The bigger government gets, the less freedoms the people have. It is critically important not to ask government to solve problems (government is bad at solving most problems), and to seek ways to shrink government.
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I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
> and to seek ways to shrink government.
Id rather seek ways to maximize liberty, and while they frequently can mean limiting the government, the act of shrinking the government is not _necessary_, and even works against my goals if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
I’m glad Canada is talking about centralizing how trade is managed, for example. I think it’ll be good for us in the long run. Yet I don’t think food security is best accomplished through centralized farming practices. Distribution of these systems may be slightly less efficient, but I think that’s a price worth paying in the longer term. Especially as we need to worry more about climate change which can have localized impacts.
It’s a complex matter. We shouldn’t hesitate to centralize when it makes sense. But we should be careful, too. Centralization comes with drawbacks, no matter what. They won’t always be easy to anticipate.
As more governments slip into autocracies, similar scenarios are likely happening in other countries as well, and we just don't know about it. The fact that US social media platforms are operated by people supportive of an aspiring autocrat should be a red flag for anyone still using them. Especially for citizens of the US, where the line between the government and corporations gets thinner by the day.
These are truly bizarre and frightening times for anyone outside of this system.
There is no logical or humane reason to keep working as much as we do. You want to be competitive join a sports league or something. If you want to question why would anyone do what I suggested you can just go to github.com and see millions of altruists doing it for free. A clear example of humanity trying to break free held down by a vast swathe of wretches of would-be millionaires and current billionaires.
It is impossible for me to entertain anything related to conserving any part of the status quo while I still have to work 40+ hours a week. It is a complete shit show and we've made no progress in the past 250 years except a couple apps and other bullshit "technology" with meaningful tech being an absolute drop in an infinite ocean of shit. How embarrassing for all of us.
Life seems like work to me. I think I live in a country that’s fortunate enough to get to believe otherwise, but when we factor in all of the externalities of our goods and services, there’s a tremendous amount of work and environmental debt (future labour) occurring. If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
> I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
Risk is a stupid thing. There are plenty of insanely smart people who will not rock the boat because they do not want to undertake risk and so we lose out on their productivity. We've created a thunderdome where only the most callous and pathological survive and win, anyone else gets crushed.
>If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
We are living inside of the externality of a small group of peoples pathologies.
I don’t think I heard about this: is there a reliable place I can read more about it?
The social media platforms are supposed to what? Be a foil to the governments? Replace the government? Be a foil to the governments you don't like? It's unclear what you think the ideal here is.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-academic-arrested-thaila...
It’s not as if they’re going to leave early in the stay and go back to Europe or North America, because of the sunk cost fallacy.
> Barnes later submitted negative reviews of the hotel online, including one that said the resort’s foreign management “treat the staff like slaves”.
The thinking of your post betrays an increasingly common totalitarian assumption behind the role of government -- perhaps covid has caused this.
In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.
As far as I can tell this is just far-right propaganda to disguise what actually happened -- which is the UK imprisoning people for conspiracies to burn down hotels with immigrants in them; or participating in on-going violent riots by calling for various buildings to be attacked or people to be murdered.
This speech isnt covered by free expression, and is a crime in all countries, including the US.
And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments. When that separation is blurred the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place in order to keep companies from abusing people, and from being an extension for governments to do the same, are just gone. At that point the country becomes a corporatocracy, serving the interests of companies rather than citizens.
The US has arguably functioned like this for decades, but when there are literal businessmen in power this is more evident than ever before. It's how you get scenarios of presidents manipulating the economy for their and their cronies' benefit. The next step is complete authoritarianism where companies are government puppets, where the spread of and access to information is tightly controlled and sprinkled with their own propaganda in order to keep megalomaniacs in power, and where any dissidence is squashed before it has the chance to spread. This is how you get China, Russia, and any government that aspires to that formula.
It's crazy that this needs explanation, or that it's a controversial line of thought.
To keep this on topic: the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms. This feels like a thin appeal to some higher authority that hopefully GP agrees with more, and definitely doesn't feel like a less totalitarian approach.
Not heard of anyone getting debanked for it — "u", sure, but not "a".
No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting.[1]
There are many others who want them to just “enable” society—perhaps because of their own financial incentives.
Nowhere did he say corporations would be doing everything. There were a whole plethora of organizations and institutions (social clubs, religious adjacent institutions, etc) that used do do a lot of the public good type stuff and have fallen by the wayside or become indistinguishable from government contractors over the past 100yr as high touch western governments have usurped and stuck their noses in their functions.
They said to be careful, because if I die in Minecraft, I die in REAL LIFE!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokedown_Palace#Filming
Except it was Manila and the Philippines that banned actress Claire Danes, after she slagged off Manila by basically telling lies to media outlets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Danes#Personal_life
But we’ve all known since 1984 that one night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU&si=aVIPqwJfNdf...
No. But will meet regulatory minimums insofar as active ingredients, purity, etc.
They don’t have a monopoly like the OP described, however. If they did? Yikes…
Notably, that kind of economy is roughly how the USSR ran, and no one praised it when it died.
Ha. Please tell me more about this fantasy world you live in. The only thing Musk has done is tilt the needle towards his own biases[1]. Disinformation on X is still rampant[2], and Musk himself is one of the top spreaders of it. Those who benefit from spreading disinformation love to spout the idea that they're victims of censorship, and appeal to free speech absolutism. Yet when placed in positions of power, they're the same ones who censor opposing views for whatever reason they find convenient, while allowing the nonsense they believe in to spread.
There was a time when journalism followed a code of ethics. Its mission was to inform the public of world events, without putting a spin on facts. Once media companies became profit-driven corporations, and particularly once social media platforms took over and everyone was given a megaphone to spout their opinion as fact, ethics went out the window, disinformation was cheap to spread, and people were no longer in a position to distinguish fact from fiction.
So this is not about censorship. It's about promoting factual information about the world we live in, while demoting whatever someone thinks reality is, and especially when someone could benefit from that line of thinking. This is not a particularly hard problem to solve, but it won't happen on platforms that are driven by profits from engagement. Companies have no incentive to promote truth. Their only incentive is accumulating wealth, and they'll do that by any means necessary. Thinking that free speech will prosper and disinformation will wane on these platforms is delusional, especially now that we have autocrat sympathizers running them, and both companies and the government benefit from the status quo. If you think these people will give up power willingly, think again.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wrong-claims-by-musk-us-ele...
> Chambers appealed against the Crown Court decision to the High Court, which would ultimately quash the conviction.
These are absolutely trivial cases to assume that somehow the UK has suspended the free expression rights of its citizens. These amount to over-reach by the lowest courts (staffed by volunteer judges, fyi) which were corrected. That's about as good as justice is in practice.
(It's also an unaddressed issue on exactly what social media is -- people tend to assume its some private conversation, but its at least as plausible to treat it as a acts of publishing to a public environment. When those actions constitue attacks on people, the UK/Europe have typically regarded public attacks as having fewer free expression protections).
Neverthless, these cases are used by the far right online to disguise what has been action taken by the UK gov against far right quasi-terrorist groups engaged in mass violence. The UK gov is not persecuting people for free expression, they have taken action against people using social media to organise murder.
One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
Free speech is important for progress.
Well for jurisdictions where the government weaponizes the justice system that means the company either has to choose not to do business there or to bend the knee..
Well, that certainly is a name. (For an actual filming location in Manila, that is.)
Unless you are making the claim that the Thai government is giving special privilege to Meta/X or vice versa, then it already is this way. Since the doxxing/bullying happened anyways, this is irrelevant.
I think we both agree that what is happening in this article is bad. You made some assertion that “lack of oversight…is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst“, so who is supposed to provide this oversight? You are clearly saying “not a government”, but I think that social networks doing this “oversight” of what governments are doing is equally dangerous.
This subject is always framed by people like yourself as being all about the far-right racists and somewhat recent riots, when it has been going on a lot longer than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
Are you really going to defend the conviction of a teenage girl quoting Snoop Dogg lyrics on facebook?
While the punishments were light typically (usually fines). Many of these cases can end up with time in prison.
Then there is the communications act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003#Malici...
Man was prosecuted because he sent a drunk tweet:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bad-tweet-uk-sir-tom-...
You are defending these these awful laws. There a plenty of cases that I've forgotten about because quite frankly there are so many.
> One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
This is disingenuous. Firstly, it doesn't matter who the criticism is coming from if it is valid (which it is). Secondly you can see there are plenty of well know public figures that aren't far right that have criticised the current laws in the link to the selected cases, these include MPs, Comedians and Well known authors.
e.g.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51j64lk2l8o
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/yorkshire-mp-philip-da...
If you've never been involved in court proceedings it will come as a surprise.
Can you link me to the evidence you have for this person having been convicted? Because she wasnt, the case was immediately over turned on appeal and the lower court volunteer judge basically reprimanded.
Do you have any evidence for any of these things you believe? Have you looked into any of them? Who told you about them? How do you know about a teenager in liverpool that upset a police officer? Why is that something you know about? Do you not find that odd? Isn't it strange that you "know" she was "convicted" but have no actual idea what happened?
Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.
Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?
If you choose the first one, then you're preventing the investigation of mass riots, conspiracy to murder, mass disruption of public infrastructure -- and so on. All which have happened in the last 9mo, and gone through the courts. BUT you do have the advantage that police wont, once in a blue moon, turn up to someone's house and investigae them for a bit of nonesense that disappears within a day or at most a month when a real judge has looked at the case.
If you choose two, then you can still offer guidance to local police forces to be more careful in assessing complaints -- guidance which has almost certainly been given, since the gov arent happy theyre being distracted with this BS.
Now ask yourself: who at the moment really wants option number 1?
I am aware of this and I deliberately used this as bait, quite predictably you defended what took place.
You must have missed the bit where the police literally go looking for offensive words on social media. They literally have software that flags up speech.
It matters not that later on it was "corrected". The reason it was "corrected" I suspect was because of the amount of pressure put on politicians after it was featured in the media.
* There should not be entire police departments dedicated to prosecuting things said on social media.
* There should not be software that flags up the fact that you said naughty words.
* This should not have never even got to court in the first place.
> Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.
Argh yes the terrifying "far right".
The fact is that the government point at scary people like the Islamic Extremists (I am old enough to remember that), the neo-nazis, homo-phobes and other generally nasty people to sell these awful laws and then they are (mis)used against normal people.
> Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?
Why does it matter? If Adolf Hitler/Francisco Franco/Mussolini/Stalin/<insert despot> rose from the dead tomorrow and was making valid criticisms of the various laws in the UK that stifle speech that doesn't mean that they are incorrect about those facts. It would make them hypocrites, but not incorrect.
Yes. I do. I want them to put resources into catch the criminals in my area that have been stealing motor vehicles instead as that actually affect me and my community. Not policing social media.
I dont know what century you think this is, if you're sincere about catching criminals you would want even more intrusion into online spaces.
It's a crime to conspire to murder; to commit fraud; to arrange an act of terrorism; and so on. And in all relevant cases, social media was used in court after-the-fact just as evidence.
So we're talking about activity on social media which are crimes themselves, just being used as evidence after other crimes have been committed.
This is the problem with the propaganda being put out there at the moment, none of it is true -- and all of it is in the service of disgusing the content of actual court cases.
People on the far-right like to use the phrase "posting to social media" when they mean "using online communication platforms to arrange a violent riot with the intent to murder people". And they like to pretend this evidence collection is happening before those actions -- when its after, and presented in court.
You can always justify more infringements on personal liberties under the guise of stopping crime, protecting the children, stopping the terrorists. That doesn't mean we should.
What we shouldn't be doing is using resources to find people saying naughty words on facebook (which is literally what they do).
This was literally posted here like last week, I suggest you read it:
https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/04/11/encryption...
It is you my friend that has been propagandised. They always point at a scary person and then say that they need to take away your rights and your privacy.
> It's a crime to conspire to murder; to commit fraud; to arrange an act of terrorism; and so on. And in all relevant cases, social media was used in court after-the-fact just as evidence.
Why should I lose privacy and my ability to speak freely because someone else committed an unrelated crime?
Why does this require mass surveillance, when they can get a warrant to search their electronic devices?
The answer is I shouldn't.
> So we're talking about activity on social media which are crimes themselves, just being used as evidence after other crimes have been committed.
Some of this activity that are crimes is making edgy comments on twitter while drunk and then deleting it the next day. That is illegal under the communications act of 2003.
No liberal can guarantee that they won't be replaced with a genocidal authoritarian, so systems need to be designed with that possibility in mind.
Something as "innocent" as a census can be weaponized by a future authoritarian government.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-s...
The oligarch who presently threatens the legislature of the largest democracy in the world with being having their opponents funded at the primary stage -- is also the same person who has had 100,000s of legal employees of the government fired and who has prompted these stories about the UK on the world's most imporatnt political media platform, that he owns. He did so after riots took place in the UK whose aim was to murder immigrants who had been falsely accused of crimes, these accusations also spread by the very same oligarch.
There's a line from the person trying to burn down a hotel with immigrants inside, in the UK, to social media, to the enslavement of unknown persons in the US. That line we call "the far right" and it's a pretty small group, at the top.
I cannot really grasp how a person would be confused by who the far right are and at the same time have at their fingertips news stories about girls in liverpool. One has to imagine you aren't really being serious.
I have linked you the communications act of 2003, I have linked you examples of cases where people have be prosecuted for speech and you are going on about the current Administration in the United States which is on the other-side of an ocean.
I am asking you when have you met someone in real life that is "far right"? You are unlikely to have done so because there is maybe a few thousand at most in a country of 80 million people.
I have seen the leaked membership details of the BNP. Do you know how many people were in the BNP? IIRC it was less than 500 people for the entire UK.
You are talking as if there are Brown Shirts marching up every UK high street.
> David Cameron is a twit
Not
> I'm going to blow up the airport
Can't imagine why this person got jail time for that given that it was just idiocy, but still
Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, don't realize how their constant harping on "basic freedoms" comes across as ethnocentric. My parents are American citizens, but they were raised in Bangladesh and they don't really believe in free speech or democracy. My dad always talks about free speech with implicit scare quotes, like he’s referring to an american custom.
It is weird even on a pragmatic basis. I accept as a concept that it may have been effective when we were a little less connected, but these days it seems like it is actively asking for a wrong kind of reaction from the population. Not to mention, the people you imprison for typing the wrong stuff online are likely now going to be way more radicalized than when they went there. Honestly, I just do not get that approach.
The problem here is you're not thinking like a state and you think this is a bad thing.
When you have some radicals out there causing problems that's an excuse for you to spend billion making your military industrial complex buddies rich. It gives you an excuse to crack down and take out anyone you like because they "are the radical enemy that's dangerous". And Western governments and companies will gladly sell you weapons and technology to monitor and blow up anyone under your rule that you want.
Can you an example of a person who was convicted and exactly what they said?
Who actually believes this except for liberations who aren't just right wing hiding their true views.
They revere Bhumibol, not his philandering, mercurial, and ripped son Vajiralongkorn who is de facto in exile in Germany. Everything in Thailand is de facto run by the military junta and aligned oligarchs like the Chearavanont and Shinawatra families.
And the younger generation (Gen Z) doesn't have much affinity for Bhumibol either, because they grew up in the midst of a middle income trap - their lives are better than their neighbors in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam, but CoL and the employment market is hellish, oligarchy and relations matter so if you didn't attend the right schools you're screwed, and abuses of power like the RedBull Heir running over a cop and all the extravagance around the royal family and their extended retinue grew more unpopular.
Tbf, I assume your frame of reference was the 1990s, and until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 Thailand went through a massive economic boom so satisfaction with Bhumibol was high. Bhumibol also at least tried to appear like he cared about normal Thai people.
As to democracy, that is both culturally alien to them and their experience with it has been one of failure. We have never had a stable democratic government in Bangladesh, and my parents are persuaded that it's not possible. In general, they view democracy experiments outside Europe as something of a cruel joke. My parents felt quite vindicated that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, because they expected that to happen.
Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.
Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.
edit: added which; when compared to
Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.
South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s and become a developed country.
Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) [0] instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/14/business/from-chickens-to...
to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.
in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.
freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.
In theory, yes. In practice, see palestinian protests in western world and others (phone searches at borders, mass surveillance etc.)
So where do these universal “rights” come from? Do they reflect some fact of human biology? Of course they do not.
Their healthcare provided by corporations is vastly more expensive and has much worse outcomes than healthcare provided to billions of people by governments.
Same for higher education.
If police question you based on your speech alone, that itself is a violation. You should not have to answer to the state for voicing disagreement or for having an unpopular opinion.
Here's an example of half a dozen police officers coming to talk to parents for complaining about their school in a private WhatsApp group: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre... (they were later arrested)
Here's a police officer saying on video that if you tell someone to speak English it "could be perceived as a hate crime:" https://x.com/PeterSweden7/status/1911348268346323047
This was a partially deaf person asking the person they were talking to to please speak clearly (no mention of language was made, not that it should matter). The only appropriate response to a police officer coming up to you to discuss the interaction is profanity.
Here's multiple arrests for protests after the death of the Queen: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62883713
These are ones I found with a Google search in under ten minutes. I'm sure there are dozens, hundreds more - one link I didn't open said there have been approximately 3,000 arrests based on social media posts. I'm sure some of those are justified, I'm sure a lot of them aren't.
A conviction does not need to happen for damage to be done or for speech to be chilled.
Thai people generally love the idea of democracy. But they’ve been under so many dictators for so long they’ve become jaded. Every Thai person has a strong political view more or less and people absolutely criticize the government, military, and even gossip about the royal family extensively - behind closed doors and with friends. Graft is rampant though, and the powerful with big last names can literally do anything they want and get away with it, the police don’t serve the people, and the individual is generally disenfranchised.
There however have been and continue to be powerful democracy movements and political dissent - see the yellow shirt / red shirt riots, the democracy protests and mass killings by the military over the last 60 years, add in it the king Rama the ix personally advocating against the power of the government over its people and the importance of basic human rights.
I’d note that human rights isn’t an American concept but a basis in liberal humanism, which has been a conceptual framework evolved over thousands of years. Most my experience talking to people about liberal humanism and the status quo in South and Southeast Asia is “yes of course it’s self evident, but” where the but is effectively a powerlessness over the social structure of society. I’d note further that Theravada Buddhism is at its core liberal humanist as well, which is specifically relevant in Thailand. This is why ultimately with the Thai people the liberal humanist movement is quite popular and there continues to be considerable internal political problems - because the eightfold path dictates a liberal humanist philosophy and the people in power prefer the prior slavery based society before Chulalongkorn.
I mean in the UK we aren't used to using the court system to obtain our rights, but this is basically the american system. It's extraordinary to hear americans express concern that a handful of people in the UK had to use the standard court procedure to have their rights enforced, which they did.
Would the UK be better if these cases did not happen? Sure. But there's no legal system, almost by definition, that isnt going to have these cases. That's what courts exist to do -- to prevent executive overreach.
The question is why are a handful of people, whose rights were enforced by the courts, being used as political agitprop against the UK? The answer is pretty obvious. It's a deliberate project of the far right to create popular resentement towards democractic governments in the west, at the time these governemnts are arresting rioters for attempting to murder immigrants.
This isnt hard to see. These stories are spread by a very narrow range of extremely famous propagandists with a very obvious agenda.
None of them mention that these cases were all thrown out on appeal. Nor that there's a tiny number of them. Nor that all the ones that result in conviction are basically domestic terrorism
The son however - I’ve rarely seen his picture hung in homes or shops - just his father.
The truth though is Thailand has been run by big last name power as a structural thing. While Thai people generally embrace liberal humanism due to their Buddhist beliefs, the elite social structure still tries to hold onto the slavery based society of the past. The police are the primary fulcrum of their power, in a cross relationship with organized crime. The military waxes and wanes in its control, but it’s the police and dark powers that truly control Thailand.
Also, you are mistaken when you link free speech to human beings. Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.
In the idealized abstract, it feels like free speech is a universal and agreed upon ideal. It isn't. Not between nations. Not even within nations. Even in the US, we have no set definition of free speech. Free speech spans from absolutists who believe all speech is legal to those who want to limit free speech to the absolute minimum as they define it.
Germany does not have free speech so yes it is markedly different.
> Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.
I'm not talking about any legal framework around free speech. If I was, I'd be talking about the First Amendment or about a specific law or court case.
Boogeymans win an election. And gain all the tools needed.
Surprised picachu face as the kids say, I believe.
Of course it's up for debate. Debate is what gave the notion of "inherent worth"[1] intellectual and popular credence in the first place. You forget that human beings were historically categorized according to a chain of being with the clergy and royalty (rather conveniently) at the top. One's worth to $DEITY and the world was determined by the height of the seat one sat on. This arrangement of affairs was treated as an unquestionable given for thousands of years in civilizations across the world. To suggest otherwise would have been treated as insanity or denounced as heresy.
The existence of Inherent worth thrives upon the fact that those who debate it depend on it. To suggest it's beyond questioning turns the idea into an article of faith.
> Are cultures that decide you have no worth as a human being based on your skin color, or religion, or caste, or last name, equal to those that don't?
Until midway through the 20th century in certain parts of the world, this was accepted as fact. In other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa of all places, it's still the case today.
[1] A more rigorous term for what you're referring to is self-sovereignty. Strictly speaking, the term "inherent worth" is a contradiction in terms.
DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-s...
If you want to claim he’s going down a different path you or they could make that argument, and I am going to tell you that if you want to make a claim using the beginning of a well worn argument and not include information on why your position is materially different, then you don’t get to be upset when people make assumptions
I know this because they paid me the legal minimum and only provided workplace safety as much as they felt compelled to by the government.
The corporate boot tastes no better than the federal one
It of course can be debated and @rayiner is doing a good job debating it, but IMO the worth of any individual human being is as factual and certain as 1+1=2. I'm happy to debate it but you have a hill to climb if you want to change my mind.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/08/american-acade...
You might as well say heliocentrism is a western thing and Asians should be taught the earth is the center of the universe.
Then I definitely agree with you.
Over 2000 years of philosophy would say hell yeah it's debatable.
Without some belief in a "higher power", there is nothing inherent about anything to do with humans. Sure, we can CHOOSE to ascribe every human as having value and a sanctity to human life that means we should harshly react to those who take human life for granted or cause suffering, and I absolutely and emphatically take that view, that human life is important and humans have a right to things like dignity.
But pretending that it is "inherent" is a lie. It's a thought terminating language game. Pretending that such dignity or rights are inherent only plays into those who wish to remove them. They must be CONSTANTLY and AGGRESSIVELY defended and fought for BECAUSE they are not inherent.
If we do not enforce human rights, they do not exist.
Human rights are an outcome of a regulated society. Rights can only exist when a "higher power" DOES exist, so without a god to enforce things, we must make our own higher power to enforce rights. The State.
The only inherent rights in nature are physics, chemistry, and biology. They aren't very conducive to society in general, and certainly not one that wants to build smartphones or farms.
I respect the advocates who make a consequentialist argument for the norm, but not the advocates that say that free speech is a natural right or a God-given right and believe that that settles the question.
Heliocentrism is an observable fact about the universe. Can you show me democracy and freedom of speech in a telescope or microscope?
Why?
For 40 years, Police in the US have been given basically carte-blanche to do whatever dragnet surveillance they want, as long as it "technically" is done by a third party they just buy services from. Police have had constant and perfect visibility into the digital world, with almost no moderating force, and yet they're so bad at finding culprits that violent crime clearance rates are still a coinflip.
Oh actually that's just in my State. ME claims the national violent crime clearance rate is ~20%. Jesus.
It seems obvious to me that police departments are either utterly incapable of, or utterly unwilling of, doing their damn job. We have given them near infinite power and zero responsibility and they've spent those immense resources being trained that everyone is trying to kill them, being taught how to shoot people first and ask questions later, and harassing people, often including journalists literally exposing their mob activity.
Please don't give them more power until they demonstrate an ability to productively use the power we have already given them.
Lots of "idiocy" is explicitly illegal. Being dumb isn't an excuse to commit a crime. Literal children in the US get in trouble (legally, as in, sent to juvie) for bomb threats all the time.
Making a bad judgement call, like "surely everyone will understand I'm just joking about my threat to literally murder people" often has legal ramifications.
There are always royalists, Westerner or not.
"protesters were met with severe repression" doesn't really sound like those folks have much reverence, eh?
>So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
It's not hypocrisy I'm accusing anyone of – it's selfish, indifferent tribalism and disinterest in the mistreatment of people as long as they are "other" people.
But as you say these things are cultural. Such ideas never found an audience in Asia.
It doesn't matter if you show all the times it was abused, or someone life has been ruined for because they drunkely said something stupid on facebook, it is just ignored or if it later gets overturned that it is no big deal even though they had to spent months or years dealing with the legal system.
I have spoken to a lot of young people (typically men) in their 20s that just want to leave the country because they can see where this is all going.
Anyway my top comment has been made dead. I hate this site.
I'll give a concrete example: I don't think the government needs to be in the business of organizing youth football. Many sports get by just fine with sports teams organized, funded and run by volunteers. Youth baseball is usually this way; organized by dads and perhaps partially funded by local pizza shops (too corporate? Essentially harmless.) Football though is organized through school districts, funded by property owners paying their taxes. This isn't necessary.
Do you think it would be better to have people sue those who insult them on social media, in order to bankrupt them -- as in so-called Free Speech america? Where on earth do you imagine free speech is so protected that your worry is a (2 or 3) in 70 million-short that you'd have to talk to a police officier?
The idea that we have police investigating social media posts (and the like) is largely just made up. Its a handful of cases.
Do you understand that you cannot have 100% perfect decision making (of police, or anyone else) in a society -- and that the people who want you to demand this 100% are the ones organsising murders on these platforms? The ones kidnapping people and enslaving them in foreign prisons?
You're just playing a useful idiot. The idea that people in the UK are, at large, even aware of these cases is nonesense, let alone are worried about a police visit for a social media post. Just open twitter: are any of the millions of UK profiles in any sense "reserved" or chilled by these police visits?
The people who are spouting this nonesense are worried because they use these platforms to incite race riots whose aim is to kill people. Have a little perspective.
Arguing with a royalist trying to pretend that opposition and non-unity doesn't exist doesn't really have a point.
This is why it has always scared me when people have said "run the government like a business." I don't want to live in a monarchy/dictatorship/oligarcy/plutocracy/etc. I don't want government decisions to be based on "shareholders" views. That just sounds like Plutocracy. I want a government to be representative, to care not just for the rich and powerful, but the weakest. If we judge a man by how he treats those he has nothing to gain from then we judge a government by how it treats its poorest and worst off citizens. I don't care about a ceiling inasmuch as I care about a floor.
[0] I also don't quite understand why people are so hostile to employee owned organizations or even organizations where there is still a clear hierarchy but shares are distributed more liberally or any such systems are employed that allow for employees to more directly participate. There's a wide range of solutions between total dictatorship and complete socialist style equality.
Why? To what extent? There are multiple correct answers to these problems. The best universal one is allowing folks to migrate to a cultural configuration they like instead of dictating what values others should hold.
It is possible to both believe something and at the same time, recognize that the belief is not universally held.
Thank you for being open-minded and for having empathy.
(s)he did not imply corporations.
The issue in Thailand, is all three will get you in deep trouble if discussing the royal family, or other topics yes?
The UK is the home of Cautions and ASBO's where you find out you have a criminal record just like that.
A place where you'd rather call the police than intervene to stop an ongoing crime because you might end up with a criminal record.
Canada of course is similar here.
The question isn't whether UK society is the freest imaginable -- but at the moment, it is very plausibly, the freest on the earth.
That's not true of the UK. Especially Scotland.
Freest in the world my big arse.
There's places in the world where slaves are openly traded today. I'll give you a clue. They tend to support Hamas.
e.g. many conservative religious people might agree that everyone has “inherent worth” given by God, yet disagree that implies a right to free speech, if one understands that right as including speech they view as immoral (e.g. blasphemy, pornography). Some religious people might even argue that (from their viewpoint) immoral speech inherently harms the human dignity of those who produce and consume it, and hence prohibiting that production and consumption respects their inherent worth rather than violating it
Whereas, conversely, other people might question the meaningfulness of “inherent worth” on philosophical grounds (e.g. from a positivist perspective it is rather dubious-it isn’t something you can empirically measure and it is unclear how to define it in the language of natural science), yet simultaneously favour the policies (e.g. expansive free speech rights) you seek to ground on it for other reasons-e.g. a person might support expansive free speech rights, even while rejecting the idea of “inherent worth”, simply because they find personal enjoyment in that right’s exercise