OBJECTION!

You’re just attacking me, not my argument

No, I’m pretty clearly attacking your argument. Your argument rests on this assumption that if allowing denial of service based on race only affects minorities <5% of the population, that that makes it acceptable somehow. It’s a horrible position but the fact that it reflects very poorly on you to voice it is beside the point.

You skipped the whole counter argument (comparing to scabs and unions) that this lacks the social structure to support that behavior. If you tried to open a business that wasn’t racist then the racist people would come and threaten you, this isn’t happening with the Uber situation.

Regardless, the Civil Rights Act applies to all businesses. It doesn’t matter if you think one particular business model makes the Civil Rights Act unnecessary - it is still the law. And opening up exceptions to it would set a dangerous precedent.

The thing is that Uber is not performing any discrimination, they are enabling other people to discriminate against each other and attempting to still provide service through it. Claiming that Uber is discriminating is functionally not true.

It doesn’t matter either way. “Discriminating” and “enabling discrimination” are both illegal. I have no idea why you’re so attached to this legal technicality of “contractors” that Uber uses to skirt labor laws, because it doesn’t even change anything here. Declaring someone a contractor does not magically repeal the Civil Rights Act.

The scale at which you would have to be a minority for this to impact you significantly is somewhere in the 1-5% range

OK, so you need to reach a threshold of 5% of the population before you’re allowed to have rights, got it.

with the assumption that the other 95-99% are opposed to you.

That assumption isn’t actually necessary.

Let’s say there’s a small town where 65% are non-racist (or less racist) whites, 30% are racist whites, and 5% are black. If your diner decides to serve that 5%, the 30% of racists will refuse to eat there, and you’ll end up losing a lot of customers. So, rather than “95-99%” needing to be opposed to you, it only needs to be the case that your population is outnumbered by the people who hate you - which is the case for many minority groups in many places in the country.

A diner not serving black people is impactful because a handful of people are the business owners and are effectively gating you out.

That’s not really true. If if was just a matter of a handful of business owners being racists, then those racist businesses would be out-competed by non-racist businesses that appeal to everyone. The problem was wider and more systemic, being welcoming to everyone would cause racists to boycott the business, so even if a business owner wasn’t racist themselves, they would be incentivized to ban the people who the racists hated.

This also goes both ways and is potentially international, Japanese could choose not to serve non-Japanese, a black person could choose not to serve white people for comfort or security.

You’re fundamentally not understanding why Uber allowing people to make this decision is not the same as 1960’s segregation.

Because it isn’t! The scenario you described is literally the exact sort of thing the Civil Rights Act exists to stop! You are literally advocating for allowing denial of service based on protected classes!

So long as the option goes both ways this only hurts the people who opt into the program, not everyone else. The only way this could hurt others would be if those who choose to opt in (as in they only want a certain thing) get priority in the scheduling or if you live somewhere where you are the overwhelming minority.

So the only way it could hurt anyone is if they’re a minority. Yes, that’s exactly why we have the Civil Rights Act and why what you’re suggesting is illegal.

In the second example, if you are still living in a sun down town then getting Uber rides is probably not your biggest problem.

Next you’re going to tell me that black people in racist towns should just eat at home if restaurants don’t want to serve them. And if the bus driver makes you sit at the back of the bus, just drive a car.

Even now, Uber drivers are independent contractors

This is a bullshit legal category that exists primarily to exploit loopholes, but even that does not give anyone the right to discriminate and violate the Civil Rights Act.

If the driver pulls up and thinks you’re sketchy they can cancel the ride, there is no obligation.

Strictly speaking, if a driver cancelled every ride that a black person booked, they could be sued for it, although such a suit would be very difficult in practice because you’d have to have enough records of that driver (or the company, if that was the target of the suit) to show a consistent bias.

This is the case in every business. Denial of service based on protected classes is illegal.

So you disagree with the Civil Rights Act then? Because one of the things it did was force businesses to serve customers, regardless of things like race or sex. And before we had it, there where large parts of the South where black people would be refused service, and if someone did serve them, they’d lose a bunch of white customers.

That’s the very good reason why it’s “not already an option.”

Neither drivers nor Uber have the right, or should have the right, to refuse service based on categories protected in the Civil Rights Act.

This is such an individualist framing.

Of course, material conditions have nothing to do with what beliefs people arrive at or what movements spring up, no, it’s entirely 1) AI, before it existed, or 2) magic.

Yes, because that’s exclusively what soldiers do when on deployments. They literally only shoot children.

I literally just acknowledged that they do things other than shoot children. The problem is, “I don’t just murder children, I also do other stuff” is not any kind of defense whatsoever.

EOT on my end. You’re just shouting naive platitudes from an imagined moral high ground, when in reality you’re just ignorant. No point continuing this thread.

And you’re just blindly licking the boots of your oppressors.

I never said anything even remotely similar to “the military is inherently moral”. Is moral of you to put words in others’ mouths?

Calling any form of military “unethical” is the absolute peak level of clueless wishful thinking.

Right, you only said it was “idiotic” to claim that any military was anything but moral, my mistake, that’s extremely different from saying that the military is inherently moral.

Military in normal countries is used in times of peace to help fighting natural disasters, like floods. I don’t see that as immoral. Do you?

Spend a month helping out with natural disasters, but then you go and murder one bunch of kids and everybody just remembers you as a child-murderer 😔

Or I’d have to support people who actually fight for my interests instead of blindly licking boots and rallying around a flag while dismissing all criticism because “the military is inherently moral.”

Your position can’t withstand even the slightest degree of scrutiny, lol. As expected of a bootlicker.

Hmm, but if I’m conquered by the despot one border over, then I suppose I’d have to start supporting his military, wouldn’t I? After all, I’d be an idiot to not support the only people protecting me my despot from the other despot one border over, right?

There’s no real difference between offense and defense. The more secure my position, the more easily I can attack from it without fear of retribution.

Sorry, I’m not sure I’m familiar with this particular school of moral philosophy. What’s it called? Bootlicking?

What’s wild about this is that people predicted AI would be used for nefarious purposes, but generally in the form of like, showing your opponents doing crimes. But here it’s being used to show their own side doing crimes while the other side is only made to look “cringy” or more like a stereotype.

It really speaks to the utter depravity of the US right that, given a machine that can generate any video of anything they could imagine, this is what they do. These people are utterly incompatible with any kind of free or even functional society, and I really don’t know what could ever be done fix them or their culture.

This sketch was about Facebook but it’s also relevant to Twitter

It’s sad because for most people school is about the only time anybody cares enough about your thoughts to actually read an essay and respond to it intelligently.

I specifically disabled my watch history to get this. If I want to watch something, I’ll go to my subscriptions. Why would I want to interact with YouTube’s algorithm?

It does not. Where?

Tbf, the article should probably mention the fact that machine learning programs designed to play chess blow everything else out of the water.

More personal attacks, because it’s all you’ve got. Funny how I’m the one criticizing civility fetishism but I’ve been considerably more civil this conversation than you have. Maybe you should try practicing what you preach.

Also funny that you think you understand Marx, who famously called for, “Ruthless criticism of everything that exists” as if Karl Marx would be clutching pearls over me calling out Jonathan Haidt.

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).

Absent your attempts to make it insulting and pathological, that’s called passionately opposing injustice. Being dispassionate is not inherently more “sane” or “reasonable,” having emotions is human and some things should provoke emotional reactions.

But of course, in reality, my response was quite calm and well reasoned, presenting plenty of evidence to support my points. You’re the one who can’t keep pace with that and have to resort to these petty insults in an attempt to discredit me, because you’re incapable of a logical response.