I think what you’re getting at is the heart of dysfunction with the Western world’s conception of free speech. We perceive free speech as the government getting out of the way and letting people say what they want, but if that’s the only thing you do then your free speech is very, very shallow. How do you stop bigots from shouting over minorities by clogging the mail? How do you stop the wealthy from owning all of the TV channels and controlling the public conversation? How do you stop corporations or foreign governments from astroturfing every online forum with misinformation?

Free speech, counterintuitively, actually requires a democratically accountable government to take responsibility for maintaining it. It does not simply come into existence by their absence.

If it’s okay for postal workers to refuse to deliver mail containing viewpoints they disagree with, that means it’s okay for bigoted postal workers to refuse to deliver mail from or to LGBT organizations.

Wrong. You are describing two separate things and arbitrarily deciding that they are equal actions. Preventing hate speech from being circulated is a moral act, while hatefully censoring benign communications is not.

I agree in that it should be a democratically-accountable panel that prevents hate speech from being disseminated through the mail, rather than an individual, but that doesn’t make this individual’s actions wrong.

“I was just doing my job” cannot be accepted as a defense of doing something immoral. In this case the rules were on the wrong side of morality, and breaking them was the right thing to do.

Apples to oranges comparison. Facilitating speech is not automatically a neutral action. Facilitating hate speech is bad and censoring hatemongers is good. The law is irrelevant to the question of morality.

The Post Office disseminating hateful propaganda is bad, actually, and just because the law currently requires Postal workers to do it doesn’t make it right.

Do you really think buying Facebook ads and running upvote farms is a major contributor to the temperature of the country? I’m sorry but I’m just not convinced. I think that the corporations and billionaires that own all of our media outlets are responsible for 99% of disinformation and that Putin’s efforts are a fart in the wind in comparison.

The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.

:doomjack: The Okinawans themselves will tell you this, in a lot of respects that island is Japan’s dumping ground.

Something that NotJustBikes brings up in one of their videos is that the Netherlands’ incredibly bike- and public transit-oriented infrastructure makes driving a car (for those who want or need it) much more pleasant as well.

if they mowed it how often like they claimed it wouldn’t have gotten that bad before noticing

I’m not so sure about this. Say they visited and did maintenance once a month - a construction crew only needs a couple days to trample over an area and dump a bunch of construction materials on top of it.

I’m sure the legal case will come down to what Texas law requires a person to do with their land to be considered to be using it, and whether or not SpaceX did their due diligence to make sure they weren’t messing up anyone else’s land with their construction. It’s possible that all of this was an accident, but I don’t think that SpaceX deserves the benefit of the doubt.

also

the hole they dug was a failure

lmao it was a hole in the ground that they dug as a marketing gimmick what more do you want.