Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.

Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.

I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.

And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.

Third party voter here. I don’t expect any third party candidate to win. My home state of Connecticut is solidly blue. All of our electoral votes WILL go to Harris, no vote of mine could change that even if I wanted it to, which I don’t. I am no fan of Trump.

I vote for whichever third party looks likely to get the most total votes, because of a third party can drum up 5% of the total national popular vote they get a lot more federal election funds in the next election.

My voting priority is for next cycle, to get a third party on the debate stage. That’s what I’m voting for.

Read your damn history.

SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period

Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.

Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.

The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail

Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…

I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don’t shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that’s a good policy or not.

In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I’m NOT in favor of such a policy.

If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he’ll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he’s not already spent on lawyers).
Or, what if it’s not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the ‘long walk off a short pier’ post was in that person’s browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you’ll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.

And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it’s time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they’ll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena’d from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.

Is this ‘better’? I don’t think it is.

To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don’t want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
But that’s my personal standards, and I don’t think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don’t agree.

I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don’t have the right to order them not to. I’m okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.

I think I might be okay with encouragement of homicide or murder or terrorism being at least somewhat illegal.

Question for you though, let’s say you have a person with numerous documented mental health problems, who has been suicidal for quite some time, they post some awful shit on a forum one day when upset. One of the responses is to go take a long walk off a short pier. Only they go and do that, with a bunch of rocks in a backpack, and they drown.

What punishment would you prescribe for the person who told them to take a long walk off a short pier?

Making things illegal is easy, but all the law does at the end of the day is a list of if you do X your punishment will be Y.
So for the dude that told him to take a long walk off a short pier, what is the punishment?

Yes, but quality over quantity. I was a redditor back in the early days, pre Digg migration. Being a redditor meant something back then, almost universally meant you were tolerant, usually but not always somewhat liberal, and with a very strong sense of fairness. I remember a good friend of mine started dating someone and when they mention their new partner was a redditor I am immediately thought oh good, that means they are very likely a good person (they ended up married). Reddit has of course grown since then, but not all of the growth is good. I used to go there for engaging discourse, knowing that I was surrounded by other relatively smart people and we could have respectful discussion on almost any subject. Those discussions are few and far between now.

So yes I would like Lenny and the fediverse to grow, but I am more interested in what kind of people we attract than simply growing numbers. When I would rather do is create a reputation that the fediverse is a place to come before respectful discourse and sharing of ideas, not just scrolling through page after page of mindless content like on a big tech social platform (FB / Insta / TikTok / etc).

there are always some restrictions on speech.

There may be a few, but they should be as minimal as is humanly possible. Restrictions on any civil right should be seen as an absolute last resort, to be tried only when all other options have failed and there is an overwhelming need to fix some desperate problem.

but on the other hand, if you have people committing suicide because they were encouraged to do so, then maybe it makes sense to make pro-suicide speech illegal

No it doesn’t.

You are focusing on the symptom rather than the disease. The problem isn’t that there is pro suicide content, the problem is that people are listening to it. If your society is so gullible and fragile that they will kill themselves because some asshole online says to, you have a much much bigger problem than online speech. You have an education problem and that is what you should fix. You are not teaching your kids critical thinking skills and you need to start. Getting rid of the pro suicide content is just starting a game of whack-a-mole because the next guy will post something else equally damaging that gullible people will fall for.
Birds aren’t real, climate change is a hoax, the Earth is flat, vaccines react with 5G cell phone towers to cause autism, and forward this message to 50 people or you’ll die tomorrow. Even if you get rid of the more harmful ones, your society is still collectively prey to any intellectual abuse and/or memetic virus.

The solution to disinformation isn’t to block disinformation, it’s to harden your society against it. Do that and the problem will solve itself, because people simply won’t listen to the crap so there will be a lot less reason to post it and even fewer people spreading it.

Train your people to employ critical thinking skills, and when they don’t, blame them and not whatever moron they were listening to.

Perhaps it’s not easy to decide where the line of legality should go though, which is why this topic is controversial.

It’s not easy. Especially when you need to determine what’s a controversial opinion and what’s hate speech.

For example (and this is NOT anything I agree with)-- if one said ‘I don’t believe gay people should be allowed to adopt children, because science shows both male and female influences are more helpful when applied together for a child’s development’ what is that? Is that hate speech because it advocates taking rights away from gay people? Is it an opinion stated with the goal of protecting children?

Does it become illegal to express almost any position that isn’t pro-gay?

It’s a VERY slippery slope.

Certain speech is criminal like inciting violence. If someone said ‘I’m going to buy a gun and kill gay people, and you all should kill gay people too’ that is a specific statement of criminal intent and also inciting violence. That will get you cops knocking on your door (and rightly so).
You can apply a ‘test’ to that- does it show specific intent to commit a crime? Does it encourage others to commit crimes? Yes on both.

But how do you ‘test’ someone saying they don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt? How do you tell from a few words if they have a hate-filled heart, or if they legitimately think gay people can’t provide a loving home? You can’t.

For the record- I’m using LGBT as an example. I personally liberal-libertarian— I believe married gay couples should have guns to defend their adopted children and pot farms from criminals, with single payer healthcare to keep them alive if they get hurt. I’m against almost any effort to take away anyone’s rights.

So I’ll fight for the asshat’s right to say ‘fuck the gays’ just as hard as I’ll fight for the LGBT person’s right to marry, adopt, and use whatever bathroom they want (provided they wash their hands).

On the censorship thing, maybe it is okay if an online messaging website bans certain content, like pro-suicide content, or pro-terrorism content, etc. You could call that censorship but you could also call it safety.

I think that should go either way and I have no problem if a platform decides to ban that kind of stuff. I certainly have no desire to consume such material.

I have a BIG problem when the government decides that platforms are required to ban things. Even if they’re things I don’t myself want to read.

It’s a slippery slope.

In concept I agree with him on that. I support your right to say awful shit, but I am not going to spread that message to others. Where Elon lost the plot was thinking of Twitter as a public square. It’s a nice thought, but it requires the whole platform to be 100% neutral and unbiased. So it’s all good to call Twitter the public square, but that’s a lot harder to take seriously when the guy in charge of policing the square is heavily biased.

how can we protect people without this censorship?

We don’t, nor should we try to.
Protecting people’s feelings from offense is not a valid activity in a free society. The second you start down the road of ‘we must regulate this guy’s words and actions to protect that guy’s feelings’ we become a nanny state full of people with paper thin skins. We accept that one consequence of free speech is that sometimes people will say things that are hurtful. We do that because the alternative is getting rid of free speech.

Hate must be addressed at its root.

I could not agree more. Fighting hatred with hatred only breeds more hatred. But that seems to be the standard strategy today, it’s okay to not just refuse to tolerate intolerance, but to be actively intolerant of those who themselves seem intolerant. It is just fighting bad with bad and the result is more bad.

The way we fight the roots of hatred is with open discourse. The people who have hate in their hearts, we do not isolate them, we do not wall them off from society, we do not practice and encourage intolerance against them. We show them a better way. We make ourselves examples of doing better, not just against the people they don’t like, but against the people we don’t like.

We try to build bridges and encourage communication. For all the people who say immigrants are lazy lawbreakers, we show them immigrants who are the hardest working motherfuckers there are and pay their taxes. For the people who think black people are a problem, we introduce them to black people who break their stereotypes.

For the overwhelming majority of people who have hate in their hearts and intolerance and prejudice, those feelings are based on stereotypes.
People don’t join the KKK because they start in a mixed culture and then conclude black people are a problem. They join the KKK because they have stereotypes they see reinforced in media and TV.

There was a famous Black dude whose name I don’t remember, but he of his own volition managed to deprogram a whole bunch of KKK members. All he did was sit down and fucking talk to them. That’s it. Like sit down at the bar next to them and start a conversation. Many of the KKK members had never encountered a respectable well-spoken black person before (let alone one willing to talk to them) and were completely blown away because it broke the stereotype of a black person that they joined the KKK to fight against.
A good number of them ended up leaving the KKK and giving this man their robes on the way out. So there’s this friendly black dude who has a big box of KKK robes that were given to him by ex-members he deprogrammed.

That is how we fight hate. We fight hate with love, we fight intolerance with tolerance and open arms, we fight stereotypes with exposition, we fight ignorance with knowledge.

Otherwise it’s like we are saying there’s too much stupidity in society so we’re going to prevent people with lower IQs from attempting school. It doesn’t work.

There’s a big difference between hate speech and revenge porn.

A person has rights to their likeness and image. That’s why anybody who goes in front of a camera, be it a porn star or a model or an actor, signs a ‘model release’ giving the photographer authorization to publicize and sell their images. Without that simple one page contract, nothing in the photo shoot can be published. Porn actors do that. And in fact, they usually do it on video, where the actor holds up their driver’s license and says ‘my name is blah blah I am a pornographic actor and I am consenting to have sex on camera today and authorize this production company to publicize and sell the resulting video’ or something like that. Revenge porn victims have made no such agreement, and while the penalties are stronger because of the harm it causes them, the legal basis for having any penalty at all is simply that they did not consent to having their likeness and image publicized.

Hate speech has no such issue. It may be harmful to a person or group, but if you remove the very broad ‘hatred’ label, it becomes just an opinion that would otherwise be protected speech.

The other problem is that what considers hatred is very much subjective. For example, if I say wanting to own a gun is evidence of mental illness, a lot of people on Lemmy will agree with that and I will probably get upvotes. If I say wanting to use the bathroom of other than your biological genetic sex is evidence of mental illness, I will probably get banned. What is the difference between the two? Supporting LGBT rights is popular, supporting the second amendment is not. So you create the situation where the only difference between a valid opinion and an invalid one is whether or not it’s accepted mainstream, and that’s a bad way to go.

Also, in a free country, it is generally considered that expressing an opinion which may be detrimental to others is not in itself considered bad. If I say that people over 80 years old should require a yearly driving test, that’s a valid position for me to have and nobody will call me ageist for saying it. If I say that Donald Trump should be arrested rather than elected, that is directly detrimental to a person but it would get me upvotes here. If I said that being Republican is evidence of mental illness, that is directly prejudicial against an entire group which has many different reasons for believing as they do, and it would probably get me upvotes also.

My point is, hate speech as a concept is difficult to define and when you try to ban it with censorship you are just starting down a slippery slope that will have the opposite of the desired effect. You legitimize the counterculture and do nothing to stop the real problem, the actual hatred.

You are addressing the wrong problem. You’re focusing on the symptom rather than the disease.

Fighting hate speech rather than hatred itself only strengthens the hatred. As soon as you say “you mustn’t say that” you validate the hatred and give it power. Look at any counterculture, positive or negative. Trying to suppress it only validates it, gives it legitimacy as being important enough for the establishment to want to suppress, and if the people who might support the hatred already don’t like the people who would suppress the hate speech, you’ve just poured fuel on the fire.

The problem to be fixed isn’t hate speech, it’s hatred. It’s a tougher problem to solve, but a much more important one that you will actually get a productive effect by solving it.

That I would actually very much agree with. As Elon himself said in the early days of the Twitter takeover, “free speech does not mean free reach”.

This is also why I think engagement algorithms are a cancer on our civilization. If it is in a platforms monetary interest to amplify the most vile anger inducing stuff, be that stuff that is actively bad like hate speech or simply divisive like a lot of political crap, that is bad for our society. It pushes us farther apart when we should be coming together to fix the problems that we can agree on.

You don’t have to be a porn star or even a porn consumer to oppose laws banning porn.

And you don’t have to be a shitbag to recognize that, while well-intentioned, censorship is still censorship.

I have absolutely no love whatsoever for the people who would spread such crap. I would love to get rid of it. But banning the speech doesn’t do that. It’s like smashing the altimeter in the airplane and then declaring that you’re not crashing anymore. But the reality is, smashing instruments in the airplane is never a great idea whether you are crashing or not. It just prevents you from seeing things you don’t want to. And you get hurt in the process.

Censorship, historically, has never ended up anywhere good.

Absolutely fuck spez.

But he’s right here. Just because he’s a fuckstick doesn’t mean he’s always wrong on every issue 100% of the time.

Various forms of censorship under the flag of ‘online safety’ have been pushed by governments since the internet began to exist. And before that with print media and television. Censorship is not the answer. Never was. First it was for porn, then it was for video games, then it was for hate speech, it’s always something.

But in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard,

“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.”

Censorship must be opposed.

Today I learned. Thanks for that!

There’s currently no way to delete an uploaded image.

That’s especially problematic since pasting any image into a reply box auto-uploads it. So if your finger slips and you upload something sensitive, or if you want to take down something you uploaded previously, there’s no way to do it.

What should happen is whenever you upload an image, the image and delete key get stored in some special part of your Lemmy account. Then from the Lemmy account management page you can see all your uploaded images and delete them individually or in bulk.

So it seems you can now do this- Profile, Uploads shows you all your uploads. Go Lemmy!