Rep. Stansbury asked what Twitter has done and is doing to combat hate speech on its platform. Navaroli correctly declined to address current policies since she has not been at the company for some time. However, she then said that they balanced free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different approach: “Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”
Martin Lloyd Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Eerdmans : 1960), pp. 129–30.
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Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. ... Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else …
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The reason I wrote the book is not to settle old scores or give my version of the match, but to say that we should not be paralyzed by a dystopian vision of the future – worrying about killer AI and super-intelligent robots, which is like worrying about overcrowding on Mars.
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When strong evidence for a specific and falsifiable claim is presented, the response is a barrage of article and paper recommendations on larger and related questions instead of conceding the point of contention. It may be considered a type of slothful induction.
Joel and Ethan Cohen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
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There's just gotta be a place up ahead
Where men aren't lodown and poker's played fair
If there weren't, what are all the songs about
I'll see y'all there
And we can sing together and shake our heads
About all the meannes in the used to be
The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state. First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.
Nathan Jacobson, published at Mind Matters (January 1, 2023).
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The term censorship conjures up images of piles of burning books or dissidents locked away in the remotest reaches of Siberia. We can take heart that minority voices are not in chains in the United States. Nevertheless, we must not kid ourselves. We live under a state of highly sophisticated and ubiquitous suppression of disfavored voices. The gatekeepers like the Trust Project and Google are making judgments about who is and is not trustworthy with good intentions and in the name of noble ideals.
But if our sexuality is our deepest and most important inner truth, and politics is about the promotion of the truth, then it was inevitable that sex would be politicized. Whereas cultures used to cultivate the virtues that made family and religion flourish, now the law would be used to suppress these institutions as they stood in the way of sexual “authenticity,” as politics sought to create a world where it was safe — and free from criticism — to follow one’s sexual desires. Hence, the push to redefine marriage legally was never really about joint tax returns and hospital visitation but about forcing churches to update their doctrines and bakers to affirm same-sex relationships. Affirmation of the sexualized self is the key to our new politics. And our new language.
What strikes me as strange is why I should have held on so long and tenaciously to this faith in “democratic socialism.” How could we ever have believed that you could deprive human beings of the fundamental right to initiate and engage in their own economic activity without putting every other human right in jeopardy?