#unpersuasion

[cayomuchacha]

Best of luck getting me to read all that bullshit buttercup. I refuse to engage with a brick wall💖

really discouraging trying to engage with “moderate” (conservative) liberals.

Because if this is how they speak to me, idk if i could call it persuasion, i am saddened for the justified reactions of people far less nice than me when spoken at like i have been spoken at towards by these callous and seemingly uncaring liberals. it’s the berating chastisement. it’s just so unfriendly, unlikeable, and insufferable. i say, biden had the executive prerogative to mandate multiple stimulus checks. They say, he TRIED! I say he didn’t try hard enough for my liking. They say there’s WORSE.

😩 it’s the circlular conversation of torture liberal democrats led by biden clinton pelosi etc have kept minority dissenting voices on loop with their amorphous moral goalpoasts.

Democrats in government keep my island Cuba on the terrorist list for evil, imperialist reasons. He upholds through verbal inaction the illegal sanctions placed on Cuba by US law. He doesn’t even speak against it. Democrats in government keep Palestine from having state representation at the United Nations for evil, imperialist reasons. Democrats in government supply with IRONCLAD SUPPORT the WEAPONS USED BY A GENOCIDAL ROGUE STATE. I WON’T PUT DEMOCRATS IN OFFICE AGAIN UNTIL DEMOCRATS RESOLVE THE GLARING ISSUES BROUGHT FORTH TO THEM BY DISSENTING VOICES OF VULNERABLE MINORITY CONSTITUENTS OF THEIR OWN COUNTRY WHO THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT.

[eee-lordy]

4 for the prompts! with felix??? thanks!

Thanks nonny! Would love more Felix requests if you have any up your sleeve 😍

"Not what I came for."

───※ ·❆· ※───

He tried to get you to come home with him for the summer.

But you'd watched this cycle from afar, across campus. You'd watch Felix charm people closer into his orbit. And they would flock toward him like flies to sticky paper. Felix ate it up every time. And then he'd get bored. And a new summer would roll in, and Felix would parade around a new placeholder for a handful of months.

"I'm not particularly interested in a fling, lover boy." You half joked. The people Jacob attached too every summer weren't always romantically linked. But regardless of intentions, you rose your point.

"Is that what you think of me really?" Felix held a hand to his chest in appallment.

"Not entirely. I am just as infatuated with you as everyone else. I just don't want to be buttered up to be abandoned when winter comes you know?" You sat across from Felix, not taking for granted how he leaned in to listen to you speak. There was no use in fighting off how entranced he'd been with you. There was no fighting the way Felix trailed beside you this semester. You were his next victim. And you'd let it last as long as the school year played out. But you knew better than to follow him home.

"Then I've got a challenge ahead of me. How can I prove that I'm determined to spend longer than a summer with you, love?" Felix flicked out a wrist, letting his long fingers fall to your face and rest on your cheek.

You smiled despite your hard stance. You shrugged because you really didn't have an answer. You let him go on persuading you a while longer to join him at Saltburn. Then you insisted he head back to his own dorm, it was getting late.

The rest of that month, each day ticked by with anticipation of summer break approaching. Felix asked once in a while if you'd reconsider his offer. He droned on about how he'd miss you. He'd mentioned wanting you to meet his family. He even begged once. You stuck out a sorry lip, pouting a decline. It just wasn't going to happen. If Felix liked you as much as he said he did, he'd come running back to campus, more tan, less educated, and just as enamored with you. If he did, you'd be delighted. If he didn't, you'd be assured you'd decided correctly to stay away for the summer.

When the day came for Felix to pack up and head home, he didn't ask you along. He didn't say much of anything at all. You'd never seen him so desolate, so unpersuasive. He flung his arms around your shoulders for a hug that he wouldn't let go from for a long time. Neither of you spoke. Neither of you said goodbye.

And then the days felt empty. You'd made plans and enjoyed the sun and filled your days with fun best you could. Not one passed without thoughts of Felix in mind, though. You wondered how he'd been doing, what he'd been up too, if he was thinking about you even half as much as he said he would.

You even turned down a new date, feeling a little ray of hope left that Felix would come running back to you once the new semester started.

Each second of those free as can be days passed by excruciatingly. You were kidding yourself when you tried to pretend you didn't miss him. You were frustrated when you realized he'd become your favorite ear to talk off, favorite set of eyes to look for across the halls. You told yourself to stop caring when you glanced at your calendar and saw too many days left to pass before summer was over.

And then there was a knock on your dorm room door.

Felix had returned, cutting his break short. He didn't even unpack the bags he'd taken home. He headed right to your door and hoped you'd still open it with a smile like before. And when you did, he flung himself toward you in an embrace you hadn't expected.

"Back so soon? Missed the lunch hall food that much?" You joked, hugging Felix back in utter shock and awe.

"Not what I came here for." Felix cooed, clinging to you with all his might. "Told you I'd miss you. I didn't just want to bring you home for the summer. I wanted you."

"And I believe you now." You beamed, relishing the way his hands stayed clutching your sides. Stunned by the way Felix was looking at you now, with a desperation in those eyes you didn't have to miss any longer. You couldn't believe Felix broke his cycle. He went home without a companion, and he came back here much sooner than you knew he always used to. Felix broke his cycle for you. You broke his cycle.

"Let's make up for lost time, yeah?" You grinned, insisting he leave his bags on the floor and follow your every lead. As Felix bended to your will, you asked what his plans for next summer were. He told you to start making them. It was his turn to be strung along. And it was your turn to watch as Felix wrapped himself right around your finger.

───※ ·❆· ※───

[anghraine]

My housemates and I are watching S5 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which my bff J and I love, and Ash had never seen. She's been having a blast with it and it's been really cool to watch through her eyes.

I've seen some condemnations of how Entrapta is handled in S5 that I found, let's say, unpersuasive. Re-watching now, I'm not just fine with how she's handled, but have realized how much I really love it. It's still refreshing for me to see a narrative where an obviously autistic person—an adult, which is extra refreshing!—is treated as a moral agent without ignoring her actual handicaps.

Entrapta is capable of moral failure and has failed morally in the past, despite her basic good nature and personal kindness. She has lines she won't cross and where she'll stand her ground, and she hits that line before most everyone in the Horde but Adora, but her priorities were still very wrong. She's not just an avatar of Autism, and by S5 we see that she's grown and changed without any indication that she's less autistic now or more authentically Entrapta than she ever was. AND at the same time, it's clear that there is something rather cruel when other characters evaluate and judge her behavior without making any allowances for how Entrapta perceives and processes things around her. Sometimes they don't seem to even slightly consider how differently Entrapta experiences and understands the world.

The scene (in S5!) where she belatedly figures out that the others in the scene are angry at her, and everyone except Scorpia acts like she's stupid for not already realizing it, is incredibly familiar, honestly. It's one of those moments where I felt like it could seem forced or artificial in a "teaching moment for the kids" way, and yet it's one of the most relatable moments in the show for me.

[mariacallous]

The Internet Archive has lost a major legal battle—in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law.

Notably, the appeals court’s ruling rejects the Internet Archive’s argument that its lending practices were shielded by the fair use doctrine, which permits for copyright infringement in certain circumstances, calling it “unpersuasive.”

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.

The NEL was an offshoot of an ongoing digital lending project called the Open Library, in which the Internet Archive scans physical copies of library books and lets people check out the digital copies as though they’re regular reading material instead of ebooks. The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.

The NEL was the subject of backlash soon after its launch, with some authors arguing that it was tantamount to piracy. In response, the Internet Archive within two months scuttled its emergency approach and reinstated the lending caps. But the damage was done. In June 2020, major publishing houses, including Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, filed the lawsuit.

In March 2023, the district court ruled in favor of the publishers. Judge John G. Koeltl found that the Internet Archive had created “derivative works,” arguing that there was “nothing transformative” about its copying and lending. After the initial ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the parties negotiated terms—the details of which have not been disclosed—though the archive still filed an appeal.

James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University, says the verdict is “not terribly surprising” in the context of how courts have recently interpreted fair use.

The Internet Archive did eke out a Pyrrhic victory in the appeal. Although the Second Circuit sided with the district court’s initial ruling, it clarified that it did not view the Internet Archive as a commercial entity, instead emphasizing that it was clearly a nonprofit operation. Grimmelmann sees this as the right call: “I’m glad to see that the Second Circuit fixed that mistake.” (He signed an amicus brief in the appeal arguing that it was wrong to classify the use as commercial.)

“Today’s appellate decision upholds the rights of authors and publishers to license and be compensated for their books and other creative works and reminds us in no uncertain terms that infringement is both costly and antithetical to the public interest,” Association of American Publishers president and CEO Maria A. Pallante said in a statement. “If there was any doubt, the Court makes clear that under fair use jurisprudence there is nothing transformative about converting entire works into new formats without permission or appropriating the value of derivative works that are a key part of the author’s copyright bundle.”

In a statement, Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland expressed disappointment “in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”

Dave Hansen, executive director of the Author’s Alliance, a nonprofit that often advocates for expanded digital access to books, also came out against the ruling. “Authors are researchers. Authors are readers,” he says. “IA’s digital library helps those authors create new works and supports their interests in seeing their works be read. This ruling may benefit the bottom line of the largest publishers and most prominent authors, but for most it will end up harming more than it will help.”

The Internet Archive’s legal woes are not over. In 2023, a group of music labels, including Universal Music Group and Sony, sued the archive in a copyright infringement case over a music digitization project. That case is still making its way through the courts. The damages could be up to $400 million, an amount that could pose an existential threat to the nonprofit.

The new verdict arrives at an especially tumultuous time for copyright law. In the past two years there have been dozens of copyright infringement cases filed against major AI companies that offer generative AI tools, and many of the defendants in these cases argue that the fair use doctrine shields their usage of copyrighted data in AI training. Any major lawsuit in which judges refute fair use claims are thus closely watched.

It also arrives at a moment when the Internet Archive’s outsize importance in digital preservation is keenly felt. The archive’s Wayback Machine, which catalogs copies of websites, has become a vital tool for journalists, researchers, lawyers, and anyone with an interest in internet history. While there are other digital preservation projects, including national efforts from the US Library of Congress, there’s nothing like it available to the public.

[specialagentartemis]

I’m not thrilled about the Internet Archive verdict, but I’m also just like, of course this is what was going to happen. What did those overconfident idiots THINK would happen. They did a mass book piracy. Their arguments that they didn’t were extremely unpersuasive. Did they really think the publishers would just go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about it

[loving-n0t-heyting]

I do find it kinda unpersuasive as an argument that tumblr specifically has it out for [demographic] thst you can point to both all these public instances of [demographic] getting banned and yr own collection of reports you filed that you never heard back from about [other demographic]. Real tell here is that te rfs and nazis say the exact same thing, if you ever make the mistake of reading them at any length. Theres an obvious skew to ones own knowledge here

That said, matt is clearly being a very publicly thin skinned ass about this situation in particular particular, which you cant chalk up to sampling bias

[itsclydebitches]

I know there's a lot to unpack in James' new interview but I am feral, FERAL I SAY, over this fucking line right here:

"His need was to be loved, and his tragic flaw was the belief that he was unlovable."

Back before Season 3 hit and Tedependent became ~trendy~ (not actually lol) I was heacanoning and writing Trent as a pretty anxious individual, someone with a ton of internalized self-loathing whose "whole vibe" was more of a mask than legitimate self-confidence. At the time I worried about him coming across as too OOC because really, what did we have to support this? Ted Lasso's prevailing theme of men discovering love and support when they previously had none? The lovely parallel of Trent struggling with many of Ted's own flaws, but presenting in opposite ways (cutting cynicism vs. endless optimism)? The then—far less developed—comments from James that Trent might have a rough relationship with his father? It felt unsubstantiated, unpersuasive, built more on my own interest in those kinds of characters and the occasional awkward moment from Trent than actual canon. Even into Season 3 I questioned whether my reading of him as struggling, significantly, with the care Ted offers wasn't just a result of my own, imagined inner life for him.

But NOW.

I'm sorry, hold up, can I just re-confirm that TRENT'S TRAGIC FLAW IS HIS BELIEF THAT HE'S UNLOVABLE? Unlovable??? Thank you, James Lance, for validating every reading I've had of this character since he first appeared on screen. Do people realize the depth this adds to every interaction Trent has? Particularly with Ted? Unlovable Trent Crimm starts off this relationship with a sincere compliment on his style ("I like your glasses"), something that Season 3 will present as a core part of his personality, something he's largely hidden away. Unlovable Trent Crimm grappling with the fact that yes, Ted enjoyed spending time with him. Him. WHILE he was playing the part of the asshole journalist. Unlovable Trent not being rejected when he admits, in moments of vulnerability, that he "Loves [their] chats." Unlovable Trent having his father's (likely snide) "Independent" comment reframed as a fun pun + advice to follow his "bliss": you have support, Trent, no matter what you choose to do. I don't care if you're successful covering a masculine-coded sport, I care if you're happy. Unlovable Trent committing the ultimate betrayal and being forgiven for it, immediately. Unlovable Trent being forcibly integrated into the Richmond family; actively accepted rather than passively tolerated: yes you should work here, yes you're a Diamond Dog, sit your butt down, Trenthouse Magazine, you will never be excluded again.

I'm sorry for the rambling post but I'm just so!! Insane about this!!! So much of Trent's hesitance could have been written off as a result of his career. That is, it might have been merely a learned reaction after decades of deliberately pissing people off. Of course they dislike him, but take him out of that environment and everything's fixed. Yet James has confirmed that he played Trent as intrinsically believing this. The career was a result of that unfounded fear—Might as well keep people at a distance before they hurt me first—as well as, simultaneously, a desire to somehow achieve the love that should have been unconditional from the start—Maybe my father will like me if I can be that "alpha male man's man" in print. Because this isn't just a flaw, it's a tragic flaw, a literary term that denotes a deficiency that leads to the character's downfall. This belief is so entrenched that it has led to Trent actively self-sabotaging his chances of being loved in the first place; a horrible self-fulfilling prophecy. He NEEDED someone like Ted—a fucking love sledgehammer that forces people to accept his care in the least subtle ways possible, even when they're acting as their own worst enemy—and by god, he got him!

Aside from Nate, Trent has always felt like the most isolated character to me at the start of the series (and even Nate has a good relationship with his mother and sister). What we've learned in Season 3 and James' interviews has only reinforced that reading for me: he was closeted in his marriage, unintentionally hurting his daughter, he's suffering under his father's expectations, he hates the press persona he's created to survive, he's bored at his job, footballers and other potential interviewees despise him—and not without reason (Roy). He has no friends that we see pre-Richmond and he's reached a point where the simple act of someone saying that they liked spending the day with him—again, while he's actively TRYING to piss them off and keep his distance—has him in such a state of shock he runs for the door, pens an uncharacteristically hopeful write-up, and is well on his way to upending his entire life for that man.

Because of course he is!!! From Trent's perspective Ted is a fucking impossibility shaped into human form. This is a man in his 40s whose greatest lifelong fear—now all but a certainty at his age—has been dismantled in a matter of hours. I'd write a book-length love letter to him too! And RIP to finale!Trent, but I would have run fucking Rom-Com style after the man who not only changed my life, but my entire sense of self-worth. (Ah fuck, but there's that tragic flaw again, keeping Trent hesitant. I now stand by my reading of the "I'll leave you be" scene as an unrequited goodbye.)

But finale aside, the man who'd convinced himself he was unlovable fell for the man who was love incarnate.

If that's not the most romantic shit you've ever heard idk what is!!!

[azdoine]

I say this with love but at this point I genuinely think the vote blue no matter who crowd is at covid-19 levels of having to argue for an eminently sensible harm reduction policy position while also being as unpersuasive as possible

[hasufin]

You've probably seen clips from this. This is Sen. Josh Hawley's speech to the RNC, in which he directly calls for Christian Nationalism.

I watched the entire thing. It's... it's a ride.

The weird thing is, sandwiched in the middle of his ahistorical bullshit and his Christian Nationalism, is an economic proposal which would fit right in at the DNC. It's weird.

Anyway, below is my complete reaction to it:

So, against my better judgement, I did listen to the speech.

Now, I’ve been reluctant to do so. It has been my experience that American Rightwing Christians tend to speak in a sort of dialect; that they tend to say things which – to an outsider such as myself – seem terribly incendiary, aggressive, and deeply unpersuasive. I’ve had Christian friends explain to me, of preachers “Yes, I know that sounds horrible to you, but that’s just how they talk in the Church”. And thus, I did ask this question [on Quora] to among other things give those within that community an opportunity to explain his words. I have, I confess, been disappointed: what I’ve received instead has been dismissal; just refusal to acknowledge that the things being said would reasonably be interpreted as threatening to one not steeped in that culture. Dismissal, I will say, serves to affirm our concerns: it’s like how Kavanaugh claimed that Roe was “settled law”… until he voted to overturn it. We don’t trust dismissal, because it has been a lie in the past and we expect it to be a lie in the future.

Now, the first few minutes of Hawley’s speech present me with a conundrum.

You see, he gives a brief historical recount of the fall of the Roman Empire, and of the Puritans (whom I have never before heard referred to as Augustinians, but again, I’m just not fluent in this particular patois.)

And the problem here is, his narrative is simply false. I mean, he pinpoints the early 400s as the fall of the Western Roman Empire – fair enough – but that’s also when Christianity became the majority religion of that empire; characterizing them as pagans as that point, and “paganism” as the cause of the fall of the Empire is quite ridiculous. But I’ll come back to that later, and why it’s deeply disturbing to me.

And then the Puritans. Again, I’ve never really heard them called Augustinians but that’s reasonably an oversight on my part – I’m of the opinion that their influence on the American colonies is somewhat overstated, but that’s just my opinion. His characterization of them is I think somewhat lack in nuance and reality, but the how and why of that seems important.

So I’m left with a bit of a conundrum. Do I assume his actual knowledge of history is that of a disinterested high schooler? Do I assume he just plain doesn’t know what he is talking about? If that’s the case, I – and everyone else - really ought to disregard whatever he says of policy: he is a fool, and we oughtn’t be led by fools.

But, perhaps he does know better? Yet, that’s worse. If he knows that the Roman empire did not fall due to “Paganism”; that the Puritans were a particularly intolerant sect of Reformationists who found freedom overly threatening and ultimately declined largely due to the infighting which is characteristic of rightwing authoritarian groups. If he knows this, and offers an ahistorical alternative instead, then he is a liar, and should be directly opposed.

One can slice that Gordian knot by realizing he offers these not as history, but as mythology. It’s not whether they’re true, but what they’re meant to communicate. However, as a non-Christian, that’s… that’s actually worse.

His decision, then, to attribute the downfall of Rome to corruption, to loving pleasure and self-indulgence, is important. Now, I think we all know that Rome did not fail because their soldiers were just too busy drinking and having sex. But that claim appeals to a disgust-based morality: it indulges in a visceral hatred of those excesses. And that same disgust-based morality can be used to justify any number of horrors. It’s a disgust-based morality which ties a gay man to a fence and leaves him to die; that beats a transwoman to death; that decides Jews are baby eaters and condemns them to ghettoes and them to death.

His ahistorical account ignores the entire history of Christian internal warfare. It pretends that the Puritans were an inclusive society – rather than one which executed their own on the mere allegation of them being people like me.

And I’m hearing him proceed further, to claim all things good… indeed, the utter ridiculousness of claiming specifically secular achievements as Christian. This is a fact-free speech, which is intended to appeal to a particular audience of which I – and any other non-Christian – is not a member. He proclaims that as a non-Christian I should embrace Christianity… after having lied and said many of distinctly non-Christian things are Christian. I mean, if you define Christian as “the stuff I want to claim” and non-Christian as “everything else” then sure… but that’s not what those things mean, and we’re back to that conundrum: is he a liar or a fool?

And then he gets back to his disgust-based morality, his appeal to hatred, his lies about his opposition, and just outright about what is going on right now.

Ah, and here we are: “the left” is evil, “the left” wants to destroy. And… wait, did he just claim that liberals like Ayn Rand? What??? And Milton Friedman? How… how does anyone buy this? I’m sorry, what the hell is this?

He is literally saying that the left is against god. This speech very literally demonizes his opposition. He lies about people, and and paints them as simply being against good. I wonder how anyone considers this as acceptable at all. This is Blood Libel.

Now, wait, he’s deriding other republicans? And saying that it was republicans who spearheaded DEI? I’m just confused here. Basically, it seems like he’s saying literally anyone who opposes him is evil, and he will make up Any Damned Thing to paint them that way.

Being honest, I’m not sure I am all that interested in the second half of this. Hist first half, in which he very literally calls everyone who isn’t on his side evil; in which he says the left is against love and god. I recognize that he doesn’t directly say “let’s put all the liberals in camps and kill them”, but this is the rhetoric which is used to justify these things. The policies he puts forth afterwards are less incendiary – and it’s kind of weird that he had to open a policy proposal which matches rather well with the liberal platform, with demonization of liberals, and I don’t know how anyone can reconcile that. But, y’know, he also claimed that liberals like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, so there’s a lot of contradiction there.

Oh, wait now he’s directly speaking against religious liberty. He’s saying directly that religious liberty is only valuable because it lets us all practice the same religion, and that Christianity is our national religion. So we’re back to Deeply Disturbing here. “More civil religion, not less”. Atheists are evil, they hate Christianity, this other not-religious thing is religion, trans people are evil… yeah. And he wants direct endorsement of Christianity. Now, I don’t think that taking down a pride flag is directly oppression, but I definitely see it as a first step: establishing that not-Christianity is a religion, and should be supplanted with Christianity by the state. So, having listened to this… I would dismiss him as a madman if he weren’t giving a speech at the RNC. But he is. And I see what he’s saying as setting the foundation for much worse. There’s nothing good to come of defining Everyone Else as being evil.

[togglessymposium]

I feel like theodicy is the place that (post-Plato? post-Zoroaster?) Abrahamic religions tend to really fail as systems of thought.

Like, spiritualism in general tends to be unpersuasive as a question of fact- there's simply no real empirical support for it, even though the construction itself is often powerfully evocative and beautiful. But the matter of evil in Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc. is something else, a place where this subset of religious doctrines just has visible and painful problems on its own merits. It's not just that I don't accept the factual claims- it's that the arguments don't add up at all. Theodicy is the crux where you have to fundamentally choose between doctrinal fidelity and the pursuit of truth, because it's where the doctrine is facially, deductively inconsistent and wrong.

At the end of the day, you just can't propose a flawless and omnipotent designer of the cosmos while simultaneously making evil a centerpiece of your analysis. You can be Manichean, and have evil arise from not-God or from some limit God has. You can assert that evil doesn't exist, though that can be tricky: Plato's evil-as-absence thing was largely unsuccessful as an attempt, both because positive evils like pain are regular features of human experience, and because pure deprivation as an ontology of evil still doesn't solve the theodicy problem. But what you cannot do is assert that the foundation of the cosmos is a perfect and all powerful entity incapable of error, and also that evil exists. The toddler's hand is well and truly caught in the cookie jar.

Most forms of modern Christianity and Mormonism try to use free will to thread the needle; mainstream Islam I think is a bit more Leibnizean, though it still leans hard on human culpability. But you can't actually do this! The claim, of course, is to say that the setting of the cosmos is perfectly good, that human volition itself is also perfectly good, but that volition has the special quality of sometimes (though not intrinsically) producing evil, which we all then have to deal with. But there's nothing in free will that actually makes it a suitable solution to this problem. The deity is necessarily extratemporal, and in that frame, volition lacks the special properties it would need to hold this weight; when you can flip to the end of the book any time you like, there's no such thing as indeterminism. Every human choice has one and exactly one result, just as with any other domain of reality; free will, like gravity and electromagnetism, is a process with wholly knowable outcomes. Hence, 'free will' is (in the context of monotheism) a purely linguistic construction that means only 'the consequences of this process are not God's fault.' It has no properties other than the shift in culpability itself, no proposed mechanism or relationship to other phenomena, no inherent virtues that can be explained in terms of any moral system. It's an entirely circular argument, a way to credit God for very tall apple trees but blame somebody else for the invention of applesauce.

[onecornerface]

Almost all arguments for theism are problematically sectarian

Why do atheists and agnostics not find the arguments for theism persuasive? According to some less-charitable theists, this is due to emotional resistance to theism. According to other more-charitable theists, this is due to some nebulous conception of reasonable disagreement, or because God does not reveal his existence to everyone. According to some atheists and agnostics, it is because the arguments for theism are weak. I suggest an explanation which overlaps with some albeit not all of the above.

Many defenses of traditional theism (including positive arguments for theism and rebuttals to arguments for atheism) hinge upon controversial principles in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. These tend to be principles which many atheists and agnostics reject or do not see reason to accept. This makes such defenses of classical theism unpersuasive—even if such arguments are sound *and* atheists & agnostics are reasonable.

In fact, I think this problem applies to nearly every popular argument for theism. They ALL hinge on controversial premises in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics—ALL principles which are disproportionately rejected, or not accepted, by atheists and agnostics. For brief illustration, I will below give several representative examples.

Many versions of the cosmological (or first-cause) argument for theism are successful only if the first-cause needs to be personal (or person-like), which seems to require something in the ballpark of mind-body dualism or libertarian free will, which atheists tend to reject. This is in addition to how the Kalam cosmological argument requires controversial views in philosophy of infinity. However, I am here assuming that such views in philosophy of infinity are true and thus that there must be a temporal first cause. The temporal first cause is shown to be God (in a traditional sense) only if it must be personal rather than nonpersonal. And this requires controversial premises from philosophy of personhood, agency, mind, or free will—which atheists and agnostics tend to reject or not accept. Otherwise, it cannot be shown that the first cause can’t be an impersonal quantum vacuum state or suchlike.

Similarly, many versions of the argument from design (such the fine-tuned universe argument, which is by far the most credible such argument) are successful only if a personal designer is a superior explanation than an impersonal (non-) designer. But a personal designer only has greater explanatory value if we make controversial assumptions in fields such as philosophy of personhood, agency, mind, or free will—which again atheists and agnostics tend to reject or not accept. Notably, my observation here is entirely independent of controversies around multiverse hypotheses. Even if multiverse hypotheses are false, scientifically poor, or philosophically unsound, this gives very little comfort to fine-tuning arguments for theism—unless theism offers superior explanations, via appeal to controversial metaphysical theories, which atheists and agnostics tend not to accept.

Moral arguments for theism overwhelmingly rely on non-naturalist moral realism, which many atheists and agnostics (especially among non-philosophers) reject. If moral naturalism or moral anti-realism or moral weak realism is true or justified (either in general, or to atheists and agnostics), then atheists and agnostics have no reason to see moral arguments as providing any grounds for theism. I leave open the question of whether atheist moral non-naturalists should find theism compelling.

Arguments from consciousness only succeed if some kind of mind-body dualism (or something in this ballpark) is true, which many atheists and agnostics reject.

Some logic-based transcendental arguments for theism succeed only if something in the ballpark of Mathematical-Logical Platonism is true, which many atheists reject. Here I’m inclined to make a disjunction: I’m too unfamiliar with the arguments on this topic, so for now to me it is not clear whether Platonism is true, but *if* Platonism is true then it probably does not require theism.

The problem of divine hiddenness is an argument for atheism which claims (roughly) that God has not revealed his existence to atheists & agnostics, and that the best explanation for this datum is God’s nonexistence. One common theistic response is that God has revealed God’s existence to everyone. However, this response is parasitic on the assumption that at least some of the arguments for theism are persuasive enough that they ought to persuade atheists and agnostics—which I argue they need not do (since they rely on sectarian theories), even if they are sound arguments.

There are a variety of non-evidentialist defenses of theism. Atheists and agnostics tend to either be evidentialists or to hold mild non-evidentialist theories which do not lend significant support to theism, and which likely lend even less support to particular sectarian theistic positions such as the traditional forms of Christianity and Islam. Appealing to non-evidentialist epistemological theories (as a persuasive maneuver, at least) is thus likely to be a non-starter.

I think on commonsense ethics and on nearly all secular ethical views, it is pretty clear that when we can prevent horrific evils, then we should. Hence, the fact that God does not prevent horrific evils provides a powerful piece of commonsensical and secular-theoretical ethical evidence that God (as construed as perfectly good & all-powerful) does not exist. Theistic attempts to explain away the problem of evil may be successful—but *only* when assuming highly sectarian ethical principles, which nearly all atheists and agnostics see as wildly implausible. A very good person wouldn’t allow children to starve to death if he or she can easily prevent it. If you think God would do so, then either you think God has a really good reason to allow children to starve (which is a highly revisionist ethical theory), OR you think God is very good despite not needing a reason to allow children to starve (which is also a highly revisionist ethical theory). (Alternatively, God may be morally imperfect or not all-powerful—these nonstandard versions of theism are not targeted by the argument.)

A big final question: Are arguments for atheism, and/or responses to arguments for theism, also highly sectarian? I think less so, but arguing for this claim is beyond the scope of this post.

[cantsayidont]

Hateration log, supplemental:

BULLETPROOF HEART (1994/1995): Very peculiar film noir (sometimes entitled KILLER on home video releases), directed by Mark Malone from a script by Gordon Melbourne, about a soulful hitman named Mick (Anthony LaPaglia), whose assignment to kill a woman named Fiona (Mimi Rogers) becomes the world's weirdest first date. Mick and his half-bright assistant Archie (Matt Craven) soon discover that, far from trying to hide or escape, Fiona — who has stolen a lot of money from the mob and is now threatening to go to the D.A. — is positively desperate for someone to put her out of her misery, responding to her putative assassin with alternating fits of morbid fascination, glib taunting, sadomasochistic seductiveness, weary melancholy, and at least one catatonic fit. Mick finds himself increasingly reluctant to go through with the job, much to the frustration of both his target and his boss (Peter Boyle).

The odd scenario and repeated tonal shifts are strange enough to hold your attention throughout, but the story never really finds its groove: It might have worked as either a sexy black comedy or as a tragic romance, but it keeps trying to do both and thus not entirely succeeding as either. It doesn't help that the eventual explanation of why Fiona is so keen to die is unpersuasive, or that the ending seems to be setting up an additional twist that's not ultimately forthcoming. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: Memorably odd, but it can't quite decide what it wants to be.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

“Why do authoritarian governments engage in propaganda when citizens often know that their governments are propagandizing and therefore resist, ignore, or deride the messages?”

This is from a fascinating paper titled Propaganda as Signaling by the political scientist Haifeng Huang. The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. People get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense the authoritarian regime wants them to believe.

And yet regimes often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda. Huang observes that propaganda might actually be counterproductive, because the official messages often contradict reality. Why display public messages that everyone knows are lies, and that are easily verifiable as lies?

He gives us an answer: Instilling pro-regime values and attitudes is one aim of authoritarian regimes. But it’s not their only aim.

Alongside the desire to brainwash people, the regime also wants to remind people of their power. When citizens are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime. The vast amount of resources authoritarian regimes spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power.

Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them. The message is: You might not hold pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.

Huang describes how China’s primetime news program, Xinwen Lianbo, is stilted, archaic, and is “a constant target of mockery among ordinary citizens.” Yet the Chinese government airs it every night at 7 pm sharp. The continuing existence of this program is intended to remind citizens of the strength and capacity of the communist party.

The willingness of the government to continue to undertake costly endeavors to broadcast unpersuasive messages is a credible signal of just how strong and all-powerful it is. In fact, Huang compares this to political campaigns in democratic countries. Political ads rarely contain new information. They almost never change anyone’s mind. The function of political ads, though, isn’t to persuade. It’s to “burn money” in a public way. They are costly signals of the political campaign’s willingness to expend resources which shows their commitment.  

Huang goes on to report the results of his empirical research. He asked Chinese citizens how familiar they were with the Chinese government’s propaganda messages. He found that people who were more knowledgeable about these messages were not more satisfied with the government. But they were more likely to say that the government is strong, and were less willing to express dissent. Authoritarian regimes aren’t necessarily trying to convince you of anything. They’re trying to remind you of their power.  

Interestingly, Huang even says that the overt insipidness of regime messaging is part of the point. He writes:

“For this demonstration of strength to be well taken, propaganda may sometimes need to be dull and unpersuasive, so as to make sure that most citizens will know precisely that it is propaganda when they see it and hence get the implicit message.”

The regime is saying: Yes, we know this message is tiresome and obviously false. But we are showing this to you to tell you that you are helpless to do anything about it.

People are more likely to rebel against a regime when they sense that it is vulnerable. By broadcasting a consistent message repeatedly, the regime is attempting to bolster its power.

A weak organization can’t produce such messages. They can’t expend the resources. A strong organization can play the same program every night on all networks. They can broadcast the same message on every website and advertisement and television series. As Huang puts it,

“Citizens can make inferences about the type of government by observing whether it is willing to produce a high level of propaganda, even if the propaganda itself is not believed by citizens.”

That is, even if everyone knows what they are seeing is nonsense, the fact that everyone is seeing it means that the regime is strong enough to broadcast bullshit.

People are deterred from dissenting against the regime not because they believe in their dull messages but because they believe the regime has more power than themselves. Moreover, these official messages dictate the terms of acceptable public discourse and drive alternative ideas underground. They habituate citizens into acting “as if” they believe in the official doctrine, if for no other reason than that they do not publicly question it.

The political scientist Lisa Weeden, in her study on the cult of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, discusses why authoritarian regimes coerce their citizens to engage in preposterous rituals. She notes that,

“The greater the absurdity of the required performance, the more clearly it demonstrates that the regime can make most people obey most of the time.”

If the regime can make the people around you partake in absurdities, you are less likely to challenge it. You will be more likely to obey it. Of course, this doesn’t mean regimes are not interested in indoctrination. They would prefer if people really did hold pro-regime attitudes and values.

But the purpose of propaganda is not limited just to instilling desired beliefs. Often, demonstrating the regime’s strength, capacity, and resources to intimidate people is a more important goal.

[mariacallous]

The triumph of populist parties such as the French National Rally (RN), Alternative for Germany, and Brothers of Italy in the recent elections for the European Parliament seems like an inflection point in Western politics. It suggests that the European Union’s most powerful states could soon be led by populist parties. French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for elections to the National Assembly might lead to cohabitation, should the RN win a majority and elect a far-right prime minister. Former U.S. President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have a better-than-even chance of winning the U.S. presidency by the end of the year.

To understand the challenge posed by these far-right parties, they need to be properly named. Not labeling them “populist” would be a good place to start.

In contemporary usage, populism is a term deployed by centrist commentators to claim a monopoly on political common sense for the moderate middle—an objective-sounding word for extremism and excess in the same way as centrism is a synonym for sensible moderation. But the currency populism has gained thanks to this rhetorical maneuver has been bought at the expense of coherence and precision.

The term populism derives from a political movement in the southern and western states of the United States in the late 19th century. Agrarian cooperatives and trade unions in this region founded a political party in the early 1890s called the People’s Party. The party demanded the government become more responsive to its rightful owners, the people. This sweeping rhetoric in favor of democratization was central to the eponymous historical movement that birthed populism. It is an integral part of movements that can be properly described as populist, like Peronism in Latin America.

But the way the term is now used in the West suggests instead that populism is a political style, not an ideological position, which can be used to describe the idiom of both right-wing and left-wing movements. Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage are routinely described as populists.

The argument for this conflation is that both tendencies are defined by their hostility to the institutions, conventions, and expert elites that sustain liberal democracies. Populism, left and right, is said to be an expression of illiberal democracy undomesticated by the rule of law. This left-right dyad is actually a threesome, because the institutions and conventions that populists are allegedly hostile to are embodied by the moderate center. This middle ground is the vantage point from which populists become visible. The problem with this centrist god’s-eye view is that it obscures both the differences between left and right and the nature of the threat posed by the latter.

Populism became part of the European discourse in the 1980s when French political scientists like Pierre-André Taguieff began to use the term “national-populism” to describe the far-right National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Anton Jäger, a historian of populism, argues that populism was initially used in France as a pejorative term, but once journalists got hold of it, its academic lineage gave reportage and analysis an air of neutrality “different from the semantic overkill associated with terms like fascism or the extreme right.” By the 1990s, the leaders of the National Front looking to escape their neo-fascist past had embraced national-populism as a self-description. According to Jäger, this twist in the intellectual history of a term “transformed the [National Front] from a fascist party to a populist one.”

The extension of the term to left-wing political movements suggested that the center was threatened by extremists from both wings of politics. It was an unpersuasive argument because it was untrue. It’s hard to see Sanders and Corbyn as the left equivalents of Trump and Farage if only because their political careers have been lived out in conventional mainstream parties where their left-wing pieties were a traditional part of the ideological spectrum contained by those parties.

Corbyn’s euroskepticism has a long history on the Labour left, dating back to Tony Benn’s opposition to the United Kingdom’s membership in the European common market, the EU’s lineal ancestor. Sanders’s calls to reform Wall Street, audit the Federal Reserve, break up banks classed as “too big to fail,” and tax the “1 percent” are the stock-in-trade of the Democratic left. For these to be classed as populist in the aftermath of the crash of 2008 tells us more about the dogmas of ideological centrism than it does about populism. The self-serving centrist use of the term populism to describe right- and left-wing movements has lent a veneer of respectability to right-wing extremists and eased their entry into the political mainstream.

Trump, Farage, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Mahendra Rajapaksa, Min Aung Hlaing, and Alice Weidel aren’t populists; they are majoritarian nationalists. Every one of them has the same goal: to take the nominal majorities in their countries (defined by race or religion) and turn them into self-aware, supremacist majorities, determined to remake their nations in their own image and to reduce religious and ethnic minorities to the ranks of second-class citizens or worse.

The historical font of majoritarian nationalism is not populism, but Hitler’s National Socialist party. The Holocaust disqualified majoritarianism from the political mainstream in postwar Europe. The Cold War, in turn, froze the nationalist imagination on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But Nazism’s master concept of a majoritarian nation-state built on the scapegoating of “inferior” minorities remained an inspiration to supremacists elsewhere. M. S. Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organization of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), held up Hitler’s treatment of minorities as an example for Indians to follow.

Indians are more sensitive to the significance of majoritarian nationalism than their Western counterparts for historical reasons. Late colonialism and the prospect of self-determination forced anti-colonial intellectuals to actively imagine the post-colonial nation-state. Colonized nationalists tended to mimic European models. They invoked language and religion to legitimize the nations they wanted to build.

The only decolonized states that refused an explicitly majoritarian nationalism and founded formally pluralist nation-states to accommodate their diversity were India and Indonesia. “Formally” is doing a lot of work here, because in several unspoken ways India and Indonesia deferred to the sensibilities of their religious majorities from the early years of their histories as republics. Their constitutions, though, rejected the idea of an established faith. Indonesia is arguably the less interesting of the two because it was for many decades an authoritarian state. India was the only post-colonial state in Asia to combine democratic practice with a rhetorical commitment to a homegrown pluralism that it defined as secularism.

The systematic uprooting of this pluralism by the BJP and Modi made Indians acutely aware of the existential threat that majoritarianism poses to liberal democracy. They had witnessed firsthand the use of institutional and vigilante violence to hack out a harshly Hindu nation. Still, the threat from majoritarianism wasn’t always obvious to Indian commentators; they had to be educated into it by India’s experiences in the 21st century. It wasn’t until well into the first decade of this century that the term majoritarianism achieved currency.

Before that, Indians used a term that, like populism, obscured more than it revealed. The term was “communalism,” a peculiarly Indian political coinage that described the weaponization of religious community for political ends. Communalists came in different flavors; there were Muslim communalists whose parties sought to represent only the Muslim interest and there were Hindu communalists whose parties addressed themselves only to Hindus. There were minority communalists and majority communalists.

But it was the triumph of Modi that forced the recognition that a communalized majority had the demographic weight to reimagine and reconstitute India in a way that wasn’t available to a minority. Majority communalism was best understood as majoritarianism, the nationalism of a supremacist majority. If South Asian commentators were relatively quick to understand this, it was because they had the intellectual “advantage” of being adjacent to the savage majoritarian violence that ravaged the recent history of the subcontinent. The Gaza-like destruction of Tamil areas in northern Sri Lanka and the violent ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State in Myanmar underlined for them the bloody logic of majoritarianism.

From Lucknow, Lahore, Colombo, Kathmandu, Dhaka, or Yangon, it’s obvious that the violence visited on Gaza and the dehumanization of Palestinians in the West Bank grows out of a project of majoritarian supremacy.

The Western nation-state’s failure to name or confront majoritarianism has helped the far right mainstream itself. The once-fringe but now respectable notion that the West’s white Christian natives are being replaced by foreigners via legal and illegal immigration is the ideological foundation for the hegemony of the right. The popular appeal of majoritarian parties has pulled centrist parties like Sweden’s Social Democratic Party and France’s Renaissance to the right on immigration, to the point where their policy is nearly indistinguishable from the positions of far-right parties. Even Britain, Europe’s most successfully multicultural country, has Labour, a social-democratic party, criticizing the Tories for not doing enough to reduce immigration.

Tough talk about immigration is a form of dog whistling, whether it comes from a ruling majoritarian party like the Brothers of Italy or a centrist one like Britain’s Conservative Party. Stephen Bush writing in the Financial Times notes that Meloni’s government hasn’t brought illegal immigration down; she has actually increased quotas for overseas workers. How could she do otherwise? Italy has one of the worst demographic deficits in the world. But to prove her hard-line credentials, she has made it legal to detain an undocumented migrant for 18 months.

Bush points out that an honest plan to restrict immigration would entail a public willingness to raise taxes to fund the services that immigrants provide or a public commitment to curtail them. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer haven’t made that case because they know that the voting public might not want immigrants, but it does want better care homes, a more efficient National Health Service, cheap deliveries, and low taxes. In the absence of candor or a willingness to make the case for immigration, muscular centrist rhetoric about limiting immigration piggybacks on majoritarian prejudice. The massive gains made by majoritarian parties in the recent European Parliament elections suggest that the center’s bid to steal the far right’s lines isn’t working.

The now-mainstream concept of “Fortress Europe” isn’t only about keeping foreigners out—it’s indistinguishable from surveilling and disciplining resident immigrants within. Dog whistling about Muslims is now respectable in Europe because centrist parties and commentators do it, too. The massive marches in London pressing for a cease-fire in Gaza were criticized across the political spectrum for allegedly intimidating members of Parliament. The speaker of the House of Commons excused his violation of parliamentary convention by citing his anxiety about the safety of MPs. Articles in the New Statesman and the Guardian, organs of the center-left, cited in this connection the factoid that three-fourths of all extremist violence in Britain was the responsibility of Islamists. The willingness of social-democratic governments—Germany is a case in point—to use the Gaza protests to put their Muslim citizens on notice is a warning that the majoritarian right might be knocking on an open door.

It isn’t hard to imagine how these tropes about unreliable minorities might be used by neo-fascist parties within a whisker of office in the major nations in Europe. Europeans who believe that internecine violence on a South Asian scale is unlikely in Europe should think back on the genocidal majoritarian violence in Serbia and Bosnia 30 years ago.

Given the backlash faced by single-issue protests like Black Lives Matter and the Gaza encampments, a Trump presidency will amplify the sense of white grievance that put him center stage in U.S. politics. Given his track record of singling out Muslims for discriminatory treatment, the post-Gaza political landscape will be the perfect setting for a Trumpian reassertion of the Judeo-Christian values of a righteously white republic. “Making America great again” would almost certainly entail putting uppity minorities in their place again.

The West is now circling the same abyss as the non-West. France’s (and Europe’s) allergy to visible religious difference in the name of laicité is not different in principle from China’s determination to Sinicize the Muslim Uyghur. Switzerland’s ban on minarets echoes the zeal of China’s Han commissars for remodeling mosques. To continue to describe Trump and Le Pen as populists is to trivialize their historical significance. They are, like South Asia’s bigoted majoritarians, heirs to the blood-and-soil nationalisms of interwar Europe.

The difference is that this time around Muslims are the designated Other. Marine Le Pen has achieved mainstream respectability by walking the RN away from her father’s trademark antisemitism and toward Islamophobia. The reason she swapped scapegoat minorities so easily is that all majoritarianism needs is a minority to mobilize against; any minority will do. After Sri Lanka’s Buddhist-nationalist state bombed the Tamil minority into submission at the end of the civil war, it segued without missing a beat to demonizing Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority.

If the West is to avoid the violence foretold by recent South Asian history, its commentariat should be terrified that majoritarian parties and politicians are making the running in politics across Europe and the United States. Its progressive and centrist parties should learn from their Asian counterparts that stealing policies from the majoritarian right does not buy them time. Europe’s public intellectuals should be trying to make the cast-iron case for welcoming young migrants into a graying continent. Most urgently, the West’s political elites should stop being complicit in majoritarian fever dreams before they congeal into a rancid common sense.

[himitsutsubasa]

Full text under cut

BY KATE KNIBBS

SEP 4, 2024 1:55 PM

The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case

Hachette v. Internet Archive was brought by book publishers objecting to the archive’s digital lending library.

THE INTERNET ARCHIVE has lost a major legal battle—in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law.

Notably, the appeals court’s ruling rejects the Internet Archive’s argument that its lending practices were shielded by the fair use doctrine, which permits for copyright infringement in certain circumstances, calling it “unpersuasive.”

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.

The NEL was an offshoot of an ongoing digital lending project called the Open Library, in which the Internet Archive scans physical copies of library books and lets people check out the digital copies as though they’re regular reading material instead of ebooks. The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.

The NEL was the subject of backlash soon after its launch, with some authors arguing that it was tantamount to piracy. In response, the Internet Archive within two months scuttled its emergency approach and reinstated the lending caps. But the damage was done. In June 2020, major publishing houses, including Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, filed the lawsuit.

In March 2023, the district court ruled in favor of the publishers. Judge John G. Koeltl found that the Internet Archive had created “derivative works,” arguing that there was “nothing transformative” about its copying and lending. After the initial ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the parties agreed upon settlement terms—the details of which have not been disclosed—though the archive still filed an appeal.

James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University, says the verdict is “not terribly surprising” in the context of how courts have recently interpreted fair use.

The Internet Archive did eke out a Pyrrhic victory in the appeal. Although the Second Circuit sided with the district court’s initial ruling, it clarified that it did not view the Internet Archive as a commercial entity, instead emphasizing that it was clearly a nonprofit operation. Grimmelmann sees this as the right call: “I’m glad to see that the Second Circuit fixed that mistake.” (He signed an amicus brief in the appeal arguing that it was wrong to classify the use as commercial.)

“We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books,” Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland tells WIRED.

The Internet Archive’s legal woes are not over. In 2023, a group of music labels, including Universal Music Group and Sony, sued the archive in a copyright infringement case over a music digitization project. That case is still making its way through the courts. The damages could be up to $400 million, an amount that could pose an existential threat to the nonprofit.

The new verdict arrives at an especially tumultuous time for copyright law. In the past two years there have been dozens of copyright infringement cases filed against major AI companies that offer generative AI tools, and many of the defendants in these cases argue that the fair use doctrine shields their usage of copyrighted data in AI training. Any major lawsuit in which judges refute fair use claims are thus closely watched.

It also arrives at a moment when the Internet Archive’s outsize importance in digital preservation is keenly felt. The archive’s Wayback Machine, which catalogs copies of websites, has become a vital tool for journalists, researchers, lawyers, and anyone with an interest in internet history. While there are other digital preservation projects, including national efforts from the US Library of Congress, there’s nothing like it available to the public.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

me watching academics responding to an obviously rationally unpersuasive argument: surely these esteemed and highly educated professionals who work with arguments for a living won’t need anyone to point out the sophistry here

the academics: yes this is enough to determine the state of the art for the next 20y

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

me watching judges and lawyers responding to an obviously rationally unpersuasive argument: surely these esteemed and highly educated professionals who work with arguments for a living won’t need anyone to point out the sophistry here

the judges/lawyers: yes this is enough to determine the whether the defendant is tortured for the next 20y