The trick is to keep that going in the longterm. I did manage to lose that amount of weight in the same amount of time as well, but ended up gaining it back in under 5 years, which I hear is the fate of most people who lose weight.
There's a nice substack I found that is precisely about this problem and wider variations of it, that is, the problem of figuring out numbers that actually tell you something about the universe:
You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"?
> alt-right
Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
There's a reason Jesus' reply to the first temptation of the Devil was "One does not live by bread alone": the world is not a problem to be solved, and as long as man continues to see it like that, their suffering will continue unabated.
This is what mankind should be shooting for: http://www.fiftytwostories.com/?p=270, not whatever goal the blind idiot god of capitalism spews forth.
No, there are no current day U.S. equivalents to the Uyghur reeducation camps, the ethnic cleansing of Tibet, and the extreme censorship.
What's more, there is no evidence that China is even capable of changing course on these matters, given that their reaction to all these is to deny that they're even real, even suppressing the merest mention of them.
Notably, this is not what the US does with its own wrongdoing, as even extreme anti-government sentiment is allowed to be freely expressed.
The chilling effect is entirely about the speech suppression. One of the side effects of speech suppression is that one no longer knows what people really think, and there isn't good evidence that silencing someone changes their mind, which is the really important thing. There were vigorous efforts to silence the Nazis for example, and none of it mattered, because all speech control efforts target symptoms and not causes.
About right-wing terrorism, pretty sure that's independent, as it has always been there.
The state of discourse online is such because of the Culture War, and the Culture War predates Trump, and possibly caused Trump to be elected in the first place. The current phase of the Culture War began with universities getting creative with their definitions of "bigotry", "white supremacy", "racism", and "sexism". The worldview promulgated there eventually percolated to the mainstream and is a massive driver of the ongoing cultural conflict.
"Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."
Nothing gets stopped by merely refusing to extend some small measure of legitimacy to whatever is deemed "bigoted". These policies and norms do not change minds, which is the skill these wannabe social engineers need to master.
Aside from the "this chills speech/does not" discussion, I just want to point out that hate speech laws or deplatforming don't actually accomplish any of their stated goals. Timothy McVeigh did not need any online echo chambers to perpetrate the Oklahoma City Bombing. In the Weimar Republic, there were hate speech laws (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...). Relevant quote:
"Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."
Hell, Hitler himself was convicted of high treason, but only got a slap on the wrist because the judge and jury were basically on his side.
The only thing strong or soft speech policing contributes to is the further erosion of our civil liberties.
> in the United States, a lack of public accountability already results in outsized impacts and over-policing of communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights.
... in the United States, a lack of public accountability already results in outsized impacts and over-policing of [progressive ingroup], [progressive ingroup], and [progressive ingroup].
> We follow in the steps of the Googlers who spoke out against the Maven contract and Microsoft employees who are speaking out against the JEDI contract. Regardless of our views on the military, no one should be profiting from “increasing the lethality” of the military. We will not silently build technology to oppress and kill people, whether in our country or in others.
Mentions the Maven contract but not Dragonfly, at least not directly.
The worst part is that I don't even disagree with the letter, but I doubt the author has principles as much as he has tribal allegiances. I suspect he would be all-in on this tech if it came with some sort of guarantee it would only be used on "Nazis".
>A slightly off-topic insight I came upon recently was from the civil rights movement: don't call people racist, because it backs them into a corner they can't get out of.
>It's better to debate them on their choices so they can find their own way towards a more enlightened and equitable worldview.
Whether this is possible is very dependent on what exactly is meant by the massively overloaded "racist"/"sexist"/"bigot" terms. These terms are sometimes apt, but quite often these days, they are deployed against facts, in which case it's not possible to reason someone out of the position.
>I've also come to realize that this may partially explain why conservatives I know have been reluctant to engage in political discussion in these times.
No, the main reason for this is that holding certain positions is dangerous in some bubbles. See: James Damore, Lindsay Shepherd, Eric Weinstein, or Charles Murray.
>engaging them in a more positive way. I'm still trying to figure out what that is, however.
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