divided

Comparing size without considering population will only lead to bad conclusions. Could you imagine someone claiming cancer deaths in Germany aren’t a problem because it doesn’t have near as many deaths as the US, it’s not even close? Sounds silly, right?

The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.

[1] https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/best-countries-book-lov...

Oh, please. These issues were not about child exploitation.

Your original statement conveys the FBI should never ask Twitter to take down accounts. My response was such that there _are_ good reasons for the FBI to ask Twitter to take down accounts.

If we now agree on that, the issue is no longer requesting to ban accounts vs not requesting to ban accounts, but instead where the line on account bans exist. This is a much more gray debate, wouldn’t you agree?

It was the heavy hand of governent coming down on citizens over jokes. Parody and satire have always been given wide interpretations in the courts.

I agree these were intended as jokes, and parody and satire are given wide interpretations in court. But they do have limits. Presumably you wouldn’t want someone to lose their right to vote because someone else intentionally misinformed them, even if its intention was satire. I do think instead of an account ban it could be resolved with a misinformation notice, but we might be presuming the FBI official has more knowledge of online platforms than they do. It did seem from the emails Twitter was ultimately the one to decide the correct handling, so I don’t blame the FBI for just alerting Twitter of potential violations.

The fact that you point to the FBI website as proof they were acting in good faith shows a remarkable faith in the government you have.

Having worked for the federal government, I can inform you it is a huge hassle to get anything published. If they publish it, every line would be analyzed for compliance and in this case probably put in front of lawyers. They can still make mistakes, but it’s overly paranoid to believe a government website would advertise unconstitutional violations of rights for years.

It is not the governments job to protect people's rights.

Objectively false.

The gov't violates rights all the time.

True! But these violations are failures in the government for doing its job properly. Violations often lead to punishment or scandal. It wouldn’t be a scandal if people held the belief the government wasn’t supposed to protect your rights.

It's the job of the third party institutions like the media to expose and for the courts to render judgment.

…the courts are part of the government…

The FBI should not be asking Twitter to take down accounts. Period.

Have you considered the real consequences of this? If the FBI for example finds accounts linked to child exploitation, drug trafficking, or terrorism; should they not ask Twitter to take down those accounts? If they find accounts linked to Russian, Chinese, or Iranian farms who are using it to amplify certain messages in order to try to destabilize the US, should they just say hey that’s fine?

Further, from what I read of the tweets, it appears what those accounts wrote may have been illegal after all.

Here’s a quote from an FBI website:

Report potential election crimes—such as disinformation about the manner, time, or place of voting—to the FBI.

I’m not sure exactly what laws those are referring to, but it appears deceiving people about voting may be illegal. So although you and I and other smart people might read their tweets and think “haha!”, not everyone may read it as a joke.

It is the government’s job to protect the rights of its citizens. Freedom of speech is not absolute (slander, libel, threats, yelling fire in a crowded theatre, etc.), and in this case I think it’s reasonable that one’s right to freedom of speech shouldn’t supersede another’s right to vote.

A Twitter ban is certainly less damaging than criminal charges over whatever statute it violates.

That's a good devil's advocate, but it's worth pointing out minor children consent (with parental consent, too) to surgeries all the time. Whether that's cancer treatments, surgeries to repair bone fractures, plastic surgeries, etc.

I believe bottom surgeries are all but unheard of for under 18, but there were 203 top surgeries performed on minors in 2021 (safe to assume vast majority of these were either 16 or 17). In comparison, more than 8,000 minors had breast augmentation in 2019. 4,700 girls had breast reduction surgery in 2010 (apologies, these were the newest numbers I could find, clearly after more than a decade it's reasonable to believe there are more reductions than implants). In 2015, there were 7,021 breast reductions for boys.

It seems to me like if the genuine concern was over minors making decisions about their body that aren't reversible, we would be seeing equal and proportional outrage for these other surgeries, right?

Edit for your edit :) Gender affirming care appears to be what's best for kids according to the majority of research and the major medical associations in the US. The experts certainly could be wrong, but generally speaking I prefer having doctors treating me in a hospital and pilots flying my planes.

Thanks for the notice, I will try to do better.

Well, it’s sorta helpful to better understand your mindset. Of course you don’t see any connection between the Enlightenment and trans rights.

It would suck to realize one’s ideological underpinnings are the same as those that have been on the losing side for centuries and are almost universally recognized as the “bad guys” now.

It is really cute to believe your beliefs will win out in the next decades. Again another great attempt at humor, bravo!

I commend you at your attempt at humor. It’s a solid approach when losing an argument.

A trend that has lasted decades? Try at least centuries.

Egalitarianism and tolerance is a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking. Constitutions gave power to the people over kings. Capitalism gave individuals a chance to rival the power of vassals who were determined by a caste system.

I’d argue it’s a trend that’s gone on much longer, but progress was much slower when access to information and ideas was not the same as the last century.

It’s not to say there aren’t setbacks, but those setbacks have always been temporary or localized.

Now can something completely prevent this progress? Yeah, but it leads to very dystopian futures that everyone should hope to avoid.

Be a friend and share a few examples.

To be fair, this isn’t the sort of argument you’d want to make with any historical knowledge.

At some point in history, a lot of extremely bad opinions went from “almost everyone” to “vast majority” to an ever shrinking minority. Just to name a few:

- black people are inferior - women are inferior - gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry - Native Americans are savages - Depression/anxiety should be stigmatized

Each of these opinions followed a predictable but long path where more exposure to better opinions eventually won out. I’m unaware of any progressive opinion on egalitarianism that has failed to become mainstream given a long enough time horizon.

I don’t see any reason why this current “debate” will turn out any differently.

The peer comment to mine by dragontamer sums it up better than I could.

I’m not saying problems didn’t exist before Elon, but Musk has been a net negative for the company who thus far has only managed to make a bad situation worse.

I respect your choice and to each their own, but to characterize Elon as a wartime CEO when he’s caused 80% of the crisis is a very generous characterization. His “leadership” thus far has been sporadic, ill thought out, and reckless.

I agree, I was misinformed. Too many articles state both acquisition or $1B fine were viable routes for Twitter, but other sources with more solid analysis look to contradict that.

I was aware that Twitter went to court to complete the deal, but I admit to being misinformed as much of the analysis I read stated both avenues ($1B fee or force the acquisition) were viable.

For example, Dan Ives, who is often quoted in articles about this deal, had this to tweet: https://twitter.com/DivesTech/status/1545527442491822089?s=2...

It appears that is incorrect.

Fair enough, I'm not versed on the legal in's and out's and it appears you're correct.

I knew Twitter sought to close the deal, but most of the analysis I read claimed they could have chosen the $1B instead, as if both were viable legal paths. It appears that is incorrect.

I see this differently. Elon attacked the credibility of engineers at Twitter by publicly making up a lie about their incompetence and shouting it out with the biggest megaphone in the world.

Imagined another way, if your manager went to Twitter to announce to 1,000 followers how bad a snippet of your code was, he'd be a jerk.

When your boss is abusive towards you like this, it's a good thing to stand up for yourself and/or your peers. I imagine each Twitter engineer responding knew there was a good chance they'd be fired for it.

Now if they handled it the "professional" route you mentioned, that's fine, too. But when Elon started the mudslinging with a lie, I'm not going to begrudge someone telling the truth with some sass.

Where have you been? I think you may be uninformed on this.

Here's some details: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/technology/twitter-musk-b.... Later when Elon sought to pull out of the deal, Twitter threatened to go to court to enforce that $1B fee, which led to the buyout proceeding.

Cherry picking? I think you’re confused. I chose the same year YOU chose to say police per capita was down 11.6%.

In that same time, property crime is down 51% and violent crime down 35% for a combined reduction of 49%.[1] So we have a whopping 58% more police per crime between 1987 and 2016.

The “unknown crime rate figure” I use is the FBI reported stats. As a word of advice, in future discussions you can assume these are the crime rates used as they represent the most complete picture of crime data we have available.

FBI’s statistics show a decrease in the homicide rate from 8.3 per 100k to 5.4 during that period. Check out the site linked, it’s a clear downward trend.

Also your final paragraph shows a complete lack of understanding on what these stats are. The FBI collects stolen bicycle stats under theft/larceny, which is included in my figures. These figures represent reported crimes. Whether they are solved or prosecuted shouldn’t affect the data, merely whether someone contacted police to notify them a crime had taken place.

So those “usual biased opinions regurgitated without thought” are not opinions at all, but rather statements of fact. Crime is down from 1987 whether looking at violent crimes, property crimes, small crimes, or big crimes. It would behoove you to put a little more thought into learning the difference between opinion and fact.

[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...

Violence is bad. Yes. I can’t believe that has to be argued.

The glorification of violence in your posts here is disturbing.

State sanctioned violence on innocent people is especially bad, but even guilty people should have their day in court. When an officer kills someone when it could be avoided, it’s a bad thing.

Struggling to believe that on an enlightened forum as HN this is debate worthy.

And finally, regardless of whether state sanctioned violence is required in civilization today, it should be one of civilization’s aims to eliminate violence.

I don’t think this is surprising. Police killings are more likely to happen when the officer feels threatened. Research regularly shows we’ve been conditioned to see Asian people as less threatening than white people.

Most murderers are not caught in a shoot out with police. And murderers account for such a small number of police interactions that it’s a little bizarre to extrapolate the murder rate would strongly correlate to victims of police violence by race.

What’s a better consideration? That more police interactions happen with black people. Some of this is due to racism. Black people are far more likely to have the police called on them for being “suspicious” and police are more likely to stop or question black people (as shown in NYC stop and frisk or traffic stops, etc.).

Statistically, white people and black people have about the same rate of drug use. There are 4x as many black people getting arrested for drug use.[1]

Now one way to interpret this is that police target black people more, and so they find more crimes, reinforcing the idea that black people are criminal, leading to even further over-policing.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a gang problem in black communities, but it’s a complicated problem and the solution isn’t improve policing OR support black communities… it’s we need to do both.

This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.

I think this shows a misunderstanding of what defund the police was, and comes off as patronizing in that ignorance. The intent of the movement was that the difference in funding would then be invested in those communities, which is something you seem to agree would help accomplish their goal of reducing crime.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-report-despite-...

First, I don’t think there’s just one metric to use, and it’s a tall argument to say funding of all things should be ignored.

Second, I think the stat you focused in on probably doesn’t tell enough of the story, either. Crime rate is HALF what it was in 1987, so police per crime is significantly up since then. Also, advancements in policing and technology would lead to fewer officers needed per capita if they’re like most industries. For instance, we have 25% fewer pilots per capita[1], but 3x the flights of 1990.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/537863/number-of-pilots-...

Instead we ask too much, cut funding and criticize the outcomes.

The movement that was partially aimed to stop asking so much of police officers by distributing those responsibilities mentioned in your first sentence to others (Defund the Police) was almost entirely unsuccessful. As the peer poster mentioned, there are almost no instances of police budgets being cut. You are correct about us criticizing the outcomes, though.

It would help if you better understood why the outcomes are criticized, though.

US police killings are 7th most in the world, with peers like Syria and Afghanistan. If you look at it on a per capita basis, US police kill at a rate 3x higher than the next closest developed nation, 10x-20x more than most developed nations.

The NYPD—a police department—has a greater budget than the entire military of Ukraine—with 1/5th the population. Its budget would make it the 33rd largest military in the world.

If their role is supposed to be stopping crime, I know you’re aware that the US has among the highest crime rates of any developed nations. If their role is supposed to be investigating and solving crimes, our police officers are among the worst in the world at the clearance rate.

So. A single police department with more budget than most of the world’s militaries. The sum of our police spending dwarfs other nations. Our police kill more citizens, our crime rate is higher, and fewer of our crimes get solved. What’s not to criticize?

At this point it takes intentional ignorance to believe there’s a chance that all police violence is legitimate. Not only is there a glut of video evidence to the contrary, but internal investigations and courts have conclusively resolved this that _some_ police violence is not legitimate.

Is most police violence legitimate? Maybe. But it’s a pitifully low bar to say > 50% of the time police resorted to violence appropriately.

Depends on what you mean by same geographical locations, but that can vary a lot. If you’re looking over 100’s of kilometers, there will be both poor and wealthy districts. If you’re looking within a single city, there will be poor and wealthy districts. This really only gets informative if you’re looking at different models used in the exact same polling place and even then it could be no more than correlation for other reasons (maybe for example poorer people prefer the older machines because they’re more familiar while wealthier people prefer newer machines because it matches their iPhone).

If voting preference is at all correlated to income, and what models of voting machines used at a polling place are correlated to the wealth of that district, then you will likely find a correlation between voting machine model and voter preference, with the older/cheaper model showing a preference for the candidate more favored by poorer people.

It’s not a sign there was fraud. Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?

What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?

Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models? I assume those districts would be the poorer districts, and Lula did have more support among the low income, correct? I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.

If Brazil is anything like the US, there are many, many safeguards in place whenever an election machine is certified and used.

Baseless means without evidence. So when a politician is yelling at his fans that the machines overturned the results of the election, and no one has found evidence of it, you should doubt those claims.

In other words, through certification and audits there is a lot more evidence the machines worked properly than the feelings you are using for making your decisions.

Was the research group meeting about politics or did this randomly come up during them? And honestly it wouldn’t surprise me for college students to bash Biden as well. Why associate your political beliefs so strongly with one man? Surely someone saying Trump is a criminal business man says nothing about whether your belief on income taxes is legitimate.

Not to say my college experience was typical, but it was largely apolitical. There were student groups for Republicans and Democrats and if you didn’t want anything to do with politics you didn’t have to. I didn’t spend my time discussing politics with my friends, my professors didn’t lecture about how much Bush sucks during their Operating Systems course, and my classmates weren’t bringing up how immoral the Iraq war was during the single philosophy course I took.

I come from a conservative state, the school population would likely have only slightly leaned left. I didn’t feel pressured about my conservative beliefs. Looking back at the time, though, I shifted from center-right to center. Not because of being clubbed over the head in arguments, but from exposure to ideas and experiences and beliefs that my rural upbringing sheltered me from.

I feel like this was a tongue-in-cheek proposal, but why would we want to be the thought police here? These are, after all, students sharing their beliefs with other students.

Conservatives have spent decades demonizing higher education as professor-led indoctrination centers. This would have the likely effect of fewer conservatives going to college and fewer conservative parents sending their children. So in that kind of environment, of course the campus becomes more and more liberal, and that’s the pool of people who later become professors, so a higher and higher percentage of professors are liberal.

It’s sorta funny your proposal is to send more conservatives to college to counterbalance the liberals, but that’s a problem with decades-long conservative messaging and not anything the schools are doing.

As an aside, there’s no real solution here for conservatives. Young people lean liberal. I grew up conservative in a conservative state, but college and debates with other students opened my eyes to other perspectives and I’ve shifted left ever since. Exactly like the findings in the study.

The issue is growing up our beliefs are segregated along that urban/rural divide. Where I grew up, conservative kids were the majority. As soon as you mix people between that line (college), you will almost always have a majority liberal lean even in conservative states. Which as you noted will lead to conservatives becoming more liberal, as I did. Although I wouldn’t say pressured, at least in my case it was exposure to different ideas more than anything.

I think that’s ultimately why conservatives demonize higher education as indoctrination. Not because it’s literal indoctrination like a church listening to a preacher, but because their kids raised conservative will meet kids raised liberal and it’s far more likely the conservative kids shift left than the others shift right. That spells disaster for a party.

This sort of response encapsulates the conservative victimhood complex. Whenever any data or research comes out that contradicts their viewpoints, the go-to is to assume bias and dismiss it without addressing its actual merits.

The writer is an Economics major, not one of the softer social sciences. According to a 2010 study[1] (yeah, yeah boy have things changed since then!), the more economics classes one takes, the more likely they are to lean Republican.

So would someone in a field that is split evenly between conservative and liberal viewpoints publish a paper with findings that suggest the conservative viewpoint is correct? Yes, don’t be silly, it clearly happens all the time. No reason to get conspiratorial here.

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...