• 0 Posts
  • 181 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2023

help-circle
  • So the people in cities should just be worth less when they vote? It’s a federal vote for a federal office, everyone in the country should count the same.

    The individual states already have their own powers which make sure the federal government doesn’t make decisions that are bad for those states. And each county and town have their own governments that pass local laws.

    I’ve also heard this argument so many times but I haven’t heard any actual examples.





  • Yeah Doug was just a tenuous reference to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’s secret Ruler of the Universe.

    I agree, AI is problematic. In theory, that could work in my favor if I train it to be secretly biased towards my beliefs, and put in safeguards to prevent it from being retrained or removed. But I imagine in the real world that would fail spectacularly.

    No system can be perfect with imperfect humans and bad actors at its core, and I don’t really think AI should have any power over humans. Sorry, I kinda brought this down a rabbit hole away from the original point of the post lol


  • Ah, well if enforcement is part of the thought experiment then that’s only a couple extra amendments. The clear enemy of fascism is democracy;

    • Enforcement is led by an oversight committee that is democratically elected by the general population every four years

    • The oversight committee is overseen by an AI trained in intellectual honesty, ethics, and democracy

    • The AI is periodically trained and updated by Doug, a Minnesota resident who answers Survey Monkey questions on his opinion of ethics and democracy and is unaware of the consequences of his responses. Only the AI knows. No one else must know. Human bias has been conquered and postage peace has been achieved.


  • Not who you replied to, but let me give it a try if you don’t mind.

    • All promotional mail must clearly state the organization it was created by and its intent. • Claims made to support that intent must be followed by evidence from an independent and peer reviewed journal, study, or survey from within the past 20 years and clearly cite those sources. • And must provide at least one source that disagrees with the claim if one exists.

    If I can’t stop fascists sending mail, I’ll make sure the recipient has some tools and knowledge to debunk their bullshit. Also it will filter out low effort bullshit, and make factually wrong discrimination more difficult.


  • I understand that. I’m reading way too many laws already lol

    If the letter is determined to be unlawful, there’s a provision that allows Canadian Post to not deliver the letter. It’s a whole process that the mail carriers did not follow. Maybe if they had tried, and used the argument that it was unlawful discrimination or harassment to deliver the fliers, they would have had a leg to stand on. It seems that they didn’t, they took matters into their own hands, and they were punished accordingly.

    To be more clear, I’m not arguing against the punishment. Just the fliers and if they could be considered unlawful


  • Well I’m not too well versed on Canadian federal laws as I’m a bit further south. So I looked into discrimination laws in New Brunswick, Canada and found this Human Rights Act

    Some parts that could be relevant;

    The New Brunswick Human Rights Act is the provincial law that prohibits discrimination and harassment based on 16 protected grounds of discrimination.

    The Act prohibits discrimination in the following five areas under the provincial jurisdiction: Employment (includes job ads and interviews, working conditions, and dismissals); Housing (e.g. rent and sale of property); Accommodations, services, and facilities (e.g. hotels, schools, restaurants, government services, libraries, stores, etc.); Publicity; and, Professional, business or trade associations (e.g. Nurses Association of New Brunswick, New Brunswick Teachers’ Association, New Brunswick College of Physicians, etc.).

    Publicity includes any publications, displays, notices, signs, symbols, emblems that show discrimination or an intention to discriminate against any person or class of persons

    Not a lawyer or expert, but that seems to apply at least superficially. Maybe a bit of a stretch. But it helps that the fliers were full of factually wrong and hateful anti-trans myths. And freedom of speech has limits, even federally.

    ETA: However, mail carriers are probably exclusively covered by federal law, and the federal Canadian Human Rights Act only seems to specify discrimination and not harassment. I do think it’s too much of a stretch to say this would be covered by any federal laws

    Final edit: ok I read more. This is the closest thing I could find from the federal Human Rights Act

    12 It is a discriminatory practice to publish or display before the public or to cause to be published or displayed before the public any notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation that (a) expresses or implies discrimination or an intention to discriminate, or (b) incites or is calculated to incite others to discriminate

    If I am misinterpreting it, please let me know. I think it could be used as an argument tho


  • No where does that source say Biden tried to shut down the Internet. The closest is this part

    Donald Trump publicly advocated that “in some places” we have to talk about “closing up the Internet.” He got his wish, but it came after him personally following his election in 2016. The very free speech about which he made fun turned out to be rather important to him and his cause.

    Also I can’t take a site seriously when one of their sources they link to is the Twitter user “End Wokeness”

    There are some parts I agree with, but there’s plenty there that’s right wing dog whistles for “I want to say hateful things and have no consequences” free speech









  • Yeah, probably wrong. There’s not a bunch of third party info on the environmental impact this factory will have, and no evidence anyone was bribed. If it makes you feel better, this isn’t their first factory and I couldn’t find any negative news about that factory either. Community leaders were supportive though, and a bunch of jobs were created.

    I did find some articles about the positive environmental impact sodium batteries have from production, to relative ease of recycling, if that makes you feel better.



  • Even in the event that the article is talking about, he at least had some logic behind it

    When Walz was elected a few months later, he did try to halt the pipeline’s development. Early in his first term, Walz continued a legal challenge from his predecessor’s administration against Line 3, which he continued until 2020.

    But after that legal challenge was rejected, Walz declined to use his executive powers to stop the pipeline, and his administration approved key construction permits that allowed the pipeline to move forward. He told MinnPost in 2019 that he believed a unilateral decision “would violate principles of ‘checks and balances’ between the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government.”

    “If you fall on the side that says, ‘Well, the governor should just stop this; it’s the right thing to do,’ then you would be making the case that the next governor should just build one, without any environmental review, without any process involved,” Walz said at the time

    Which I don’t 100% agree with but at least see where he’s coming from.