Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged infringement

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

The right has its own version of political correctness. It's just as stifling. - The Wa... - 0 views

  • Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
  • But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
  • Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
  • Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
  • Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.
  • Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
  • Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
  • The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.
  • There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”
  • Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
  • Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.
  • The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.
Duncan H

Stop the Great Firewall of America - 0 views

  •  
    What side of this issue are people on? I understand that people want to stop piracy and provide the incentive for people to invent new things they can patent, but I worry that if the rules become too draconian, they could suffucate the very creativity they should be protecting.
Javier E

Why We Can't Talk About Gun Control - James Hamblin - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, Metcalf noted, "not that it shall not be regulated." Rather the first four words of the amendment, "a well regulated militia," not only allow but mandate regulation.
  • We have over 75,000 firearms rules and regulations on the books, and approximately three of them are ever enforced," Metcalf explained, to some nervous laughter in the audience.
  • "I can't tell you how many senior executives at firearms companies, over a beer when no one's watching, will say, 'You do know we realize that, of course, at least a third of our customers shouldn't be let within five miles of a gun."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Homogenous media communities with very different understandings of reality, where challenging prevailing assumptions is out of bounds, may be growing in popularity. "People are looking to media now to be a cheerleader for their point of view," Brownstein said. "There's less interest in dialogue over competing points of view than there is for affirmation of [the reader's] own point of view."
  • To what extent is the gun debate actually about guns? Brownstein asked, citing that only 28 percent of people in urban areas live in a home with a gun, but 59 percent in rural areas do. White people are twice as likely as black people to live in a home with a gun. Evangelical Christians are much more likely to own guns than are secular people.
  • "We know that gun ownership tracks a lot of other cultural divides that shape the partisan and ideological standoff in America," Brownstein said. "Is all the passion about guns a broader statement about who defines what America values?"
Javier E

Conservatives say campus speech is under threat. That's been true for most of history. ... - 0 views

  • There’s a story conservatives have been telling about the decline of free speech on campuses, and it goes like this: America has spiraled downward from a golden age, when the groves of academe were precincts of whole-hearted civil freedom, to today, when hypersensitive left-wing students, obsessed by race- and gender-based “microaggressions,” clamor for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
  • in practice, American campuses have rarely been quite so welcoming to nonconforming views. Speech has gotten faculty fired and students arrested; it has been met not only with dirty looks but also with heckling and sometimes violence.
  • What’s true is that old forms of censorship — by administrative fiat, governing boards, government regulations and prosecutors — are less common than they once were. Today, it’s more likely that the call to rule out obnoxious views comes from students. And yet one way or the other, freedom is embattled.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If we look back over the past 100 years, perhaps the lowest tolerance for academic freedom has coincided with war and global tensions. The enemies of dissent frequently invoked menaces from abroad as they clamped down on speech.
  • With the dawning of the 21st century, arguments against free speech as such became commonplace, and passions rose to the point of outright violence.
  • Before this year, I doubt that we would have seen an opinion editor of Berkeley’s Daily Californian maintain, in defense of violent “black bloc” protests against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, that “asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”
  • The intense hatred of racial “microaggressions” is flourishing on campuses just as state and national Republican officials are zealously practicing macroaggressions: infringing on voting rights, affirmative action and progressive advances in criminal justice.
  • While shortsighted activists focus on slights (real, imagined and arguable) at hand, the political powers that be are indisputably rolling back equal rights directly and profoundly where most people live — off campus.
  • When defenders of racial equality take the bait and obsess about a few loathsome provocations, they plunge into their adversaries’ trap, diverted from the political arena where democracy and equality badly need them.
ilanaprincilus06

In Canary Islands, Tensions Are High Over African Migration : NPR - 1 views

  • "Until December, a maximum of 50 people would come here," she says. "Now, we're serving 75. Most of the new ones are Senegalese and Moroccan."
  • Last year, 23,025 people arrived on boats — 8 1/2 times more than in 2019, according to United Nations refugee agency data.
  • Nearly all who reach the islands want to end up in mainland Spain, to find jobs or join relatives, which is more than 1,000 miles away.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Citing COVID-19 restrictions, Spanish police are stopping migrants from leaving the Canaries for the mainland — even those with valid documents.
  • The bottleneck has angered some locals, while for migrants it's causing misery.
  • Moroccans make up one of the largest immigrant groups in Spain.
  • 70% of young citizens consider emigrating due to frustrations over a lack of economic opportunities.
  • Now it is opening six new migrant camps for 7,000 people on the islands.
  • "We're all afraid!" he says. "Every day there's police around here, every day there are fights and robberies.""It's awful. One day this is going to explode because there's no solution at all. The government promises and promises and nobody helps."
  • "They eat in the camp, breakfast lunch and dinner. And us? We're hungry. Hungry and ashamed, because it can't go on like this," he says.Pockets of xenophobia have bubbled here since the crisis began. There have been anti-migrant marches and reports of organized groups attacking Moroccans.
  • "The main problem is not the migrants arriving but the local authorities and the government," Carlsen adds, "the image they are giving in front of the Canarian people — they feel like they are abandoned."
  • Somos Red was formed after one member found Diop and others sleeping on the streets. The solidarity group fundraised and rented this hostel for the men to live in.
  • "This country is not only for us, they are people!" she says. "They have the right to live well in good conditions. And if other people come, let them come."
  • The center-left government's junior coalition partner, the leftist United We Can party, demanded migrants urgently be allowed to travel, condemning what it considers the "repeated infringement of human rights" in the Canaries.
  • If he gets deported, Rida says he'll try again to come to Spain.
pier-paolo

The YouTube Paradox - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The online video-sharing upstart, which shows more than 100 million video clips a day, has titans wondering: friend or foe?
  • trying to improve the site for its users while working to find arrangements that will satisfy Hollywood.
  • that YouTube and MySpace, the social networking site, “are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • an early Internet video site that was bought by Yahoo, said that YouTube would eventually be “sued into oblivion” because of copyright violations.
  • dealing with YouTube “is not the typical situation we run into every day” because the company has not thought through many of the issues raised by its business.
  • “Part of what we are doing is working with them to figure out what their business model can be,”
  • The minute a Yahoo, Microsoft or News Corp. buys YouTube, you have a target for anyone who wants to sue.
peterconnelly

Virtual learning apps tracked and shared kids' data and online activities with advertis... - 0 views

  • Millions of students who participated in virtual learning during the Covid-19 pandemic had their personal data and online behaviors tracked by educational apps and websites without their consent and in many cases shared with third-party advertising technology companies, a new report has found.
  • Human Rights Watch found 146 (89%) appeared to engage in data practices that "risked or infringed on children's rights."
  • Han said the majority of the apps and websites examined by Human Rights Watch sent information about children to Google and Facebook, which collectively dominate the digital advertising market.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a fellow at the NYU School of Law, said the findings add to mounting concerns around the collection of data among young people. In recent months, there has been intense scrutiny from lawmakers about the impact tech platforms have on teens.
  • "We already knew technologies were being abused and putting children at risk, but this report is really important because it shows the scale of harm and how the same mistake is being made by educators and governments around the world," he said.
  • "Students must be able to do their schoolwork without surveillance by companies looking to harvest their data to pad their bottom line," said Samuel Levine
  • "The data must serve a purpose, but the purpose cannot be advertising," he said. "If it is not something we do in physical classrooms, it is not something that should be part of digital school life."
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20 items per page