I think the crux of the issue is not freedom of speech, but rather determining what counts as harmful disinformation. I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed; the point of contention is precisely where we should draw the line.
The violent, seditious sentiments present in America today are a direct result of people being permitted to pander dangerous lies with no consequences, lies which have caused deaths, and will cause more. If the GOP had not been able to lie about election fraud, the Capitol attack might not have happened.
At the same time, it's hard to draw the line between a mere falsehood and a dangerous one. In hindsight we can tell that a conspiracy theory claiming that the world is controlled by a cabal of Jewish pædophiles with space lasers is dangerous, but what about when it was new? In a democracy with a variety of views, it is hard for there to be government-sanctioned truths.
Without wanting to be too cynical, it's also worth pointing out that there's lots of precedent for the government stripping minorities of their rights in the name of national security. The only difference here is that the minority being targeted happens to be White.
>I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed
Who decides what is 'disinformation' or 'misinformation'? You? The Democratic representatives? Jack Dorsey? No thanks. I think I'd like to make up my own mind.
Your politics also shine through your comment which also betrays your biases. Free speech is hard when it's speech you don't like and used by your political opponents .. isn't it.
> Who decides what is 'disinformation' or 'misinformation'? You? The Democratic representatives? Jack Dorsey? No thanks.
You are restating what I said almost word for word — but still disagreeing. Somehow. Everyone probably agrees that disinformation must be curbed; not everyone agrees on what exactly disinformation is.
You seem to think I'm biased against Republicans. This is the case. You seem to be biased against Democrats. That is the point. We have biases, and as such cannot agree on what the objective truth really is. That's why determining whether something is true, misinformation, or disinformation is hard.
>You are restating what I said almost word for word — but still disagreeing. Somehow
I can elaborate. That you've elevated disinformation as a major societal issue that needs to be solved is itself a particular partisan talking point put out by Democrats to explain Hillary's loss in 2016. Trump never had the temperament to be a good president. He should not have been voted in and Hillary was a better candidate ... but he did get voted in because millions of your fellow citizens voted him in. But he was such anathema to the core Democratic base that it became permissible to brake every norm, break every rule and right, including gaslighting and lying, just to get him.
So underneath this 'concern' of yours is not a good faith attempt to tackle this problem objectively. You want a laser focus on your political opponents while you continue to turn a blind eye to the disinformation, misinformation, gas lighting and outright lies that Democratic party, along with mainstream media (which ostensibly became the PR department for the party) and Big Tech engaged in pushing one conspiracy theory after another, week after week after week for the entire Trump presidency.
> is itself a particular partisan talking point put out by Democrats to explain Hillary's loss in 2016
...No? Trump lied far less back in 2015. The reason he won is that media gave him a platform, not that he used it to lie. Most Democrats agree with this analysis. Curbing misinformation is not a partisan issue, either: Trump spent his entire presidency railing against "fake news" and though the fast majority of his complaints were inaccurate, falsehoods are peddled by media from both sides of the aisle.
> yours is not a good faith attempt to tackle this problem objectively
Neither is yours. Taking an aggressive stance from the get-go, claiming that Democrats are as bad as Republicans when it comes to lying – none of these are markers of good faith.
My whole point is that because misinformation can't be tackled objectively, it's far harder to censor people than it seems. Because of this, censorship is not as good an idea as one might think. I do say that "If the GOP had not been able to lie about election fraud, the Capitol attack might not have happened," but I spend the rest of my comment explaining why censorship is a bad idea.
>The reason he won is that media gave him a platform, not that he used it to lie.
He won because people voted him in as per the constitution. I'm sure there are a ton of factors around the particular mechanism of his winning. The media gave him a huge platform to be sure. They didn't do it because they liked him. They did it because of ratings and as a way to mock him because it looked like he would flame out (and he almost did flame out, many times). But OK, free press is free press and he got a huge amount of it.
But to be clear, it was the Hillary campaign strategy to let Trump tank himself by shinning a bright light on what a mess he was. At one point she literally stopped taking interviews and press conferences for months [1]. So if media attention is what wins election, what the heck was she thinking?!? And if Hillary didn't want the media platform, is it really the media's fault for giving it to Trump? In hindsight, that was a bad campaign strategy. Also, had Bill Clinton never decided to visit Loretta Lynch on her plane, she never would have recused herself, and that dummy James Comey would never have made himself the face of the email investigation (another thing Hillary brought on herself) and tank her poll numbers a week before election with that ridiculous letter to Congress (if there was one thing that lost her the election, that latter was it).
>Most Democrats agree with this analysis.
I'm not sure about that. For 4 years after Trump's election, the Democratic base, the Democratic party and the former nominee attributed Trump's win to foreign interference. I think every Democrat, Hillary included, has claimed Trump is an illegitimate president, who was clearly a Russian puppet, who stole the election because of Russian disinformation. That happened. And of course, prior to 2020, the party that ALWAYS claimed election fraud was the Democratic party. Every lost election, state or federal, was because of voter intimidation, or voter suppression, or voter id laws, or some variation of that. So who actually sowed the seeds of election mistrust? Where were the calls to curb misinformation then?
But yes, I do agree that legislating away 'misinformation' is fraught with problems.
Not everyone agrees that disinformation should be curbed. And the reason many people, including the authors of the US Constitution, don't agree, is that they feel the risk of false positives is far too high.
That is _because_ I have no confidence that anyone doing the curbing, including myself, will correctly identify "misinformation", I don't want such curbing to be happening, period.
> I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed
I think it, and the processes around it, needs to be understood.
Whether it needs to be curbed is another question; it certainly needs not to be systematically advantaged unless avoiding that would have greater adverse costs which means, when it is spreading within a regulated system like Cable TV, it definitely needs to be understood to assure that the spread is not an artifact of, or enhanced unintentionally by, the structure of regulation. Which makes it an important area of legislative inquiry even given the assumption that none of the disinformation covered is outside of the scope of protected speech.
>I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed
I don't agree with that. I think the problem is precisely those who think they get to decide what is and isn't disinformation and who gets to choose to curb it.
That's kind of what I'm saying, though. Disinformation is a problem, but because there is no objective arbiter of truth, curbing free speech to prevent it is impossible. Anyone who can do so (i.e. Jack Dorsey, Amazon, etc.) has immense power, and this is a bad thing.
You've successfully made the opposite side's point. You cite election-fraud misinformation as "leading to deaths", which is misinformation itself: the 5 deaths at the Capitol were 3 rioters having a heart attack, stroke, and apparently trampled; 1 rioter shot by a security person; and 1 Capitol policeman who died the next day of causes unknown to his own family still, yet erroneously trumpeted by NYT etc. as being killed by a fire extinguisher.
And, armed with this disinformation, you propose to abandon one of the core societal principles which has allowed America to succeed beyond anyone's imaginations. Now hopefully you can see why everyone's alarmed about what's going on.
There's lots of ways global warming could lead to colder winters.[0] For example, the temperature differential between Arctic and mid-latitude air normally keeps the polar vortex contained. As this differential decreases, however, the polar vortex becomes less contained. As such, the maximum latitude reached by the jet stream increases with the Arctic's temperature. This creates colder weather in some places. [1] [2]
As unintuitive as it sounds, global warming can lead to colder temperatures. It is up to people who disagree with this theory, not its proponents, to prove their case.
"
The polar vortex is coming—and raising the odds for intense winter weather
In the stratosphere over Siberia, temperatures recently jumped nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, shoving the polar vortex off its North Pole perch."
This article is very good at talking about what we know from SSG. It has nothing to do with carbon.
You have to be trolling. I just read those articles you sent me and they agree with what I am saying. Carbon causes slow and gradual warming but their are still natural cycles that 'cause the snow that skepics get so worked up about'.
I said co2 does not cause cooling. Nothing you provided even mentioned that. The only thing was from the first article 'scientists are looking into it' related to co2 causing cooling.
