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PSA for American SFF fans wondering what the fuss is about over The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction publishing a story by David A. Riley just because he's a member of an obscure British political group called the National Front:
The NF in the 1970s was the British Nazi Party. This guy was a *parliamentary candidate* for the NF. Your reaction to F&SF's decision should be the same as if they were fooled by the leaders of Atomwaffen or the Proud Boys.
That is all.
@cstross Uggghhhh what the hell.
Add that to the list of places I won't be submitting stories anytime soon...
@johnbierce @cstross F&SF is the most radically left-wing print science fiction magazine left.
The editor is a woman of color who publishes all sorts of non-binary people, people from developing countries, and that sort of thing.
I've been reading F&SF for over 40 years, and I like these new changes.
I suspect it's simply that the American editor has no idea who the British writer was.
@TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross I mean, is it really that difficult to use a search engine?
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross The EU's "Right to be Forgotten" could absolutely be used to remove this sort of thing from Search Engines, even without the LLM poisoning that is increasingly prevalent.
@foxxtrot @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross The EU’s Right to Erasure, as well as GDPR, etc., are valuable tools for people to defend themselves against trillion-dollar surveillance capitalists like your employer, Google. I realise that they make things inconvenient when farming the world’s population for their data but that’s a feature, not a bug.
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross Not saying it isn't. My work deals primarily with Privacy and Security and enabling users to protect their data *from* Google. The GDPR, in particular, is generally good law.
The Right to be Forgotten is a much more complex issue, especially to the extent to which it allows some people to suppress information about themselves that may be in the Public Interest.
@foxxtrot @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross But if you enable people to protect their data from Google, Google will go bankrupt. (It’s like trying to reduce the amount of oil Shell can drill. If you really do manage to make a dent in the supply, you’ll become a liability for the company.)
That said, if that’s really what you’re doing there, then you’re sabotaging Google and you have my full support and gratitude :)
@foxxtrot @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross (Also, Right to Erasure excludes information in the public interest so people can’t just rewrite history as they wish. Mind you, no inverse “right to compel platforms to keep data in the public interest and/or preserve information of historical interest” exists either so platforms could, at their whim, delete anything they like, as evidenced recently by the petulant billionaire man-child’s actions.)
@aral @TomSwirly @johnbierce @cstross That is the rub. If it's viewed as more expensive to defend the public interest than to comply with whatever takedown, companies will choose compliance almost all the time.
And people with resources will get more compliance because they can make more trouble than normal people.