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nomilk 9 hours ago

It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.

exe34 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc?

AdamN an hour ago | parent [-]

In some cases yes. Tor for instance was created by the USG and is not easily controlled by the USG.

NuclearPM 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda.

ceteia 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information?

stein1946 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What if educating people takes decades and lies can be prompted in a few minutes?

glwiththat 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards, or smokers, druggies, gamblers, people addicted to doomscrolling or video games or ragebait "news" or…

Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives

shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards

This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.

> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives

Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.

Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.

schiffern 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  >If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
I think you're confusing "works" and "works perfectly."

Education works. It doesn't work perfectly.

pwndByDeath 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Cause and correlation, education gives you options, it always comes to a choice, I know the donuts lead somewhere but I choose to eat two anyway.

Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education.

MASNeo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh my, that is a depressing view on the human condition.

ceteia 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility?

synecdoche an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That depends on what "education" entails. If it's one source only chances of it being propaganda is high.

ffsm8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Intuitively yes, but it's possible that this is one of our biases speaking

From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...

But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect

AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...

Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.

There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.

shevy-java 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People need to decide on their own, so I am against censorship.

ceteia 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your phrasing implies someone spook out against that, but nobody did?

whattheheckheck 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For real... the species is not going to last long if a subset of it gets to control the information flow of the other part... literally unsustainable

simianparrot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes Europe is in a really bad spot propaganda-wise. See Germany’s latest crusade against online «hate speech» — ie. unapproved political views.

shevy-java 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That does not compute.

raincole 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It computes quite well.

> It was a 2021 case involving Andy Grote, a local politician, that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. His complaint triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.

A police raid for calling a politician a dick. Let it sink.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...

generic92034 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power of a politician in charge of leading local law enforcement. It was declared illegal later. And you take that as a proof for what about the whole of Germany?

abraae 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A little bit like a country's leader calling for the death penalty for a decorated pilot and astronaut who reminded service members of their duty to reject unlawful orders.

jasonvorhe 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

linkregister 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government.

If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.

ch4s3 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The claim that Iranian protesters were western agitators is a pernicious lie.

roenxi an hour ago | parent [-]

Are you suggesting the US intelligence services are negligent in this instance? The US launched an unprovoked attack last year to try and force regime change, they look for all the world like they're about to do the same thing again this year. If they didn't have a hand in the protests, that seems like a stunning failure on the part of the US State Department to support their own policies. It'd be a lot cheaper and far less risky than the current military buildup.

Unless I suppose your interpretation of the purge of USAID, etc, by the Trump administration house-clearing a bunch of people because they failed to position assets in Iran. That'd be evidence in favour of them missing the boat on the Iran protests, I suppose. But even then, they've had a few months to get their act together and at least try something.

9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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