In other news, water is wet

Because the world is full of contradictions

A Mastodon user I follow recently posted that there are 3 types of laws. I think that is an interesting framework.

What Pakistan is doing here is definitely a “power law”.

and this is a bad thing how, convincing people in the Soviet sphere that the US is better in every way???

honestly any that wants to leave (by a democratic referendum) and doesn’t cause any exclaves or enclaves to exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesusland_map

Another author who doesn’t make the important distinction between moderation and censorship.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

John Perry Barlow was right

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

The more time passes, the more information can already be found on the web (including forum threads) and the less need there is to post new threads to these kinds of forums.

Another example of this phenomenon is that, last I checked, all or most of the articles about individual Israeli settlements on en.wikipedia had, very near the top, a sentence like “the international community considers Israeli settlements illegal under international law, but the Israeli government disputes this”. This is literally about right, but the article about one individual settlement wouldn’t become less accurate or informative if it were left out. No such thing as neutrality on contentious issues.

Just shows that there’s no such thing as neutrality on anything contentious (wikis are in any case systemically unsuitable for contentious issues). Even when and how often to mention indisputably true things can be a form of taking sides.

My comment was in no way a defense of Israeli settlement activity, which I find indefensible and the main obstacle to peace in the region. But to my understanding it is still factually correct that the land the settlements were built on didn’t (at least for the most part) have any residents immediately before they were built.

I think most Israeli settlements were built in previously undeveloped places.

I dislike the whole concept of “social media” in the Facebook sense.

I think the ideal form of “social media”, which was also popular in 2004, was the web forum. I want that back, not something where I have to follow people, but something where I can meet and find people with common interests and discuss those interests with them.

Apache isn’t copyleft, not sure why you thought it was

To a different license that, objectively, is not free and open source.

Quick reminder that the “Nobel prize in economics” is not actually a Nobel Prize.

(I didn’t know this for a very long time, so this may be news to some people reading this.)

https://www.newsweek.com/tourist-menu-abroad-cope-what-get-instead-1960207

This is why US First Amendment standards for freedom of speech need to be adopted everywhere, not with hundreds of “but this kind of speech is harmful to society” exceptions.