7 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2019
    1. This is the problem with ex post facto consent being used to justify these sorts of invasions. What if it’s not given? The world floods into your life anyway. What had been private is now uncontrollably crowdsourced. Your consent becomes a trifling detail in a story about you that suddenly belongs to everyone else. It doesn’t matter otherwise.

      Ex post facto consent is forced consent. It is consent simply to save face, or, in the case of Euan Holden, the opportunity to profit from it. And no one should be able to "crowdsource" my life for their own entertainment. My life is my own. It should always be my choice not to belong to everyone else. This is an invasion of personal privacy that is absolutely unacceptable. Certainly people will talk about me behind my back, but they should not be allowed to publicly post such conversations! We need act promptly to enact stronger laws that would protect people from such gross invasion.

    2. This is the Faustian alchemy of social media: we are all given the opportunity to become celebrities in an instant, sometimes for nonsensical reasons, with or without our input. But we gain virtually none of the benefits of that fame, none of the glamor or the institutional support to help deal with the invasiveness of celebrity and how it can eat away at every boundary you ever took for granted.

      Not everyone wants to be famous, in fact we've all seen people implode from fast and furious fame. I can name several writers (JD Salinger, Harper Lee) who retreated from society, choosing instead to save themselves via hermitage. Just because we do something remarkable (or even unremarkable in this day and age) does not mean we are willing to sell our soul. The reference to Faust here is clear...some of us want to know the repercussions of our decisions before making them. Some of us don't want that deal with the devil.

    1. But Tony McAleer, a former white supremacist leader who now runs Life After Hate, a rehabilitation program for neo-Nazis, called doxxing a “ passive aggressive violence.”

      The danger with "doxxing" is that it is anonymous. It is not face-to-face confrontation. With doxxing you can simply point your finger at a person and defame them, even without having to prove anything was true. And you can ruin a person...just look at Matt Lauer or Bill Cosby. Now I'm not saying they were or weren't guilty, but the public definitely decided that they were OUT. Doxxing is dangerous because it is irreversible, and so completely life-changing.

    2. Marla Wilson, 35, of San Francisco, said she was appalled when she saw white supremacists marching so brazenly in Charlottesville. Doxxing, she believed, was an effective way to make people think twice about being so bold with their racism.

      This is inaccurate thinking, and is frankly horrifying. Should it be up to the everyman to enforce ethics/morality? If this were true, we would be living in Orwellian times, where "citizens" live in fear of the whims/dictates of the current regime. And there would be no checking to make sure the accusations were true. People would be convicted before being tried. Super scary stuff. No thank you.

  2. Sep 2019
    1. The subcommittee noted that there was a 17 percent increase in reported hate crimes in 2017 from the previous year and a 31 percent increase since 2014. And in spite of the ADL’s report that white supremacists were responsible for 78 percent of extremist murders in 2018, the FBI still dedicates most of its time, money and manpower to investigating and stopping international terrorism.

      This needs to change. We need to turn our focus to the needs of our yet underrepresented citizens. We have neglected domestic matters for far too long, and the mass shootings and hate crimes are a direct result of not paying attention to the depravity and horror of the hate that is among us.

    2. Investigation admitted that prejudiced assumptions against the Black Lives Matter movement, Muslim Americans and black identity extremists was all a lie. Intelligence officials sat in front of lawmakers and openly admitted that white supremacists and right-wing violence are the biggest domestic terror threat but also admitted that federal agencies aren’t really doing anything about it. On Tuesday, June 4, the House Oversight subcomm

      Fantastic! It is about time.

    1. Mike Caulfield's methods of fact and source-checking are golden. They could avoid a lot of angry dialogue and calling out I see daily on many of my social media sites. People are just too ready to "gut react" today, which leads to a lot of nasty exchanges online between friends and strangers alike. And, as a society, we are too ready to believe what we see. This behavior is unthinking and dangerous, and keeps us simple-minded. "Thoughts about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism." I love this guy!