admiralteal

I don't think he's being sincere.

What does "protected by 'free speech'" even mean? Who is this free speech and how are they protecting or not protecting anything?

Fraud is a form of speech. It's putting ideas out into the world -- ideas that induce a false understanding in another, typically to reap some material benefit to the fraudster... but lots of the protected forms of speech do that.

The state punishes this speech by outlining a procedure for a harmed party to punish the fraudster, backed by the authority of the state (i.e., lawsuits).

Just because speech is part of a contract doesn't magically transmogrify it into non-speech. Besides, what even constitutes a "contract" isn't something we can say is fully and perfectly defined...

So here we have speech and punishment for it. That sums up to censorship. And how do we decide what is and isn't "fraud" and so does or doesn't qualify as protected speech? It's complicated. Very complicated. We have a huge statutory framework. Legal tests. We're still trying to specify the line. The target shifts through all of history. Cases get overturned and updated and our frameworks and tests evolve. Sometimes we go too far. Sometimes not far enough. Sometimes the shifting reality of how our society operates changes the balancing point. Sometimes we have simply been wrong and regretted it.

Now I think I know what you actually are trying to say. That political speech needs to be highly protected from government meddling. That's hardly a radical idea. I don't know any credible person who disagrees with it.

But there's also a significant legal grey area between which, for example, it becomes hard to identify where political speech ends and direct calls to violence start. Surely it isn't protected for a political leader standing in front of a riled mob to point across the street to his political enemy and shout "go kill him, now!" But where's the exact point where the rhetoric shifted from "proper" political speech to a call to violence, exactly? How much subtext and implication are we going to accept? How riled does the crowd have to be? Either way, by outlining a point where speech can end you up punished, we've censored that speech. And censorship through civil action is still censorship, don't be confused.

In its best form, the state exists to help balance rights in tension. When one person's speech rights are out of balance with the harms that speech inflicts on another (such as in fraud or an incitement to violent), the state exists to mediate that. And we should want it to be just and fair when it does, and balance that tension in a way that creates the best possible environment. Join the reasonable people and discuss where you think things fall on that balance. Don't pretend there's some magical and inviolable difference between this censorship and other kinds that are acceptable, though. Have a reason.

You aren't answering me. You're deflecting.

Are we legalizing fraud or not?

But literally all modern states have media censorship. Literally all of them. For example, prohibitions on libel or fraud. That's censorship. Confidentiality of national secrets is a form of censorship. Hell, even copyright laws can be interpreted as a form of censorship.

In modern history, it's typically the right wing dictators that got voted in through "legal" means, and it's the right wing dictators that achieve power by slowly controlling what can and cannot be said by the media. The leftist dictatorships, if you want to call the soviet-style ones as such, do so through violence and the military. You have it exactly backwards which sins here come from which wing. It doesn't pass a common sense test, so I think you may need to go back to school.

And let's not get bogged down in utter bullshit. We're talking about "progressive" censorship here, which almost certainly means hate speech laws. There have been exactly zero dictatorships that flowed out of political movements of intentional inclusivity. Neither the Nazis nor Soviets were concerned with "hate speech". They both were all about it.

To be clear, I object to both comparisons-- both to the population-wide demographics and the law-wide one -- though I do clearly think it's a conversation worth having.

Because it fundamentally misunderstands what the purpose of representation is. Representation is not an ends on itself, so "matching" population demographics is useless for anything other than identifying likely discrimination. It's not a numbers game. There's no "but hey, look how close we truly are to achieving good representation!" It's not that, because it's still remarkable that this many queer people have been put into power. They're the exception to prove the rule that the field is still inherently hostile to them.

The goal isn't "equal" or "proportional" representation or anything like that. The goal is elimination of the systemic discrimination. The goal is ensuring that brilliant new minds aren't being filtered out for being different from the social norms. This is back to the old RGB quote.

That's libertarianism in a nutshell, though. A political ideology founded from liberalism which claims to reject all of liberalism while also being just the same as liberalism embraced by people who actually kind of hate liberalism. It's a lot of very confused voters registered to that party.

Literally everyone censors speech, and is fine with it. Everyone, with exceptions so scant that may as well not exist at all.

Laws that prohibit workplace harassment. Defamation. Laws that punish incitements to violence. Laws that punish fraud and confidence scams. Laws against insider trading. Even things like RICO. These are ALL, in varying forms, limits on speech that are basically uncontentious to most normal, well-balanced people. These are limits on speech so ubiquitous and accepted that people have actually somehow convinced themselves that somehow "free" speech is clearly categorically different than these other things even when it plainly isn't.

The only people sincerely for (edit: total) free speech are honest-to-god anarchists. True "free speech absolutists" basically do not exist, and when someone claims to be one it really just means they want to be able to get away with using racial slurs in public.

Being queer doesn't make you worse at law. Preexisting discrimination and discriminatory forces in law world is causing that number to be so much lower than the wider population and the best way to forcefully address that is to increase representation and visibility in that population.

These are elite positions. Everyone on the short lists, queer or not, is qualified for the job. The choices made at that point are not for picking the "best" candidate because there is no "best" candidate. There's different choices. Different viewpoints. Different backgrounds. Different politics.

And I think the Biden administration is making good choices as far as appointments go. Intentional choices. Choices meant to make a culture shift that needs to happen.

Batteries have also seen huge price drops.

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ee/d1ee01530c

Even in the past 10 years, the cost per kWh has gone from something like $270 to $180. These prices maybe aren't quite in the full freefall solar has seen, but they're declining very rapidly even absent any technological quantum leaps.

Unlike transit busses, school busses only need to be in service a couple hours a day and can basically trickle charge overnight. They require far lower range on top of the declining battery prices. While I don't know the original NYC study being referenced, it is zero surprise that the school busses are a lot lot lot cheaper.

BEV transit busses are, frankly, a stupid fucking idea. Almost as stupid as battery trains. Put up a pantograph and electrify it properly -- it costs a fraction as much over relevant lifecycles.

Most of the water-born microplastics are tire dust. Byproducts of car-dependent modern life.

And, as someone else in the thread quoted, another requirement of the law is a full ban of any policies designed to increase walkability or access to transit, which would be the way to fight back against those microplastics.

The most important rule for conservatives: they do not want to turn over a better world to their children. They want their children to suffer in all the same ways they did. They believe progress is inherently bad and must be resisted. And I mean, of course they do... that's the definition of "conservative".