This is a cool way to protect a belief, narrowing the scope so that the refuting data do not apply anymore. Perhaps I can write a fucking essay about it, but do you have data to support this narrowing move? There is like a ton of data that the West has been invasively spying of possible threats to the status quo (from Cointelpro to undercover UK cops like recently), not just people “acting on it”. Furthermore, actions can fall under protected free speech as well, like putting up a poster, demonstrating, and protesting. So your proposal is inherently undemocratic if you roll back freedom to only protect oral expression, quite similar to a “Don’t ask don’t tell” attitude towards gay people. What you just said is simply counter-factual. Blanket surveillance is a staple of Western societies in the 21st century, and it blows my mind that there are still people oblivious to what is more or less spelled out clearly in the Patriot Act and all laws modeled after it across the globe.

For me, Lemmy was a place where I mostly found like-minded people. Even if we don’t always agree (and we shouldn’t) I have had some genuine feedback to the thoughts that haunt me or tickle me. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the interinstance drama which I mostly ignore. And I think that the base probability of transphobia is higher than the sidebar rules would implicate. I am always surprised when I see naive and uninformed takes.

Although I do have found a place to share such thoughts with less harassment and backlash than Reddit, there is some unearned harassment and hating here as well, eg there are some consistent downvoters, to the effect I have a single downvote to anything I post.

Although I think that here in Lemmy I enjoy a higher probability of getting thoughtful responses and well-intended humor to what I post, I feel that a number of people I have interacted with me were highly prejudiced I was a troll or a bad faith actor.

This lack of trust to other users is one of the greatest achievements of fascists and spooks, and they have successfully used it with freedom movements everywhere.

I was also surprised at how conservative the privacy community is. Compared to the amount of radical content posted on every other topic, I find myself among those who think that c/Privacy actively discourages newcomers from developing advanced privacy and anonymity skills.

The privacy thing and some aspects of the Democrats situation pre- and post- election make me think that there is some “manufacturing of consensus” bad faith actors among us. This can lead to disbanding of any project, so we need a solid mindset, in which we assume good faith, but have exact methods for handling disagreement and genuine questions, but also look out for bad faith actors and take steps to build healthy online communities for anarchist and communist free and private software enthusiasts.

Afterthoughts

• The sitewide rules ask us to assume good faith, be civil, and discuss thoughtfully. As it happens, we fail to adhere, and I am to blame as well. I am quite uncivil to people I disagree, but it is often forgiven because a lot of other people are cheering. This makes us a stupid crowd by the way.
• As a Disclaimer, I switched sides wrt to Democrats. Although I had chosen not to post anything pre-election, I was like “Quit this nonsense and vote Democrats already”. I was radicalized after the election, and now think that Democrats are lobbying grifters and can stuff it.

No one is attempting to prove bleeding P->Q here.

If P -> Q and P, then Q

Sure, and when ~P^Q, then P->Q is still not false, and you can further use it in a proof, in the context of other given statements.

This was never presented as a method to show that P->Q, which arguably can only be shown with data.

With all due respect, get your head out of your arse and read this from what I posted:

While modus ponens is one of the most commonly used argument forms in logic it must not be mistaken for a logical law; rather, it is one of the accepted mechanisms for the construction of deductive proofs that includes the “rule of definition” and the “rule of substitution”.

Emphasis is mine. I cannot scream hard enough to get this simple message across to your flipping head. You are reading it wrong, and if you had done one class of prepositional calculus you would have known, therefore you haven’t.

As for your foundationalist pursuits, most of science advances without getting back to the foundations, just as calculus was in practical use long before it was formally proven. So you see a person (OP) struggling with basic conception and composition of his argument, let alone the formal expression, and you raise the bar to the level of logical foundations of mathematics? If not dishonest, this is utterly unproductive.

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Modus Ponens Justification by Truth Table Wikipedia

Quine is the most sane person among your lot. And righteously followed by Thomas Kuhn.

Given A and given B, with literally nothing else, prove A -> B.

That was never the task at hand. You are projecting your belief system so hard you cannot even parse the arguments at a functional level. Yet, after an hour or so, suddenly 4 more vote me down, and only in this particular thread. (Since the rest of the comments in the whole post are unaffected, even mine? What the fuck did you go to your philosophy of science SimpleX chat and called for back up?

Pathetic.

For the last time The truth table does not mean that A->B is “proven”. Obviously you have never done propositional calculus on pen and paper, because this misconception is literally worse than OP’s ravings.

You postmodernist you

I stand by the comment. Bringing up Gödel in polite conversation should go straight to the site-wide banable offenses.

Good luck!

This attempt to patronize is futile. You proved you were in bad faith, and I wish not to continue this discussion.

We want to prove A -> B ergo given A and B, A -> B.

Still failing to see that we aren’t proving A -> B, but getting its truth value within a proof.

OP brought propositional logic to a relativistic conversation. My goal was show why that’s a bad idea.

I think your goal was the equivalent of what any postmodernist does in deconstructing any given field:

• “Nothing is real”
• “you can’t prove the first axioms within the system”
• “it is all in the historical context”
• “No truth statements are possible”

By the same coin, all the other logical fallacies go out of the window, together with boolean logic and what have you. Even the valid ones.

It’s now an axiom that A and not B cannot be

How so?

Remember, we started with the assumption we could prove A -> B by negation, not that A -> B was guaranteed.

It is rather that the fact that people who do have something to hide will probably use encryption cannot be refuted by an instance of someone using encryption without having something to hide.

We waved our hands and said there’s no way for that to happen.

This is textbook modus ponens, sorry if you find that disturbing.

you are assuming some sort of framework that allows you to build these truth tables from real life

This is unproductive and eventually relativistic. I can’t fathom how you dare bring advanced topics of math/logic fundamentals in a discussion like this. We are talking the kind of stuff that takes 200 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2, and why it is not correct, or absolute. What is the purpose of that level of meta in a discussion about flipping privacy?

Pregnancy, abortion seeking, sexual orientation of clergy, being trans, all have become matter of life and death level reasons for caring about privacy.

Ah, another one: insurance company might profile you as XYZ subcategory and discriminate against you.

“Yes but you know what data brokers are hiding from you?” I haven’t tried this one, but I will.

In modus ponens you have four cases:

Here, A is “Having sth to hide”, and B “Caring about encryption”. Obviously case b says that although people having something to hide seek out encrypted methods of communication, it is logically accepted that there might be other reasons, even unknown. A more silly example is this: the grass is wet does not necessarily means it has rained. There might be other reasons. But this does not mean that rain does not make the grass wet.

To sum up, the OP could have just said that. It does not change anything anyway. You can’t beat a propaganda apparatus with this “fallacy talk”.

It is widespread propaganda to make everyone who uses private and encrypted tooling as potential criminals. Encrypted chat is not sth clean cut kids do. Simple as that. It is a pushed narrative by those who don’t want encryption.

Everytime a superficial opinion is so strong that is robust to constant debunking and perpetually reprises, it is typically a propaganda apparatus at play.

Having said that, your attempt to appeal to logic is utterly futile, and also in this particular instance, done badly. Mostly because of the imbalanced and non-sequitur rendering the text unintelligible.

This is some BS. What the OP haplessly tries to say is simply modus ponens. What Gödel are you talking about.

tries to frame itself as it is for traditional Christian values

Nazi Germany had a complicated relation to religion. Although promoting relations with Protestant clergy in the pre-war period, there were conspiratorial tendencies in the Nazis either Nordic-washing Christianity or looking toward some kind of self-styled supremacist paganism, which was popular with the SS top leadership.

In the end of the day I don’t think it even matters though. The American Christian-nationalists are the structural equivalence of the Islamic State in that they want to undo secular political entities and unravel modern institutions. It doesn’t matter if some of them belong to some sinister cult. They will do as much evil, and they are not different from mainstream 1930’s Nazism for that matter.

this one is easy to attack

Exactly. Trans representation was as bad as it already were, and then instead of some positive news coverage what you’ve got? Like 700% upward vilification and stigmatization, with the support of many center and center-left media, and huge institutional and billionaire support.

Man I am telling you, there is another Holocaust in the making and people will not believe it happened when it is over.

That book you suggested by this professor On Tyranny is indeed a compulsory reading at this point for every person caring for Western democracy.

Of his own personal experiences Ionesco wrote:

University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards, one after the other. At the beginning, certainly they were not Nazis. About fifteen of us would get together to talk and to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy…. From time to time, one of our friends said: “I don’t agree with them, to be sure, but on certain points, nevertheless, I must admit, for example, the Jews …,” etc. And this was a symptom. Three weeks later, this person would become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Towards the end, only three or four of us were still resisting.

Replace Jews with trans and you have a discussion we only have too often with fellow “leftists”.

I don’t actually believe there’s a way for the Left to pitch trans issues

Then fuck the Left, I guess?

doesn’t alienate our progressive base

Then fuck “our” “progressive” base?

If the “Left” had spent a fraction of the resources to match the vile torrent of anti-trans propaganda, the situation would be different, with regard to both of your points about pitching trans issues to the progressive base.

Like, John Oliver and Jon Stewart showed exactly how a mainstream progressive media can combat anti-trans demagoguery by Republicans, not to mention Scientific American, the American Psychological Association, and other bodies. You probably weren’t listening because if you don’t think this is a way to “pitch” then you might have been listening to other sources that make the matter unpalatable, like “biological males in female sports” and what have you.

So I take it as a given that you were listening to the wrong sources about it, and you are at least partially anti-trans yourself. On the other hand, you might not be listening to all the analyses after the fact that point to other issues as to why Democrats lost the election. See for example this thread, this comic strip, and this thread also.

In a nutshell, Harris did already try to appeal to the transphobes and she failed. So this should be end of discussion. I am not discussing compromise of the human rights of any group in order to appease to either moderate or extreme bigots.

I already said no. We have a totally different mind model here. You think that there is a static majority with crystalized opinions, a conservative inertia that we have to adapt to. I believe that the revolutionary powers compete with fascist propaganda to win over the majority, who is bound to different material interests.

When this deceptively mild approach of appeasing the majority used, it legitimizes that the fascists are somehow in the right to a degree.

That is what I cannot stand about centrists. I am an anarchist, there is no middle ground between me and, well, a number of things that are utterly unacceptable. There is no middle ground to nazism, and corporatism, for example. By upholding these standards, I am dragging society towards absolute equality.

With your appeasement approach, you legitimize fascists, which is called the ratchet effect. Without revolutionary powers dragging people leftwards, centrist appeasement pushes the mainstream rightward.

Having said that, the proposed example is completely out of historical context, and is wrong on so many levels. I can’t go into all the details right now, but the very idea of “throwing homosexuals in the mix” is preposterous given the historical context.

Let me direct you to the fact that the British Empire paid reparations to slave owners, but even to this day if you try to mention Reparations to the Caribbean and African nations you will be met with vile harassment from hordes of nazi trolls. So I cannot educate you in Marxist political economy right now, but you comparing abolitionism to gay rights is comparing apples and oranges, and the equivalence is unwarranted.

Only under the concurrent prism of anti-wokeism these are deemed comparable, from the viewpoint of being “not cisgender heteronormative germanic/anglo/saxon Christian male”. So you would not be bringing this even remotely up if you were not ever so slightly affected by anti-woke propaganda yourself.