finite_jest

That is extremely unlikely to be true. The guests don't own the copyright, so they can't leverage that. Also, some of the guests are protesting this on Twitter.

Predictably, people break out the C-word.

Censorship is now a taboo word? That's pretty ironic.

I'm sure the motivation of many book burners of the past was also to save the would-be readers from eternal hell. Possible good motivations don't justify censorship.

You could argue that in this particular case censorship probably won't even be effective. Rogan is seen as a something of a censorship martyr by quite a few people now, Streisand effect and all.

Also, there's the fact that most of the removed episodes have nothing to do with Covid-19.

I don't think that's a good framing of the issue. Otherwise, why is merely making the "cancellers" face the "consequences" of their actions bad?

No, it's not representative of how free speech would look like. "The coven of the witches" problem arises in part because of all the witch-hunting going on.

Forgive me but what are you protesting exactly?

Corporate censorship. [1]

At some point you have to look in the mirror.

I don't appreciate your personal attack. You are not arguing in good faith, and I'm done responding to you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship

They can do whatever the fuck they want.

If that's your framing, you should also grant that we can also protest whatever the fuck we want. This is a trite and unfruitful line of argument.

every periodical does. I’m not sure what the point of complaining about that is.

That is broadly correct, though not all of them are equally biased. However, journalistic objectivity [1] is something we could demand them to strive for. I'm not sure if the press have always been like this.

Likewise, it’s not particularly noteworthy that WSJ and Fox News have a conservative bias.

Most of the US mainstream outlets are biased in a particular direction. I've said the before here, but you can see that by taking any reasonable list of major outlets [1], and checking their biases [2][3].

If we are to get up in arms about something, it should be because they are being deceptive (or worse, publishing false information), not because they are merely biased.

Paltering is also a form of deception, and you could argue that it is quite pervasive and pernicious. I think Mother Jones, and many other outlets, are guilty of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity

[2]: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_media_in_the_United_State...

[3] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

[4] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

I don't think that's the reason. Hanlon's razor is just a heuristic, we shouldn't blindly and naively apply it to everything. I think you can see how biased Mother Jones is by taking the headlines on their front page, and trying to rewrite them as someone attempting to be impartial would.

I think that is is an excellent and relevant example of press bias, which @legerdemain was commenting on.

Generic straw mans are not conducive to good faith arguments, HN or elsewhere.

I have seen this disingenuous copy-paste objection show up in every thread on this topic on HN

To be fair, your comment is objectively more generic and closer to a "copy-paste objection" than the GP's.

I have no idea how the press were in nineteen umpties, but it seems clear to me that the reporting by Mother Jones is pretty biased, and they have their fair share of polemic-level opinion pieces.

Do you think they would cover the recent removal of To Kill A Mockingbird (which is ironically a book they do mention in the article) from the curriculum by a Washington school board [1] in the same way? I don't think so. I searched their website, and it looks like they haven't covered it at all.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-requi...

We don't have a moral duty to make eighth-graders see depictions of everything that is heinous and ugly about the world.

It has a "FIND GAME" option if you'd like to play with random people.

I don't know, but Brendan Eich (Brave's CEO) [1] is pretty active on Twitter, and I think he used to answer the questions people asked. You could try asking him there. Let us know if you get an answer.

Also, I apologize for being a little bit too harsh in my previous comment.

[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich

Come on, what kind of clickbait is that? So Brave has an opt-in option to see ads [1], and they have some measures to protect against fraud. They are simply being honest about the fact that using a VPN would increase the chance of being marked as suspicious for the purpose of paying you to see ads.

This is HN, and one might hope we can do better than BuzzFeed. In fact, Brave probably would want you to use a VPN, they sell their own VPN service after all [2].

[1] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026648512-How...

[2] https://brave.com/firewall-vpn/

Maybe, but still

  P(doing something nasty | "Great question") > P(doing something nasty)

Right, and a standard response to cryptopunk fundamentalism is pointing at rubber-hose cryptoanalysis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

I changed the title, as the original was misleading and clickbaity: "Elections Canada: 205,000 mail-in ballots were not counted".

The original reporting this is based on is by Blacklock’s Reporter [1] which looks like a better source, but unfortunately it's behind a login/paywall.

[1] https://www.blacklocks.ca/205000-ballots-not-counted/

---

PS: I found this older article [2] which covers the same issue. Apparently, if my understanding is correct, this number (~1/6 of the mail-in ballots) is much better than the 2019 election [3]. I guess that is something you could expect. Also, I'm not sure what a cancelled ballot means. Does it include the case when someone simply forgets to return the ballot?

[2] https://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/1-in-6-mail-in-ballots-n...

[3]: Ibid. "Elections Canada says there is typically a gap between the number of mail-in ballots that go out and the number that come back every year. In the 2019 federal election, only 55 per cent of the domestic mail-in ballots and 61 per cent of international mail-in ballots were returned on time. The remainder were either returned late or not at all."

It is a technological problem too. Telegram has a much better UI/UX than Signal, and not having end-to-end encryption by default is part of the reason.

Based. Abelson and Sussman, of SICP fame, are among the signatories. So is Ronald Rivest, the R in RSA (and CLRS). Chomsky too.

The title is slightly misleading. It would be more accurate to change "its own archives" to "its reruns of the old shows".

That's bad enough though. They are making "woke cuts" [1] to old shows, lest their viewers question the universality of cultural norms by being exposed to an unfiltered version of the past.

Sure, the unaltered versions are probably accessible somewhere, but that doesn't make what they doing "not censorship" and ok. It would be like saying that the Hogwarts Library wasn't censored because you could find the banned books in the Restricted Section or elsewhere. At least Hogwarts had the defence of being something of a high school.

[1]: The Telegraph: BBC makes 'woke cuts' to archives, including Dad's Army https://archive.is/Y5nJw

Antibiotics rock, and I think penicillin is rightly praised as being as closed to a Panacea as it gets. However, we shouldn't underestimate the positive effect of better hygiene, vaccination, and advances in surgery techniques.

I share the feeling that better nutrition is probably not as much of a significant factor in developed countries. For what it's worth, we are more obese than our ancestors.

Our World in Data has this nice chart of life expectance by age in England and Wales [1]. I have this pet hypothesis that a good chunk of the increase in the life expectancy of the younger people in that chart is due to vaccination and better hygiene. And, for older ages, the a good chunk of increase is due to advances in surgery.

The effect of antibiotics is probably more uniform across the ages. It is note-worthy that penicillin was discovered in 1928, so the increase in life expectancy before then can't be due to antibiotics.

I have no expertise in this area, so you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. The Our World in Data chart is really cool though. That steep fall and rebounce due to the Spanish flu, and the contrast with COVID-19 with respect to affect on different age-groups is also interesting. [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-ab...

[2]: I think comparing the naming of the diseases also tells us something about how society has changed.

Based. Nullius in verba [1]. The whitewashing of censorship is accelerating the erosion of trust in the institutions, and it's refreshing to see a long-standing institution take a bold stance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba

Young wasn't trying to remove Rogan's music.

I very much disagree. We could be a bit more accurate/pedantic by saying "he's trying to mount pressure to remove Rogan's podcast from Spotify" instead, but that doesn't change much.

not be on a platform with people he perceived as ultra-shitty & socially-ruinous.

I cancelled my Spotify a long time ago, but I don't think it's much of a social platform. If you don't want to interact with Rogan, you simply can. I think you could even mute an artist, so Spotify wouldn't even suggest their content to you.

But there is no "freedom of speech" side here.

There is. Rogan is not trying to remove Neil Young's music from anywhere.

I've heard this unfruitful line of argument too often recently. Besides being unfruitful, I think it is based on a subtle fallacy/diversion.

The idea of free expression reasonably includes the right to criticize the principle itself. For example, in the US, you absolutely have the legal right to criticize the First Amendment. However, by doing so you would rightly be labelled as being against free expression.

If you like free expression, I think you should be cheering for Spotify and Rogan in this case.

TBH, that still doesn't make sense to me, but I don't really know much about how school libraries operate in Texas.

I found an example of what you were referring to though (thanks to @shankr linking to a relevant Twitter thread). [1]

[1] https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...

Thanks for the link. Also corroborated by the statement on the school's website: [1]. That seems overly paternalistic and prudish to me.

[1] https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...

Recent example of literal book burning in Canada: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...

In the sense of school boards removing books from curricula, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a recent example. [1]

In the sense of removing books from bookstores, Amazon did ban a broad category of books. [2]

In the sense of literally burning books, I'm don't know of any recent instances in the US by either side. But I know of one example in Canada. [3]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-requi...

[2]: WSJ: "Amazon Won’t Sell Books Framing LGBTQ+ Identities as Mental Illnesses" https://archive.fo/v5rWn

[3] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...

This is the cheaper/easier option, and several schools have already opted to do so.

Do you have a source reporting that schools are actually removing books in response to this particular inquiry? It seems that they shouldn't be. (I am aware of other instances of books being explicitly removed from school libraries or curricula by the school boards.)

What makes me skeptical is that I'm not sure in what situation physically removing a bunch of books from the shelves would be cheaper/easier than retrieving records about them.