encouraging someone to kill themselves

I’m pretty sure that can be ignored without harm. Whether someone elects to kill themselves or not is up to them.

A fundamental right is not really a problem. Expression that doesn’t directly harm (defamation, incitement, threat) can be ignored.

I don’t continue reading

Seems like willful illiteracy & incomplete evidence fallacy. There was literally all the resources on the internet & a quick search to check hastily drawn conclusions before posting them.

Your belief that I don’t understand these ideas or haven’t encountered them is incorrect.

It’s more an observation that your position isn’t justified well.

I’m saying that a free society must not equally allow every possible expression, and that anything invoking and glorifying Nazism in specific is beyond the pale and must be stopped, including violently when necessary.

You are talking about weakening legal integrity of fundamental rights & committing violence against nonaggressors (violence against peaceful expression is never necessary): that’s flat out illiberal & incompatible with free society. Worst of all, you’ve failed to demonstrate any of it is necessary or sufficient to safeguard the fundamental rights free society stands for: basic logic indicates it does the opposite. Moreover, historical record discredits your position & shows such approaches when attempted are easily abused by authorities, harm society, and end up failing: you remain conveniently mute on this.

Claiming to have heard & understood it all before doesn’t mean your position now isn’t broken & muddled. “Defeating” illiberal movements in ways that end up defeating free society is incompetent advocacy. I think you’re mistaking fighting fascism (even at the expense of fundamental freedoms that define free society) with defending free society.

Anyone who seriously cares about free society needs to oppose illiberalism from your direction, too. I do. Your illiberalism is more insidious than overt fascism, because someone might mistake yours for progressive.

The only positive is there’s a better chance of reasoning with misguided people trying to do the right thing than someone who definitely wants to end free society.

they instead exploit the willingness of others to do so (like you’re insisting on here) because it drags them into unproductive conversations and creates feuds (like we’re doing here)

No, this disagreement is real. I cannot support recklessly subverting fundamental rights to score cheap “wins” that ultimately result in loss. Committing to a free society requires integrity to defend all of it consistently.

It’s seems to me your “solution” adds to the problem. It’s possible to oppose it, oppose facism, & argue for a better solution.

Moreover, it seems to me you’re falling for their game. Testing integrity by trying to provoke society to weaken its legal protections enough to punish offensive exercise of fundamental rights is a classic challenge illiberals pose to lure society to attack free society.

authoritarian, but that word means something different to everyone

Advocating for unnecessary limits on liberties is objectively illiberal. Weakening integrity of legal protections for fundamental rights increases their vulnerability to abuse by authorities, which is a step toward authoritarianism.

My original comment about paradox of intolerance is something that person needed to hear.

But it’s wrong, your reasoning is unsound, and no one has to agree with it. Your logic isn’t compelling.

Germany being the example

Germany is not a great example. Do their restrictions inhibit the rise of abhorrent movements? People still speak & assemble privately. Neo-nazis are still around. AfD continues gaining with its intimations of ethnofascism skirting barely within legal limits. German laws seem ineffective at deterring the rise of far-right extremism, which looks hardly any different in the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Germany has internet patrols penalizing vitriol, insults, & satirical images of politicians showing fake quotes & live police suppressing pro-Palestinian protests as anti-semitic. So, German laws seem effective at helping authorities stifle & penalize online criticism. At least when authorities (following eerily similar rationalizations in the US & Germany) try to suppress pro-Palestinian protests, protesters in the US have firmer legal claims to defend their rights.

intellectual charity

The Principle of Charity means interpreting your words in their truest, likeliest meaning favoring the validity of your argument. It doesn’t mean just letting you have the argument.

If you don’t want to justify your claims convincingly, that’s fine. I’m still going to tell everyone who reads this why I think a free, democratic society deserves better than the deeply broken idea you’re pushing.

While I wish you well, too, you and the rest who endorse that thinking seem sorely misguided, and I wish you would think better.

OP felt a compulsion to protect our virgin eyes & ears.

We can disagree, but I’m not all that interested in getting scholarly about it - the writing’s on the wall, we have real - not theoretical - fascism headed our way within this 4 year presidency and we’d better be ready to fight.

1. Scholarly: you brought scholarship into this by invoking paradox of tolerance. I had to point out that people whose vocation is to think harder & longer than you on this have drawn conclusions at odds with yours. Therefore, your reasoning is not on firm, settled ground.
2. Realism: your conclusion is not only theoretically challenged. Cracking open a history book reveals it’s unnecessary & ill-advised in practice.

The civil rights movement overturned defacto ethno-fascism & advanced equality by using & promoting civil liberties, not opposing them. Freedom of expression & the free speech movement were instrumental.

Even when the threat is real, compromising civil rights to combat it spills beyond the threat & backfires. Read about the Red Scare & McCarthyism to see government restrict civil liberties in the name of security (the Soviets were spying in the Manhattan Project & Federal government), Congress seize the chance to wield a partisan weapon against anyone they flimsily accuse of “Un-American” activities, the lives ruined through rights abuses, the work it took to wind back those laws. Truman criticized those restrictions as a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism”. For his reckless witch hunt against communists, Joseph McCarthy was criticized as “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”. Persecution ultimately harmed anti-communist efforts more than help them, and critics argued it distracted from the “real (but limited) extent of Soviet espionage in America”.

Read about how basic freedoms like speech & assembly were indispensable for disenfranchised activists to advance universal suffrage as they fought to lift restrictions due to property ownership, race, poll taxes, tests, sex, age.

Read about the considerable work those activists performed using their civil liberties to organize, picket, resist, & act in civil disobedience to gain the expanded freedoms you take for granted today. Look at their work & struggles from the abolitionist movement to black lives matter, and look at the work the activists of today are not doing. Notice how they didn’t organize to weaken basic protections whereas people who think like you argue we should.

Arguing to squander basic protections with some wishful thinking that elected authority will reliably fight your causes for you without as easily turning against you

1. is a lazy failure to understand the limitations of authority & its risks for abuse when you tear down protections against it
2. spits in the face of everything past generations of activists fought for.

Like you, I oppose fascists and (more generally) authoritarians, but I’m very clear about why. Authoritarians don’t respect limits to authority: they would tear down those pesky rights & liberties that protect free society & stand in their way, and they would readily crush people & everything we hold dear for their unworthy cause.

“Resisting” authoritarians chipping away at free society by chipping away even more is exactly what authoritarians would want. How thinkers like you don’t see that is beyond me.

Your prescription is wrong & serves authoritarians: I cannot abide it.

it would be a paradox because this tolerance ultimately ensures the unbridled spread of intolerance. Folks weakly on the left have misunderstood this forever.

While I can’t read what you’re responding to, that doesn’t follow (it can be ignored or protested) & no, they haven’t.

The paradox of tolerance doesn’t lead to a unique conclusion. Philosophers drew all kinds of conclusions. I favor John Rawls’:

Either way, philosopher John Rawls concludes differently in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, stating that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls qualifies this assertion, conceding that under extraordinary circumstances, if constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, a tolerant society has a reasonable right to self-preservation to act against intolerance if it would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution. Rawls emphasizes that the liberties of the intolerant should be constrained only insofar as they demonstrably affect the liberties of others: “While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger.”

Accordingly, constraining some liberties such as freedom of speech is unnecessary for self-preservation in extraordinary circumstances as speaking one’s mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty. However, violence or violations of rights & regulations could justifiably be constrained.

A point of clarification: tolerance has a number of paradoxes identified in the SEP, and the paradox in discussion is more precisely called the paradox of drawing the limits.

Opposing basic civil liberties like freedom of expression is very authoritarian & small-minded. Basic rule on policymaking: don’t give yourself powers you wouldn’t want your opponents to have.

Quoting A Man of All Seasons

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake!

Sacrificing basic civil liberties when they don’t suit you is a threat to everyone. Their willingness to do that is why everyone hates authoritarians. It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.

There are better ways to beat these shitheads, and it’s been done before. Contrary to what you wrote, defending civil liberties regardless of whose is high-minded & defends everyone.

Even if it successfully shielded them from 100% of civil rights cases (which it objectively has not)

Objectively, the planets sometimes align, too: the odds are highly against it.

it provides no protection from criminal charges

Also exceedingly rare: we’ve only seen any decent prosecution recently. It’s likely to fail.

While that fight should continue, society has more mundane tools to ostracize & make people’s lives hell.

You’re entitled to be wrong & deny reality. Everyone is entitled dismiss your position.

I’m exceptionally doubtful that clearly established constitutional rights aren’t being violated

Anyone who’s hasn’t lived under a rock the past decade knows clearly established means practical impunity.

Reported in Politico

Some courts have required an extraordinarily precise match between the misconduct alleged in one case and in a prior one in order to find a violation of someone’s constitutional rights.

[…]

When Baxter sued, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out his case. It held that while it was well established that a police dog couldn’t be unleashed on a suspect who was lying down, there was no case addressing someone sitting down with their hands up, as Baxter said he was doing.

From Reason

“I have previously expressed my doubts about our qualified immunity jurisprudence,” writes Thomas. “Because our §1983 qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text, I would grant this petition.”

The judge spoke to a point that qualified immunity critics have been making for some time: The framework was concocted by the Supreme Court in spite of court precedent. It’s a perfect example of legislating from the bench—something conservatives typically oppose.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871, otherwise known as Section 1983 of the U.S. Code, explicitly grants you the ability to sue public officials who trample on your constitutional rights. The high court tinkered with that idea in Pierson v. Ray (1967), carving out an exemption for officials who violated your rights in “good faith.” Thus, qualified immunity was born.

That doctrine ballooned to something much larger in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), when the Supreme Court scrubbed the “good faith” exception in favor of the “clearly established” standard, a rule that has become almost impossible to satisfy. Now, public officials cannot be held liable for bad behavior if a near-identical situation has not been outlined and condemned in previous case law.

Though the original idea was to protect public servants from vacuous lawsuits, the practical effects have been alarming. As I wrote last week:

In Howse v. Hodous (2020), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit gave qualified immunity to two officers who allegedly assaulted and arrested a man on bogus charges for the crime of standing outside of his own house. There was also the sheriff’s deputy in Coffee County, Georgia, who shot a 10-year-old boy while aiming at a non-threatening dog; the cop in Los Angeles who shot a 15-year-old boy on his way to school because the child’s friend had a plastic gun; and two cops in Fresno, California, who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant.

In other words, cops need the judiciary to tell them explicitly that stealing is wrong. The aforementioned police officers were thus shielded from legal accountability, leaving the plaintiffs with no recourse to seek damages for medical bills or stolen assets.

Court standards are so strict, nearly any meaningless, incidental difference suffices to grant officials cover of qualified immunity: literally the difference between lying down & sitting is all it takes to violate rights with impunity.

No, logic does that: showing everyone else you’re wrong is just icing.

You have yet to show that it isn’t derogatory, so far you just have your own oppinion.

Examples have been given, so it’s not opinion: it’s plain observation which you’re denying.

Where’s your evidence? You’ve only given an overgeneralization

that is derogatory

and questionable speculation (not observational evidence) that doesn’t support it.

It is often used to dehumanize women, as the term is mostly used when talking about animals.

Even if a term often dehumanizes, does it follow that the term itself is derogatory (especially if common uses often don’t dehumanize)?

The speculation poses generalizations on observable phenomena.

1. If a term is mostly used to talk about animals, then it’s dehumanizing.
2. Noun female is mostly used to talk about animals.

Some problems with that: where’s your observational, generalizable support for any of it? (Empirical generalizations need that type of support.) Is 2 even true & how would you show that?

Does your overgeneralization withstand observation? No: if it did, then the example given & other refuting instances wouldn’t be easy to find.

What is an empirical claim that fails to account for observable reality? Worthless.

Outright denying observations that conflict with your claim/pretending they don’t exist is part confirmation bias & part selective evidence fallacy. Try respecting logic & choosing tenable claims that can withstand basic observation.

FYI Linguistics and much of science rely on methods other than statistics. Classical & relativistic physics were developed without it. Planetary observations rejecting geocentrism didn’t involve statistics. Much of linguistics is detailed observation & analysis of language samples to identify patterns and rules, so good luck finding statistical studies to support your claims.

Counterexamples don’t require studies: learn logic.

Refuting the claim “men are generally bald” merely requires the existence of a few men who aren’t. You’re claiming “female is a derogatory noun to humans”: as shown it isn’t. Can you explain what the mother quoted in the news is saying about her daughters if your claim about female is true? No, your claim fails.

Deny plain observation all you want: your claim is false.

Statistics aren’t needed to reject an overgeneralization. On the contrary, you would need something like statistical generalization: you’re (over)generalizing the meaning of a word. Any counterexamples suffice to defeat a bad generalization, since no sample should contradict a true generalization: look it up or take introductory logic.

You’re overgeneralizing, and only asserting your claim doesn’t begin to meet the burden to support that. In contrast, I’ve indicated evidence exists & where it’s readily found, which you ignore. Ignoring evidence that doesn’t suit you is a fallacy (often committed in bad faith).

The fact remains that counterexamples to your claim are common, which wouldn’t be expected if the conventional meaning were derogatory.

Here’s an example quoting a story in the news:

“What if I would have been armed,” she said. “You’re breaking in. What am I supposed to think? My initial thought was we were being robbed—that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped. You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women? A little bit of mercy. […]"

So your claim is that by referring to her daughters as females, this mother is insulting them?

While I might be able to argue in “bad faith”, the unsolicited speech productions of the community do not. Do you want to ignore more examples?

Confirmed: couldn’t even search females in lemmy. Disregards common classified ads. Claims “bad faith” while ignoring evidence in bad faith.

Why would I?

Because the claim is empirical, and yours violates plain observation?

So you didn’t look at the

abundant evidence here (search females), in classifieds, personals & online equivalents (eg, ads that limit eligibility to females), or text corpus searches revealing that the noun female referring to humans is often non-derogatory

did you?

registry and gpedit

They’re still around and the various configuration technologies tap into them.

Most of us are pissed that all of those methods half work or are depreciating away for no reason other than some UIx twat couldn’t be bothered to hook something properly so they just reskin an element and misplaced half the functions.

Pretty much the case here, too. It mostly works, and the parts that don’t are super annoying & require ad hoc script-fu.

it blows my mind why this has not been resolved

Yep, configuring Microsoft has sucked incredibly hard compared to free OSs. Managing plain text configuration files in /etc & ~/.config is refreshingly nice compared to the bolt-on weirdness hidden behind various interfaces in Windows. It’s cute getting an error to contact your administrator when you’re the administrator.

Attention in that area is extremely late & overdue, so I was happy to see something like configuration.dsc.yaml.

I see AI mostly as an assistant whose work I review. I might give it a fully written text, tell it to clean up my clunky language, then review it. Or I might ask it to provide some answers with references & review those references.

AI won’t fix broken foundations.

I’m sure we can ride out 11 on 10 … right?

I try to avoid Windows altogether if I can & confine it to less serious work.

In posts like this and elsewhere, commenters kept claiming the noun female to refer to a human is generally derogatory or offensive.

Someone wrote

Occasionally my partner does or says some things that remind me of the “manosphere” aka 4chan neckbeards.

A perfect example was that he sometimes says “females” when he means “women”. I explain that it’s not a swear word but it’s still derogatory. I explain why. Once I did, he understood and stopped doing it.

Despite abundant evidence here (search females), in classifieds, personals & online equivalents (eg, ads that limit eligibility to females), or text corpus searches revealing that the noun female referring to humans is often non-derogatory, so it all depends on the context, they’d insist that usage of the word itself is offensive, insulting, or disrespectful, and they wanted everyone taught to think that until it’s the generally accepted meaning. They didn’t seem to consider that promoting unconventionally sexist framings (ie, female is a dirty word) for wider adoption in our language serves sexists more than anything, and it might make more sense to resist that.

What if we had all these configuration knobs & switches controlled by a plaintext configuration file, and to replicate the configuration, we could just share the file? Maybe we could call it declarative configuration management?

Wouldn’t that be cool? We already have it (partially)?

Maybe an AI could guide us in preparing that file?

Centralized social media is an advertisement platform that targets advertisements according to information & conduct users feed the platform, and some of those users are teenagers?

They’re advertising cosmetics to teenagers unlike ever before in the history of teen-centric media?