the european concept of "freedom of opinion" and the american concept of "freedom of speech".
But yes, this is a complicated problem, and i don't really see easy solutions. But i am pretty sure that the kneejerk reaction of the rightwing to demand real ID on all of the internet is based on their lack of a workable concept of how the internet actually works (As can be easily observed whenever they have to react to internet things, like the Rezo thing with the CDU here in Germany), and their desire to try to force the internet to work in exactly the same way as the offline world which they do understand. Copyright discussions are another side of this. I do not see it as actually solving more problems than it creates.
On September 04 2019 21:01 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
On September 04 2019 19:53 Silvanel wrote:
On September 03 2019 22:52 Simberto wrote: There are a lot of good reasons for anonymity. Imagine you are a gay youth in some backwater village of saxony which votes 70% AfD. Or just someone that believes in democracy. If you are anonymous, you can talk about the shit that happens in your village online. If you cannot be anonymous, you cannot say anything, because nazi assholes will beat you up.
It works both ways.
What's the scenario for the other way? A village of gay youths beating up a lone nazi?
The weakness of socially liberal societies like the ones we live in is that they openly allow dissent even from minority views, even if that view is harmful to democracy and liberties themselves. Which is why in the first place were were discussing the removal of anonymity from facebook and other media where foreign funded anonymous profiles are able to push said undemocratic and authoritarian views.
The scenario the other way is someone afraid of expressing his views publicly in fear of being ostracized and even losing work beacuse of it. I know several Germans from Stuttgart area expressing such concerns (in private when there are no other Germans around). I also know plenty people in Poland working in IT/R&D area being afraid of admiting publicly that they vote for PiS in fear for ostracizm.
If they truly cared about privacy, perhaps they should stop voting for authoritarian parties that are the ones that want to enact these repressive ID policies?
At first I thought naming the job of the commissioner responsible for migration like that when you need to cooperate with socialists and liberals had to be either incompetence or audacity.
Doubling down on her decision to name Margaritis Schinas the “vice president for protecting our European way of life," European Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen said the EU can't allow others "to take away our language from us (...) We have seen foreign powers interfere in our elections from the outside," von der Leyen wrote in an op-ed published Monday in multiple European newspapers. "And we have seen home-grown populists with cheap nationalistic slogans try to destabilize us from the inside. We should not allow these forces to hijack the definition of the European way of life. They want it to mean the opposite of what it is."
Critics of the name of the portfolio, which includes migration in its mandate, have slammed it as a "dog-whistle" of right-wing extremists. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen endorsed the new title in a speech on Sunday, calling it an “ideological victory,” according to Reuters.
The incoming Commission president acknowledged her use of the "European way of life" phrase had sparked a debate "on the connotations and the concept of the term," but insisted this is a good thing, concluding "it is a debate we should have in the open."
After reading this I'm convinced it was incompetence at first (how could they not expect the name to cause controversy???), but now they decided they can't fully back out of their mistake because it could be seen as accepting the other's side monopoly on defining the (undefinable) term, which is something you want to avoid when you're competing with the parties further to the right.
So, the intention of such a naming scheme was to apparently copy far right populist slogans in an attempt to co-opt and redefine their phrases. Quite bizarre to be honest.
On September 17 2019 01:57 Simberto wrote: A genius plan. Let us use the words the nazis use so we can prove that we are not nazis if we are using the same words the nazis use.
Well the parties do share a basis of values. Think it might be a play for right wing votes in the EU election. The CDU have dropped from 43 to 23 seats in 4 elections. Something needed to change for them, dragging in the nazis under a more respectable label is one way to try to fix it.
Last German election also went badly for them. So could perhaps see a full platform shift if this pans out well. Hard to be a Christian values party when the amount of Christians is on the downturn.
Though the downturn in Germany isn't that drastic yet. Not 100% sure about the validity of the below but seems to match my expectations and was top google result for me when looking around.
On September 13 2019 13:51 redlightdistrict wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gHOA2y9BzU Merkel is eerily starting to sound like the ending of the1964 book The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester.
User was warned for this post.
I dunno, I for once am supportive of the idea of creating an EU army. We can't rely on the US and NATO forever.
The desire for an EU army is, imo, pretty closely tied to an openly aggressive Russia invading its neighbours, not imperialistic tendencies by certain EU figureheads.
What Merkel said boils down to "We have too many different weapon systems compared to the US who have half as many and that costs us too much and needs to be more efficient."
How she wants to ensure equal competition between national weapons manufacturers remains unadressed.
On September 17 2019 02:12 Gorsameth wrote: The desire for an EU army is, imo, pretty closely tied to an openly aggressive Russia invading its neighbours, not imperialistic tendencies by certain EU figureheads.
One of the major reasons I am for it. Second is that it makes the EU a more conjoined union since a tied military union will tend to force cooperation to run well.
On September 17 2019 02:13 Vivax wrote: What Merkel said boils down to "We have too many different weapon systems compared to the US who have half as many and that costs us too much and needs to be more efficient."
How she wants to ensure equal competition between national weapons manufacturers remains unadressed.
The US system has serious drawbacks as well with awarding a lot of development contracts that are never realistic from the beginning. Though I agree with the central idea. Run it as any other contract, write a set of demands and whoever fulfils it best vs price wins the contracts.
Russia is obviously the main reason for most of the union, but needing something to conduct peacekeeping missions and/or protect the French interests in Africa also plays a part.
On September 17 2019 01:57 Simberto wrote: A genius plan. Let us use the words the nazis use so we can prove that we are not nazis if we are using the same words the nazis use.
Well the parties do share a basis of values. Think it might be a play for right wing votes in the EU election. The CDU have dropped from 43 to 23 seats in 4 elections. Something needed to change for them, dragging in the nazis under a more respectable label is one way to try to fix it.
Last German election also went badly for them. So could perhaps see a full platform shift if this pans out well. Hard to be a Christian values party when the amount of Christians is on the downturn.
Though the downturn in Germany isn't that drastic yet. Not 100% sure about the validity of the below but seems to match my expectations and was top google result for me when looking around.
Somehow i missed this from a couple of weeks back but Erdogan said it's unacceptable that Turkey cannot have nuclear weapons.An insane dictator right on Europes doorstep with nukes is just what we all need.
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday it was unacceptable for nuclear-armed states to forbid Ankara from obtaining its own nuclear weapons, but did not say whether Turkey had plans to obtain them.
“Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads, not one or two. But (they tell us) we can’t have them. This, I cannot accept,” he told his ruling AK Party members in the eastern city of Sivas.
On more funny note they just found a sort of "goodbye gift" from Brits to Poles. During engineering works near Szczecin (Stetin) they found unexploded one of the biggest WWII bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallboy_(bomb) Most likely dropped on 16 April 1945 during ride on German Battelship Lutzow.
On September 20 2019 17:07 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Somehow i missed this from a couple of weeks back but Erdogan said it's unacceptable that Turkey cannot have nuclear weapons.An insane dictator right on Europes doorstep with nukes is just what we all need.
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday it was unacceptable for nuclear-armed states to forbid Ankara from obtaining its own nuclear weapons, but did not say whether Turkey had plans to obtain them.
“Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads, not one or two. But (they tell us) we can’t have them. This, I cannot accept,” he told his ruling AK Party members in the eastern city of Sivas.
theres to hope turkey gets another leader cause erdogan seems to have forgotten what happened to qaddafi when he was on a similar powertrip. most likely though he already sold his soul to the russians for guarantees.
On September 20 2019 19:53 Silvanel wrote: On more funny note they just found a sort of "goodbye gift" from Brits to Poles. During engineering works near Szczecin (Stetin) they found unexploded one of the biggest WWII bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallboy_(bomb) Most likely dropped on 16 April 1945 during ride on German Battelship Lutzow.
Thank You very much Brits. Thats very kind of You
I grew up in Hanover. They find unexploded bombs there at least every few months. So this stuff is a pretty normal occurence to me.
TeamLiquid StarLeague 5 in 
EPT
