Category: Society & Citizenship

Prohibition, Affirmative Consent | Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig

Similar sexual assault policy changes at Harvard have spurred 28 Harvard Law professors to write a letter of objection, noting that due process and the rights of the accused are seriously threatened by policies that compromise the presumption of innocence and affirmative burden of proof. But those who defend the law likely have a legitimate complaint with the burden of proof as it currently stands: namely, people don’t tend to believe women when they claim they’ve been assaulted.

I agree: the fact that women are not generally perceived to be as credible as men is a real feminist issue. … Affirmative consent laws will not actually address the problem that women are generally viewed as less credible than men.

Nobody is claiming rape isn’t wrong or that it isn’t a problem, but the fact is that it is already illegal, and much of the struggle against the failures of the legal system in handling rape cases will consist of destroying the delusion that women are not credible agents. Affirmative consent laws will be no help there, and may well do some harm.

Source: Prohibition, Affirmative Consent | Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
archive: Prohibition, Affirmative Consent | Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig

Additional: An Appalling Case for Affirmative-Consent Laws – The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf

The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women – The Atlantic

Under the banner of free speech, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been host to rape videos and revenge porn—which makes female users feel anything but free.

All of this raised a series of troubling questions: Who’s proliferating this violent content? Who’s controlling its dissemination? Should someone be?

Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is one of many civil libertarians who believe Facebook and other social media platforms should not screen this, or any, content at all. “It of course must be noted that the company—like any company—is well within its rights to regulate speech as it sees fit,” she wrote in a May 2013 piece in Slate in response to growing activism. “The question is not can Facebook censor speech, but rather, should it?” She argues that censoring any content “sets a dangerous precedent for special interest groups looking to bring their pet issue to the attention of Facebook’s censors.”

When the problem involves half the world’s population, it’s difficult to classify it as a “pet issue.” What’s more, there are free speech issues on both sides of the regulated content equation. “We have the expressive interests of the harassers to threaten, to post photos, to spread defamation, rape threats, lies on the one hand,” explains Citron. “And on the other hand you have the free speech interests, among others, of the victims, who are silenced and are driven offline.”

Soraya, Bates, and Jaclyn Friedman, the executive director of Women, Action, and Media, a media justice advocacy group, joined forces and launched a social media campaign designed to attract advertisers’ attention. The ultimate goal was to press Facebook to recognize explicit violence against women as a violation of its own prohibitions against hate speech, graphic violence, and harassment.

As President Obama put it in mid-September, “It is on all of us to reject the quiet tolerance of sexual assault and to refuse to accept what’s unacceptable.”

Source: The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women – The Atlantic

 

I think the platform is an extremely important factor in the seriousness of communication because of its foundation for the context of that communication. Furthermore, specifically for the internet, there are jurisdictional issues which would have far ranging consequences if solved with only “violence against women” in mind. Many empowered western-culture women may reasonably wish to have threatening internet comments prosecuted the same way as if those comments had been physically snail-mailed to them, even if the sender/commenter is foreign from abroad. However, that opens the door to the question about prosecutions in the other direction, which I would find far more problematic.

This to me begs the question “What is good enough?”

There’s Something Rotten In The State Of Social Media | TechCrunch

There are a few clear themes to point to here that can illuminate exactly where the rot stems from. The overarching theme being monetization — or, more specifically, increasing external pressure to monetize these social services.

Also worth emphasizing: human time and attention span are finite, so any digital service that steers you away from the things you are actively interested in for its own profit-making ends is acting parasitically.

Source: There’s Something Rotten In The State Of Social Media | TechCrunch

America dumbs down: a rising tide of anti-intellectual thinking

The United States is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most important, powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?

While 82 per cent of Americans now say they seek out news digitally, the quality of the information they’re getting is suspect.

An aversion to complexity—at least when communicating with the public—can also be seen in the types of answers politicians now provide the media. The average length of a sound bite by a presidential candidate in 1968 was 42.3 seconds. Two decades later, it was 9.8 seconds. Today, it’s just a touch over seven seconds and well on its way to being supplanted by 140-character Twitter bursts.

Little wonder then that distrust—of leaders, institutions, experts, and those who report on them—is rampant.

Instead of educating themselves via the Internet, most people simply use it to validate what they already suspect, wish or believe to be true.

Facing complex choices, uncertain about the consequences of the alternatives, and tasked with balancing the demands of jobs, family and the things that truly interest them with boring policy debates, people either cast their ballots reflexively, or not at all.

Source: America dumbs down: a rising tide of anti-intellectual thinking

Why Work As We Know It May Be Immoral – Medium

I’m convinced that not only do we as a society work too hard, but we value work too much. Our insistence that work is inherently virtuous doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Having more of our human workers get replaced by machines is the best thing that could possibly happen to us.

They free up the greatest capital there is — human ingenuity and intelligence — to devise better and more effective ways to solve global problems.

It’s immoral to ask people to work when there’s no work that needs to be done. It’s immoral to create unnecessary labor so people have “something to do”.

“It’s only when we reject the idea that … labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor,” [David Graeber] writes. “To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others.”

Source: Why Work As We Know It May Be Immoral – Medium