CNN Doxxes a gif maker

phiwum said:
Perhaps his racist and genocidal comments could justify doxxing, but the fact that he would like to see others dosed is not particularly relevant.
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I think we’re just going to have to disagree on this one, phiwum. Part of my moral calculus respecting the process of deanonymization is whether the anonymous person in question has been conscientious in upholding norms against it. Game theory, tit-for-tat, etc.

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phiwum said:
Yes, though our knowledge about teapots, how they are made and by whom and how far Saturn is all counts as evidence in favor of the claim.
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A child in the bronze age could've told you that the claim that there is is ridiculous on its face, and that the reverse claim requires no evidence.

Again, this is a simple point about logic and is off topic here.
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Then why bring it up?
 
mgidm86 said:
It is entirely possible that someone sent that GIF to Trump. You have zero evidence to state otherwise.
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I have the fact that A) the gif made its way to Trump, B) it made its way to him within 3 days of its creation, and C) it did not otherwise appear anywhere in the mainstream.

That draws a straight line between Trump and the source of the gif.

Your assertion that some random person sent it to Trump and he just happened to see it so soon after it was created is beyond ludicrous. Trump is one of the most famous people on the planet. He claims to have 100 million Twitter followers alone. How much random crap like this do you think is sent to him on a daily basis?

And then there's the fact that this isn't the first time something like this has happened.

Must have been just another amazing coincidence.
 
d4m10n said:
Why irrelevant, you guys? If someone stands ready and willing to commit murder, is that irrelevant to whether it may be justifiable to kill them?
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Is it OK to preemptively kill someone to save someone else's life - presumably an innocent person? Sure. But this isn't the case here. The guy was far from a public figure, and in light of his fear and his show of contrition, CNN probably didn't have the heart to name him. Actually that probably would have made him an alt-right hero - another reason not to name him.
 
Minoosh said:
The guy was far from a public figure, and in light of his fear and his show of contrition, CNN probably didn't have the heart to name him.
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1) You don't need to be a public figure to engage in doxing.

2) The show of contrition was manipulative ********.

3) Good for CNN. Mercy may be admirable even when supererogatory.
 
d4m10n said:
I think we’re just going to have to disagree on this one, phiwum. Part of my moral calculus respecting the process of deanonymization is whether the anonymous person in question has been conscientious in upholding norms against it. Game theory, tit-for-tat, etc.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
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These are not moral considerations, as far as I can understand. A desire for tit-for-tat is primarily about vengeance, not morality.

Obviously, the central question here is what the function of punishment is and what considerations determine whether a punishment is apt. These aren't questions I've thought deeply about, but an answer to the second one will certainly require that a punishment not be more painful than the crime. HAS never doxxed anyone, though he publicly approved of doing so. Publicly approving of X is not as bad as doing X, and hence doxxing HAS is more severe than the transgression committed.
 
Argumemnon said:
A child in the bronze age could've told you that the claim that there is is ridiculous on its face, and that the reverse claim requires no evidence.
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The hypothetical child knows ****-all about logic, apparently.


Then why bring it up?
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Because this utter nonsense that "negative" claims get a benefit of the doubt is pervasive and stupid.

For one thing, there are positive and negative claims that are equivalent.

"There is a k such that 2 k + 1 = n."

"There is no k such that 2 k = n."

The first claim is "positive" and the second "negative" (terminology not really used in logic, so correct me if I'm wrong). It is not difficult to prove that the first statement is true iff the second is also true. Per your intuition, however, we should assume that the first statement is false and that the second statement is true, i.e., we should presume a contradiction.

This is a simple illustration of why the nonsense that negative claims get the benefit of the doubt should be dropped. There is no argument in favor of this silliness, and it leads immediately to contradictory assumptions.
 
So do we know his name yet?

Its almost as if this has turned into another TBD snowflake thread whose topic never actually comes to fruition.

Do we know who Eric Hoteham is yet?

EMAILS!
 
NoahFence said:
So do we know his name yet?

Its almost as if this has turned into another TBD snowflake thread whose topic never actually comes to fruition.

Do we know who Eric Hoteham is yet?

EMAILS!
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Hey, this thread is NOT about President Clinton!

Oh wait.....

laughing dog...
 
d4m10n said:
Not at all. It is a strategy for solving a certain class of cooperation problems which are likely to arise among clever apes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/2011/12/19/generous-tit-for-tat-a-winning-strategy/
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You are speaking about strategies for social organization, a kind of group-based prudential reasoning. This is not at all what I consider properly moral reasoning. Such strategies may play a role in achieving broad moral goals, but moral reasoning is about what goals we ought to have in the first place.

To be more specific, most of us have the view that punishment ought not be much worse than the infraction. This is so even if harsher punishment produced "better" results for society as a whole. No amount of merely game theoretic argument could show that this view is mistaken[1].

All of this depends, of course, on what we take morality to be. I'm implicitly giving a (sketch of a) particular view of moral reasoning here.

[1] Of course, anyone proposing this moral principle needs an argument regarding why it is correct. I won't pretend to have an adequate argument at hand.
 
phiwum said:
The hypothetical child knows ****-all about logic, apparently.

Because this utter nonsense that "negative" claims get a benefit of the doubt is pervasive and stupid.

For one thing, there are positive and negative claims that are equivalent.

"There is a k such that 2 k + 1 = n."

"There is no k such that 2 k = n."

The first claim is "positive" and the second "negative" (terminology not really used in logic, so correct me if I'm wrong). It is not difficult to prove that the first statement is true iff the second is also true. Per your intuition, however, we should assume that the first statement is false and that the second statement is true, i.e., we should presume a contradiction.

This is a simple illustration of why the nonsense that negative claims get the benefit of the doubt should be dropped. There is no argument in favor of this silliness, and it leads immediately to contradictory assumptions.
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With mathematics you are correct, you can rearrange the terms of the claim and the rules of mathematics guarantee that the negative claim is true/false.

However that does not work for many other types of claims. e.g. prove that reindeer do not fly. (See James Randi video for a humorous examination) For those types of claims only the positive is provable and easily, but the negative can not be logically proven.
 
paulhutch said:
With mathematics you are correct, you can rearrange the terms of the claim and the rules of mathematics guarantee that the negative claim is true/false.

However that does not work for many other types of claims. e.g. prove that reindeer do not fly. (See James Randi video for a humorous examination) For those types of claims only the positive is provable and easily, but the negative can not be logically proven.
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There is sometimes a strategic reason to presume the universal statement is true, depending on one's assumptions about the facts. I'm thinking of very basic learning theory here. But such strategic reasoning really is not the same as "benefit of the doubt", which suggests that the proponent of a negative claim is presumed correct, barring evidence to the contrary. (It also works only for very simple universal claims, the strategies becoming more complicated as quantifiers become nested.)

None of this has much to do with benefit of the doubt when it comes to claims like whether Trump has an "association" with HAS. There is no reason to think that denying such an association is by default true. We ought to simply withhold judgment until sufficient evidence (including background knowledge) tips the scale.

That is the heart of skepticism, after all.
 
d4m10n said:
Any chance you could answer the questions I posted for you? You did make a somewhat bold claim earlier.
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How is that a bold claim? It's not even a claim, just a pretty straightforward reading of the statement. If HAS does X, CNN might do Y.

In any case, what stops him from posting under other IDs on reddit? Maybe he's scared CNN is monitoring his activity somehow or that if they see similar activity from a brand-new ID, they'll connect the dots. Maybe he isn't smart enough to hide his tracks better. What's clear is that CNN spooked him by contacting him initially and he apologized and promised never to do it again. Then they threatened to out him, "should any of that change." So "fear of being outed" seems to be the obvious answer to your question.

The answer to your second question should also be quite obvious but I'll answer with another question: He was so scared of CNN outing him for anonymously posting such hateful stuff so why would he then post in his own name?
 
xjx388 said:
The answer to your second question should also be quite obvious but I'll answer with another question: He was so scared of CNN outing him for anonymously posting such hateful stuff so why would he then post in his own name?
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What makes you think he ever stopped doing so?

HAS said:
Date: Fri Sep 30, 2016 12:32 UTC
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/554cr1/_/d887bb3/
My entire Facebook page is full of Trump support and hate for Hilary and my coworkers know I support Trump and I have a Trump sign on my front lawn. And I'm also a university professor.
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johnny karate said:
We do have evidence, in the form of the meme that Trump gleefully tweeted to the world. That conclusively indicates that more than just "monitoring" was going on.
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But you have zero evidence how exactly that GIF made it's way to Team Trump. There are many scenarios under which no one from Team Trump was monitoring the subreddit. What if some outside party, who knows an underling on Team Trump, forwarded that GIF to the underling who then redid it with audio and passed it along to the rest of the team? If it's is such a big deal to make a connection between Team Trump and r/The_Donald, then why isn't CNN pursuing that angle?

So you have nothing to go on to "conclusively" say anything.
 
d4m10n said:
What makes you think he ever stopped doing so?
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Who knows if that's even true? In any case, neither you nor I have any clue what he has posted in his real name. CNN must have looked. Don't you think that if he posted the same kind of racial hatred that they would have just outed him in the first place? In that scenario, there's nothing for him to be afraid of since he owns it.

I think it's likely he is an open Trump supporter and Hillary hater but keeps his racial hatred behind the veil of anonymity.
 
phiwum said:
The hypothetical child knows ****-all about logic, apparently.
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He knows enough to know that it has nothing to do with logic, actually. It's philosophical.

Because this utter nonsense that "negative" claims get a benefit of the doubt is pervasive and stupid.
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I didn't say it got the benefit of the doubt, but I find it odd that you are either unaware of or disagree with the age-old principle of burden of proof.
 
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