>they're mainly complaining about proprietary OS vendors restricting users' choice in browsers
I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.
I would have agreed with you in the past. And I still do when it comes to defending a lot of the BBC content that doesn't come from the news department.
But BBC News is just so bad and utterly corrosive that I'd abolish the entire institution just to get rid of it. Yes I know other UK media is all as bad or worse, but none of them have the public standing or institutional power that the BBC has. I don't think there's any way of reforming the news department at this point. It's not just a matter of a few bad shows or bad 'journalists'. The entire ethos/mission of BBC News is fundamentally broken. They don't know how to do journalism as a public broadcaster, and I don't think they could ever learn how. Certainly not within the current media culture in the UK.
This incident isn't a one off. It's typical. The only unusual thing is the program got cancelled and they actually deleted the article - usually they double down for weeks and refuse to admit fault. I'm guessing that's only because crypto isn't (yet) a partisan culture war issue in the UK media.
I think experience will differ a lot based on when you were vaccinated. Earlier on (Feb/March last year) it sounds like the waiting time wasn't being strictly enforced - you were advised to wait especially if you were driving but there wasn't really any administration of it. That was the experience my parents had and I heard similar from other people vaccinated at that time.
I got vaccinated in the summer at one of the larger vaccination centres and they were being more strict about it. After getting vaccinated they gave you a card with a time written on it which was when you were supposed to leave (although both times it was only 10 mins not 15). There was a dedicated 'room' with chairs in it and a clock and a nurse watching over things. After your time was up you left the card on the chair. Nobody was physically forcing you to stay but there was an obvious expectation that you would and I didn't see anybody walk straight out either time (out of a sample of 60+ people that I overlapped with).
My experience was as described in both May and July. If anything, I think they said less about it on the second dose. It might vary depending on location . . .
>The defining characteristic of cancel culture has always been using collective online action to have someone ostracized from social or political circles, removed from their job or professional relationships, etc.
That's because the whole thing is a moral panic imagined by liberals in the media who were mad that people could reply to them without the filter of the NYT letter pages editor (it was then embraced by conservatives as well for similar reasons and because "you can't even say X anymore" is convenient way to push the buttons of older conservatives). Most of the supposedly dire results of being 'cancelled' are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people because most of them are various forms of 'not getting as many media gigs'. Ordinary people can't get 'cancelled' because we don't make a living going on CNN or giving talks at universities.
Sure you can cherry pick examples of people saying something stupid on social media and their workplace massively overreacting (similarly you could find real examples behind the moral panics of the 80s and 90s - well ok, maybe not actual demonic possession but most of the rest of it was based on at least a few semi-real cases). That's not what any of the people crying about cancel culture care about. If it was they'd be advocating for stronger protection for employees.
The desired solution is of course always to regulate social media so that the nasty mob can no longer reply to opinion columnists and they can go back to splitting their time between writing poorly researched rants and trying to get academics who disagree with them fired.
The defining characteristic of cancel culture is people with massive platforms who spend a lot of time trying to get people fired for saying then they disagree with complaining when people are rude to them on twitter (at best, much the time they are crying about people politely pointing out mistakes in what they are arguing).
'Today' is tabloid bilge and has played a big part in the dumbing down of political discourse in the UK. It's hard to take any of the rest of your recommendations seriously when they start with Today.
Certainly there are other BBC programs that are better, and a small number that are very good, but at this point I honestly don't think they are enough to make up for how awful BBC News is and how much damage it's doing to UK society. In the past I would have made excuses for the regressive way the BBC is funded, but it's really hard to do that now.
The more recent numbers from New York put the IFR at 0.5 to 1%, which matches what most organisations (WHO, governments etc) have been assuming for a couple of months now. Also the actual death count from NY makes the Stanford numbers pretty much impossible (0.2% of people in NYC have already died).
You're getting downvoted because you're dangerously wrong. Yes some anti-vaxers send threats, but the idea that they have managed to silence the mainstream scientific opinion on vaccines is ludicrous. That information is widely available to everybody. I bet you can't find a single anti-vaxer who isn't aware of what the mainstream position on vaccine safety is. Being opposed to the orthodox position is a big part of the appeal!
Also anti-vax isn't something new. It dates back to at least the mid 90s and the original Wakefield paper. There were no cult like organisations pushing it at that time. What did exist was a mainstream media willing to push the story for many years, even long after they knew the original paper was faulty. The problem wasn't born out of fervent zealots, it was created by con artists and co-conspirators in the media who exploited liberal ideas of "free speech" and "media balance" to knowingly spread a conspiracy for their own financial gain. There was no "subculture" at the time. I'm not sure you can even really say there is one now, given that anti-vax is one of the conspiracy theories that has wide appeal across different groups (i.e. it exists across the left/liberal/conservative/right political spectrum).
You are trying to push your own ideological position (more "free speech" is good and will solve the problem) onto an issue, and it doesn't fit what actually happened at all, or what we know about how conspiracy theories spread (it's not a lack of counter-information, because conspiracy theories by definition include the fact that they are being suppressed by central authority).
The way free speech works isn't that nobody is ever wrong, it's that the debate ultimately leads to the truth.
People who don't understand science don't trust random scientists, and there is a reason for that -- anyone can put on a lab coat and say whatever they want. You have to consider the source and actually read the research and determine if it's credible. Most people don't have the training for that, and many of the others don't have the time, but that's not a problem as long as you trust someone who does. Your brother in law is a chemist and you trust his opinion; he trusts the CDC's. When your trusted chemist and your trusted nurse disagree, they get together and hash it out and if they're both being reasonable then one ultimately convinces the other.
The problem comes when you introduce a culture of attacking rather than debating people. Because you're not going to silence the CDC, but you may very well silence the brother in law, and then you create a group of people who don't trust anyone providing the true facts because everyone within their in-group is being silenced.
Which is why, despite a century of various fringe anti-vax misinformation, it's only now, in the climate of filter bubbles and deplatforming, that enough people believe it to compromise herd immunity and allow diseases like measles to stage a comeback.
Yes some anti-vaxers send threats, but the idea that they have managed to silence the mainstream scientific opinion on vaccines is ludicrous.
I don't read what he said that way at all. When one uses force instead of trying to convince, one has admitted to losing the argument.
You are trying to push your own ideological position (more "free speech" is good and will solve the problem) onto an issue, and it doesn't fit what actually happened at all
You're strawmanning here. Free speech is good and did win the argument. Your conceit is that "solving the problem" being the same as "winning the argument" is a false equivalence. Solving the problem is something else entirely.
No one in 2019 publicly defends drunk driving. It still happens. There are southern California communities of explicit white supremacists, but mainstream society shuns them. Those are examples of groups who have thoroughly lost the argument. However, "solving the problem" doesn't mean that the state and industrial complex gets to enforce their will over the populace to the point of creating "thoughtcrime."
I don't want to live in that kind of society. (Tired of having to argue? Looking for a solution which is final?)
I do think that exposing others to pathogens and damaging herd immunity is quantifiable, and we can pass laws around that. It's much preferable to legislate the tangible and physically measurable, instead of creating "thoughtcrime."
>It is an uninformed choice if you want to run wayland
Creating a product that only works for people who already a) know about it and b) buy their hardware specifically to support it doesn't seem like a good strategy to achieve widespread adoption, which requires converting people who don't currently use or know about wayland.
Nvidia goes out of their way not to play nice with Linux. It is no wonder, that Linux ecosystem will not accommodate their special requirements.
When you are purchasing Nvidia, you are giving money to Nvidia. If you have problem with some software not working with a product your purchased, contact the people you gave money to for support.
I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.