Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
(from internal email)
>Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
From today:
>Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
Seems no one woke up in a bad mood here.
>“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince said. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”
The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Edit: I was proud of Cloudflare not turning them off after their domain was deregistered. Now, so disappointed. Freedom of speech is rarely the speech we agree with. Or even speech we find palatable.
I'd think that isolating this group is a poor strategy.
Look at terrorist camps in Pakistan where children are indoctrinated from a young age with radical ideas.
Is the solution here to build a wall or to improve education and spread new ideas?
The truth is that you can never build a high enough wall.
"We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it."
At this point, the wall will be too high to effectively toss education / ideas over, the internet being the primary form of communication.
The problem is that there aren't two sides here. Even engaging, at all, legitimizes the notion that this type of idea is up for debate. It's not.
We can try to stem the flow of people into radicalization and extremism. Guess how that's done? By shifting the window of acceptable rhetoric--ie, ignoring their offered ideas and debate--until it's very clearly not within social bounds to be a nazi. And we're trying to do that.
But to engage with the nazis themselves, no. We need to make it such that espousing those ideas--visibly being a neonazi, running hate sites like the daily stormer--means being lonely, isolated, and powerless. And by showing that when nazis try to pry their way in, they will be hurt, there will be violence, and nobody will be sympathetic. Make it so nobody will join them, ever. and we do that by stamping out their propaganda, by not allowing a single resource to be used by them.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
All ideas are up for debate.
> shifting the window of acceptable rhetoric
I agree
> ignoring their offered ideas and debate
This has no bearing on the people whose ideas you are ignoring, it merely reinforces the notion of an acceptable idea within the already existing good-idea-population. So no.
> they will be hurt, there will be violence, and nobody will be sympathetic
So, espousing violence against a group of people. Here the group of people are defined by the fact that they use violence to achieve their means.
Surely, you are not defining this group by their beliefs of racial superiority, as you would not say the same thing if they were merely writing nonviolent blog posts, would you?
* Your anger and hatred have led you to become the very thing that you set out to hate. *
You should be very scared of the world you're creating. I know I am.
* Your anger and hatred have led you to become the very thing that you set out to hate. *
No, this false equivalency, which happens over and over and over again ad nauseam, is just that: false. https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/12/16138982/trump-char...
I know very very well that the people I wish to remove from society, I wish to remove for their choice to hate people for who they are. The two key things there are 1) choice and 2)people for who they are.
Do you think the violence of slaveholders is equivalent to the violence of slaves rebelling?
Again, this is, ver specifically, a crowd that shouted "JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US" during their mob. Again, this is, specifically, a group that is publishing literal neonazi propaganda. Again, this is, specifically, a group that wants non-white people dead because they are not white, that wants non-straight people dead because they are not straight.
The group of people is defined by literal nazis using violence to achieve their goals, the goals themselves being also repugnant and worthy of scorn.
I am done here. You are defending and creating space for nazis, and then further advocating that other people be coerced into using resources to amplify their message. There are not two sides here.
You should be very scared of the world you're creating, in which you suggest that it is permissible to not only be a literal neonazi, but also that moderates will consider the side of the neonazis worthy of having space, to the extent that they will advocate for private entities to be forced to amplify nazi speech. Because that's what you're doing.
Don't use critical internet infrastructure to wage a campaign of hate and to organize rallies that ultimately culminate in a terrorist ramming attack against unarmed demonstrators?
>The worlds gone sideways.
There was a torchlit rally where people shouted "Jews will not replace us" and "Heil Trump." One of those in attendance was Matthew Heimbach, a white nationalist leader who previously assaulted someone at a Trump rally[1]. Heimbach has urged violence before and cheered stabbings[2] by his fellow Nazis as well.
Part of Trump's base is engaging is white nationalist violence in the open. I agree, the world has gone sideways.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-nationalist-leader-pleads-...
“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/service-provider-boots-ha...
Speech that the majority agrees with has no need to be protected. Even North Korea will let you agree as much as you want with the party line.
When the internet is no longer privatized and is guaranteed as a public service by law, then this argument will have a leg to stand on.
We've taken it for granted for a long time that the folks at the top of the data food chain are benevolent despots. This is a belief that is ultimately not rational.
Maintaining an internet made of actors who are ultimately private corporations providing a service enables these decisions.
The thing is, I suspect if we made the internet a public service in each country, then its speech laws would actually be substantially more restrictive than what CF, Google and others are doing.
Case in point:
> The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are okay, but this was the line? The worlds gone sideways.
Yeah. Although sideways? Let's not forget that an horrific act of fatal violence branded as domestic terrorism that was specifically targeted at suppressing free speech to further a regime of racially motivated violence and hate. Daily Stormer put up 2 distinct articles arguing this was okay. They then defamed a private organization by claiming they too supported that vile sentiment.
I mean, don't get me wrong. DDoS gangs are extortionists. But at the end of the day money is just money. Human rights are fundamental.
Edit: This country isn't getting fixed without empathy, understanding, and compromise on a national scale. Without that, we're all just yelling how lovely the moral high ground is when we're all wallowing in the mud.
This seems to me like a category error that you're making here.
It's possible to be upset about treatment of citizens in China but also strongly disagree with racially motivated violence in the United States. People walking around with torches chanting blood and soil art literal, not figurative, Nazis. They have a very clear agenda. That agenda claimed a life and injured many others. Daily Stormer then supported it. This doesn't seem like a very grey zone to me.
I'm also not entirely sure that I agree with your characterization of the Chinese government has a fascist government. There are degrees of Badness in the world.
I may not be able to understand where White Supremists are coming from, but I fully appreciate their right to free speech. I also don't understand people who prioritize limiting speech, but respect their opinion. That's the empathy I refer to.
These two facts are connected. Another example would be not being fully sure what bleach exactly is, but being all for drinking it.
I'll take the world where that exists before I live in a world with thought police.
It seems difficult to have it both ways.
Edit: it seems my debate partner deleted a telling comment. Too bad.
Anyway, I agree with you that the current legal framework allows private companies to discriminate. Ideally, government regulation will fix this; otherwise, as soon as the pendulum swings, I'm sure you'd be displeased with progressive websites being dumped off of internet infrastructure by corporations run or owned by those with conservative leanings.
Very few folks are confused when they see a group of white men fly Nazi flags, then murder and maim, then cheer it on as an act of heroism.
Which is probably why your "Free speech actually means freedom from any and all consequences" is going over here like a lead balloon.
> I'm just expressing my views within the HN bubble.
And for the most part being treated civily, even though you seem to be trying your best to defend the cause of literal fascists and their literal endorsement of spontaneous and fatal violence.
I'm surprised an advocate of "free" speech devoid of consequence can tolerate and support those who engage in violence against that very principle.
And not even the cold, calculated murder of widespread cultural warfare which you yourself demand we awknowledged uniquely. It's the unstable and white hot murder of people so indignant at the existence of opposition that one spontaneously murdered one and injured over a dozen more as his fellows cheered him on.
This is all what you've agreed they are. And it sums up to a picture of danger. I think you understand them quite well.
> According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right wing extremists groups.[41][42]
This is pure sleight of hand meant to deceive.
When incident can be defined arbitrarily and possibly include both a gun massacre and a spray painted swastika as equal events, this stat is incredibly deceptive.
What's the ratio when you count deaths? I'm on mobile but iirc it's about 90% killed by Islamic terrorists.
53% Islamist, 47% (other, as Islamist actually fit this description too) far-right, 0% other. (So the ratio is closer to 1:1 than the 9:1 you suggest)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/aug/16/...
If we're going to talk about murders in a more general sense, you have to start looking at populations and then note that whites in the US are far, far more prevalent than Muslims.
But it's not murder in a general sense, it's murder by white supremacists.
> It is unfair if we're talking about terrorism, because prison murders are not terrorism.
Sure it is, if it's political, ie about white supremacy.
Terrorism:
> the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
The murderer may not have woken up that morning and pulled out a binder full of detailed notes on vehicular murder from under his bed, but he did not accidentally drive into that crowd of people. When he got into the car and plowed into that group, he did so because he stopped regarding them as fellow human beings, because he disagreed with their opinions on some issues, and because he hated them.
It was an act of terrorism, identical in purpose and outcome to other acts of terrorism in the UK.
EDIT: I struggled to figure out how to include that the horrific events happened in less than a minute.
They are nazis. We do not compromise with nazis. The only understanding necessary is that they are nazis.
There's no "unplanned murder". Intent, and (depending on jurisdiction) premeditation are requirements for a murder charge.
Terrorism is defined as "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".
So we have three requirements:
- "unlawful": Intentionally driving a car into a crowd is obviously unlawful
- "violence": yes, equally obvious
- "in the pursuit of political aims": He was a participant in a white supremacist march, and drove into a group of people opposing his politics.
Generally, the only real requirement for a charge is an affirmative response by a Grand Jury. Intent is certainly not a requirement before levying a charge, which is why it is so common that charges levied do not merit conviction. The prosecution needs to prove intent in order to get the charge to stick.
You seem to have conflated 'charge' and 'conviction' here, and are then using that conflation to prop up your argument that intent has been proven, when it has not.
I have no personal insight (or any insight really) as to whether or not the driver did have an intent, but being charged with a crime for which intent is a requirement to convict does not mean that they will be able to prove intent, or that any such intent was present at the time.
It might just as easily have been a prosecutor who wanted to send a strong message by imposing strong charges that may or may not stick.
Because until then, nobody had been convicted, and, by your logic, everyone would have been obligated to act with the assumption that no crime had been committed, right?
Osama Bin Laden claimed credit for 9/11, verbally expressing his intent.
> Because until then, nobody had been convicted, and, by your logic, everyone would have been obligated to act with the assumption that no crime had been committed, right?
A crime is something that may be punishable by law. You can know that a crime is committed without knowing who committed it, or what their motivations are.
You appear to be reaching for a way to be right here, but speaking in legal terms, you are plainly wrong. A charge is not proof. An allegation is not proof. You may or may not be right on what his intent was, but the charge doesn't make that case for you, so you can't use it as proof for further arguments.
Paraphrased, your argument is:
* Bobby (a compulsive liar) says that he intended to do it, so we know he intended to do it. * "unlawful": Intentionally driving a car into a crowd is obviously unlawful * "violence": yes, equally obvious * "in the pursuit of political aims": He was a participant in a white supremacist march, and drove into a group of people opposing his politics.
Your second claim fails because intent has not been proven, as it relies on the first claim, which is not provable.
By all accounts, it seems that it indeed was his intent to commit murder by driving into that crowd. I'm not arguing with that. I'm only arguing with the hole in your logic that gets you there, as it is fallacious.
Hold up here.
Substantiate your claim, where does it come from, how do you quantify it?
On it's face you seem to be agreeing with the Nazis that he just 'accidentally' gained ramming speed into the demonstrators his group was attacking earlier.
You wouldn't be doing that would you?
Fine, lets talk about that then.
Governments these days aren't terribly friendly to fascism as a protected idea set.
This for me is the only real defense for taking them down.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-opisis-cloudflare-refuses...
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
I tend to agree with CF that they're a bad place to invest with censor power, but I also tend to agree that if you defame a company you do business with you shouldn't be surprised if they decline further business with you.
I've pretty much reached the point where when someone vehemently declares their adherence to a principle I decide they probably haven't thought about it a lot.
Even in the US where there is a strong, fundamental legal protection of speech, it can't be said to be a principle. There's all sorts of places where it is compromised.
Yes people whose namesake is derived from a group of people that committed genocide is where I draw my line. Do you even hear yourself right now? What kind of mental gymnastics did you have to perform to equate internet vandalism and theft to hate groups who call for a return to Nazi practices?
Jacobinmag has no trouble with its host.
Man, then you'd have to include all the communists, including Mao's party (that's still in power in China).
Brown guy here in case you feel like calling me a Nazi as well
better tell the Supreme Court
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
By the time speech is brought under tighter government regulation, the people pushing for 'hate speech' controls today will be terrified as they watch what a worse version of Trump does with the new power (a serious theocrat for example). That outcome is inevitable, it's what happens every time people don't think through the consequences of handing massive new powers to a very aggressive government.
Are you implying that The Pirate Bay and DDOS gangs are worse than actual, literal Nazis? Because that's the only way I can see to read it, but that can't possibly be what you meant.
Your phrasing implies that if they're willing to kick out Nazis, they should be willing to kick out media pirates. That's bizarre!
Cloudflare: "Its okay if you break the law, but say offensive words that don't break the law and you are outta here."
Hence, my surprise. Criminal acts = ok. Offensive legal speech = not okay.
Criminality isn't the only thing people look at for this stuff.
Legally, it is when someone decides to sue or prosecute you for assisting a criminal enterprise.
Many of them were coming from right wing circles, white nationalists. They have a thing for Assad[1], this is white nationalist group leader Matthew Heimbach promoting Assad. Many of them from different nations have been making pilgrimage to Damascus to meet with the regime[2].
Then one of these Nazi Assad fanboys runs down people in my own nation in a terrorist ramming attack.. I'm heartbroken. Many of us have been detailing this lot in great length for years but no one seems to of listened until we had a martyr in the US.
This is 2017, half a decade of this.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/13...
Not really. Why isn't it enough to have destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya? If you destroyed Syria tomorrow, for whose blood would you thirst next?
Huh?
>whose blood would you thirst next
What?
Well, no, actually, they don't draw the line there. They provide DDoS protection for ISIS content and Al-Qaeda content and host that content through their caching.
To be honest, I feel they probably don't want to change their TOS regarding free speech because it creates a new headache for them (now they have to hire people to deal with the claims, make sure a lawyer checks each time they cancel a contract, etc.) In that sense, a "tactical" cancellation of the service like they did with Daily Stormer is probably the most reasonable way to go about it.
You might dislike it, but it's their right.
I didn't say anything in support or opposition to what CloudFlare has done here, merely pointing out the hypocrisy of it all.
I did not claim that they did.
> Their involvement is limited to serving the web sites i.e. speech
I guess so.
"Icky"? They provoked this response by using CloudFlare's name in their cause. What would be the appropriate response?
“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.
What more due process do you require?
I asked "Actual Nazi's like National Socialists with a Eugenics campaign, or people we just don't like".
Did not go well.
We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi and thereby dilute the effect b) call people are actual Nazi's whatever the fuck you want, they can all go die quietly for all I care.
"Nazi" used to be a thing that people used to call politicians they didn't like online. Now everyone is calling everybody a nazi everywhere. It'll get to a "Who cares if they're a nazi?" point pretty quickly.
I don't call someone a Nazi unless they are literally a Nazi, I don't call them a Fascist unless they are literally a Fascist and I don't call them a Communist because they think that maybe corporations shouldn't have the game rigged in their favour and own the pitch.
The part I really like is when I've been attacked by people with largely similar views to my own for sticking up for the rights of people to hold different views.
If you think your argument is stronger, then make the damn argument, don't resort to name calling and lazy "but he's a Foo and we all know that Foo's can never be right, stupid Foo's".
There are people on the hard-right in the UK I can't stand and there are some who have some valid points, you can accept the validity of some points without accepting the argument.
Also while I'm venting, I fucking hate "what aboutism", "Foo's have been doing <bad things>" "yeah but what about what the Bars did"...yeah both Foo and Bar can be cunts at the same time, We are talking about Foo in this instance, lets get to Bar's later.
My philosophy is "You have a right to think whatever you want, You don't have any rights to make me think it".
I'd rather have reasonable debate over a wide range of issues than furious debate over a narrow spectrum as Chomsky warned about in Manufacturing Consent (I think, I need to re-read that book).
Sure, but what happens when people thinking whatever they want are able to affect national policy, even if they aren't a majority? You get the Trump administration... or worse.
How about the test being whether they are waving the Nazi flag? That's pretty unambiguous.
That sounds like something a Nazi would say.
I can do and am things a Nazi cannot do and isn't. I also can be brutal and hateful, like when I get sick of all these snakes on this motherfucking plane. I can do everything they can, but also so much more. That is the difference.
I was more warning of general, "He is a Nazi he doesn't have any rights", sentiment. Any bad actor can devise an identity that isn't Nazi, and prey on vulnerable by making them look like Nazis. I mean it wouldn't be hard to make ACLU look like Nazis for defending neo-Nazis.
Due process is not a synonym for don't do anything nor no consequences.
I didn't see how it was relevant either.
The CEO doesn't describe any process that Cloudflare intends to follow that will provide predictable decisions. So the original comment is correct: the explanation doesn't describe anything similar to due process, even though the CEO explicitly says that is/will be Cloudflare's guiding light.
For what it's worth, I think Cloudflare has a strong argument for canceling based on the Daily Stormer's claim that Cloudflare supported them or endorsed them or whatever ( http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-15-commerce-and-trade/15-u... ). But the explanation promises to go beyond that, and doesn't deliver.
If it were my call, every hate group's content would have inexplicable persistent problems. I'd use the Simple Sabotage Field Manual as my playbook.
I have many reasons to oppose nazis, including incredibly personal ones. That said, I think crossing this content line for an infrastructure company is a big deal, and I hope it's not repeated.
edit: To expand, observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.
They killed _millions_ for arbitrary reasons. What about them?
What does fascists even mean these days?
Real fascists wounded my grandfather and he pushed them back all the way to Berlin. My teacher wintessed German soldiers raping and dismembering their childhood friend.
It seems these days I see a lot of "everyone I don't like is a fascist". Trump is a fascist, the barista this morning who made me a late instead of a cappuccino is a fascist, etc. Pol Pot committed terrible attrocities that doesn't make him a fascist, he was Communist.
Do you not accept a line where free speech threatening violence harms other free individuals? This isn't a thought excercise, the Daily Stormer is a group calling for the extermination of people based on race and religion.
I don't.
I rather have people saying out loud, that they want to kill me, than saying it it in private and then just doing it ... so I - and others (like police) know whats going on, and can prepare for them.
If you forbid things to be said out loud, they will just boil hiddenly, until they explode.
Speaking with IBTimes UK, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Matthew Prince, said that his company would not be blocking its service to websites listed, as it would mean submitting to "mob rule".
"Individuals have decided that there is content they disagree with but the right way to deal with this is to follow the established law enforcement procedures. There is no society on Earth that tolerates mob rule because the mob is fickle," Prince said.
...
"We're the plumbers of the internet," Prince said. "We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes. If companies like ours or ISPs (internet service providers) start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China."
Must have been in a pretty bad mood.
They can die in a gutter, for all I care. They made their line, with the political dissenters, the quiet, and the the hidden. But you know, blame the "bad people" and the "abusers".
So maybe I this case the general public can distinguish between literal and figurative fascism. The Daily Stormer supported acts of violence committed by the former, not the later.
It's like that in America, what things are called is more important than what they are. Obviously there are plenty of Americans perfectly capable of understanding context, but they don't seem to be in control of the political narrative.
A clear example of this is if you take fringe idiot politicians who say populist stuff and have zero workable policies. In the UK, they're a fringe political group like UKIP. In the US, one was just voted president. Here was a guy with a famous history of scamming (indeed, he was the poster child for it), making obvious and contradictory promises he couldn't keep even if he wanted to, and with no detail as to how. His whole platform was telling people the superficial stuff they wanted to hear. How did he do? Almost half of the voters individually voted for him, in a strong voter turnout. The only thing missing from his obvious scam was twirling a waxed moustache, and still nearly half of American voters went out voluntarily and voted for him.
"c. colloq. Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.
Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’)."
(http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109061)
The earliest example given, incidentally, is from way back in 1769.
In fact, given the American love for sarcasm and hyperbole, and lack of an actual historical Nazi party of any note, it seems to me less likely for one to interpret the label literally.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content, Prince said. Some hosting companies exercise tight control about what can be served, but his firm doesn't want that kind of power."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...
I'd be perfectly fine banning whom calls themselves nazis.
perhaps I'd be bad about running the 'pipes' of the internet.... oh wait. I do.
One man's fascist propaganda is another man's social revolution.
This is the thing everyone forgets about the Nazis: they genuinely thought they were the good guys.
That's not at all equivalent to other types of discussions we are having today about the economy, the environment, and education.
If you're just saying that some company could be controlled by a "Nazi" and they may restrict their services, I get that. I don't think it's a "slippery slope" type of argument though.
Just for the record, I find the nazis and the neo-nazis repugnant. I'm a descendant of holocaust survivors, so seeing swastikas being paraded down the street in America hits very close to home for me. And I have no problem shutting down incitements to violence. But that's not what happened here. The Daily Stormer was taken off the air because of an alleged false claim that they made about their CDN. That is a very dangerous precedent.
If you want to be a hateful little shit, go right ahead, but don't expect a helpful hand. That's the "plot" here, friend.
Unfortunately, no, it's not. And BTW, the CEO of CloudFlare agrees with me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15034304
> If you want to be a hateful little shit
In my opinion that sort of language is inappropriate. Does that mean that if I were in a position to do so, I should be allowed to silence you?
Stalin and Mao killed far more people then the Nazis, but I'll be down voted and banned because my opinion doesn't fit your ideological narrative.
This is assuming I even am allowed to post my view at all.
Still to me blocking nazi comtent is even more obvious since their violence is even closer linked to their ideology.
To me, actual terrorists actually committing terrorism is far worse than bratty idiots throwing the N-word around on an internet forum
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
Don't be a liberal, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a white male, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
Don't be a female, you might get booted off Google and GoDaddy.
> That would never happen!
That's what you think, that's not what history has proven.
I may also be simple coincidence.
Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content because they experienced the end result first-hand. Perhaps the US should learn from them.
Speech can't limit anyone else's freedom however.
> Germany, among others, outlaw this kind of content
Leading to multiple wwii games having a different version for Germany and for the rest of the world due to the censorship that they apply.
> Perhaps the US should learn from them.
Why should it?
The freedom to say those discriminatory things also serves no purpose - It's either a call to action, or empty rhetoric... the former is illegal, the latter is pointless.
Today? Counter-demonstrate, or walk away. Actual Nazis haven't been a serious threat to Jews for 70 years. By contrast, the large and well-funded groups today who call for genocide of Jews, and are doing their best to put it into practice, have widespread and open support among ‘progressives’, and nobody bats an eyelid when marchers wave their flags.
lol, what the fuck are you talking about?
'progressive' people are pro immigration.
Many immigrants are muslim.
Some muslim hate jews, therefore 'progressive' people support antisemitism.
Simple, isn't it?
I support marriage equality and the right for gays to get married, but I don't enjoy the sexual activities that gay people do themselves.
You apparently also don't enjoy someone just translating?
(hint, translating doesn't mean the translator has the same opinion as the source, I thought that is obvious)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_antisemitism#Hadith
The following hadith which forms a part of these Sahih Muslim hadiths has been quoted many times, and it became a part of the charter of Hamas.[79]
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)
How so? Speech is just speech.
so you are saying, that we germans ended up in a total dictatorship, because things were too liberal before?
Today you're in luck because the guys with this power are on your side.
What happens when they're not?
"That would never happen" you might say, but history is full of things "that would never happen" happening (plenty of people said the same thing about Trump being elected).
And while I agree a scenario like that would probably never happen, the CEO has set a precedent, and for every similar case people are going to point at this and say "but you did it for those guys, how come not these guys".
They'll switch to one of dozens of alternatives?
And while dozens is still a decent amount of choice, what happens if/when the industry goes through consolidation and you're left with only one or two major players with similar ideological outlook?
The paradox of tolerance applies directly to free speech.
As an example, the CEO of Cloudfare stated the removal of Daily Stormer was an arbitrary decision made by him, because he "woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet" and as CEO he had the power to do so [0], so what happens if the CEO of a Cloudflare-like service is a staunch Christian and starts removing sites based on that?
Or as more realistic example, the Republicans control the house, the senate and the presidency.
They came quite close to having a super-majority in the Senate, and who knows what will happen in the 2018 mid-terms.
For many Republicans, things like abortion and LGBT rights are moral issues and if they get a super majority it's not unthinkable that they will push to remove or criminalize things that they are morally opposed to.
From the ACLU's post on why they are defending Milo Yiannopoulos [1]
"But the sad reality is that many people think that speech about sexuality, gender identity, or abortion is over the line as well. They’ll say that abortion is murder, civil rights advocates are criminals, or LGBT advocates are trying to recruit children into deviant and perverse lifestyles. If First Amendment protections are eroded at any level, it's not hard to imagine the government successfully pushing one or more of those arguments in court. "
I know Cloudfare is a private company and so from a legal perspective this is not a freedom of speech issue, but beyond the law, freedom of speech as a general principle is something that needs to exist in the hearts and minds of those making the law, and actions that erode that, especially from entities that wield enormous power over communications infrastructure, set dangerous precedent.
0: http://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-...
1: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/how-could-you-represe...
Freedom of speech does not apply to those who would take away your freedom of speech with what they are advocating (in this case, killing us). This is the nature of the paradox of tolerance. We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Yes they are, but look at how the term 'Nazi' is being thrown about with abandon these days [0].
Once you have established that it's ok to ban/silence Nazis, then all you need to do to silence your opponents is brand them as a Nazi.
That is not hypothetical, and is something that is actively happening right now.
> it's people who are declaring their allegiance to a group that literally killed millions in the name of racial purity.
Where do we draw the line? Do we kick people off the Internet if they declare allegiance to communists - a group that literally killed millions in the name of ideological purity?
> We need not and must not be tolerant of the intolerant.
Actually, we must. The only speech worth defending is offensive speech or speech you don't like.
No-one tries to stop you from saying nice things that they already agree with.
No, that would require everyone to be a credulous idiot -- people have thrown Nazi around as a pejorative for as long as there have been Nazis. Fortunately it's easy to tell who the actual Nazis are -- they're the ones with Nazi flags doing Nazi salutes saying they're Nazis, and advocating genocide.
Again, this is the paradox of tolerance -- tolerating the intolerant decreases the total amount of tolerance in the world. You are spending time and effort arguing with me that Nazis should be allowed to speak while they threaten those that speak out against them directly with violence.
Perhaps you should go and speak to the Nazis to tell them about how they should defend speech they don't like.
Of which there appear to be plenty of these days:
https://twitter.com/markos/status/896760610242912260
History is replete with examples of how this happens. For a recent example see the Cultural Revolution in China. It involved public shaming for wrongthink, destruction of statues and other artifacts, desecration of graves (e.g. of Confucius and others) and worse. The parallels going on today are worrying.
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/15/16150176/watch-protesters-topp...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3173456/Vigilante-pr...
Nowhere, because I'm not worried about the Nazis.
500 people showed up in support of that rally. Even if you think that real-life support for Nazis is a thousand times that amount (unlikely to be anywhere near that high) that still only represents a fraction of a percent of the U.S. population (0.15%). That is literally a rounding-error away from zero, and the real figure of Nazi support is likely to be orders of magnitude less.
If the Internet hadn't been popularising for months that it's ok to punch Nazis (drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight), if the police had kept the protesters and counter-protesters apart, if attendees hadn't been able to play the victim due to getting banned from Airbnb, and if the media hadn't given the rally such prominence it would have been a total non-issue. 500 people would have come, spouted off offensive, but protected speech and then fizzled out.
Instead, we were left with loss of life and a ratcheting up of tensions along racial and ideological grounds.
That concerns me far more, especially as significant sections of the population seem to be willing (and in some cases actively trying) to conflate right-wing politics with Nazis and white supremacism.
'Slippery slope fallacy' you cry, but it's not, because this is actually happening. Take for example the recent 'March on Google' that is being organised by various right-wing figures. The organisers are right-wing and regularly classified as alt right (a classification they refute), but they are also vocally anti-Nazi and anti white-supremacism (banning Nazis and Nazi symbolism from previous events they've held), and yet in the wake of Charlottesville, several major news outlets were claiming that the March on Google rally was also being organised by 'Nazi sympathizers' and the organisers started getting threats that they treated seriously enough to postpone the rally (http://www.marchongoogle.com/peaceful-march-on-google-postpo...).
The conflation of 'people with politics we don't like' to Nazis, along with the normalisation of violence against Nazis leading to threats of violence, has me far more concerned than any actual Nazis, and the parallels with very recent, very ugly history are close enough that more people really should be worried.
(drawing counter-protesters spoiling for a fight)
Take for example the recent 'March on Google'
the normalisation of violence against Nazis
Ah. Well, it's now quite clear where you stand, and I'm sorry for having wasted time trying to talk to you.
Yes, on the side of freedom of association and freedom of speech, even for unsavoury characters.
Pointing out that some counter protesters were spoiling for a fight (dressed in black, masked, and armed with baseball bats and pepper spray) shouldn't in any way be construed as supporting Nazis.
Pointing out that the March on Google has been postponed due to threats of violence, shouldn't be construed as support for the March on Google.
And pointing out that violence against Nazis is being normalised shouldn't be taken as support for Nazis, rather it's the worry that it's all too easy to expand the scope of Nazis to then include 'other people with views I disagree with' (see above about March on Google being postponed due to threats of violence).
For where I actually stand, I used to consider myself left-leaning, but I'm not really sure I like where the left is heading these days so following Dave Rubin's lead, I'd go with classically liberal.
It's an incredibly terrible move. Such an arbitrary and biased move.
What has happened in the past few years where everyone defended free speech to everyone deciding arbitrary and whimsical censorship is something to be lauded? It feels like someone just flipped a switch and people became pro-censorship.
The tech industry is doing the same the chinese or russians are doing. Justifying censorship for "good/morals/etc".
Hate the nazis all you want but we are hurting ourselves by allow censorship on this level. These peole aren't going away. But now there is terrible precedent where social media/tech/etc can censor whatever they want. It's incredible.
The tech industry gladly supplied most of the tech the Chinese and Russians used: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
The double standards you guys have. Just fuck my society up fam.
> The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party.[1][2] Rakosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami."[2] By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.[2][3]
To be completely honest - when I went to look at what the fuss was about a few days ago - I couldn't see any serious hate message because it read like hilariously sarcastic teenage angst and black humour (no pun intended).
There was a recent article where they were laughing about a woman who was run down by a car. I absolutely abhor that that woman was killed! It should probably attract a life or death sentence after the facts are reviewed in court.
But the CONTENT about it was so stupid it was funny like 4chan, reddit, or encyclopaedia dramatica. I laughed. I wasn't laughing at her. What happened was a tragic crime. But don't we often laugh at awful things to cope with them?
I'm not a bad person. I myself don't and don't want others to spread hate or racist messages let alone hurt people or encourage others to do it either.
But ummm when it comes to words I think you should be able to poke fun at what you want. And now it seems you can't and things have been going that way for a long time.
I get that it's distasteful but I also find a lot of other stuff distasteful. Shrug.
Now I get on an intellectual level they weren't shut down just for being distasteful and somewhere in there (I didn't read much so didn't find any) there is actually hate content and that's why they were shut down.
But IIRC encyclopaedia dramatica was just distasteful stuff making fun of many colours and cultures and was also shut down.
So it has a real chilling effect and that's not the internet I want. Want to know what world is scarier than one with nazi's on the internet? It's one where corporations and governments paid by corporations tell you what is and isn't allowed to be said.
(Disclaimer: I've got nothing to say myself except we should all live together and get along.)
I think you're taking a very optimistic view on the content there.
Sounds like you don't like what they are saying and instead of allowing it you want to stop them. Shame shame.
Entitled to your privilege of doing so though.
"The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can."
If the building is on fire, you put out the fire first, and then decide what the future fire safety policy is.
That is, they could do so if they paid anything for the services they received (they didn't).
And it's only if Cloudflare didn't have a "we reserve the right to discontinue services at any time for any reason at our sole discretion" clause in their ToS (they do).
We all know what the parent meant.
well, I'm a layperson and I would not interpret it that way. Suing someone is taking a gamble, and that gamble does not necessarily pay off. In this particular case the 'high likeihood of winning said suit' is not all that high.
> We all know what the parent meant.
You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
And for me, as well.
I, like (hopefully) most people who comment here, am well aware that you can sue anyone for any reason, with zero evidence or support for your assertion. When someone asks "couldn't X be sued for Y?", I always read that as a question of someone asking about the likelihood of winning that particular suit.
Because if you take the question literally, then the answer is -- literally -- always yes, so it'd never be a useful question, ever.
But sure, maybe someone with a radically different legal system is asking. In that case, still, a simple, non-pedantic-sounding "sure, they could, but they'd be unlikely to win because A and B" would suffice.
Sure you can sue for that but I do not see any chance of winning such a suit, and I'm pretty sure that that Cloudflare would be more than happy to litigate their right to deny service.
But let's say I did, as maybe the original poster you replied to did. The answer you just gave that I'm replying to (perhaps with a bit of a more patient tone) would have been way more useful than your original answer.
> You only speak for yourself and you definitely do not speak for me.
So you reflexively see the words "X can sue" as a truism, a meaningless statement? It doesn't occur to you that the person saying those words actually wanted to convey some information with them?
Fine by me if you disagree with whether the odds of some suit getting anywhere are better than nil. But to not even realize that such a statement is being made, that must suck.
So it's completely fair that when a layperson talks about the ability of suing, they're talking about net losses from that process and not necessarily about the final verdict.
Yes, you wrote the same thing upthread. But you are not a judge so what you see or do not see isn't all that important here, what is important is how judges have found in other cases and it is typically quite hard to force a company to do business with any entity they do not wish to serve unless that entity is part of a protected class, which Neo Nazis are not. So on what grounds do you feel that Cloudflare would absolutely have to accept every customer that wishes their service? They're not a common carrier.
"Cloudflare unexpectedly revoked our traffic mitigating service in the middle of our highest costly traffic, our costs went up this much. Cloudflare caused this, these are the damages, and here are the punitive damages to deter this behavior in the future, the CEO even said this is not company policy."
Neo Nazis are not a protected class in the sense of the word so they'd have to pull some kind of legal rabbit out of their head to make that work.
The fact that there are damages does not immediately imply that some outside party is liable for those damages. It merely means that you are back where you would have been without that outside party.
So even if Cloudflare caused this that does not immediately imply liability. So if the Daily Stormer wishes to sue Cloudflare they obviously can but I really doubt they will make it stick.
Civil lawsuits only look at damages and the argument on what caused the damages. It is just about proving monetary damages.
"You further agree that if...Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you" [1].
If you don't want that kind of a service relationship, you negotiate a fixed-term contract up front.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ Section 10; also see § 15 (Termination)
Section 10 (Termination) says "you expressly agree that in the case of a termination for cause you will not have any opportunity to cure." Sections 25 and 26 require arbitration under the AAA's rules and California law. I'd put the odds of remedy at close to nil. These (mandatory arbitration and contractually-agreed upon indemnification for termination of services) are well-set areas of law.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
An executive changing policy and then throwing up their hands, "I have no choice, it's the policy!" is dishonest and doesn't fool anybody.
So basically Cloudflare are removing their services because of libellous statements by the client, not content. This isn't corruption, but Business As Usual. You fuck over your business partners, and they kick back.
Pretty sure this is the same concept.
Edit: downvote all you want. Parent is making a false equivalency and I'm just calling them on it.
Moreover, a notable contingent of the supporters of the current ruling party believe "being gay" to be a choice - would you be comfortable with a law change?
I find this distinction to be wholly unconvincing. The reason to carve out exceptions for discrimination against gay people is because they've suffered as a minority - it's a practical matter, not a matter of principle. If you try to apply your "choice" principle, you quickly get into logical trouble - for example, does a child groomed by Nazi parents, who has always supported Nazism, have a "choice" to be a Nazi shithead? What if, a few years from now, we discover a chemical that changes your sexual preferences? Should gays stop being a protected class then? What about religion and political affiliation, also protected classes?
Edit: To your point, if I must: YES. Looking at someone, or a group of people and choosing hatred is 100.00000% a choice. Just like you choosing to defend Nazi shitheads was a choice.
I see it as an extreme form of bullying where literally nothing else works other than murder or be murdered, it was law of the jungle, it was might makes right. And fortunately, the Nazis lost.
Equivocating on fascism? That's inherently dangerous. The reaction to equivocation isn't rational. It has a high chance of leading to an irrational, violent response: "sugar coating Nazis is going to get you lost teeth, as a courtesy, for not gutting you here and now".
I think it's worth being very careful about falling into a trap. It is possible to overreact to fake Nazi crap, there are a lot of stupid people. In an overreaction, it might give permission for a weak autocrat to declare martial law, and that's when the real ones come in. There is a nuance, and that isn't equivocating.
If you are employing American Puritan-based philosophy, where neos are resurging, then that answer is a resounding YES, you have 100% agency.
despite the research on addicts at least being more ambiguous.
It would be the ultimate hypocrisy in their(your?) ideology to think otherwise.
What kind of sick, sad world is that?
Do you not see how the actual content of the choice matters? The fact that one is hate and one is love? It is not the fact that they are both choices, it is the fact that one chooses to be a nazi and advocate genocide
I agree not all principles can be effectively codified into rules, and sometimes exceptions are needed, but I do think the exceptions need to be in line with the bigger principles and ethical standards themselves. However I do not think this is the case here. It seems like a clear case of content policing, because the CEO did not like what the Daily Stormer had to say about him or his company.
Well... umm... I've always thought this was a very strange perversion of the separation of powers and the fundamentals of our legal/justice system...
CloudFlare is not the only player in town, and that's far from censorship.
If he doesn't like your site and has a bad day he's going to take you off the internet.
Over time, such capricious terminations could lead to the Board seeking action against the CEO, depending on the impact to the business.
Cloudflare apparently has a legal team, so I have to assume they know whether their terms of service are actually an enforceable contract, but that provision sounds fishy to me.
I certainly hope you're wrong. Because I've "unilaterally withdrawn from" (i. e. "canceled") literally hundreds of contracts, and I don't remember ever giving a reason.
If Cloudflare can cancel the contract at the CEO's whim without needing to prove that the customer has somehow violated some terms of use, then Cloudflare isn't "bound to perform" using Cornell's terminology.
It is not a one time performance like washing a car or shoveling a driveway or buying grocheries. It is a continual term contract where each party agrees to continue going. In these cases, it would be legal to have a clause allowing either party to terminate the contract at any time. Certainly daily stormer was free to stop using cloud flare at any time. And similarly, cloudflare is free to terminate the stormer's account at any time provided they refund the cash. So the contract is not really illusory because both parties still have the obligation to perform, they just don't have the obligation to continue performing.
Or is the plan to only give those speech control powers to politicians & authorities one agrees with? It's like all sanity and reasoning has left the building.
The debate is a wider cultural one, which ends in political action. That's how powerful changes to government are put into place. See: 1970s, or see: post 9/11.
The issue isn't whether Cloudflare should be able to control the content on its network, that's a small, narrow, mostly settled debate.
The very large issue is: is the culture shifting toward ending freedom of speech as we know it, in favor of controlled speech. That is the only debate that matters here, and it is occurring throughout this thread.
The consequence of any further limitations put onto speech eg in regards to the Internet medium, is that the next version of Trump will use his FCC in horrific ways to silence counter speech.
How do all the people here not understand this is the core issue? We just lived through a terrifying expansion of power post 9/11 because the culture became unduly scared, in which all the reasoning was fraudulent and solely used as a means to expand power. Now we have dozens of new power levers, increasingly abused by each administration.
The single most important bastion of freedom to protect, is speech + press.
Nothing is stopping you from self hosting what ever content you want. If you come to my machines, you play by my rules; simple as that.
The issue is: once all the big platforms are aggressively enforcing speech controls, supported by a wider shift in the culture that backs that, how likely is it that the government will take the opportunity to become a speech regulator as it pertains to the Internet just as they are with broadcast & radio today.
I say: it's guaranteed as an inevitable outcome, if the platforms & wider culture keep moving the direction things are going now.
The consequence: the next Trump will do horrific things with those new speech control powers. It's extremely obvious this is where we're heading. The fear people are using as an excuse to argue in favor of controlled speech today, is identical to the fear that was taken advantage of by the government to implement dozens of new abusive post 9/11 powers on the basis of a constantly terrified (eg the Bush terror color codes) citizenship.
The platforms are putting the levers into place, that a future government will use at their pleasure to silence opposition. We have a very, very aggressive, power hungry government; we have a very consolidated power base politically, with only two major parties. You can't see what's going to come out of that?
> Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
People seem to be saying, "you can't have it both ways". I think the point is that without actually executing the point being made, it's just a theoretical idea, the fact that he did it in this way only proves the point of why we need a better framework.
"Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
His Gizmodo quotes are somewhat revealing as well:
“We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldn’t be what determines what should be online,” he said. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
Added since I'm hitting a rate limiter:
These white supremacist flare ups happen in the U.S. and there's no predicting how serious they are by casual observation. There is substantial evidence they want to establish a white ethno state, that is their stated goal and purpose.
1924, Democratic national convention, KKK tried to get their guy made the Democatic presidential nominee, it involved physical fist fights, hundreds of police had to break up the fight, it took over 100 rounds of ballots over two weeks to sort it out. The following year, 25,000 KKK in full regalia were marching on D.C. in broad daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Conve...
1934-1936 Nazis at Madison Square Garden http://mashable.com/2016/07/27/nazis-madison-square-garden/
1984 there was a broad daylight armored trunk heist in California, $3 million bounty. Most of the money wasn't recovered but what was traced was found to be funding various Nazi organizations with the purpose of starting a civil war. One of those groups, The Order, had a hit list including Allan Berg a Denver journalist who was assassinated outside of his home, by Nazis. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-01-31/news/850106068...
2015 Charleston church shooting by Dylan Roof.
And an FBI DHS assessment this year that finds again, among domestic extremists, they are most concerned about white supremacists. "White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence." https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3924852-White-Suprem...
how about no part of it? if the founders of the united states were able to create the world's most powerful nation without giving themselves the right to censor speech then why should any private company need the right to censor speech?
If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally). But when hosting a website, there is the ability for companies to silence you.
For example, if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it. People who agree with the site might cry censorship, while the others just say that a company can block what it wants. Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
Tangent(?): Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions.
It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
Angry mobs aren't thinking about "long-term consequences." Unfortunately, the media loves angry mobs because it generates viewership and clicks.
Lots of private companies wouldn't want that (and AT&T butted heads over it).
Personally I think Facebook is already over that line, when you have the eyeballs of about 1/7th of the planet you are already a potential threat that should have government level oversight, in a democracy, you control the eyeballs you control the politicians.
I'm agreed that they shouldn't need to, but not that they shouldn't at all. Making these sorts of companies on the hook for things their customers do would make it impossible to run a company like this at all.
But remember, companies are made up of people. Those people have values and, with those values, make moral judgments -- and it is entirely within their right to do so. In the majority of cases I would hope that most people would choose to be content-neutral, but I absolutely expect and support that some people will eventually hit a threshold where they cannot look the other way anymore. And, in general, I think that's _absolutely ok_.
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
If we can't even get that content offline, the idea that cloudflare refusing to host this website means this website won't be able to find hosting is absolutely absurd.
If Google actually does that, they're asking for an anti-trust suit.
Kinderstart v. Google for one of many examples.
Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.
> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.
What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).
> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.
I completely agree with you in this section.
I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
The government shouldn't be censoring.
I don't allow white nationalists into my house.
At what point does "I" represent something too big for me to no longer have the moral privilege to refuse to collaborate with white nationalists?
Given that the Supreme Court has already decided that "wedding cake makers" are part of critical speech infrastructure, I think that Cloudflare, a service that hosts ISIS, pirates, and others, should be subject to the same restrictions as wedding cake makers.
They have? Source? And what's "critical speech infrastructure"?
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-court-gays-religio...
> And what's "critical speech infrastructure"?
That's the joke. If the government can force a cake baker to make a cake for a gay couple, why not force (excuse me, regulate) internet companies to provide services to those they don't want to provide service for? Surely, if your sexual orientation is a protected class as a consumer, your first amendment rights are moreso protected.
"No federal law requires businesses to serve all customers without regard to their sexual orientation, but 21 states have “public accommodations” laws that prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians.
In 2012, he said he politely declined to make a wedding cake for Charles Craig and David Mullins, who had planned to marry in Massachusetts but then have a reception in their home state of Colorado. They lodged a complaint with the state civil rights commission.
The commission ruled that Phillips’ refusal to make the wedding cake violated the provision in the state’s anti-discrimination law that says businesses open to the public may not deny service to customers based on their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The panel ordered him to provide wedding cakes on an equal basis for same-sex couples.
Phillips appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing he deserved a religious exemption based on the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion. His lawyers say he refused to comply with the commission ruling while his appeal proceeded."
The government absolutely could, but there is currently no law banning discrimination of service against racists or ideology in general.
The notion of protected classes with regards to private (not government) discrimination is not defined in the Constitution, but rather federal and state law. The Civil Rights Act defines race, religion, and sex as a protected class. If you want the government to prevent private companies from refusing to serve racists, you'd need a federal law passed, so I guess call your local congressman.
Given that does society not have a right to say that "If you want to earn money providing a service then you should do so by providing that service equally to all people who aren't breaking the law"?
Not saying which side I fall, I'm not sure but I think the question is interesting.
Far to often we focus on our rights and forget that other people have rights and that society has a duty to us and we have a duty to society.
The wedding cake case didn't have anything to do with free speech, and a lot to do with discrimination: http://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminate....
Do not conflate a bunch of causes just because you feel they are related. It doesn't do your argument any favors.
They have not decided anything, other than to agree to hear the case:
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/masterpiece-cakes...
To head off the obvious criticism: Yes, I understand the distinct difference between first amendment protections vis a vis the government versus the absence of those protections when dealing with other individuals and companies.
That said, I'm not a Nazi, nor am I a neo-Nazi, nor am I in any way sympathetic to their causes, but up to the point that their words specifically incite violence, I'll defend their rights to speak them.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
- H. L. Mencken
You don't want to let (for example) landlords to deny lending to people because they're gay, black, etc. Not as much of a free speech thing as a 14th ammendment thing
That reminds me a joke that someone made during a family meeting. It was something along the lines of "What? You are going to marry a COMMUNIST?" and "I don't want loyalists in my house!", both of which are outdated concepts nowadays.
While you are free to refuse entry to your house to anyone that you want, it doesn't change the fact that refusing access to someone who would otherwise be allowed in just for their political beliefs is a jerk thing to do.
But I think the poster has a point in the general sense: shutting people up through force rarely changes their way of thinking, and that can come back to bite you later on.
That's why the distributed web exists, things like Freenet ( https://freenetproject.org/) Beaker ( https://beakerbrowser.com/ ) and MaidSafe ( https://maidsafe.net/ ) and tons more exist.
I don't support Nazis, but people should have free speech, even if it's hate speech. Incidents like this will make people realise that in reality a handful of companies 'control' the Internet, and when a company like Cloudflare that positioned itself as a champion of 'free speech' does a 180 like this (no matter how seemingly justified) it's going to push people to alternatives.
Related-ish: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt-right-money-20170811...
Do you see the problem with that sampling method? Blind is a pretty self-selecting audience, and I wouldn't say it represents the average tech industry at all.
If I switch what you said around a little bit:
"I get the whole 'people can choose to interact with whoever they want' argument, but in order to do anything, you have to interact with people."
So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
People run these companies, and they're free to do business with whom they choose. Some ideologies are beyond the pale, and refusing to tolerate them is a perfectly reasonable choice.
Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.
If it becomes commonplace to discriminate against people based on their political ideology then we may very well see the 'political party' protection broadened.
The same way we deal with sexuality as a protected class, which is to say poorly but better than nothing.
> Should political ideology be a protected class?
I think it should, I wouldn't have said it was necessary in years past but it really seems like we're heading down a road where people are going to have to signal the 'right' political values in order to get hired.
In small doses businesses can refuse service to classes of people, but when the discrimination is so commonplace that it becomes a burden to those being discriminated against then you may see the creation of a new protected class (or realistically the broadening of an existing one) to make sure they aren't starved or unable to find employment.
However, it cuts both ways: your other customers also have the option to boycott you and encourage other people to do the same.
And if every business decides to stop doing business with certain people, then either a) those people really need to rethink what they want to do, because maybe everyone else thinks they're reprehensible, or b) we actually do have a case of a civil rights violation in a new way that we haven't considered making a law for.
Every business deciding not to serve black people would be a case of (b) (though retrograde, as we already have laws around that), and refusing to provide service to hate groups is, IMO, clearly (a).
That depends. Who are you? Is there a code of ethics that would compel you to interact with someone? Is it damaging to society if there isn't?
Are you sure? Because it doesn't sound like you do.
The solution for this kind of thing would be using something like tor or i2p. However, if these companies start banning these services as well that would be a problem.
If we're gonna talk about Nazis, let's talk about Nazis.
Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!
For those interested in more info behind this statement[0]:
In a post, [The Daily Stormer] site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serv...
To see him involved in yet another controversy stirring the pot isn't all that surprising, it's what he lives for. As far as I'm any judge of this the man is mentally not 100%.
Would it have been possible to deal with this problem this way instead: http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defama...
Where I have a problem is that ostensibly this did not happen because the CEO grew a conscience and a backbone (how about those booter and malware sites then?), but because the Neo Nazi's claimed that Cloudflare was secretly in league with them. If that was the real reason then the whole thing sounds hollow and more as an attempt at damage control than a case of a moral line being crossed.
Anyway, from a strictly technical point of view Cloudflare is absolutely optional so no harm done, without the cloak of Cloudflare to protect it the Daily Stormer will have to go through life now as the Daily Naked Stormer.
No, but there are obvious limits on what companies would like to be seen to be associating with. Cloudflare is a lot more lenient than most in this respect, but that got interpreted as 'there is no line they will not cross'. That assumption seems to not have borne fruit.
I'm reminded of the 'Slashdot will not censor posts' outrage a number of years ago because, yes, Slashdot did have that power and used it once. Of course for the absolutists that once was the sign that the end was neigh, only that's not how it played out.
> I wish we could just pretend these sites don't exist and stop giving them free publicity and advertisement. Trump is president because he's profitable to hate. Seems like we're repeating our mistakes. The only people who win by manufacturing outrage is the media.
Very astute observation, and definitely a thing to remember when looking at media output.
This was a PR stunt. If anything CF should terminate the account and not publish the hate groups name to their blog (it's even embedded in the URL for SEO bonus points. WTF!!).
> Of course for the absolutists that once was the sign that the end was neigh, only that's not how it played out.
But that's exactly how it played out for Digg. Sometimes is pays to have a spine (sorry Kevin). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
As time goes on the more I'm convinced the media is the enemy of the public. What's good for the news is not good for the people. Division is profitable. Fear earns clicks. Hate generates inbound links.
If 10 years ago a group of 1000 rallied for a stupid cause I'd never even hear about it. Now it's front and center going viral. Since I choose not to fill my brain with this garbage I'm "willfully ignorant". Somehow I don't see it that way.
Companies can be fined and executives imprisoned for say, selling weapons to terrorists. There's no magic hard line between "moral" / "amoral" in commerce; in a capitalist society consumption/sale are inherently moral concerns.
Does that also apply to pornography? What about atheism? What about lgbt content?
The concerted effort by the pro-censorship crowd to exploit nazis to promote censorship is rather worrying.
If you can't see the difference between those groups then the problem is on your end.
Hint: Neo Nazis wish to return to the good old days of 1939 or so where Jews and people of color are either dead, outcast, deported, enslaved or stuck in camps while white men rule the land as is their god given right.
So just in case it needs explaining: that's not the moral equivalent of pornographers, atheists or lgbt related material and I'm surprised that that needs spelling out.
They have the vote, don't they?
> Are they outside our moral tolerance as well?
Well, they are outside mine so if that's how you roll you won't find yourself invited into my house because you'd be incompatible with whoever else I might invite and you'd be incompatible with me.
> AFAIU, a lot of these so-called Nazis are just white nationalists who want to assert their superiority, but not in a Hitler way.
Yes, all we want is a nice white place for ourselves, and the temporary problem of how to get rid of those who we find objectionable we'll leave to our friends over there.
Note that the one group needs the others if they are to get their way and so they openly support each other and to all intents and purposes might as well be seen as one group by outsiders.
Note that I'm talking about what stance government and its institutions should take against such rebellion, not who you invite to your private party.
Also, these are not my political beliefs. Just trying to see where the line is being drawn here.
Are you kidding? A 100% peaceful process that will segregate society and return to the days we have fortunately left behind us and you believe that the perpetrators would not use force?
Majority decides that all people of color have to leave and they will just have to abide?
You're going to be in for a rude surprise if you think that would be without violence.
> Are people allowed to believe in a different set of political axioms (isolationism against multiculturalsim/diversity)?
Yes they are, but unfortunately for those people their beliefs are generally against the laws of most or all civilized countries where equality before the law is a very basic principle. What you are advocating is to create classes of humanity that are not equal before the law.
Even if you were to get a majority of a society to accept that there will be an immediate and violent response from the minority that you wish to dis-enfranchise. So there is no '100% peaceful process' to achieve this, that's a pipe dream.
> Note that I'm talking about what stance government and its institutions should take against such rebellion, not who you invite to your private party.
Yes, I got that.
> Also, these are not my political beliefs.
Then you're going to have to be very careful with how you express yourself lest someone mistakenly holds you to account for beliefs you don't have but wish to throw out there as some kind of academic exercise.
> Just trying to see where the line is being drawn here.
Where I deem it to be reasonable: the right for one group to exercise their freedom stops where that group attempts to limit the freedoms of others that they would like to claim for themselves. Symmetry is key.
No, it is not symmetrical because the number of members of the various classes and their power dynamics are not symmetrical. This obviously would benefit the majority ruling, or in the case of outright apartheid the ones in power or wealthy at the expense of those without power or wealth.
So no, it is not symmetrical, in fact it is the same dumb and fallacious kind of reasoning that whites under the apartheid regime used to justify their position.
The law does not allow whites to create schools where blacks are not welcome any more than it would allow a school created by blacks where whites aren't welcome. Ditto for restaurants and if you wish to create such a society you will likely find that your view is a minority view that will not make you any friends.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/15/16141456/renaud-camus-th...
That is because they are not going be be buying any counter arguments at all, regardless of merit.
> While I abhor violence and believe in Enlightenment ideals, I don't take diversity as an intrinsic good, and I think being against diversity is consistent with other Enlightenment ideals, and is not coming from a position of hatred or ignorance.
If you wish to stake out this position right 'on the line' that's your problem, not mine, it's not up to me to supply you with arguments for your feelings. I'm a bit surprised you would use an expensive word such as 'Enlightenment' and then use it to promote a radically un-enlightened position.
Whether diversity as such is an intrinsic good or not is not even up for discussion, diversity is the direct result of having a society where everybody is equal before the law. If you feel that is something that you could argue about you're going to have a hard time finding a country where you will feel comfortable.
As for the root cause: it need not be hatred or ignorance, there is a much simpler and baser emotion at work here: fear.
Ask yourself this: why is it that you feel that you could not share a country with people with a different culture from yours and with a different skin color than yours?
On another note, earlier you made it seems as if you were just 'asking for a friend' ("Also, these are not my political beliefs.") or speaking entirely in hypotheticals and now you actually admit that this is your own position after all. I'm super interested in how you got yourself into that position in the first place, I've yet to meet someone who openly admitted to such a stance so if you could please try to make me understand how you arrived at your position I'm most interested.
Assuming that all the intelligent people in the world only belong to your camp is a reliable way to cloud your perspective, and not only unpersuasive, but dangerous. Since while you're complacent about the abilities of your opponent, they are recruiting and growing because they are not that stupid after all.
> radically un-enlightened position
How so? As I said, it's compatible with equality and symmetry. Your argument about minorities and wealth disparity is unfalsifiable. There will never be a time when we'd say that wealth disparity is gone, and discrimination doesn't exist. It's un-enlightened to use unfalsifiable statements as driving principles. This is why we're stuck on a downward spiral right now, because someone forgot to put in a good termination condition.
People have moralized their political stances (diversity in tech), so that disagreement automatically categorizes you as sexist, and possibly Nazi. Bulletproofing your stance from critics by moralizing it is profoundly unenlightened. Enlightenment requires making your idea criticize-able, something we're forgetting how to do.
Also, the Enlightenment and Hellenistic ideal is equality before the law, not "each man is equal", but "each man will be treated equally by the law".
> why is it that you feel that you could not share a country with people with a different culture from yours and with a different skin color than yours?
I'm a non-white non-western immigrant to this country, so I do speak from a very academic point of view. I have no skin in the game, and maybe that's why I am comfortable taking such an extremist position.
Color doesn't matter to me. But culture does. I believe there are inferior and superior cultures in this world, and there is little to be gained from an inferior culture. I've come out of such an inferior culture myself, only because I had the writings and wisdom of great western thinkers, who instilled the spirit of scientific inquiry in me. In no other culture, is science and its spirit as respected.
Culture and community is humanity's greatest strength. Most of what we achieved is due to culture (that we accidentally acquired in the 1700s) and cooperation among people of the same culture. By fucking up our culture, we risk losing the very thing that built western civilization and its ideals, and gain next to nothing.
Do you not see how little freedom of speech is valued these days? How hurtful speech is categorized as violence? FoS got us out of the fucking dark ages, and we plan to abandon and replace with absolutisms like "Nazism and anything which remotely touches Nazism is shoot-on-sight", or even better "I'll decide if you're Nazi or not, coz you mentioned biological differences between sexes/races, and we've already established that punching/killing Nazis is Good".
Since I come from a non-western country, I know the value of western ideals, probably (dare I say) much more than you, since I've lived in the counterfactual. And I see that the west is also denigrating to the same, becoming the worst of multiple cultures mixed together haphazardly, adopting the most base populist idea of each.
> there is a much simpler and baser emotion at work here: fear.
I don't deny this. Fear is not a base emotion though, unlike hatred or ignorance. It's fear of losing what's important. It's not an impulsive misinformed fear either. It's very carefully evaluated and sustained.
> you're going to have a hard time finding a country where you will feel comfortable.
I'm not a radical myself, so I am comfortable being a passive observer in a country going to the dogs. The altright have half the story right, and the other half (violence, anti-semitism) wrong, and it's possible to have a decently rational brain which believes in the first half without the second.
Also, believing in something just because it's comfortable and would make you the most friends is a profoundly unenlightened idea. I'm sure I don't need to recount the countless times in history when people had to take contrarian positions, make enemies, and eventually been proven right. I'm not saying you should abandon your friends, but you shouldn't disrespect people simply because they have an extremely provocative position. Being gay or an atheist was extremely provocative in the dark ages. Are you sure you're objective Right and not simply following a moral fashion?
Can't not mention this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
> how you arrived at your position
Radical skepticism. Mistrusting everything mainstream media tells me, and trying to find alternative explanations for the same. The rationalist bloggers (SSC, LW), Sam Harris, a bit of Moldbug, conservative thinkers like Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, but mostly my own deductions from facts obtained from unbiased sources, or if not available, reading from ALL the biased sources (instead of just one), and weighting their argument's merit. You should try this. Every time you read an opinion `X`, find someone intelligent who is (for some godforsaken reason) arguing for `not X`, and see if his explanation makes more sense. Most of the time the mainstream opinion would be right, but often it won't.
Now let me try to correct some of the errors in how you arrived at your conclusion:
The first is that if you're an immigrant into a country you are roughly in the same position as a smoker who stops smoking. You, more than anybody else know the dangers of smoking first hand and so you will now fall through to an extremist anti-smoking position without realizing that the same people that allowed you to smoke before are part of the group of people who you are now arguing against.
Essentially you have leapfrogged the middle to end up on the other side.
Second, and point by point:
> I'm not a radical myself
You'd be surprised how many people would interpret your position as a pretty radical one. The one mistake I see over and over again in these discussions is that people have no idea in how extremist their positions really are because to them it is all reasonable.
> I am comfortable being a passive observer in a country going to the dogs.
It is going to the dogs, but this is in large part because of the group which you say you are a part of. There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in you moving from one country to another and then joining a group which fairly explicitly states that they are against people being able to do what you just did.
> Mistrusting everything mainstream media tells me
Why would you mistrust them and not mistrust the other sources that you have found?
> and trying to find alternative explanations for the same.
It appears to me that you are consciously selecting for sources that agree with your way of thinking and discarding those sources that disagree with your way of thinking.
> The rationalist bloggers (SSC, LW), Sam Harris, a bit of Moldbug
Those are considered 'fringe' (and worse) by a very large fraction of the population.
> conservative thinkers like Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, but mostly my own deductions from facts obtained from unbiased sources
Again, unbiased because they agree with you, not because they are actually unbiased.
> or if not available, reading from ALL the biased sources (instead of just one), and weighting their argument's merit.
That's a better method.
> You should try this.
What makes you think I don't? The fact that we disagree?
> Every time you read an opinion `X`, find someone intelligent who is (for some godforsaken reason) arguing for `not X`, and see who if his explanation makes more sense.
So, how is that working out for you so far :) ?
Note that - wittingly or not - you have aligned yourself with that element of your society that wants to destroy it an that given half a chance would deport you. That makes no sense to me.
> Most of the time the mainstream opinion would be right, but often it won't.
This we can agree on, but for different reasons.
Anyway, regardless of our different position on this subject once again my gratitude for taking the time for a reasoned and measured response.
Thanks to you too for engaging with me respectfully. It's a shame that this conversation needs to be anonymous on my side. This will be my last response for some hours. Need to get some work done! :D
> Essentially you have leapfrogged the middle to end up on the other side.
I don't consider this the other side. My position is a fairly moderate "diversity is not as good as it's made out to be". Peter Thiel shares my position as well, but I ack that he's considered fringe at the moment.
> You'd be surprised how many people would interpret your position as a pretty radical one
By "not radical" I meant, I'm an armchair philosopher. I don't think my position is strong/confident enough to merit agency. I am happy merely talking about this, and not acting on it. For instance, I won't go and insult someone from an inferior culture (from my perspective) because of this position.
> It is going to the dogs, but this is in large part because of the group which you say you are a part of
Here, I completely and vehemently disagree. You've just stated this without any effort to argue why. And this truly is the core disagreement. As I said, my "group" isn't Trump or Nazis, but conservatives who want to conserve what is good in this society. What is killing this society is a rejection of enlightenment ideals, promulgated by the leftists and tolerated by the liberals, using violence when necessary.
> hypocrisy
I try to see things from an unbiased perspective. Whether I'm an immigrant or not shouldn't change what's good for western society (and therefore the world). So, this should perhaps prove to you that I'm not taking this position out of self-interest (unlike the whites), but could be taking this position out of ignorance, and I'm open to being convinced out of.
> Why would you mistrust them and not mistrust the other sources that you have found?
I mistrust them as well. Obviously. You could have simply steelmanned me here.
> It appears to me that you are consciously selecting for sources that agree with your way of thinking and discarding those sources that disagree with your way of thinking.
Umm no. This is literally the definition of scientific skepticism. That you try to find ALL explanations of a given phenomenon, and then pick the one with most merit, which explains the phenomenon completely using as few assumptions as possible and refutes most or all counterarguments.
As I said later, I often find mainstream media correct. For instance, climate change is a real threat (but MSM has the most shitty way of talking about it). I convinced myself of it not by MSM in this case, but by reading IPCC, watching nicely-done documentaries about it. On this topic, the rightwing media had only trash explanations, which was easy to see. Skepticism works. I'm not fooling myself. At least, not in such an obvious way.
At the very least, picking the best out of multiple sources is better than aligning with only one.
I should also add that I don't want to believe in what I believe. It's such an uncomfortable stance. I want to be proven wrong! If you have something I could follow which would convince me out of this, I would honestly be grateful!
> Those are considered 'fringe' (and worse) by a very large fraction of the population.
I agree. Again, I don't trust them blindly, but they offer good explanations. SSC and SH are not that fringe. I know senators listen to SH, and a lot of tech folks read SSC.
> conservative thinkers like Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray,
I never said they are unbiased. I literally called them "conservative". They can't be conservative and unbiased at the same time. Cmon, give your opponent more credit.
> my own deductions from facts obtained from unbiased sources
By unbiased sources, I mean sources like the IPCC report, surveys by trusted names, etc.
> What makes you think I don't? The fact that we disagree?
You seem to not like anything your friends would disagree with, and therefore it seems you're in a filter bubble. Also, your previous comment to the tune of "I've never met someone who openly takes this stance" is another clue.
> So, how is that working out for you so far :) ?
I don't understand the rhetoric. Good?
> destroy it an that given half a chance would deport you
Core disagreement. I don't think they plan to destroy it. Further, I'd rather have a functioning Enlightened society where I'm not living, than a dysfunctional society where I am.
Please realize that culture is fluid and that culture has always been changing due to influences from other cultures and that you will never be able to find a place that is static to the degree that you seem to desire.
Once you acknowledge that you can start to think about how to constructively guide a culture's change while under the influence of more and less desirable influences from outside.
> Core disagreement. I don't think they plan to destroy it.
You must have entirely missed the hostile take-over of the conservative party by the fringe, this is no longer a thing that is up for debate, the GOP is no longer able to control the fringe to the point where it is forced to dance along to the tune of the minority radical element. It's a real problem. Once the conservative movement manages to distance itself from the fringe - assuming they can do it - you will again have representation in politics but right now it appears that you do not.
edit:
Thinking about this a bit more, you should have moved to Switzerland, it is far more in line with your way of thinking than the USA is.
This isn't a good characterization at all.
> that culture is fluid
I do want it to evolve but not in the wrong direction. I want MORE western values and scientific and enlightenment ideals, not less. I don't want identity politics and post-modernism and moral relativism and political correctness and feelings over facts/science. In short I want what Steven Pinker (http://a.co/7ctFP0t) wants. And sometimes, being smarter about immigration is the only way to move towards a better society, instead of axiomatically believing in "diversity and immigration is an intrinsic good", which is an extremely unscientific position to take.
> You must have entirely missed the hostile take-over of the conservative party by the fringe
This is actually a common myth. If you have the patience, Ben Shapiro (Conservative NeverTrumper) explains it in this video (https://youtu.be/67zCG-KPWfQ). He essentially says that the actual number of people who hate other races and want to kill non-whites, i.e. neonazis, are very few, and most altrighters are just people who want to protect western values, are against the "whites are oppressors" narrative, etc.
> you should have moved to Switzerland
This is not so important to me that I sacrifice my tech career. Also, there is pretty much only 2-3 places in the world to do AI, and bay area is one of them.
They were just given the chance and did it. And according to their chatter they are gearing up for more.
If, on the other hand, the rule is "your website exists as long as the courts don't decide otherwise," then both LGBT sites and Nazi sites are safer.
Hint: In other words, neo-nazis have no shot right? So let the neo-nazis have their say.
People like you are so shortsighted that it is bizarre.
We have free speech so that neo-nazis CAN'T win. You start limiting free speech and that's why you have nazi germany.
As my jewish philosophy professor said, nazi germany happened because of censorship. That's why she adamantly supported neo-nazis, kkk, etc having marches and even giving speeches in colleges/forums/etc. And as she said, as long as the most offensive forms of speech are protected, then she knows everyone, including her free speech, is protected.
> The concerted effort to equate Neo Nazis to pornographers, atheists and lgbt people is rather worrying as well.
It's worrying if you don't understand what free speech is about.
The reason why I support free speech for neo-nazis isn't because I agree with them. It's because I don't agree with them.
It's not a matter of just censoring neo-nazis. It's a matter of setting precedence. Okay? If you say it's okay to censor one ideology or one form of speech, then you make a mockery of free speech and nobody has free speech.
If people who disagree with neo-nazis are in power and they censor neo-nazis, then how do we protect ourselves when people who hate porn or gays or atheists are in power? Hmmm? Have you thought about this or are you just going by "emotions"?
The reason why nazi germany happened is because germany had censorship laws. So when hitler won a small minority of votes and he took over the government, he could ban political parties and political speech. If germany had free speech and you couldn't silence the 80% of non-nazis voters, nazi germany could never have happened.
"Saying I support censorship because I find X offensive" is justification for saudis censoring atheists, chinese censoring pro-democracy groups and thais censoring anti-royalty speech.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15035308
Okay? So please take a course in philosophy and try to learn what is really at stake. Because if people like you were in charge in the 1950s, 1960s, etc, we never would have had lgbt movement or atheist movement or the civil rights movement. Because they all would have been censored because they were offensive.
Believe it or not, there was a time in america when lgbt, atheist and civil rights speech was deemed more offensive than nazi speech. Thank god people like you weren't in charge and thank god we had free speech rights so that lgbt, atheists and civil rights groups could speak and express their ideas.
And oddly enough, the pro-censorship people like you are more like nazis since the nazis loved censorship. If you truly are disgusted by nazis, then you should be disgusted by censorship.
They actually do, and to close your eyes to the possibility is in light of the developments of the last couple of years a bit strange. But I don't begrudge you your worldview, let's hope you are right and I'm wrong.
Keep in mind that I live in a country that has suffered quite extensively from the previous batch of Nazis, that 'free speech' as you define it is unique to one country only and that that country at present is the one most at risk of having a serious problem on this front. Whether or not 'free speech' as you have enshrined it will survive is up for grabs but is no reason for your rather incoherent post above.
All the 'people like you' references are frankly not conducive to a productive discussion.
This, right here, is a straw-man that I've seen repeated countless times. I am not pro-censorship, but I'm sure as hell not for forcing companies to provide services to Nazis and other scum.
There's a huge, gaping difference between those two things and I'd appreciate it if you stopped conflating them.
Is there? If you need companies to effectively publish on the internet, then those companies refusing to work with you means you can't publish. Do you consider that censorship?
I'm kind of surprised that would need re-iterating but yes, there is.
> If you need companies to effectively publish on the internet, then those companies refusing to work with you means you can't publish.
No, you can go buy a printer and write your little screed in notepad and print it out, then distribute your copies. Who every equated the internet with all venues of publishing?
> Do you consider that censorship?
Absolutely not. Censorship is when the state muzzles your ability to communicate, see the former eastblock and present day China and North Korea. That's censorship. This is companies deciding who to do business with.
I, and most other people, disagree with this definition.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable... Governments, private organizations and individuals may engage in censorship.
I have a big problem with people trying to equate objectionable people not being given each and every platform they desire with censorship. If you wish to spew hate and division then you should not be surprised if you will receive some pushback from people who do not wish to become associated with your particular brand of hate. Action begets reaction. I've yet to see an actual example of censorship acted out in a way that I found the term to be appropriate when it concerns online communications between fringe groups and their followers. Typically they're spoiling for a fight and then play the victim when someone engages, and cry 'censorship' when actually censorship and worse is what they would hope to inflict on others if they achieve their stated goal.
It's all about balance.
In this case we're talking about removing these opinions from the internet.
the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
I don't see any practical difference between this and what China does on the internet. Only difference is I agree with the side that gets to censor here.
That's not censorship, that's action begetting reaction and as long as it is limited to groups that aim to do bad things to large numbers of people I'm perfectly fine with it.
Note that this particular gem of a website is run by one of the worlds foremost trolls, a man who I believe is not exactly 100% in the head and who loves to watch the world burn. If you feel that he deserves a platform I suggest you make your own Neo Nazi friendly CDN and take some business away from Cloudflare, they won't mind.
Private internet services of many kinds prohibiting use for “adult” content much more broadly than pornography is routine, and has been for a long time.
Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included.
The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Yep, and at that point the only recourse you would have would be the government, right?
> Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Your smugness suggests that you think this is surprising to me, rather than being my entire point. Businesses will do whatever they want, in their own self-interest. If we want them to do something else because we as a society value something like free speech, your options are to ignore it or to pass a law. If you're concerned about CloudFlare's ability to censor the internet, take it up with the government, because CloudFlare's commitment to free speech is good only as long as it makes business sense for them.
But at this point I think that it be better to just have a free market retaliatory war of "social consequences". IE, the pro censorship people get named and shamed and fired from their jobs (starting with the most extreme first)
Then the pro censorship people would try to fix the problem with laws, ect.
Edit: I had it backwards, obviously. I meant to say that most employers would find it much easier to fire a Nazi than someone who thinks Nazi's should be censored...
IE, the revolutionary leftists who have publicly stated things like "The liberals get the bullet too".
Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
> who have beliefs that are equivalent to nazi beliefs
That's an interesting equivalence you've drawn there. Which races do they believe in exterminating again? I forgot.
> publicly stated
Where?
> "The liberals get the bullet too". > Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?
I had never actually heard that phrase before so I googled it. I can't seem to find anything about it from before 2017, so it seems like it got famous due to a piece of graffiti from earlier this year. While I don't doubt that there are people on the far left that say this kind of thing, I think they're pretty fringe and are more bark than bite. In reality these people actually vote for people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
> Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
No offense, but your exposure to "leftism" seems pretty new and based on social media. Please do share what you're reading though...
> Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
Do people with their real names do that on twitter (I assume you're talking about twitter)? Or just eggs, like on the far right?
What's really concerning to me is that the white nationalists and neo nazis are out without hoods or masks. They are not afraid of having their pictures taken. They think they can be weekend nazis.
I'd put it in the 10s of millions of people is the amount of people that they want exterminated.
It would include all bourgeois, petite bourgeois (ie small business owners), as well as anyone else that would oppose them in an attempted overthrowing of the capitalist system as their attempted "dictatorship of the proletariat", as well as anyone who supported the current "imperialist regime" of our capitalist system. IE, probably most police officers, soldiers, and politicians.
So yes, in terms of total number of people that they want to kill, I'd say it is about equivalent in badness to literal Nazis.
"Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?"
Ah, see, here is the confusion. You don't spend much time listening to leftists. (Otherwise you'd get the "liberal" reference)
In communist and anarchist circles, a "liberal" is not in reference to an american leftist. They are talking about classical "liberals" as in someone who support civil rights and civil liberties, and the capitalist system. The "liberals" are the enemy.
Bernie Sanders and Corbyn are not socialists to these people. Neither is Norway, or Sweden or European social democracies. You are only a socialist if you believe in the violent confiscation of the means of production, and the overthrowing of the imperial capitalist system.
Modern day Venezuela is the kind country that they support, but they don't even think that Venezuela went far enough, and don't even think it is correct to call Venezuela socialist.
Go read reddit /r/socialism and /r/Anarchism and read the comments to understand what leftists believe.
I read them every day. It is enlightening.
No I understand I was making fun of your typo. You meant to say that "leftists say that liberals get the bullet to"
Honestly I think you go meet with some actual American socialists you'll find that they're a lot more moderate than the teenagers and shut ins who post on political subreddits. It's like turning to Twitter for an an "average American opinion." Small communities on places like Reddit and Twitter are not proxies for entire groups of people. Just like /r/The_Donald hardly actually represents all Trump supporters, just a vocal subset that gets the most attention.
More like "The first amendment purports to guarantee that the government will uphold this value."
Remember, a "first amendment" in and of itself has absolutely zero power to guarantee anything. Our government violates many of the provisions of the Constitution on a daily basis. "Free speech zones" anybody? Warrantless wiretapping? Civil asset forfeiture? Etc, etc., etc.
At the end of the day, the old line "the Constitution is just a piece of paper" really is true. It's actually down to us, "We The People" to hold our government accountable and make sure it upholds the principles we value. We can't just abdicate our responsibility and say "Oh, it's in the 1st amendment, so I'm sure they'll do the right thing."
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. For example, my ISP, even though it participates in "spreading" my ideas, has no say in the matter. If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake," you can argue, much more easily, that Cloudflare has no business deciding what content it offers its services to.
The issue of limited discrimination protections on specified axes for public accommodations is a thorny one especially when it comes to expressive acts; there's plenty of room for debate on what axes should be protected, but a general non-discrimination rule for political ideology has never been seriously suggested, and would arguably run afoul of the first amendment.
> If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake,"
That's not the legal basis; a specific protection from sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations (in state law in the state in question) is.
Then I guess you're in favor of passing legislation to this extent, right?
I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.
What counts as "spreading"? Do cell phone companies kick off customers with views they disagree with? Where is the line?
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
Nazis specifically aren't a protected class, of course. Neither are white people. But (any) race is a protected class. And (any) political opinion could be a protected class, as well.
IIRC, this is already the case in California, with respect to employment - i.e. you cannot be fired for expressing a political opinion.
Yes, we advanced to being a more civilized society.
Adding "politics" to the list of protected classes is akin to removing all the other ones, since someone's "idea" can be that their race/sex/age/nationality makes them superior to all others.
I'd never support a politician who promoted the idea of rolling back Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Not at all. Adding the expression of some idea to the protected list does not, in any way, limit protection for other things on that list. It's the implementation of those ideas that would be a reversal.
What if a nazi wants to go work with a black rights group? Or a male sexist wants to work in a women's shelter?
Adding politics to the list of protected classes would be the end of protected classes.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should.
Wiki:
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
Total free speech as an ideal (not as a legal framework) creates a paradox where it implores people to tolerate the speech of groups that actively intend to destroy free speech (both legally and ideally), such as fascist groups.
There's a decent video explanation here:
You do not have to tolerate all speech in an ideological sense (the only sense that matters) just a physical sense.
Be careful when letting youtube faux philosophers feed you ideas.
EDIT: I apologize if this comment was busque. See my follow up below if you want more supporting arguements.
I'm aware and don't see why an appeal to authority is necessary. Also OP didn't link Karl Popper. They linked a rando-streamer who's opinions on censorship probably have Popper rolling in his grave.
---
Just for the sake of this thread here's Popper's conclusion from `The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato`:
> . . . In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument . . .
This may seem like a logical conclusion, but it's based on a paradox and therefore inherently illogical. A paradox is usually useful for showing issues with a conclusion and not supporting one.
Consider who decides what is tolerant or not. Do the Karl Poppers (who was very opposed to totalitarism) decide? How about the linked youtuber, who blocks everyone with slightly opposing opinions? What if I consider the youtuber intolerant?
By not tolerating the intolerant, that person person should therefore not be tolerated. How could such a thing possibly be realized?
In similar fashion to the capacitor switch paradox, [1] it stems from an inaccurate model. Toleration is an abstract idea modeling a much more complex social trait. Abstraction models may make reasoning as humans easier but we should always be careful when applying them.
[1]: http://www.users.on.net/~ithilien/tam/electronics/CapacitorP...
If you didn't want to discuss their authority, then don't bring it up- "youtube faux philosophers". You made an attack on their authority and the other person just defended it.
Thank you. I always appreciate some good sarcasm and condescension.
> Next time I'll link directly to a PDF of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".
Or better yet: include Popper's conculsion directly instead of inserting someone else's interpretation.
Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.
The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.
If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.
Very disconcerting that you and so many other people feel this way. Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society. To deny free speech is to oppress.
> no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty
Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose. Civil rights, gay marrage, and abortion have all come about because of free speech. Thinking anything else is folly.
That is the familiar way. But when lies travel faster than corrections, and bots can automate the Gish gallop, it's hard to imagine truth actually winning.
Why should anybody deserve to lose because they fall victim to the masses? How is that in any way justifiable? This is tyranny of the masses, nothing else.
And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
>To deny free speech is to oppress.
And how does this constitute an argument? We oppress the Marburg virus, why are we supposed to turn the other cheek when our society and our values are threatened by destructive forces?
It is called democracy. It has brought more success/improved living conditions than any other model (tyranny of the elite) in history.
> And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
Let's see some citations. Who are these beacons of civil rights? China? India? Colonel England?
It is also worth noting that free speech is considered a human right by the UN. [1]
> And how does this constitute an argument?
It's a circular arguement. I oppress you, you oppress me, we are all one big opressive family.
[1]: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/043/8...
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The United Kingdom and France for starters, two countries that were relatively egalitarian while the US was still busy enslaving its African-American population. Of course while free speech was already a thing in the United States.
While they may not have made it into law has solidly as in the USA, free speech ideals were very present and popular ideal in France/England at those time periods.
Europe's "hate speech" laws and censorship of speech/press are from more recent times.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Freedom_of_sp...
[3]: http://constitution.laws.com/declaration-of-the-rights-of-ma...
> Articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) were written to address the prohibitive nature of the government in preventing the freedom of speech, religion, and the press.
> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.
It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.
Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.
It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.
I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates.
This is going to sound unfair, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
I don't think one can coherently take a neutral stance at that level. If not helping Daily Stormer disseminate their message is branded as censorship, but Daily Stormers acts of bullying and threads of violence are not, then I would say that that definition of censorship needs to be re-evaluated.
If they end up actually getting turned away everywhere, and have no avenue to get their message out, then perhaps that's saying something about what everyone else things of the quality of their message.
And yes, this sort of thing needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If every internet company decided to disallow accounts held by people of a particular ethnic group, then that would be a problem. But I don't see an issue with every internet company deciding they don't want to participate in spreading hate speech and giving a hate group a platform to spread their propaganda. We wouldn't be arguing about this if we were talking about shutting down a website distributing ISIS recruitment videos, would we?
That's true that there are alternatives to CF. As long as there is at least one anti-DDoS provider with an "everyone is welcome" attitude, I suppose CF can do whatever they want. So I'll concede that point.
Government censorship—having public authority (whether officially styled as the state or one having exercising a monopoly on essential tools of communication) decide for you what ideas you must or must not promote, regardless of your own desire—is what “free speech” stands against.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
If Cloudflare can't regulate the content on its service, then neither can any other service properly. Extrapolated, it means a typical blog must allow any comments posted to it. These issues were logically thought through and settled a very long time ago, and it has worked very well for a very long time: disallowing your speech on my private property, is not censorship.
Seems inevitable that this sliding process will end with the US Government having direct policing power of speech in regards to the Internet, as they have over traditional broadcast & radio.
Just wait until everyone sees what the next, worse version of a Trump does with the power to directly use his FCC to limit speech arbitrarily based on shifting definitions on things like hate speech.
If it were a protected group like LGBTQ, Cloudflare could not discriminate against them (the gay wedding cake is an example of this). So we've already decided, as a society (or rather our politicians have), that businesses must service protected groups. How far of a slippery slope is it to extend that protection to everyone?
The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery. With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region, and SV's bias towards liberalism (in a capitalist sort of way), it makes it harder to just find another bakery.
I can see the frustration. Imagine if the roles were reversed and the US internet was controlled by a conservative group in Texas (as it almost was) and those companies decided they didn't want to host packets or register LGBTQ type websites; we'd be livid. I mean we have to treat all speech equally, don't we?
It's an interesting dilemma.
That's not a protected class. In some (a minority) states, sexual orientation is. Gender identity is in some also, but not the same set.
> The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery.
Outside of a major urban area, that's far from clear. OTOH, there are many domain registrars and web hosts, and they tend not to have very limited geographic service areas. I definitely have more viable choices for either of those than I would for a wedding cake baker.
> With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region
This is absolutely not the case, especially for domain registration or web hosting.
Yes and no, that's why phone companies or internet providers are regulated in a certain fashion, so they can't deny you certain basic services.
Imagine you are a controversial figure and all phone companies conspire to deny you a phone number just because they don't like what you say. Or all postal services refuse to deliver your mails. So some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
But that's not what's happened here. CloudFlare (or any CDN, for that matter) does not provide access. CF terminating their account did not remove their ability to speak. They have many other options.
Regulations around ISPs and telecom providers exist specifically because there are often no other options.
> Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
IS false in practice. Some private companies cannot suppress speech.
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
> In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.
For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
It’s classical short-term vs. long-term thinking, and it’s damaging not just to privacy, but also to the startup economy as a whole.
> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.
FB, GOOG, MSFT, etc all serve billions of people. FB's network has a 1 people more than china.
The pro-censorship crowd wants to distract with "government vs private company" argument but that really doesn't fly when these companies are larger, wealthier and more powerful than a handful of countries.
FB censorship would affect more people than the communist chinese censoring content in china. That is extremely dangerous.
Further, does it matter if they are a hosting provider? A network provider? A telephone provider? Can those providers cancel you if the company doesn't like what you say or are?
This is tough: I honestly don't know if freedom of speech needs to be enforced by private companies. I think of freedom of speech is the problem here: companies have more influence over our conversations and the old protections are simply not adapting well.
Yes.
This is why VISA was instrumental in the 'war on porn' and why every service provider ever has a provision in their contracts stating they can terminate your online presence at their discretion.
That's a way for the industry to avoid becoming government regulated, as long as this self regulation takes care of the worst excesses companies will continue to be able to operate in relative freedom.
The few times that local national law (such as in France and Germany) has butted up against companies trying to re-write the law in a more lenient way this has - predictably - failed.
But as long as companies stay on the far side of that line they are free to draw more restrictive lines as they see fit with impunity so long as those lines do not affect the lives of so called 'protected classes' in a negative way and because of the item that triggers that class to be protected in the first place.
So yes, everybody is afforded equal protection under the law and protected classes exist to ensure that the majority can not hide behind their majority in order to legalize discriminatory practices.
You are suggesting that being a member of a (protected) class now equates to having an advantage but this is not the case, it is to make sure that being a member of a certain class does not become a disadvantage.
This is contradicted by 'protected classes'.
Let me give you an example: In a country with 99% black people and 1% white people employers have a habit of selecting people 'just like themselves' which has resulted in the 1% being vastly over represented in the ranks of the un-employed. An enlightened segment of the legislative branch of government recognizes the unfairness of this and establishes a protection outlawing discrimination based on skin color and creates a protected class, the 'whites'. Of course some blacks will argue that this is in contradiction of everybody being equal before the law, however those people fail to appreciate that this is not an advantage being bestowed upon the whites, merely a lack of dis-advantage resulting in everybody now being equal before the law.
Feel free to replace black and white with whatever groups you care about.
The Christian bakers / gay wedding cakes is one example.
But people being booted off services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon are others.
We ought to have the right to exclude people from our own private spaces, our own private clubs, and our own private businesses (freedom of association).
However, at what point (and at what scale) does our private club become so large it is a de facto public space?
There does not seem to be any real precedent for discussions like this. The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
No, absolutely nothing has changed. What has changed is that the internet has given every idiot out there a megaphone and a way to link up with other idiots at a moments notice and groups like the Neo Nazis love like minded company because there is safety for them in a crowd, a way to be part of the monster without having to stand up to scrutiny.
Will we ever be at a point where a VoIP call is filtered because the service doesn't want to transmit what you're saying?
i.e. "we don't serve people with dark very curly hair", good luck with that one.
No thanks.
The alt-right would undo all the protected classes. Tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. Your rights do not supplant mine.
The internet giants are monopolies and should be regulated as such, or broken up. But the government has basically abandoned monopoly enforcement over the last couple decades. The irony is that it is because of right-wing, anti-regulation, libertarian politics that the government has become so reluctant to enforce monopoly laws.
And, in each of the major categories, the law has already been applied on the internet.
While the specific scenarios may have some novelty, the general issues are not new with the internet.
1) Does the reason for terminating a customer violate law that protects certain classes of people/orgs? If so, you can't do it.
Obviously there are jurisdictional concerns here, but let's assume we can navigate them successfully, at least most of the time, without a messy court battle.
2) For any content, regardless of #1, does the customer have other choices besides you? If not, you can't do it.
For the second point, I think that should be there to protect from a company arbitrarily imposing its values. My feeling is that if there's enough healthy competition (I won't define what "enough" is because I don't know, but hope that it could be definable), someone will host your content. And if no one wants to, that should be a pretty clear signal that you're so unbelievably far away from what the vast majority (or even the near unanimity) would consider acceptable that you really will want to rethink some things.
If you are the only option, then likely you are a legally-regulated monopoly anyway and have some rules around needing to offer service blindly (rules imposed in exchange for that monopoly status).
If I open a bookstore, I'm not under any obligation to sell books promoting white nationalism. I choose my selection. So too can Cloudflare choose its business partners.
There are alternative CDNs. Cloudflare isn't equivalent to broadband monopolies like Comcast. You can easily switch to another CDN.
Plus, companies in general make moral judgements all the time. Deciding to start a medical services company vs. an educational services one can be a moral judgement.
I was a systems admin for a while; User privacy and security were very important to me, despite my lack of technology or skills. FWIW.
CloudFlare did not necessarily follow "Due Process" because no such process exists. They seem to think that's a problem worth addressing.
There's dozens of CDNs to choose from (https://www.cdnplanet.com/), with the best one obviously being https://fastly.com
However, for most companies it's a wash which CDN to pick.
Unless you're serving media to a large audience the cost is usually in the low triple digits. And unless you need to serve problematic regions (parts of Asia, Africa), there is barely a difference in performance between most of the contenders.
So what tips the scale for any one of the CDNs?
Well, after this move me and certainly others will definitely consider Cloudflare more often than previously - out of sheer sympathy.
The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?
That sounds like a much bigger conflict with the 1st amendment than society simply deciding to shun messages we want to suppress.
What he's arguing, though, is to use courts because he knows courts would never do that in the US.
Seems more like this would remove the echo chamber than drive them underground, I would agree with your point if it was about public shaming. But if FB goes offline I wouldn't consider anyone being "driven underground", more like forced above ground.
Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So
was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then
you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views
you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.
Just because two "bad" people liked something in a certain way does not mean that "good" people must therefore like it the converse way. Both Goebbels and Stalin may also have liked butter and jam on their toast, but that doesn't mean I should eat toast with just butter.
If that seems a little facetious, consider it this way: many leading figures deemed "good" by history were also in favour of regulated free speech. That doesn't make regulated free speech good, of course — though one might suppose that it means that these "good" people were probably not as liberal as many people seem to think.
In fact, during times of war, and of apprehension/anticipation of war, I'd say that there were many things that went on, which would make many liberal people take umbrage today. I would say all free speech was heavily regulated by most nations up until the perhaps the '90s or even the '00s.
I do not think it is unwise to regulate free speech. It is not wise for a civilisation, with laws, to allow people to flaunt their breaking of, or desire to break, said laws, without some legal consequence.
Are we to have rapist support rallies next? Join the Rapist Party for the legalisation of rape? No. The rape of anybody is a crime, just like murder. It is not legally permitted to be perpetrated by anyone in most countries.
The same should apply to racism — and you might say that it should not be illegal to make racist remarks, but actually, it should not be tolerated in terms of free speech either, because it is objectively wrong to believe a race is superior to another race.
It's not a question about the meaning of life or the existence of supernatural deities, so the answer is not something that lies beyond the bounds of our language to discuss. It's a question of whether one race of people is superior to another race of people, and this question is answerable scientifically: there is no superior race.
Given that there is no superior race, just like there is no superior gender i.e. women are not inferior to men, it should not be permissible for people to advocate views contrary to this — not because it is a "dominant discourse" or whatever Foucault might have said, but because it is a scientific fact.
Science is not a discursive means to enforce order, it's just the application of logic to evidence. There are no meaningful genetic differences between different races, and there are no bounds set to what a person can achieve other than those set by political regimes and by the person's financial situation/access to education.
Nothing should be able to call into question a scientifically-proven fact other than other scientifically-proven facts i.e. new evidence. It should not be legal to spread sophistry or incite dissent and disorder based on sophistry.
So, racism should not be permissible simply because it carries no truth. If racism had a basis in science, or indeed any truth to it whatsoever, it would not require fanatical cults and violence to spread its message. It would just be taught, as it is already taught that homo sapiens outmatched the neanderthal (though this is actually speculative and remains to be conclusively proven, but that's another debate).
There is no universal rule for handling free speech and it's not something that should be considered in terms of setting precedents. Every case of permissible free speech is distinct and the question must be asked each time: is the message that being advocated logically plausible/scientifically justified?
Remember, "rape is bad" is not something you can scientifically prove because it's not a comparison between two people from different places, it's a moral statement, albeit one that most agree with.
Thus, if you permit racist discourse against science, you will set a far more dangerous precedent for the rapists, human traffickers, murderers and paedophiles around the world who also feel that for too long their voices have gone unheard.
I wonder if Chomsky would readily be the one to grant them the freedom to speak openly about their preferences for murdering and raping people, from his armchair.
Just because two "bad" people liked something in a certain
way does not mean that "good" people must therefore like it
the converse way. Both Goebbels and Stalin may also have
liked butter and jam on their toast, but that doesn't mean I
should eat toast with just butter.
I do not think it is unwise to regulate free speech. It is
not wise for a civilisation, with laws, to allow people to
flaunt their breaking of, or desire to break, said laws,
without some legal consequence.
I wonder if Chomsky would readily be the one to grant them
the freedom to speak openly about their preferences for
murdering and raping people, from his armchair.
I've been jumping back and forth over the fence on this topic, but this stance is where I've ended up.
"No one should have that power"
"I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet"
Seems like a very tricky precedent to set that you can just not allow someone on the internet.
The natural question from this is: how long until this type of power is used against views you support?
I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I support free speech, even when the speech is hateful and malignant, because I honestly believe the best way to combat vile ideas is out in the open where people can see them, hear them, discuss them and repudiate them. Cultures can't innoculate themselves against ideas without an intellectual herd immunity, and that is impossible without mass exposure.
On the other hand, fuck Nazis.
I think I'm quite willing to let them come for the Nazis then start caring when they come for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, etc. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
Of course, on the third hand, I have no real power over anyone else's speech, and I'm just some rando on the internet, so it doesn't really matter what I think.
They're Nazis. They can fuck themselves.
Similarly, the Daily Stormer is free to take their custom to a provider who turns a blind eye to or supports their toxic ideology.
I always felt Cloudflaire was a hotpot service with nsa hooks.
Online radicalization is real. The challenge of how to deal with that and offer considerable freedom on the Internet will be a challenge for our society.
How is speech perpetrated by white supremacists to incite violence any different from that of foreign terrorist organizations?
There's a couple of ways of looking at this. One is to say Cloudfare is a private company, they were free to make a decision, they exercised that right, and now white nationalists have the right to choose to go to a different provider. Others have the right to do business or withhold business from Cloudfare in response.
Another, though, is to say that Cloudfare is now in a unique position--by the CEO's own admission--and has power over another person's speech as a result. It would be akin to a husband controlling a wife's contacts with others. Sure, the wife could leave, but that's not really a good argument for the husband's behavior being ok; someone is, similarly in the hands of the company somewhat unfairly.
Yet another way to look at it is this: when Cloudfare decides it can and will make content-based decisions, have they now implicitly argued that when they don't remove content, they implicitly support that content, in that it's not aversive enough to remove? Where do you draw the line with that? And if a company nominally accepts that responsibility, does that mean we, in exchange, should allow them to regulate other traffic?
One argument for net neutrality is that while it binds a corporation's hands, it also frees them of responsibility for things they might otherwise be liable for. This was the bargain with phone companies, after all, with common carrier status. No one blames the phone company for supporting white supremacists because they carried their phone calls, but nor do they worry about the phone company dropping their calls because the phone company disagrees with their political position.
My impression is that the CEO of Cloudfare is freaking out at the moment because he realizes he has now made Cloudfare implicitly responsible for the content on its systems, and has opened up an argument against net neutrality. He's essentially saying to the government "please come up with rules that absolve us for responsibility in this situation."
If Cloudfare had simply said "we don't drop clients because of the nature of the content" they would have had a very strong position. Now they've opened a can of worms and have called into question their complicity in the content they carry.
They can't have it both ways: by saying that white supremacist groups are too aversive for them, they have now implicitly said that everything else is not too aversive. This is a very undesirable route to be going in in terms of freedom of speech.
For what it's worth, I also oppose network companies removing ISIS recruitment videos, all other things being equal. Now, if a court decided that the content poster/creator was in violation of some ethical and legal code to such an extent that their right to distribute content should be restricted, that's one thing, but that would require actual due process in a court of law.
"It's not in CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down sites because management doesn't agree with the content,"
...unless the press tells them what their philosophy needs to be? The lesson is that no capitalist company can remain neutral, today. Which has good and bad consequences. It's amazing how the small number of media conglomerates have solidified their political power alongside their commercial power. A true locus of control in Western society.
I learned an important lesson in 2016, my worldviews are not shared in America outside of big cities. It forced me to realize that I didn't even know people disagreed so fiercely because of media conglomerate created echo bubbles.
Many people having non-leftwing ideas simply hide it. Since most workplaces have become politicised and hostile to conservative/right/slightly right of center views, people just hide it. Some people (including me) even engage in fake virtue signalling.
Polling (both opinion polling and actual elections) show that it is very strongly an urban-vs-other thing.
Polling also said that Hillary would win the election, and brexit won't happen. People, including me, lie to pollsters.
I can also sorta understand how the groups in question create a strong(er) emotional reaction. These are hate groups from "our" society. And in the same way that the death of someone close saddens more than a stranger's, seeing a swastika-bearing mob of people who could have gone to school with you may stir more anger than the hate and atrocities committed by strangers–especially if you don't understand their language, and have gotten used to it.
If we interpret Cloudflare's action as a symbol, it may also be more effective when used in this case than with ISIS: coming from (in general terms) the same society, such a signal of disapproval is more meaningful. People are social animals, and they are hardwired to seek approval from their peers. No matter how much someone tries to convince themselves that they don't care, it stings when their neighbour stops inviting them to his parties.
The same isn't true for ISIS, to whom the people at Cloudflare would have always been "the other side".
Plus, obviously, the fact that stormtrooper monthly apparently said that Cloudflare were sympathisers. That statement made it impossible to continue working for them.
Once you take it upon yourself to begin moderating and regulating content, you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so consistently. Do you really want that responsibility?
My opinion may be unpopular, however. I'm one of those folks that believe that everyone, equally, deserves to be able to express their thoughts, beliefs, and beliefs regardless of whether I agree with them.
(Yes, you absolutely need to remove the bullet point now.)
This was big when I was growing up too. KKK was always used as an example. No one liked what they had to say, but as Americans, we felt we were obligated to protect their ability to say it. You know, principles and all.
Their right to say it.
Their ability to say it is a different thing.
Their ability: do they have the tools they would like to have (and that others might own) to communicate effectively.
I think in the printing press example, people ended up stealing them to print. I'm not sure you can steal the internet.
Yes, because it prevents people from free using their own resources and those gained through mutually consensual trade to spread their ideas.
> The difference here is it isn't necessarily governments, but rather corporations that control access to the internet (printing press).
No, the difference is that nothing is being banned; people are choosing not to let other people use their digital “printing press”, which is no different than the NYT choosing not to print your opinion piece.
No one is preventing the Stormer from self-hosting. And there are a very large set of domain registrars; the fact that a handful have refused their business doesn't mean that they can't get a domain name (which is certainly a convenience that affects reach, but also not a necessity, to publishing via the internet.)
Oh, I totally agree, but the prescient is unsettling to me.
Yes, you're one tough maverick for repeating something stated only about 20x in just this thread.
But you're indeed quite brave to pretend not to have seen the 25 answers pointing out that it's also this CEO (and everyone else's) right not to participate in the spreading of hate speech and nazi propaganda.
Also:
"slippery slope" is not an argument, it's a fallacy. Observe: "now, they're only imprisoning the murderers. It's only a matter of time until they'll throw you in jail for walking funny"
> you are now -- in my opinion -- obligated to do so ...
Why? Does eating one apple pie obligate you to eat all the apple pie?
> ... unilaterally
As opposed to bilateral moderation?
> unilaterally
Happy now?
Did you actually want to discuss/argue with my comment or just criticize the way I worded it?
You may want to read this comment of mine I put in a thread that probably won't get seen much because it's not intellectually stimulating enough, or something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032018
I'll add a quote from a White Rose leaflet:
> Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness!
That's a bad thing for us overall because now it won't just be something the CEO finds offensive; rather, it will be anything that could, through any potential legalistic contortion, result in legal liability.
We should all be very concerned about these low-level infrastructure components like GoDaddy, Google DNS, and CloudFlare beginning to adopt a policy of content moderation.
I'm shocked that something as simple as "they're nazis" is actually being accepted by people here; it is pretty much the stock anti-speech argument that we've all rehearsed forever. Sad to see that many aren't living up to it now that the cards are on the table.
Domains should only be seized when the government issues a binding legal order, not when the registrar or CDN's CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
This is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine it's not coordinated specifically to weaken/undermine any form of anti-establishment or politically incorrect speech online. These attacks on core infrastructure delivery components need to be denounced loudly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
However, this doesn't seem to indicate that such editorial activity can't have a legal effect in some areas. It is limited only to cases where the service provider would otherwise be implicated as the publisher/speaker instead of a neutral mechanism used in the delivery of others' publications and speech. There are many other relevant circumstances where such behavior creates at least a non-legal precedent (Not A Lawyer, so can't and don't want to get into the nitty-gritty) and expectation that CloudFlare will act in a specific manner that violates the content policy they claim to want to keep.
The simple fact is that even if the law unequivocally allowed such activity, that doesn't mean that Cloudflare hasn't set a standard of behavior that they will be expected to live up to, inside and outside of the coutroom. That's especially true in the case of a jury trial, but there are certainly no shortage of politically-aware judges who don't want to let their 15 minutes be wasted in falsely associating them as "pro-white-supremacist". And if Cloudflare is at all PR-sensitive, they are now in for a long, slow beating.
This is all a large can of worms that everyone should regret ever having opened. How hard would it have been to say "Sorry, that's not how DNS works" when some random person on Twitter said "You're supporting a white supremacist! Undo it!"?
IMO the evidence here indicates a coordinated takedown and censorship campaign by organized political forces, and this operation has undeniably been a resounding success for them. So much so that they have fundamentally undermined the core institutions of the internet itself, hardly realizing the sacrosanct barrier they've pierced.
And I know that the HN that recognizes this with near unanimity is lying around here somewhere. I'm just not sure why they're not showing up to these threads. Maybe the votes are being artificially manipulated? Maybe everyone has slowly earned themselves bans/account censures for touching a topic that the mods are sensitive about? Maybe employers are becoming extra vigilant about catching those who express heresy on HN in hopes of catching a Damore-esque figure before it becomes a national press story? I dunno. But this type of non-neutrality on the part of core online infrastructure providers should be a much bigger deal than it is.
I don't understand? Are you saying that lying would have been morally superior? Because, as we've just seen, that's exactly how DNS works.
As for the other legal consequences, I don't see how this changes anything. Did anybody ever doubt Cloudflare's technical ability to stop serving individual sites?
I also don't see how consistency can be an argument in any such case: Being consistently wrong doesn't seem like a strong excuse for being wrong.
I feel you're also operating from a view of the court system that is vastly more cynical than the courts deserve. This is, unfortunately, a point that I cannot adequately put into words. But if you ever have the time, maybe find some decision that interests you (or, actually, pick anything at random) and read the decision, or maybe watch the oral arguments. I often read both the majority and the dissenting opinion of cases, and come away agreeing with both of them! That should be impossible because they contradict each other, but even opinions I disagree with often have an undeniably forceful argument.
(I just thought of a good example, which is a transcript from the Waymo vs Uber lawsuit. You may be surprised to see the forceful stand the judge takes to make the proceedings open to the general public. Quote:
if you want all this stuff to be so secret,
you should be in arbitration. You shouldn't be
trying to do this in court and constantly [insisting
on closed procedures].
The public has a right to see what we do.
And I feel that so strongly. I am not --
the U.S. District Court is not a wholly owned
subsidiary of Quinn Emanuel or Morrison & Foerster
or these two big companies. We belong to the public.
With regard to your expectation of HN's opinion: I believe you're mostly just underestimating how dramatic many people consider the current political situation to be. This is somewhat beyond the usual partisan divide, as can be seen by the almost unanimous decision by CEOs (generally not suspected to secretly harbour leftwing believes) to quit their advisory roles, by the increasing willingness of republicans in congress to criticise their president, or even in the Fox News moderator's spontaneous reaction to Trump's press conference, calling it "disgusting" and "surreal".
Let's say you host porn. Let's also assume you wish to charge for porn. Many banks, credit card merchants, etc DO NOT wish to deal with your company at all. They wont take your transfers nor business. There are merchants that are comfortable taking payments from you (CCBill) but they cost much more since they have the expertise to deal with these types of chargebacks etc. I am not sure how I see this is different. If you create a hate website - you might get dropped from SendGrid. Tough. That is how it works.
As more and more people continue to participate in the internet, there are going to be more issues like this, not fewer.
So let's maybe kick off that discussion a little bit? Someone that's articulate might be able to build the foundation for a policy here that would be attractive to lots of service providers.
Some things to consider:
-> Local law vs. ethical considerations. A lot of expressions and statements that are just fine by US standards are illegal or otherwise censored in other place. Google has struggled with this in China for years now. There's no reason to believe that the US will continue to be a beacon for free speech forever. Efforts to control, surveil, and censor speech are ongoing in the US, as Dreamhost recently pointed out. How should services handle this? Do you adhere to local laws or to what you believe is right?
-> Free speech vs. abuse. In this case, I don't mean abuse-by-meanness, but abuse by misuse of resources. From blatant spamming all the way down to just being the loud-mouthed jerk who posts too often in a forum, there's a whole spectrum of abuses here and most service providers happily block this content. What constitutes abuse? Should everything be supported, to the best of the service provider's ability, or is this a point where nearly everyone agrees that free speech should be limited?
-> Free speech vs. disruptive or disgusting speech. Communities gather assholes. Some of them are accidental or ill (HN has its own, which it has merrily perma-banned), some of them just want to stir shit up. Some of them give us something to think about, they just want to be really abrasive in the process. What are the limits here? What if we end up on the wrong side of some issue, what would our opinions about limited speech be then?
-> Nice vs. Free. These all kind of could be distilled down into a single debate: do we want a nice society, or a free society?
Yes, if you're drawing a line there will be, by definition, cases close to it, on both sides. But this isn't one of them. And it's not like this is some sort of new problem that we haven't successfully navigated before. Courts have always had to make binary decisions from continuous facts: pornography vs. art, or just naming that single grain of sand that makes this stretch of coast a beach per California regulation 343 etc.
"Free vs nice" is an insidious way to delegitimise the concerns of those actually targeted by torch-wielding nazis. People aren't asking for a "nice" country. They're asking for the freedom to peacefully walk around without the fear of being splattered onto the pavement by the next terrorist's car attack.
If true, that makes them a very special case.
I generally oppose almost all cases of a company using their legal right of censorship, at least when it's squarely aimed at censoring OPINIONS rather than just censoring specific modes of expression (e.g. threats, curse words, whatever). But he managed to find a legitimate-sounding loophole. He has no obligation to support the Daily Stormer's false claim of endorsement via his (in)actions.
If I have a controversial opinion (hypothetical, unrelated to the current subject matter) and it gets removed from CDN's and if I then put that opinion in my self hosted blog and someone powerful decides to DDoS my little server (and consequent hosting attempts)... Am I then not effectively censored on the internet?
It's interesting in how many places (internet and real world) this is happening lately... Interesting but mostly just scary.
I'm sure Cloudflare meant well but this action should have been thought through more.
The reality is that private companies and individuals, unless compelled by law or regulation, have no obligation to facilitate the free speech of others. None. They certainly don't have an obligation to facilitate speech that falsely smears or defames them themselves. Trying to believe or claim that they could do so in all circumstances was naive.
The principle of absolute moral neutrality is simply untenable. Choosing not to choose is itself a choice. Given the existence of repulsive opinion and content, choosing not to exclude it is simply a choice to publish it. It doesn't in any way dodge moral responsibility. It's time companies like this did the truly hard thing and set actual policies they believe in and can follow as a matter of conscience.
I can't believe I'm saying this but here in 2017, I've had a change of heart. It's not that I support ISIS, or Daily Stormer, or Nazis. Fuck all of those guys. The problem here is that I feel that the post-Charlottesville Internet is rapidly sliding into a very scary trend of _weaponizing speech_. Prior to last weekend, the weaponization of speech was mostly confined to SJW-speak, where people call others' speech "violence". No longer confined to Twitter outbursts and op-eds, we are now seeing the weaponization of speech by service providers.
It's easy to write off Daily Stormer as a bunch of inbred Nazi assholes because, hey, that's obvious, but who's next? Who's the next group that gets knocked off the Internet? Trump supporters? Civil War historians? Encryption experts? You? Me? Who gets to decide? Social activists? The government? Some other government? Matthew Prince?
Even if you're ready to drive a truck into Richard Spencer's house, you should be outraged by Cloudflare's action today. This is quite possibly, as one of his employees said, the end of the Internet--certainly the free Internet.
If one person at a private corporation can single-handedly end the free Internet, it was already over.
What does this have to do with the termination?
From Mr. Prince:
"> What safeguards do you have in place to ensure that CloudFlare does not support illegal terrorist activity?
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain." [1]
"Again, CloudFlare is not a hosting provider. If we were to terminate this, or any other customer, the material wouldn't go away, it would just be a bit slower and be more subject to attack. We do not believe that "investigating" the speech that flows through our network is appropriate. In fact, we think doing so would be creepy." [1]
> Your CEO has in the past publicly defended providing services to websites hosting dangerous material. Would his position change if one of his own family was hurt or killed in an incident that could be reliably linked to the [controversial website]?
In a word: no. As a way of proving that point, rather than speculate on a gruesome hypothetical, let's discuss a concrete example. About a year ago, a young hacker broke into my email accounts, rummaged around, and caused a significant amount of damage and embarrassment to me. At the time, the hacker was a CloudFlare user. He even used his CloudFlare-powered site to publish details of the attack. I was furious. It was a direct attack by one of our users specifically targeting me. Despite that, we did not kick him off our network nor should we have.
The fact that US hosting companies have the pretty much unquestioned choice to decide whether or not to host websites of organizations supporting a faction of armed rebellion against the US, to me says we're probably doing this right.
enuf said
Don't like it? Create a competitor to Cloudflare.
"The act was passed in part in reaction to the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.,[3] which suggested that service providers who assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers. This act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor content without themselves becoming publishers"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
That law does not change the fact that one could argue "well they did censor this so...". It is a risk. If you have a record that says "we censor nothing" then you are much safer. I would agree that under the law you site it should be clear cut, but that is not the way it has worked lately. It's a risk based on a moral belief and I applaud the CEO for doing it. That does not invalidated the risk.
"The important difference between CompuServe and Prodigy for the Stratton court was that Prodigy engaged in content screening and therefore exercised editorial control. The holding in Stratton was overruled in federal legislation when Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. As a result, Internet service providers in the United States today are generally protected from liability for user-generated content."
Anything else would obviously be unworkable. Facebook, for example, exerts wide-ranging control over content (i.e. they delete quite a lot). If that were to create liability for all user-generated content on Facebook, they would have seized to exist long ago.
https://youtu.be/wW5vJyI_HcU?t=45m17s
(quoting CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince below, aka eastdakota on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=eastdakota )
45:52 "Where would you draw the line?"
47:25 "It's really tricky when private organizations act as law enforcement"
47:33 "We try to follow what is due process"
47:56 smart-ass/sick burn re: Krebs's journalism
48:46 "We comply with any court order that we receive" (both takedowns and to not take things down) "unless we feel that it's truly abusive in these cases we [interrupted/unintelligible, maybe: would] ..."
49:00 "There have been some hacking-related sites that we have been asked to take down"
source: HN user kefka https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14654680
People get shouted down on college campuses if they disagree with politically correct views. So they go somewhere else to speak out their views, not being interfered with anymore. So they radicalize.
People in companies have to fear penalties if they speak out against developments they disagree with, so they don't speak out openly and form small circles and consult forums of their own. So they radicalize.
People see themselves misrepresented as extremists by what they perceive as the "mainstream media", so they turn to what they think is the opposite of that, so they enter their own world of facts with Fox, Breitbart, etc. So they radicalize.
Those people will vote for whoever they think represents the enemy of their enemies, and even support foreign governments that they think represent the opposite of their own establishment. They won't give a f about virtue-signaling platform providers in their own country, they will turn to providers elsewhere, whoever that may be (Russia etc).
The belief that further exclusion everywhere will make anything better is just absolutely ridiculous.
As much as I don't like cloudflare because it does create security issues (you are afterall proxying traffic through them) I have to respect the CEO's position on this. And it isn't easy.
Perhaps a statement that you did not support them in their ideals would have suited both the situation and your minds.
I've always felt like Cloudflare was one of the better leading internet companies, especially because of their neutrality towards their customers.
This is kind of a downer.
I think you can safely say this has nothing to do with political pressure if it's something you've asserted yourself. You can't say, "We've never taken down a website due to internal moral pressure," but that's something I actually consider when picking a business to do business with, so it stands to reason a business should make decisions based on this. Not everyone feels this way, and that's fine, but I prefer to do business with people I consider principled in the way that I am.
Is this a dangerous notion? It doesn't seem so in practice, in that the only people being banned are Nazis and child porn distributors; tough luck making that slope slippery with those two players.
Thankfully Cloudflare are not and should never be in the position where they decide what stays on the internet, as they are just one provider, and do not have a monopoly. This is why monopolies are undesirable, even though most companies aspire to one.
Companies make those clauses arbitrary for a purpose: that's so they don't get a bunch of amateur legal eagles who will attempt to argue forever about what they can and can not get away with. By purposefully leaving a gray area the company can draw the line by adjusting to fluid conditions when it suits them.
You can disagree with that but I totally understand why a company like Cloudflare would want to reserve some room for maneuvering: it is impossible to know what the future will throw at you.
After all I have read in the news regarding Daily Stormer, I thought it best to go straight to the source, and find out whether what I had been reading was accurate, or if their views had been entirely, or in part, misrepresented.
As a result of Cloudflare revoking their services to DS, the site is down. I can't evaluate DS directly. To me, this is bad.
If everything that was said about DS is true, their own words would reveal their colours. People could judge them accordingly.
The media regularly misrepresents individuals and groups. We shouldn't have to take the media at their word. Whenever possible, we should be able to evaluate the source. Now we can't, and we're worse off for it.
I hope this isn't a precursor to HN being sockpuppeted to death like Reddit...
Does it mean food stores could deny selling you food, based on your associations/affiliations? Airlines deny you travel? Cell phone companies, deny you a phone?
I think the reason we're seeing backlash here is that the internet is largely perceived as a utility now (I believe utility companies cannot deny service at will).
Secondly, more than once is US history have those attempting to be virtuous gone too far (e.g. McCarthyism). Surely it will happen again. When that day comes, will it be better if we err to the side of too dismissive or too open-minded?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170721194819/www.dailystormer....
I wonder if censoring the Alt-Right only reinforces them as subculture via Streisand effect.
Could you please apply the same policy to malicious sites that are you are proxying which you never bother to take down because of 'insert poor reasons here'? I think thats worse then to see or read an opinion i don't agree with, regardless of how explicit that opinion is or how badly i disagree. People should be able to say what they want where they want and not only when the largest part of the population/media agrees.
The limit lies at VIOLENCE. There never is a reason to enforce or show your opinion through means of violence. Ever.
Good to know they had a line somewhere. I was just surprised to see it.
It seems like there is no free speech on internet: because free speech is controlled by corporations and the loudest people on social media. So there will be no ISIS websites, no Daily Stormer websites, etc.
That is how it is.
So CloudFlare draws the line of freedom of speech when they feel attacked by words, but it's OK if the content they defend is used to attack and slander others?
At the end of the day Cloudflare are just exercising their own freedoms to accept the business they choose to. The Daily Stormer will (if they haven't already) just switch to another provider so it's not like they're being censored (well, not in any effective way) and everyone is now clear where Cloudflare's position is with regards to The Daily Stormer while very little time was wasted with expensive lawyers. On balance I think this seems a pretty fair outcome for all parties involved.
In general this forum is pretty pro market but when a certain idea comes under attack from the market, people start talking about public goods. It seems like there are some contradictions here that feel under explored.
I have similar thoughts about this. I do not want technology companies deciding what content is reachable.
We've heavily lost our freedoms around privacy.
Speech is the big prize for the authoritarians. Do not give it to them.
They could have played this card better I think.
These aren't child pornographers trying to stay under the radar of the law. These are Nazis advocating for the murder of people who don't look like them, and trying to make their views mainstream.
Making them harder to for the vast majority of people to find is a major part of exactly how you shut a violent fascist movement down. And if you don't think a movement like this should be shut down, you're part of the problem.
Did you ever read about how Mussolini or Hitler gained their power? Do you really think that the governments back then didn't do anything to prevent what they were trying to start? That they didn't try to shut them down, etc.?
We are talking about a severe social problem that unfortunately ends up mostly with bulls* - white supremacy and all this cr. Why? Because nobody wants to listen to these people - what are the issues they have? I would say that most of the time, these people don't have a high income. Maybe they are unemployed, etc., maybe they don't feel secure/safe - do you actually know why they do these things? Some may be mentally ill, but hell, I don't want to believe that all of them are!
How many times does this have to happen again and again...? When will we ever learn? Rising walls and shutting people up are not good ways to build something - but only to destroy.
The forum that's specifically about hatred doesn't add anything to the dialog.
What we want in order to avoid a repeat of Hitler's rise is for people looking for a place to vent and talk about real economic problems to find places to do so constructively, not places that say that the answer is "burn the n-----s!".
Sometimes its better if things have an outlet that's relatively benign and already mentally unstable people don't have cause for even more agitation. Plus it's easier to keep an eye on things and perhaps guide them a little. Confirming (in their eyes at least) what is already suspected doesn't help the situation. Let them have their site and their speech. Because you can't really stop it anyway and trying makes it worse.
A small bakery not putting a confederate flag or a rainbow or a swastiaka on a cake or conversely being compelled by law to do so if requested is different than Google or Cloudflare kicking out a customer for their speech or being legally compelled not to.
I think Cloudlfare was in the right. The Daily Stormer was pretty stupid to say that Cloudflare supported or agreed with them and got kicked out.
In half of Europe Nazis were replaced by Stalinists...hope we're not on the same path.
Legally 1st amendment is protection against the government, but principally it should be applied to any entity with national or global power.
Racist, Nazis or anyone can say what they want (minus explicit call for violence), and the opposing side has the equal right to prove them wrong. That's the beauty and intent of the 1st Amendment. How people are cheering this decision, seems rather shortsighted to me.
It's ridiculous to call Cloudflare this. There are tons of alternative CDNs. They have as much "power" as your local bookstore.
1. https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/087295.h...
An entity that puts child porn on the Internet isn't protected by freedom of speech. Soliciting hate, violence and prejudice is obviously not identical but it's a lot different from just having a different opinion than someone else.
Shitty people should be treated shitty by companies. I don't really see a democratic way of banning folks like this from Cloudflare besides Cloudflare deciding to do so.
No it isn't, this is complete nonsense. There's not very many booters and besides a few exceptions they don't have paid CF plans.
Still doesn't make sense. CF alone doesn't effectively defend against DDoS attacks without somewhat complicated setup, CF is completely worthless when your backend is getting attacked.
I think you're seriously overestimating the amount of people pushed to use CF because of these booters.
Besides, do you feel that the situation would be any different if the booters weren't allowed on CF? CF is by no means important to their operations.
They continuously hid behind "free speech" to justify hosting this stuff, even though we not talking about speech but literal malware exploit kits. Cloudflare is one of those companies that is actively making the world a worse place to live in.
But I know freedom of speech needs protection, because today, it is easier than ever to be given a label and associated with the worst of humanity, and for people to think that you're a racist/sexist/etc., even when you are very far from it. We all just saw this happen to James Damore, a pro-diversity guy, who suggested ways to make his workplace more attractive to a larger proportion of women, and cited only science that has been backed up by a significant number of studies. The tyrannical Left felt some of his comments go against their narrative, the narrative that oppression is the cause of everything unless proven otherwise. A intellectually lazy and innacurate narrative, obviously. The world is never so simple, and the evidence doesn't support such a view. If we give up freedom of speech and punish people like James Damore, we will have lost the freedom that supports our society, and allows us to have political discourse.
Do you know what separates us from Russia, China, and the rest? The freedom of speech. Democracy is only truly held by a country when political discourse is allowed. Obviously.
The Left is guilty of demonisation of their opponents and alienation of their allies, and is, from what I've seen, the only group wanting to stop freedom of speech, and impose tyranny on all others. People need to wake up to its threat. It is much less obvious than the hideous Neo-Nazis, far more insidious.
The fact that I fear being called 'right-wing' for what I have just said is absurd. Friends of mine are members of both Left and Right-wing political parties in my country, and I refuse to be associated with either, because parties and wings create division and move us further apart, and distract us from the same values that we do share. And of course because I disagree with both wings. They are both driven by fear instead of reason. Nothing clouds one's judgement more than strong negative emotion. The crocodile brain. The worst part of ourselves.
My limit? The explicit threat or encouragement of violence. This is never acceptible. This is where we can and should be coming down on the neo-nazis, white supremacists, socialists, antifa, and the rest of them. They are violent people, so this isn't hard.
Encouraging neo-nazism, given the holocaust, might be considered encouraging violence. This makes some sense to me. So perhaps, where there is incontrovertible evidence of encouraging Nazi belief, or belief systems that are explicitly and historically supportive of violence, we can consider the implicit threat of violence an explicit one. Can anyone poke holes in this? Or any of what I've said? Unlikely anyone will read this absurdly long comment, but I still want to post it.
However, I have to object to what I see as an attempt to portray yourself as a politically unbiased observer:
>Friends of mine are members of both Left and Right-wing political parties in my country, and I refuse to be associated with either, because parties and wings create division and move us further apart, and distract us from the same values that we do share.
Prior to this, you assert that "the Left" is "the only group wanting to stop freedom of speech, and impose tyranny on all others." Earlier, you refer to the "tyrannical Left" and mention that you consider James Damore to have been a victim of censorship, and their "(obviously) intellectually lazy and inaccurate narrative."
You may reject political parties but you appear to disagree with one ideological wing far less than the other. Such language only serves to poison the well, and encourage exactly the distraction and emotionally charged polarity you claim to oppose.
Unfortunately for them, this puts them squarely in the same category as, say, Google [2][3][4], whose near-ubiquitous presence in people's digital lives intersects with their black-box suspension behavior and near-memetic lack of customer support, to unpleasant effects. And no ill will towards Google either; they are just one of several examples who exist at the sweet spot of significant market share, widespread presence at various layers of information-networking, and a largely disconnected customer support experience.
Cloudflare is trying to set themselves apart from a company (and competitors) that evoke that association by blogging about the gravity of their decision, but at this stage their writings aren't backed by demonstrable due process, like they aspire to work towards. Instead, they truthfully admit that it's troubling that any number of private corporations up and down the stack can boot people and information off the net, and then segue off to a self-reflective, but inconclusive closing.
No new ground is blazed by this post. After all, those hosting content that they know has fallen afoul of contemporary sensibilities are still concerned, the people troubled by private corporations' control of the net stack have another example to add to their list, and the people who are most disturbed by the nature of the content banned in this instance are pleased this situation played out the way it did.
Some will invoke the slippery slope argument, and perhaps rightfully so. I'd argue from a pragmatic standpoint that mainstream views shift over time, so it's natural that some topics will become taboo, some views will become to be seen obsolete and even abhorrent, as history has shown. And absent government regulation (in all relevant jurisdictions), corporations will try to act in their own self-interest, trying to balance reassuring their own customer-base with satisfying wider public value-sets, while seeking to shed customers who may cause them a disproportionate amount of cost: monetary, reputational, or otherwise. Government regulation protects certain classes of people through various mechanisms, like those with disabilities, or certain, but not all intrinsic characteristics that have been commonly used in the past to discriminate. We, as societies, then overlay subjective judicial systems to try to reason whether corporations' behavior towards certain individuals was legal or illegal.
It's wasted effort to try to gauge, as outsiders, whether Cloudflare will enact a transparent process if any process they enact operates solely on the honor system. If it's checked by the legal system, then that's a different story. We're too early for that story.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/, section 5 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12972554 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3839568
The government must permit free speech because we cannot improve a system we cannot criticize. But this is not a sufficient condition to give new and radical ideas a chance. Citizens must believe in the principle, too. Just like all the anti-discrimination restrictions on government offer little protection to the marginalized when any business can do it, a guarantee that the government will not throw you in jail for your speech means little when no one will host your website, no one will print your book, no one will hire you, and campaigns of bullying and harassment are fair game.
It is easy to feel that might makes right when you are on the side of the majority, but looking back in history, it is not always obvious what is right. For example, we often imagine that the historical opposition to interracial marriage proceeded from base hatred, but this wasn't so. The science of the time showed clearly and repeatedly that the races had vastly differing intelligences and that intelligence was heritable. We know now that this research was flawed, but at the time, it was well established scientific opinion. The concern was that by mixing the races, we would drop the intelligence of humanity down to the mean, and deprive ourselves of great thinkers, and bring about the doom of humanity in an idiocracy. It was argued that those who supported interracial marriage were blinded by compassion and would cause the downfall of civilization.
This was a very popular, very intellectually credible view, held by good and responsible upstanding citizens who were willing to work hard and fight hard to protect civilization.
Sure, they were able to pass laws based on their views. That's right and proper. But should they have been allowed to suppress dissent? Should the scientific community have rejected research that would lead to the doom of human civilization? Should people be fired for supporting it? Demonstraters identified, shamed, and harrassed? Print shops refuse to print their literature?
The world is a weird place. Speech which we consider dangerous abnd abhorrent usually is. But sometimes? Sometimes it's right, either in part or in whole. Sometimes what you think is right, based on what you think you know, turns out to be wrong.
The reason it is critical to let Nazis speak, the reason it is critical to oppose arguments with arguments alone and never with any measure of force, is that this is the only system under which views which are true and right have a chance of winning.
Whatever you want the rule to be, however you want to treat the Nazis, remember that not that long ago, their ideas were the ones that were obviously popular and right, that all the well-informed and powerful and good people subscribed to.
The price of free speech is that there are always crazies. People starting cults of ignorance and hate, drawing the desperate and the damaged into them and threatening the very foundations of society. These ideas need to be fought, but it is crucial that they be fought WITH. WORDS. If we resort to collaborative blows, we will miss it when the crazies are right about something important.
A court could easily side with the "abhorrent neo-nazis" if DDOSing raises their bills and Cloudflare's adhoc policy was the culprit, no matter what arbitration clause was written in their contract, and put the damages on Cloudflare.
There are literally thousands of hosts out there in and outside the United States. The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
Exactly. Thank you for this beautiful statement.
Dear writer of faul thoughts; have you considered that maybe one day this HN forum that you love so much will be closed due your writings here? Let's keep our forum clean from your Nazi sympathizing so that HN can continue as a part of the beautiful open web.
Foreign hosts are not really the right solution to freedom of speech on the internet. First of all it depends on the agreeability with the opinion rather than the right to express it. But moreover they can be DDoS'd just the same without a service like cloudflare. Cloudflare is a proxy not a host.
The core problem is that the Internet is a modern public space while its management has been handled by private entities. Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police permitting the KKK to march, which the US constitution permits. They don't have to do it as a private entity, but if DDoS becomes the norm for unpopular speech then the internet is no longer a public space, just a space for views that don't get DDoS'd.
Looks like some heavy reality bending for a questionable cause to me.
DDoS is the internet equivalent of a mob censoring public speech. Proxies like cloudflare are the equivalent of the police protecting the right to speak, no matter the view.
Remember that these principles, which date to the Enlightenment, work for all views and have benefited the civil rights, antiwar, suffragist, environment and other movements immeasurably.
But even if it was. You must get a permit just like in real life. Which a private entity doesn't have to grant you. Because you know... personal freedom.
Not to mention access to Internet is considered a basic right in some countries.
So grand parent makes compelling case, just not in US laws.
The question is, should the Internet be a free and open public forum or not? Should we permit mobs to knock legal servers off the Internet?
That would seem to run counter to the idea of an open internet embodied in net neutrality, upon which certain laws have been developed and passed over the years. It would be a mistake to merely look at the current laws on the books without grasping the underlying general principles.
The better analogy is that Cloudflare is performing the function of private security instead of a police force.
The United State government doesn't require any private entities to provide armed security for political groups they dislike (in fact, the US government couldn't make such a mandate as the mandate itself would fall afoul of the first amendment).
If we believe that there must be a steward of this resource that should provide this kind of service in a first amendment protected manner, then we should advocate that the government offer DDoS protection services.
Remember that these same principles apply to progressive views as well... which have not historically been as popular, and greatly benefited from free speech protections. I would say we would not be where we are now as a society without them.
As a brown immigrant currently living/working in the States I'm not a Nazi sympathizer by any stretch but I wanted to post in support of your broader point.
The commentary on past posts on HN and elsewhere floors me. It seems one or two things are prevalent:
1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
2. Support for Cryptofascism (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-fascism) is rampant. Either folks don't know that they already support it, or they wittingly do and are too afraid to say it out in the open.
Immensely disturbing. As someone who cherishes the rule of law over the rule of man, not aiding and these illiberal parties is the minimum. They are not pluralists; they don't care about the rules of the game. They won't politely tolerate you. Deviants will be chastised, expelled/expatriated, jailed, or killed. Ignoring prudence (preservation of self and the society at-large) is perilous.
Sorry, hate to break it to you, but these illiberal forces are a clear and present danger to this comfortable society you call home.
No, it's the last gasps of a dying breed of racists, empowered by the Internet and that look a lot more popular than they are due to media focus. Nazis are lame, but you leave them alone and there's nothing to fuel the fire. You send out counterprotesters, get in fights with them, act like these people are on the verge of starting a civil war and in their minds you've proved them right (delusional though they may be), and they get energized and then you have a real problem.
Kicking nazis off the Internet is one thing, but yours (and the grandparent) is the language that causes the slippery slope arguments. That people can't even discuss the issue of free speech without being assumed to be nazi sympathizers or "cryptofascists" or whatever we want to label people we don't agree with isn't ok.
Someone having a debate about the right of nazis to use modern services is not by extension a nazi.
Really? Because yesterday the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES defended white nationalists and neo-nazis on national TV.
This discussion also shouldn't have much to do with free speech. If private companies do not want to allow pro-nazi websites to use their servers, they should be allowed to refuse them.
The only slippery slope here is the idea that Nazis are dying and there is no need to take them seriously. People in Germany did not take them seriously when Hitler started his rise to power, then the country fell into disarray and Hitler had simple answers to hard questions. After everything that has happened over the past year, it is time to stop thinking that something like Hitler's rise to power could never happen again. We are in uncharted waters.
Trump is unscrupulous, he'd defend anyone who would be his friend (and there aren't many of those these days, so he's left with the dregs). He's not a slick political maneuverer who is going to overturn the federal government. He'll be gone in a few years. The displays like this last weekend are hundreds or a couple thousand people. They aren't parades of uniformed militia (like Hitler's rise saw).
These people want attention. They're getting it especially when we exaggerate the threat they pose, which only fuels their grandiosity and recruitment.
I try to understand your strategy. Because this does not seem to be a valid workable way imho.
No, he reiterated his condemnation of them multiple times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5Mp2Ge3Wg&feature=youtu.be...
His first response is the most significant.
I just don't see where this is stopping. What else needs to be taken down? /pol/? Who about Breitbart? Or maybe some 2nd WW Nazi propaganda? Or something from the US civil war?
You guys seem to be ok with this very slippery slope being assessed by random private companies accountable to who knows. And then you have the nerve to call us who believes that limits of free speech should be set by courts and open process "nazis"?!
> [...] shut down every communist site as well?
And you completely disregarded the conditions why?
That doesn't fit Communism, but that's the definition of Nazis.
As for domestic terrorism, when was the last leftist riot?
Communism, as an ideology, disagrees with capitalism... and capitalism equally disagrees with communism.
However neither ideology discriminates against the other - a capitalist company will employ a communist if the individual is a productive employee, and a communist commune will welcome a capitalist if they strengthen the commune.
Individuals within both groups do advocate for violence against the other, but the ideologies do not. Contrast that with Nazism or literal Islamism - ideologies that explicitly espouses violence and discrimination against "the other".
That's the key part. Either you're one and fit the narrative, or you gotta GTFO in communism. You couldn't come to communist commune and establish a company or bank or invest money or whatever like in capitalist community. It's not like you could come in and own personal property as in capitalism either. The most you could do would be a closet capitalist and keep your ideas to yourself. But you could be a closet gay in nazi country too.
When communists came to my country, it wasn't pretty. Either become one and dropped property if you had anything worthwhile or you were fucked. To be fair, I don't know how else could they have attempted to install communism. But communism doesn't tolerate different ideologies on the same soil.
And today's communists do discriminate capitalists on day-to-day affairs. E.g. disregard of private property. Wether it's calling a gay person names or spitting on rich man's car, both are discriminating people that don't fit one's narrative. Ultimately, if either person got into power, they'd do harm to the other person or at least kick them out from the community.
Of course, somewhat personal action feels worse than doing something to property. But ultimately it's the same - discrimination based on one's ideas.
Given the chance, gay people will try to live their lives in peace.
Given the chance, Nazis will try to exterminate billions of people.
Nazis haven't been systematically persecuted and killed for millennia. Ironically, gay people have been systematically persecuted and murdered by Nazis. Such persecution is why there are protected classes, which some governments recognize gay people as belonging to.
That's not what is happening, as I understood it. The grandparent simply refuted the general argument that "The business does not need to be accountable to anyone" by providing a counterexample whereby unconditionally following this argument can lead to an unwanted outcome.
In other words: it's not that simple.
However, that was not the argument that was made. The original argument is unconditional: "to anyone", period.
The grandparent pointed out this flaw. You are on the same side of the argument.
Therefore comparing cloudflare and the bakery is dishonest, there you go.
Well, that explains why you still haven't realized that the comment you took offense with was actually concordant with your own position.
Because it's not really a choice. You can pretend play to advocate for whatever political ideology. The same way you can have sex with women even if you're gay or vice versa. You can choose your sexual behavior.
But political orientation is not really a choice. It is perhaps a result of your choices, early influences, social group, etc.
The idea is that you can believe whatever you want, but as soon as you start to propagate violence and pose an active threat against democracy - like e.g. making detailed plans to overthrow the government, advertising that only certain people should be allowed to vote, etc - there should be reasonable limits.
It's kind of a water a person swims in. It's the way he thinks. It's too meta for most people to even think about it as something chooseable.
It helps that I live in a country with more than 2 dominant political parties; it lets me think in shades of gray (rather than in black-and-white).
Who says it's so for everybody?
There are millions who insist that their sex orientation is their choice. They can try X, experiment with Z, and whatever. That was part of the idea of "fluid genders" and sexual liberation in the sixties and especially seventies.
If that's not "a choice" I don't know what is. Just because it's not often a choice doesn't mean it can't be.
In both cases the discrimination would just force me to pretend to be something other than I am.
I don't disagree about color, but the way how you can or cannot force people to avoid visibly and openly living their political identity OR their sexual identity is exactly the same, as it is for religion. It's always outside force, forcing you to pretend to be other than you really are.
My brother in law is mentally ill.m and his local diving center won't take him for a dive. I have to ask him to sue them for refusal of service based on his sicknes and because his sickness is not his choice.
Nazis are not.
To me its strange someone would consider closing down /pol/ a "slippery slope". I am amazed that someone would consider 4chan a moral compass for the type of things their admins should put up with. moot has closed down /pol/ for this very reason in the past with even less "political" awareness than the CEO of cloudflare.
4Chan is "free-speech" not through effort but through negligence & apathy. moot shut down /pol/ (aka /n/) before, twice, on a whim because he didn't like the content. It's not the first time it has devolved into nazi-fetishism. While 4chan has the reputation for being a seedy place, moot has taken stands and banned people and conversions from 4chan (for example most recently gamergate on /v/) for reasons that can be boiled down to that he didn't like it (mods of 4chan have done this as well, such as no Naruto on /a/). The current iteration of /pol/ has likely been allowed to live through negligence - moot is no longer involved with 4chan, and the new owner hiroyuki has been as absent as moot during his VC startup days. Simply put 4chan never had any moderator accountability (see Rule 9 of the internet).
In conclusion, the notion that this is a "slippery slope" is nonsense. "Free speech" on the internet never really existed, the current view points that exist only exist because their operators have never bothered to flex their muscles - and the reason they haven't has rarely been because of some moral high ground. At the end of the day there is plenty of "reasonable" content YouTube won't host for you, and that Facebook will kick you for. If you are concerned about being silenced by a corporate vendor, then choose your partners wisely. If none will support you - then self fund. Free Speech doesn't mean the NYT is obligated to print your content, only that the government wont stop circulation of your newspaper. If you can't acquire the resources to start your own print, then tough luck.
The issue here is more nuanced. It's about any site on the Internet being censored by a mob. That's why the YouTube or Facebook analogies don't hold. You could always host the content yourself. But DDoS can knock out any unprotected host anywhere. And DDoS protection isn't really something you can DIY.
So the issue here is not about being silenced by a corporate vendor. It's about being silenced, period, wherever you host.
But we can make a distinction between destinations, like Instagram, and infrastructure, like streets and public parks and libraries that allows you to access the destinations of your choice. DDoS is something that kicks people off of the very infrastructure of the Internet itself, thus denying others the choice to visit them.
The underlying problem is that core Internet infrastructure is managed by private entities. This is unlike "meatspace" where there are public spaces protected by the police / government who block the physical equivalent of DDoS (duct taping mouths / burning down printing presses). So, what does this mean as more of our communication as a society moves into the digital realm? Is it a blessing that it is more privately managed, empowering those managers to block "bad" speech? Or should we extend the same "meatspace" principles of free speech for all by requiring Internet infrastructure providers to provide unimpeded access to all?
It's important that a small private business should have the right to not do business with someone they don't want to do business with, but that's not an absolute principle, just as free speech is not[1]. Or rather, all of our principles can come into conflict.
The idea that an entity that processes 10% of internet traffic can exclude someone from expressing their opinions - vile and hateful as they may be - via that entity, is scary. Scarier than not being able to express a given opinion in many countries, frankly. I'm not even saying CloudFlare is necessarily in the wrong here, but it's certainly not a non-issue.
[1] Not to be confused with the US First Amendment, which is very close to absolute where it applies, but does not apply to many cases where the principle of free speech is relevant.
Look, the spirit behind free speech is the principle of the bazaar of ideas.
The place where everyone can meet, exchange and learn. If someone sells something and it's distasteful, well you learn that you don't like it.
That's the spirit, which too many people don't understand, or don't go far enough to understand.
In this bazaar are now thugs, they sell wares designed to disrupt the bazaar, to addict customers, and to stop more complex goods from being sold.
They choose to disrupt the bazaar, and they count on those who repeat "free speech", to tie themselves down and not stop them.
Like a child taunting someone by saying "prove that 2+2 is not = 5."
Valid questions which have hard proofs are regularly used to tie up discussion. It's done intentionally in order to "win".
There's no victory here- the opposition isn't playing by the rules. when there is no good faith, then there is no discussion.
The problem with that example is the same thing can be used to describe MLK during the 60s. He was all of that by most of the people who lived during that time. It can be applied to pornography, or Catcher in the Rye. You either squash distasteful ideas or you don't. Here's a little secret for you younger folks. The stuff the next generation does, you might find distasteful, but it's the future. They have to be allowed to try on new ideas. If you don't those ideas become more attractive because they are forbidden fruit.
The nice thing about allowing Stormwhatever to speak, is it allows people to see them for what they are. If you squelch them, well, that just makes them stronger.
You have to be able to apply it to people who you admire and people you despise.
I too am an acolyte for the cult of free speech.
The key difference being I test the ideas and beliefs in the real world. I signed up to mod a subreddit which was in trouble and I saw what worked and what didn't.
I urge you and others to make that time investment.
You are worried about catcher in the rye- we're long past protecting it. What's being fought are memes - mind bombs and channel stuffers.
We are fighting to let thought survive, in the face of people intentionally releasing material designed to hijack human brains via emotion.
Catcher in the rye is not what's being protected.
The foundation for civilization scale thought is what's being defended.
You are using a paragon to defend something unrelated.
You assume a lot of things about the current state of discourse and the motives of the attaxkers.
They aren't debating Marxism or porn. They're trying to drown out other ideas, and to tie Down people who present cogent counter arguments.
Want a non tech example? Take a look at anti vacc or creationism.
Those are ideas designed to be consumed by human brains- polarize them and then herd them away from information which could counter the infection.
That's not the bazaar of ideas. Thats not free speech.
That's what's happening.
And we have nothing to defend against it.
You are far from an "acolyte for the cult of free speech" if think ideas you disagree with should be kicked out of the bazaar by mobs.
Here is my statement
> , in the face of people intentionally releasing material designed to hijack human brains via emotion.
And then later
> They aren't debating Marxism or porn. They're trying to drown out other ideas, and to tie Down people who present cogent counter arguments.
>Want a non tech example? Take a look at anti vacc or creationism.
How you went from there, to
>Wait, so you're saying censoring creationist and anti-vaccine sites is acceptable too?
I am not sure.
SO let me re-iterate my main point.
The battle being fought right now, is between people who are using techniques to stymie actual discussion and actual trade of ideas.
The idea is to "hack" the human brain, to target emotions, logical errors, rhetoric and so on, and to then build a block of people who can be counted to work together.
The active target is free speech itself, science, and so called "liberal" values, which is now just a label for an ever expanding field of targets.
You want to look at creationism and anti vacc to study how those non factual ideas were propagated.
Remember that these ideas won in the country which had the greatest claim to carrying the torch of civilization and science.
You look at those topics for study, not censorship.
You then understand the techniques used once you study those topics.
Once you do that, you realize that this is not about free speech, and that nothign in free speech can really deal with what is happening.
Free speech is not contingent on the subject that is being "targeted" -- science, liberal values, or even the concept of free speech itself (if challenged merely by speech). Free speech is simply the right to speak your views, no matter how unpopular, illiberal or radical. The proper response to speech you disagree with is: more speech. As soon as you designate certain speech as dangerous, "brain hacking" speech that we need to censor for the sake of "civilization and science," you begin sliding down the slippery slope into censoring stuff like creationism.
The correct way to respond to creationism, and Nazi ideas, is by explaining how wrong they are. And that means that unpopular Leftist ideas (of which I am a subscriber), as "dangerous" as they may be to some, also get their forum in the bazaar.
I've already applied those ideas, "more speech". We've seen it repeated on so many forums now, so many subreddits a year, that the follow up pattern is already known.
It sadly doesnt work.
You can hold your view all you like mate, but in the end - its just a theory.
And do you honestly think, you are special and the only forum moderator, or forum attacker to NOT know those theories?
Really?
This isn't undiscovered country. Its just undiscovered for you.
Read what I have written.
As for your specific charge against dealing with Creationism.
1) why the hell are you fixated on creationism? are you some sort of free speech bouncer? Unless I wear the colors and say "I shall protect Creationism, even though I don't agree with it", you won't listen to me?
2) Creationism is REGULARLY debunked. In mass media, on forums, everywhere.
It makes no whit of difference to its target audience. Studies show that showing counteracting information often results in those views becoming EVEN MORE entrenched.
People debunking creationism can easily walk into a discussion - expecting that it will be a discussion.
Instead its a Specatcle, in the old Roman sense of the word - The opposite side hits them with a technicality "You can't explain all of evolution. See! theres even a debate among scientists on evolution!"
Which the antagonists then spin into "Teach the controversy!".
How can you have speech, when the other side never intended to speak in the first place?
3) WHy stop at creationism? What about jihadist recuritment material? What about JIhadist material explaining the pain they suffer, and the good reasons (according to them) they have for killing infidels?
4) What about libel? What about Laws against subliminal advertizing for that matter?
And here are some real life scenarios for you to answer -
What are you going to do when you get DDOSed? What do you do when the forum gets over run or brigaded?
What do you do when the people making speech are targeted and harassed, and thus removed from the discussion?
What do you do when people use the forum rules like lawyers, and tie forum mods into knots in order to make space for hate speech?
What do you do when experts enter a discussion, but the other side uses it as an opportunity to go "YOU CANT EXPLAIN EXTREMELY COMPLEX SUBJECT IN 2 SENTENCES! SEE THEY ARE FRAUDS!"
That sounds like every news station since the 80s, or the Washington Post forums. People on both sides do nothing but prey on emotion, it's a common tactic. Their opinion and even news articles prey on emotion. Fox of course does it as well. News is now a liability in the US; sold their soul for the almighty dollar.
>And we have nothing to defend against it.
Reason and logic. A good BS detector helps too. I understand our educational system is in shambles though. I don't disagree that is a problem, but censoring it won't solve it, at least censoring by blocking websites to register.
Please cite your source for showing where a "private association" that is not a public accommodation cannot discriminate, or explain why any church can bar non-believers from membership.
A website is not such a thing.
Long before 4chan repeated everything Usenet had done many years earlier there was plenty of free speech on the Internet.
Not because nobody was in control to prevent it, but because the news admins who were in control believed in free speech enough to facilitate it. Although Usenet is a shadow of its heyday, that still applies even to this day.
Hate to bring /b/ into my hn, but newfriends, who make up the majority of the /pol/lacks don't even know this.
Your usual neighbour's 18-year old son.
> What are their actual motives?
For the 'lulz' of course.
So how does one distinguish between a genuine kill-all-the-scum Nazi, and a child who's pretending to be one, for the lulz? You get lulz from people who get upset. And you get lulz from people who agree with you. It's a win-win.
Ultimately, there's no way to tell. It's a textbook example of Poe's Law. And indeed, there's no observable difference. Maybe everyone behind Nazi sites are in it for the lulz. And/or for the money, or fame. You get the same fucked up social impacts, either way.
I mean, many gangbangers are fundamentally after lulz.
I am really not convinced of that. I believe they have been marginalized by society and this is their way to regain their relevance. The fact that that conveniently plays into the agenda of those that would like to see the world change in that way as well but who do not have sufficient agency to do it themselves doesn't help at all.
Anyway, we've seen this movie before and it did not end well back then, I wonder how many people saw the trainwreck happening in slow motion and realize they were powerless to stop it. It's like an explosion or an avalanche. Once sufficient activation energy has been added the end result is inevitable, even if you as an observer of the first act feel the need to warn of the impending disaster it will happen anyway and you're going to be along for the ride until a new stable configuration has been reached at a lower energy level.
Re lulz, maybe spend some time reading the chans and Encyclopedia Dramatica.
/j/ was temporarily accessible through a bug and IRC chatlogs are widely available. The moderation on 4chan is very much active, it's just not compelled to fast and hard action for anything save child porn or an impending murder. Much of the hooliganism is largely explicitly allowed, at least according to the info currently available to us.
"See, we just had a misunderstanding. I thought I lived in the USA, the United States of America, and actually we live in the USA, the United States of Advertising: freedom of expression guaranteed, if you've got the money!"
-Bill Hicks on being censored by CBS
Then DailyStormer says CloudFare are secretly nazis.
Then CloudFare say "no we don't, goodbye".
If DailyStormer hadn't been so stupid, and had never claimed CloudFare was anything other than neutral, then they would still be served?
Stupid own goal DailyStormer.
The censorship and 'line' seems to be not what you say or incite against others, but what you say about CloudFare.
The censorship and 'line' seems to be not what you say or incite against others, but what you say about CloudFare
But if you shit on my living room carpet I'll also show you the door. As I think is my right.
Of course it's going to be dragged through the mud anyway now, but at least it'll be for something they actually did.
According to CloudFare... Can't seem to find exactly where they say this. Their platforms on which to say things seem to be dropping like flies here.
Not saying they didn't claim that, but that's one of the problems with taking away someone's speech entirely - your only "source" for knowing what they have actually said is the claims of the people who just shut them down.
Oppresive government wants cloudflare to stop hosting some dissenters site.
Cloudflare says no
Then such government tries again, this time accusing dissenters of terrorism or something else despicable such as child molestation or hate speech.
Cloudflare still refuses
Then someone in such government impersonates the dissenters and claims cloudflare is on their side.
Cloudflare immediately kicks dissenters out of their network.
Free speech is hard.
As for the slippery slope arguments, come on.
It seems to me that such a business owner would seem in hindsight to have been acting virtuously, and it seems that businesses that did in fact offer services to e.g. the Nazi party are now tarnished morally because of that.
No it wouldn't - There is a large percentage of population joining Nazi parties for convenience, for their career or even out of fear. Are you going to deny them the food you sell from your shop? If they are Nazi's, are they still not human beings deserving to access food in the market?
Does someone being a member of the Nazi party mean we can let them starve to death? Shoot them and push them into a trench even?
The moment you dehumanise vast swathes of the population, you've already lost and dropped to the level of "Nazi's". It's not wise to let your enemies turn you into them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/spoonuniversity.com/news/the-di...
No, they can stop being nazi's at any point. Literally in less than a second.
Blacks, jews, gays, disabled people can't.
Stop trying to equate the two.
Are you pretending that nazism can be interpreted charitably?
I can kill someone and claim it's for buddhism or my local sports team, but there is no basis for either of those promoting murder.
Nazism not so.
But the difference (or similarity?) is that only a diminishingly tiny fraction of practitioners for either religion believes in stoning.
If I asked you to give me a few key points of the tenets of Islam and Christianity, would any be about killing, eradicating, or persecution of people?
If I asked you to do the same for Nazism? Are you going to pretend it's comparable?
Second, it's irrelevant. In my hypothetical, I'm talking about specific individuals who have conceded to believing that apostates should be executed. If they invoke their religion as a shield for having that view, and have done nothing otherwise illegal, you can't refuse to serve them under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The view on stoning in Bangladesh could be religious, but it could also be cultural, as it's not equal elsewhere where practicing muslims reside.
And if it, as I posit, isn't a core tenet of the religion, and if it is, as I posit, one in nazism, it can't be solved through cultural tolerance.
"Approximately 77,000 German citizens were killed for one or another form of resistance by Special Courts, courts-martial, People's Court and the civil justice system. "
"Almost every community in Germany had members taken away to concentration camps. As early as 1935 there were jingles warning: "Dear Lord God, keep me quiet, so that I don't end up in Dachau." (It almost rhymes in German: Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm / Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.)[17] "Dachau" refers to the Dachau concentration camp"
- Given EXTENUATING circumstances, the choice may be difficult to exercise.
And even then - many people exercised that right, even knowing the risks - because it was just the right thing to do, and being a nazi wasn't.
I'd note that I'm pretty sure by the time Nazi's owned the government in Germany it was too late.
They may stop looking and acting like nazis, but still believe the same ideas.
What do you really oppose? Nazis? People who look and talk like Nazis? People who perform horrible actions like the horrible actions the Nazis did?
Historically, yes.
At what point do I as an individual have the right to not associate with a group or ideology that's seeks my destruction? Because that's really what's at the heart of the matter whether we're talking about Cloudflare or just me because I'm sure that Cloudflare has Jews, racial minorities, and LGBT folks on their staff. And I'm sure even some of those folks are even investors. So why should the investors and employees of Cloudflare protect Nazis who seek their destruction? For money? I can accept that it's a matter of profit, but if you're asking for a moral basis to aid those that want to kill you I can't see there being any argument in favor of protecting or aiding them.
How about the possible historical situation where a business owners doesn't offer services to the irish, jews, gays, blacks, etc?
Because those things have also happened -- and when you say it's ok to refuse those services to a group, you open a window for refusing those services to other groups too.
Just because consensus or power today is with the "good groups" (as far as you're concerned) doesn't change that fact.
It's even worse when what's right and wrong is even more muddy. E.g. someone criticizing their own country (like the Vietnam war protests) or in favor of a regime change etc.
I'm sorry if someone was born a nazi then.
I must have missed the memo on us hackers. What group of traits in people do we blame for our woes? Just so I know who we want to exterminate.
I know this isn't a place for sarcasm, but when I can't tell if your comparison is sarcastic or not, I have a hard time not responding in kind.
I think you are misinformed (I assume you talk about natzis).
Not all natzis are violent or are looking for violence. There are plenty of pre-war natzis that loved how Hitler pulled their country from dispair of economical and technological swamp, created economy of solid growth and created hundreds of thausands of jobs. Up to this point Hitler was an incredible leader and actually all those real successes as a politican made him being voted to become Germans fuerer.
As with any other group or person views, a reasonable person never agrees with anyything they say or believe. Thats called fanatism. Look at Trump. Mamy things he do or say are reasonable and as a POTUS he sould be praised for. On the other hand you shouldnt agree with him when he talks crap.
So its wrong to say all natzis are looking for violence, just like its wrong to say all Muslims are looking to blow thmeselves up in crouded spot.
It doesn't even hold up today because you are saying historically there were Germans that supported the Nazi party because of Hitler's leadership in other areas. But we're in 2017 where everyone knows that Nazis committed a genocide. So anyone like the Daily Stormer that supports Nazis we know to be dangerous. And It's okay to not do business with dangerous people who want to harm innocents.
To your point about Muslims, we know that there are millions of peaceful non-violent practicing Muslims. You are trying to make a logical equivalency here and what I believe is more important is the facts that we know about the real world we live in. Supporting Nazis is explicit support of genocide. Practicing Islam has an unfortunate overlap with violent terrorists. But practicing Christianity also has an unfortunate overlap with domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Roof. I don't think existing in this theoretical world of forced equivalency even benefits your argument as much as you believe it does.
How is it exactly dangerous? How did they views hurt you or your family? How did they affect you? IF you children happen to be listening and turn to Natzis, I can bet even if DS never existed in the first place, they would get to be Natzis somehow anyways.
Point being, limiting free speech is never a good idea. Especially of something SO silly as a website where it is NOT pushing itself on you, but to the contrary - you have to visit it to be a "part" of it.
Where do you have this from? From a computer game or a movie? From a gumball machine?
Read this book.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-achievements-of-Hitler
Amongst all interesting points: 10. Nazis started first checking of drunk drivers.
Read the book. Don't pass "go", don't collect $400, and spare me more pop history. I lead you to water, now drink or don't.
Furthermore, your response doesn't support anything at all but only steer conversation off to a different course.
As you can rewind, I was merely responding to previous post not to equal Nazism with violence, just like you can't equal Muslim religion with violence. In that context, I couldn't care less about some historical book. I assume in your country you have access to Amazon, so go ahead dive in their books section. You welcome!
Hitler was openly advocating persecution of Jews and annexing countries through war. Supporting Hitler at the time, even without hindsight, was to be in active support of violence to say the least.
Normally you don't need to point out the link between Nazism and violence, but these don't seem to be normal times.
The US (and France and co) were quite antisemitic at the time as well. Hitler took that sentiment and run with it to unprecedented murdering levels, but it was there (and of course, when it was millions of developing worlds colonial slaves who got the axe, nobody really cared. Heck, people didn't even care that much for Jews at the time either: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267 ).
As for "annexing countries through war" the European colonial powers had been doing exactly the same to 2/3 of the world for centuries (and continued to do so after WWII).
The difference is that Hitler did that "annexing" to other European countries, not to third world people (for whom hypocritical Europeans could not care less).
(Of course European countries have also had a long bloody history of fighting and annexing each other for centuries up to WWI as well).
How is this relevant? Get back to me when people proudly call themselves neo-colonialists, and I will gladly call them idiots. No one is defending that part of British history (for example).
You'd be surprised. I recall the British being quite fond of their Falklands war -- for an astonishingly remote land that has absolutely no historical connection to the isle and population of Britain apart from the colonial plundering.
Plus, it's not like the big powers are not invading and bombing countries here and there to this day under various pretexts...
Yes, I would be surprised, because it's inane. You've got a poll? I must've missed the large gatherings of Brits protesting to take back India.
> Plus, it's not like the big powers are not invading and bombing countries here and there to this day under various pretexts...
Yes, and like I asked last time, what's your point? Show me a movement bent on persecution of a people, leading to invasion of other countries, that is hence emulated elsewhere, and not criticized as neo-Nazis are.
Iraq was unrelated to 9/11, was about oil, but used 9/11 as an excuse to look for WMDs, and is immensely unpopular.
Are you claiming that there are neo-Bushists organizing to take back America from Saddamists that aren't criticized like neo-Nazis are?
Does that proposition sound ridiculous? It's because it is. You are not making a comparison, you are bringing up non-sequitors to gaslight the issue.
There are wars and invasions, and most if not all are very unpopular, and any that revolves around eradication of peoples are historically reviled. Except for neo-nazis views of 1940s Germany, for some reason. Do you have a comparison to that?
For the parent, I would prefer that you argue the merits of national socialism on their own terms. It makes it easier to see where you stand.
I don't consider "whataboutism" an offense -- rather it's what people used to call "calling a spade a spade" and not siding with pots in calling the kettle black, but rather pointing the finger and both the pot and the kettle.
(Of course I don't belong to either the pot or the kettle. I can understand why compatriots of one or the other would take offense at "whataboutism". They'd rather only the other is called out).
I also don't particularly see how if reality proves that both sides in WWII were bastards, or that the best between them dropped nukes on civilians with the same ease the Nazis murdered Jews (but just for 200.000 people, not 4 million) that's "in service of Nazism".
Rather it's in service of the truth those other victims ALSO deserve.
I wouldn't be satisfied if we just didn't repeat Nazism.
I also want us to not repeat imperialism and colonialism [1].
For that, call all out all sides is necessary.
(Well, we never stopped those, but in any case).
And I want us to not repeat the murder of JFK. However Oswaldians aren't a side in the conversation.
The opposition to nazis aren't colonialists. They are anti-nazis, democrats, republicans, human beings, ie people that don't like persecution of peoples. That's not a bad, equal, or comparable side to any obfuscation you've managed to dream up.
What if I'm an American Christian and think abortion is literally murder? Would it be therefore okay for me to ban customers who identify themselves as Pro-Choice?
Or if I consider the Catholic church a criminal organisation for enabling systematic child abuse? Does that mean I can ban Catholics?
If you say no, what about white supremacists who merely spread the idea that whites are superior but don't encourage violence against other races? If the KKK formally promised to never commit any violent acts again and leave POC alone but continue preaching racial superiority and claiming the US as a white nation?
This is a pretty slippery slope you're arguing.
Are there muslims and jews that don't circumcise/mutilate their children? Are they still muslims and jews? If you say yes, then it's not a religious tenet, but a cultural tradition.
> What if I'm an American Christian and think abortion is literally murder? Would it be therefore okay for me to ban customers who identify themselves as Pro-Choice?
I was raised Christian and no one in those circles takes issue with the choice of abortion. Seeing as you explicitly wrote "American Christian", it's clear it's trying to make a distinction, which I agree with, that there is an evangelical branch of Christians in America that are radical, and that it's not what Christianity is about.
> Or if I consider the Catholic church a criminal organisation for enabling systematic child abuse? Does that mean I can ban Catholics?
Catholics condemn child abuse, it's not a part of their religion, but I think they should allow priests to marry instead, because forced celibacy is unnatural for humans, and it clearly leads to a disturbingly high rate of abhorrent criminal misconduct.
> If you say no, what about white supremacists who merely spread the idea that whites are superior but don't encourage violence against other races? If the KKK formally promised to never commit any violent acts again and leave POC alone but continue preaching racial superiority and claiming the US as a white nation?
So what you're asking is: If white supremacists don't act on the core principle of their organisation, should they be allowed to practice?
Sure, I don't see the point of them keeping it up at that point, but whatever floats their boat.
There's no difference between the two. You can break any religious tenet and still belong to the particular religion/faith.
Heck, you can murder people and still be considered a christian saint for example.
Sure it is. One is within the tenets, one is: maybe, despite the tenets.
You are a [religion]:ian because you follow the tenets, and you can be a [religion]:ian by reforming, despite breaking tenets.
Nazis are not and have never been violent in opposition to their core beliefs, but completely in line with them.
You've probably missed the memo. Not all neo-Nazis, and certainly not all modern alt-right/new-right groups are against Jews or want to exterminate any particular group. In fact many are pro-Israel and are even OK with homosexuals and blacks, but favor a strong state, discipline, no immigration, traditional values, etc. So, that means you're ok with them then?
I am well aware that there are normalizing voices within their ranks, that vocally proclaim a nuanced view. The news and discussions on daily stormer does not mirror that, nor did the conduct in Charlottesville. If they held those views you claim, they would not carry the Nazi flag, do the salute, use SS and other symbols, shout "Heil Trump", etc, etc, etc.
You either identify as a neo-Nazi, or you don't.
I can't say that I'm a vegan, but that I eat meat, eggs, fish and dairy.
You instead look at what someone eats, and then determine if they are an omnivore or other.
Judge the tree by its fruit and all that.
Give me a break.
If people would like to make the argument that Naziism also has higher inherent value than prejudices against Naziism, they are welcome to do so explicitly...
The US liberals kept a pretty sour memory of McCarthyism. But fundamentally it is no different.
1. Nazis started WW2 with around 80 million deaths, including hundreds of thousands US soldiers, and killed 5-6 million Jews in the gas chambers of concentration camps.
2. McCarthyism originated from and was systematically exerted by the US government in many official capacities. There were vetting committees, job prohibitions, and other direct government interference including using intelligence agencies to gain information on US citizens. They didn't let Charlie Chaplin enter the US.
That's very different from a private company that ceases to make business with a Nazi website due to violations of their ToS.
On a side note, John von Neumann suggested to government officials to pro-actively launch a nuclear strike on Moskow. That tells you how different the climate was then as opposed to now.
If people with the this mindset would get to official government, how long would it take to launch McCarthyist-like policies?
Your comment and many others in this thread are a shame for humanity, and I mean that seriously without hyperbole.
A big part of Soviet deaths were thanks to utter mismanagement and not paying much attention to human life. Even catastrophes like Leningrad siege may have been avoided (or at least greatly reduced) if Soviets were more humane.
It's a shame to humanity to call USSR a victim of WW2. Not only they started it, but they also took home the most. For a half of Europe, WW2 ended only after the fall of Iron Curtain. After nearly 3 decades, the division is still huge. It will take a long time to get rid of USSR legacy.
But yes, technically Nazis started WW2 few days earlier and then Soviets joined in :) I doubt that makes much of a difference.
By the way, just to mess with your mind more... It was Soviets who attacked my country first and started terrorising civilians. Nazis were sort of liberators when they attacked from the other side although they soon turned out not much better. Then Soviets came back, fucked shit up even more and forgot to leave for 50 years. Cool, huh? Sorry, saying that WW2 was Nazi job and claiming that Soviets didn't start it hand-in-hand with Nazis is just a disgrace to thousands for people who died at the hands of either.
But in any case, it's Cloudflare's business, and so it's Cloudflare's decision to make. What concerns me more are censorship mechanisms involving DNS and BGP games. Which the US has been quite fond of using, to take down what it considers to be illegal content. That's a vulnerability of the Internet itself, reflecting continuing US dominance.
So hey, we have Tor and other overlay networks.
Edit: And just to be clear, I'm a communitarian anarchist. I'm not at all sympathetic to fascists. But I do oppose all censorship.
And taking down The Daily Stormer was speech. If you want to regulate that kind of speech, it's your right to say so. But don't pretend you're supporting the First Amendment when you do so.
It's not a defence of political freedoms to compel people - rhetorically or otherwise - to disseminate messages that appall them; it's a grotesque imposition upon their political freedom.
I'm sorry but The space to sit idly and think about it is gone. All of society is on the slope because America didn't realize that some points are raised not to discuss, but to tie down discourse and keep logic at bay.
Leaving the field open for emotion and lazy logic to defeat whoever remains.
There's rules to how this is done, and they have little to do with facts but everything to do with owning the communication channel.
Slippery slope arguments are only valid if you believe that your jurisdiction doesn't have proper rule of law. Otherwise experience, at least in European countries, showed that courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech.
Very true. Well, except maybe for that one time when Germany became an open-air rape camp under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being accused of racism. That kind of sucked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
And, oh yeah, there was that time they threw a lawyer in jail for defending a Holocaust denier.
http://www.dw.com/en/german-neo-nazi-lawyer-sentenced-for-de...
But otherwise, sure, unqualified success. Great example.
The second case is not a slippery slope because it does precisely what's codified in German law, nothing more and nothing less. The lawyer herself denied the holocaust and that's punishable in Germany. So the law was correctly applied. That has absolutely nothing to do with the slippery slope discussion.
80 cops "failed to notice" over 1000 violent crimes taking place in a space about the size of a football field, over the course of several hours.
My "speculation" is, by far, the very kindest interpretation.
> So the law was correctly applied.
Let's hope so. Defending her is a crime so we'll never really know.
Fair trials without all that pesky social change! What could possibly go wrong?
That's not an honest reading of the article you linked. From the article, "[the lawyer] also signed a motion during Zündel's trial with "Heil Hitler" and shouted that the lay judges deserved the death penalty for "offering succour to the enemy" -- leading the court to dismiss her." She was a neo-Nazi herself.
We'll just make a list of all the arguments that are okay to advance in court, so then lawyers know which ones are forbidden.
That seems like a good concept with no far-reaching implications.
The action doesn't need embellishment from me.
"A man was arrested for walking." and "A man was arrested for walking and aiming a rifle at a woman." are clearly different actions.
A lawyer went to prison, for illegal statements she made, in court, in defense of her client. These illegal statements that would be illegal even outside the context of being a federal court lawyer.
I can't understand this fetish of generalizing to the point of total vagueness. Case-by-case analysis is just as important now as ever.
Oh it was ILLEGAL. Why didn't you say so? That makes it totally palatable that a lawyer might be imprisoned for doing his job, and doesn't AT ALL impeach the entire concept of a "trial."
> would be illegal even outside the context of being a federal court lawyer.
You have it backwards, friend. The inside of a courtroom needs MORE protections for speech, not fewer, than the outside. Laws like libel simply don't apply there (disclaimer: in the US. Can't speak for how they do it in failed states like Germany), and for very good reason.
If my lawyer yelled "Heil Hitler" and claimed the judge in my case should be murdered, while ostensibly defending me, I'd want them at the very least disbarred and wouldn't mind a bit of jail time.
BTW, I highly doubt a judge exhibiting this behavior in the USA would keep their law license, and they'd probably end up slapped with a contempt charge as well.
> The inside of a courtroom needs MORE protections for speech, not fewer
Perhaps for the defendant. But actually, in every country -- including the USA -- lawyers have extremely strong and often vague constraints on their speech.
And even then, what you're saying just isn't true, even in the USA. There are far more constraints on your speech during a trial than in the public square. Judges in the USA have extremely wide latitude in determining what can and cannot be said, how those things should be said, etc. Those are constraints that judges can enforce in their courtroom but cannot enforce in the public square.
Also, FWIW, knowingly committing libel during a trial is probably a bad idea. Even in the USA.
> disclaimer: in the US. Can't speak for how they do it in failed states like Germany
Well, if you consider Germany a failed state then I'm not really sure what to say. They have their problems, but then so does the USA. No place is perfect.
E.g., using your metric, the USA has THREE TIMES more rape than Germany. So if you put your identity politics aside for a second and look at the data, you come to a far different conclusion.
Also, IMO German citizens have a lot more practically useful freedoms than US citizens, even speech-related freedoms. "Don't be a Nazi" is something the Germans are pretty serious about, but they're a lot more lax about a lot of other speech that is de facto prohibited in many parts of the US. Eg, I seriously doubt Damore would've lost his job in Germany. And the Germans I talk to claim it'd be unambiguously illegal. And cultural self-censorship matters as well -- I'm much more comfortable discussing Christianity in Bavaria than in Alabama.
Germany draws their lines differently from the USA, but we're talking more about delineations at the fuzzy edges than actual differences in kind.
So again, if Germany is a failed state, I'm not really sure what a non-failed state looks like. At this point it's kind of hard for me to take you seriously.
Except that it is.
https://www.casamo.com/can-you-sue-for-defamation-during-tri...
>> what you're saying just isn't true. There are far more constraints on your speech during a trial than in the public square.
Which, OBVIOUSLY, is responding to:
> The inside of a courtroom needs MORE protections for speech, not fewer, than the outside.
and NOT responding to:
> Laws like libel simply don't apply there
The object-level claim is that even with exceptions like that one you link to, speech is MORE LIMITED in court rooms than in the public square everywhere -- including the USA.
And yes, yelling that a judge should be murdered in open court would land a US lawyer in jail.
You're nit-picking (and what's more, nit-picking over a willful misinterpretation of the argument I'm making), not responding to the substantive object-level claim.
While neither is much like a failed state, the US right now is a lot closer than Germany (and more clearly heading in the direction of getting closer yet.)
If you have a US military base in your country you are objectively not a sovereign nation.
What an awful example and has nothing, what so ever to do with the laws against being a Nazi. Do you honestly believe the US has never avoided reporting something for fear of being labeled? Really?
The other example you gave was covered by others in the thread. Spoiler: it's a lie.
You are very poorly informed. The laws against "being a Nazi" are generic "no bad speech" laws. Nazism is just their most well-known application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
> Spoiler: it's a lie.
A lawyer went to prison, for statements she made, in court, in defense of her client. That's not supposed to happen. It's not a feature.
The targets of the 234,341 criminal insult investigations conducted by German police last year[1] might argue otherwise. A few thousand of those were elementary school kids. Sixteen were preschoolers.
> courts are very well capable of recognizing the importance of free speech even for tasteless and hateful speech
Bless your heart. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your personal experience is untainted by exposure to actual courts. Prosecutors in the United States are not exactly known for rigorous exercise of discretion, and defending yourself in court can be ruinously expensive even if you prevail.
---
[1] https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...
You do not need to convict or even formally charge someone in order to have chilling effect on speech; when the police investigate you for a crime, and the mere possibility of being charged and convicted hangs over your head, you will think twice about what you say.
And while I know little about German jurisprudence, I do know that prosecutors in this country do not need to attain a conviction in order to destroy someone's life. Once a prosecutor claims you are guilty, plenty of people will believe it no matter the outcome, and that's on top of depleting your life savings on legal representation. I urge everyone to keep this in mind when contemplating how European-style hate speech laws (or any proposed laws) would play out in the United States.
The stats I linked above suggest a clearance rate of 89% for criminal insult investigations. While that number dwarfs the 56% average clearance rate for criminal investigations across Germany, it is unclear to me whether those figures describe how many investigations led to convictions, indictments, a suspect being formally charged, or merely the positive identification of a suspect. I believe the term generally refers to the proportion of investigations that lead to a suspect being formally charged, but I wasn't certain, so I left that figure out.
Feel free to dig deeper.
Going by the most common definition of 'clearance rate', around 208k of those 234k investigations led, at minimum, to someone being formally charged with a crime. Frankly, that in itself is horrifying.
Given the total number of people in Germany and the size of the fringe this number is not at all horrifying but in fact in line with expectations. It is on the rise but this is a reflection of the fact that in Western Europe the number of ultra-right wing supporters is on the rise.
Until that time comes, good riddance to Daily Stormer, you lot of motherfucking nazis.
It would be interesting to see how much of this applies to sub sects of Islam, namely the sub sects that promote violence or which promote child marriage.
My big issue here isn't the logic itself, but the selective application of it. For a similar related topic, whose statues should we have up? What is the objective criteria by which we should decide if a statue is allowed (on public property/at a memorial) and will it be applied to all statues?
If they have the power to? Yeah, in a heartbeat. But they're not the only ones, or the most powerful ones, just the most ostentatiously intolerant.
> 1. Folks will gladly loan the hangman the rope that he will use to hang you, your family, and your neighbors — all because of "purity of belief" in free speech.
If both Nazis and (as an example) Communists have free speech, then I can be supremely confident that I have free speech, and that I can use it without being expelled, jailed, or killed. (Chastisement, well, as long as you mean the verbal kind, I'll just have to cope.) I sure as Hell don't defend their rights because I like them.
Have you never actually felt your ability to speak out meaningfully threatened by the society around you?
The evidence is fresh. You will have free speech - as long as you only go to the right places, say the right things, wear the right clothes, have the right colour skin.
Over time, supremacist movements reduce that free space in greater and greater amounts. This is what the evidence of history tells us, very clearly. We can see it happening now.
If despite the hard evidence that these groups are opposed to free speech and willing to kill those exercising it, you still defend their right to try and subjugate or kill people merely because of their DNA, you are not defending free speech. What you're really doing is celebrating your own virtue - you're defending their rights because you like yourself. You are taking a calculated risk with other people's lives to do so. Even if they're not even trying to speak at all, but just walking down the street while being the wrong race/gender/religion/etc.
Fundamentalist free speech advocates make an implicit assumption: that a race of billions of social animals can completely avoid situations where one group makes another even feeling uncomfortable. It's purist nonsense. Occasionally feeling you aren't entirely free to speak is part of being a social animal.
Part of living is learning when keeping your trap shut means you're being oppressed or censored, and when you are just being respectful to someone else's house, or a workplace, or suffering beyond your experience.
You can't use a civilised person's inevitable experience of "well, I didn't want to cause offense" to justify Nazis.
Yeah, there was property damage. So what?
Also, I'm not quite sure what you're actually trying to say? Are you suggesting the protests would have been /better/ if protesters had had automatic weapons?
Are you not aware that multiple instances of arson were committed [1]?
Also:
> Yeah, there was property damage. So what?
What if this was your property? Would you be as callous if it had been your car that had been set on fire?
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-germany-protests-idUSK...
Are you aware that some property damage and or arson in protests is a tradition in Europe, and we don't consider it the end of the world?
It's part of what it takes to have an actual democracy and an engaged population (at least part of the population).
Sometimes, we even behead our kings and burn down their palaces.
I am European, and I am not aware of any such tradition. Regardless, (1) "tradition" doesn't make something morally right, and (2) a protest involving arson and hundreds of injured people cannot be called peaceful, period.
> Sometimes, we even behead our kings and burn down their palaces.
That is, in my opinion, romantic nonsense. Neither of those things happened here, by any stretch of imagination. No kings were beheaded, and the only thing that was burned down were the houses and carriages of random peasants.
Well, there's a 40+ year history of such demonstrations, going back to before May '68 -- in France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Spain, etc, that's been recorded historically, and many consider an important tool against a passive democracy were people merely vote every 4 years.
>Regardless, (1) "tradition" doesn't make something morally right, and (2) a protest involving arson and hundreds of injured people cannot be called peaceful, period.
(1) In practice tradition is the strongest force that makes something morally right: one finds "morally right" what their era considers as morally right, which in turn is what it has been passed on and taught as morally right (aka tradition).
Apart from that, there are some kind of universal principles we all more or less agree to (no killing etc), but you'd be surprised how many people would consider those things morally OK to violate when their era finds it OK for political, patriotic etc reasons.
But I didn't say it's "morally right" -- but that it's a tradition, and it has been proven fruitful in the past in keeping those in power at check, at least somewhat.
(2) Sure, but it's not like only peaceful protests are OK. Some of the more effective protests, like the May 68 rights that forever changed the ethics of modern Europe, were not "peaceful" in that sense.
I now see that you in fact did not make the case that this tradition involving property damage is morally right (in the above sense). I must have read too much into your comment. Apologies.
(2) OK, then we are in agreement here. However, the only reason I brought up the arson in the first place was because the original parent specifically characterized the protests as "peaceful".
Often there are peaceful parts and non peaceful parts (blocks?) of a demonstration (including people who just go there to break things).
Police has also been known to instigate violent acts, usually with being overly pushy and provocative, but sometimes also by having fake-protesters lead others to such things.
The public is more concerned with antifa because many people own a car but who owns an asylum-seeker?
That's not to excuse those actions–personally, I think they're counterproductive to whatever the cause may be. But people really aren't afraid of these protests. I was actually in Hamburg at that time, and even though I was walking around in a suit & tie, I freely walked right through the protest hotspots without even a hint of aggression directed at me.
Of course that doesn't make vandalism okay, especially when it harms private citizens (even with insurance the damage can be a financial drain for shop owners) but it puts the extent into perspective when you compare it to neo-nazis who actively try to harm human beings or entirely destroy their (already quite modest) livelihoods.
With respect, this is a crucial point if one desires to be taken seriously by gun owners when talking about guns, because confusing it reveals a lack of basic knowledge of the subject.
> these groups are opposed to free speech and willing to kill those exercising it
This is a false equivalence. His group was not calling for violence, let alone murder. You're using the same logic that the right-wing all over the world uses against Islam.
Well, yeah, there's been an awful lot of death and injury at protests of late. Charlottesville is easily the worst, but isn't where it started, and it's not where it's going to finish. There were thugs at UC Berkeley smashing property, lighting bonfires, and putting pepper spray in protestors' faces.
Now, I wouldn't want to bring that up first thing like I'm some sort of spineless "both sides!!" equivocator (coughdonaldtrump) after some fucking Nazi runs people down, because it's obviously materially worse than any previous incident to date. But hey, if you we want to articulate a policy of ad-hoc censorship of speech because it reduces the free space to express opinions, let's go there! Why aren't you calling for content providers to root and and destroy all the publications telling us that "speech is violence" and should be met with violence? Where's the pressure for Reddit to drop /r/antifa? Can I get a statement condemning the shenanigans at Evergreen State College, where a professor got death threats for saying he was uncomfortable with a proposed "Day of Absence" which would see him excluded from the campus on account of the colour of his skin? Can we see Huffington Post's cloud service suspended for defending the student protestors who did so?
I can't say I like Berkeley's leftist thugs much more than I like Charlottesville's Nazis, but I'm damn uncomfortable with censorship that targets either. (And yes, it's censorship, even if it's not government censorship.)
But yea, you're right about one thing, it's a sucky time all around if you care about free speech.
> You can't use a civilised person's inevitable experience of "well, I didn't want to cause offense" to justify Nazis.
Well no, you don't justify Nazis period. You use them as the legal equivalent of a meat shield.
> Fundamentalist free speech advocates make an implicit assumption: that a race of billions of social animals can completely avoid situations where one group makes another even feeling uncomfortable.
"Completely avoiding situations where one group makes another feel uncomfortable" sounds more like a conservative caricature of political correctness than any component of fundamentalist free speech advocacy.
Do you have more details regarding deaths at other recent protests?
The GP said no such thing. He talked about speech, and you changed the subject to violence.
If the white supremacists limited themselves to speech, then yes... their free speech should be protected. And, it serves as an indicator that we truly have free speech.
The whole point of free speech is to give freedom to views you disagree with. The alternative is the Soviet Union / North Korea bullshit of "everyone has free speach, but only one viewpoint is allowed".
Not everything is an excluded middle, a bi-directional slippery slope that has to end up at one extreme or the other.
The NPD is closely tied to neo-nazis and always on the verge of being banned.
The DVU was almost identical but much smaller and eventually merged with them in 2011 after several alliances.
The Republicans are a more moderate right-wing anti-immigration party that is mostly insignificant.
The AfD are populist nationalists (similar to UKIP) who try to keep some distance to actual neo-nazis but share many of the same ideas and affiliations (although much less prominently than the NPD does). They currently hold 24.4% of votes in Saxony-Anhalt, 20.8% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and are represented in every state parliament except Hesse (as of 2013, though that might change with the upcoming election this year).
I think on an absolute spectrum the AfD is the closest thing Germany has to the US Republican party but most Germans consider the AfD literal nazis (albeit in sheep's clothing).
I'm not suggesting white supremacists don't, or shouldn't, have freedom of speech. But, unless you're also suggesting that Al Qaeda, Daesh, ISIS, whatever, should be able to hold recruiting rallies across the US as long as they aren't commiting violence at the rally, I think we probably agree that there are and should be limits to free speech if the speech is an incitement to violence.
Neo-Nazi groups are organizing and training for the violent overthrow of the US government to institute a white ethno-state. Right wing extremists are responsible for more terrorist attacks in the US than any other group (including Muslim extremists). Without acknowledging the violent nature of these organizations, we can't have a useful discussion about where the line is drawn.
That Al Qaeda can't get a permit for a rally tells us there is a line. So, why do we let Nazis step way past that line over and over?
Is this actually happening? Asking genuinely as a Brit who's vaguely aware of the militia movement but not of any militant Nazi training camp regime.
When I was in high school, I drove a friend to visit his girlfriend at night. We arrived at a locked gate in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains of South Carolina. Moments after we arrived, someone drove up in a truck to let us through the gate, after shining a flashlight into the car at every passenger. We drove down a gravel road, about a quarter mile, into what can only be described as a compound. A few men with AR-15s and in fatigues were milling about. I learned later (after my friend had broken up with her) that her father was a militia leader; she wasn't allowed to socialize with black folks or Jews or LGBTQ folks. That was ~25 years ago.
Before the recent crackdown, you could readily find discussions on the web from many of these groups, where they talk about their goals and plans; often in a generalized way that likely wouldn't be legally actionable, but it's easy to read between the lines. They train together on military tactics, they discuss guns and military gear, and they actively recruit people in the military and police officers for their tactical skills and access to weapons. Many have bunkers, or compounds, where they plan to hunker down when the race war they seek finally comes.
Stormfront.org, one of the leading neo-Nazi forums, remains up and running, but the interesting topics (like "Strategy and Tactics" and "Self Defense, Martial Arts, and Preparedness") are private, and require an invitation. Some people have found their way in over the years, though, and stuff has leaked out.
The various groups have different priorities, and some are more militant than others, but the militant branches were well-represented at Unite The Right, as evidenced by the presence of dozens of AR-15s and men in military gear.
The Klan has been a militant racist presence in the US since the end of the Civil War, with literally thousands of lynchings at their back, with the most recent that I know of being in 1998 in Jasper, TX. The Klan had been in decline for decades before Trump. This is the first major event where the Klan had a large and visible presence that I'm aware of in recent years.
III%ers are probably the most active/obvious in military training for their members. They do not officially have a white supremacist message, but their presence at Unite the Right was large, and they were marching and chanting with gusto (they were the folks with the AR-15s and military fatigues, as I understand it). They are explicitly and visibly training for violent revolution. The name derives from a belief that 3% of people in the American colonies waged the Revolutionary War to achieve independence from Britain, and they will be the 3% that takes up arms to tip the US into revolution.
Oath Keepers were another presence at the event, and it is made up of former/current police and military. They don't publically claim to be a white supremacist organization, but their obviously supportive presence at many white supremacist events speaks volumes. I find them among the most frightening, as their numbers are large and they have military training, presence within local police forces, etc. As with III%ers, they avoid racist messaging and speak fondly of the Constitution, which gives them a patina of legitimacy.
A number of the other groups that were present, like Traditionalist Worker Party, Vanguard America (the group James A Fields was photographed with and seemingly claimed affiliation with), and Identity Evropa, are quite recent, founded just in the past few years. Much like the term "alt right", these groups seem like rebranding efforts to make white nationalism and white supremacist groups more marketable to young audiences. It also sanitizes their history; the people who operate these groups (and profit from them) have often long been associated with white supremacist groups but in less notable roles. The presence of well-known white supremacist figures (many of whom have spent time in prison for terrorism and violence) among the recently founded groups at Unite the Right seems to make this connection pretty clear.
It's all part of their model for achieving respectability, which has worked frighteningly well. Our president has effectively endorsed them as "very fine people". Then again, his father was a Klansman, and Trump himself has been successfully sued for violations of the Fair Housing Act in treating people of color unfairly in his rental properties.
Anyway, their online presence has sort of gone underground recently, so it's actually harder to find their discussions. It happens in private facebook groups, on twitter and YouTube under pseudonyms which come and go (kinda like ISIS), and even IRC on private servers. You can still find wikipedia coverage of them and Anti-Defamation League and SPLC coverage on their hate group monitoring sites.
The thing about hate groups is that they can only appear respectable for so long before revealing their hand as a racist hate group because they aren't spreading their message of white supremacy during that respectable phase.
Sorry, this got a little long. Curiousity got the better of me as I started digging into the actual list of participants and who's connected to what organizations through the years. It's an incestuous group. These are just some really nasty people with a long and violent past, many were radicalized in prison. No matter how "dapper" they dress today, there's not really any hiding how ugly they are as human beings.
Edit: I think I should also make clear that these people are a very small minority of Americans. Their beliefs are repugnant to a majority of us. While the US does have a very troubled history and present on issues of race, and we do have many systems that further white supremacy, overt racism is not considered acceptable on the whole.
There are many groups which are accused of having violence as their core value.
e.g. The Nazi attacks on the Jews, who were alleged to be dedicated to the destruction of the Aryan race. That allegation was used as justification for "self defense", and attacking all Jewish people.
I understand where you're coming from, but we've seen what happens when people start picking and choosing which speech is allowed, and which is forbidden. The end result is the violence and genocide that they claim to hate.
You apparently believe that it's OK to suppress the speech of "bad people". My point is that such suppression is, in fact, similar to all oppressive regimes.
The reason the Nazis were bad is not just the genocide they committed, but the reasons behind the genocide. The idea that we can "get" the bad people has been used to justify all kinds of atrocities, world-wide.
Anyone who honestly opposes the "bad people" like Nazies should denounce their tactics. All of their tactics. Not just the violence, but the underlying idea that there are "bad people", who deserve all possible punishment, no matter how nasty or evil.
Let's figure out where the line is for you.
Do you believe Al Qaeda should be able to obtain permits and police protection to hold rallies across the country to recruit people to their cause?
Do believe that free speech should be suppressed, simply because you don't like the people? Or you don't like the topic of their speech?
a) yes - you don't believe in free speech
b) no - you do believe in free speech
I live in Canada, which had the concept of "hate speech", that you apparently are in agreement with. It got repealed because it was stupid, abusive, and being abused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada
So you can deny history, as you seem intent on doing, or you can learn from history.
I believe in and have activated (actual feet-on-the ground, talking to reps, writing letters, teaching free classes on encryption, etc., real activist shit) for free speech for decades. I also believe in and will activate for a world free of Nazis. There is no conflict there, and I'm completely comfortable with my position on both free speech and opposing Nazis in every way possible.
You still haven't answered my question: Do you believe Al Qaeda, not some amorphous blob of "free speech", should be able to obtain permits and police protection to hold recruiting rallies across the US?
This isn't about whether I "like" or "dislike" certain speech, this is about known terrorist organizations recruiting with the consent and participation of our government.
I live in the US, where the stakes are real. White supremacy has a long, deadly, history in my country. You have your own white supremacist problem in Canada (and some of them came to the US for the Unite the Right rally), but it may not currently be an existential threat to your democracy. It is exactly that, right now, here in the US.
And... I'm done.
You're not arguing from a position of honest discourse.
Let's ban Christian websites then. Christians have killed lots of people over political and moral issues. Of course not those specific Christians, but who ares.
That is whould shold be careful about how ware ou go with cenrsorship.
This person will be prosecuted and very likely jailed for his crimes. The ACLU is not rushing to defend this.
Applies to recent Google memo leak pretty well. Or other left-leaning cases. This is a problem with people who can't have a civil discussion and tolerate different point of views. Rather than left or right issue.
That's where the argument become null, communists ideas have been banned from the US political landscape for a long time and even mild socialists propositions are a call for arms for many USians.
That's the exact treatment that Nazis, ISIS, North American Man/Boy Love Association and all kinds of other disgusting groups should get - they should be free to associate and state their views publicly, so that the public can hear them, be disgusted, and vote against them. If some of them do violent acts or incite violence, then those particular people can and should be charged appropriately, but not the rest of the group.
See, for example, the [Communist Control Act of 1954][0], various [state laws][1] [that prohibit communists from holding office or working in state jobs][2], and [exclusion from anti-discrimination laws][3]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/22/anti-communist...
[2]: https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-the-anti-communist
[3]: http://employeeatty.blogspot.com/2012/12/time-to-repeal-anti...
The USA legislation has a bunch of things "on the books" in their legislation that haven't been repealed since noone wants to touch them (e.g. sodomy laws), but aren't law in any practical sense since they aren't and cannot be enforced.
Despite the things you quote, the Communist party of USA does exist, can participate in elections and has done so. Of course, almost noone votes for them, but that's their own fault.
Many of the proposals and discussions in this thread are very similar to McCarthyism. Just as it was back then, despite people wanting to do so, the key acts and limitations of McCarthyism are fundamentally incompatible with Constitution of USA; just as it was (found to be) wrong and overstepping authority regarding communism back then (even if it took a bunch of years for the courts to override all the activism of the government), it's the same thing for any other radical ideologies now.
CloudFare has free speech rights too. They are excersizing those rights by saying they don't want Daily Stormer on their network.
I would say we also need to introduce a counterpart. e.g. crypto-stalinist or crypto-communist. As it is an equally plausible accusation to make that some people with hidden beliefs on that side of the spectrum could take them to those dark places.
That's good. But the rule of law should apply over "not aiding" those people.
In the private sector, there have been a number of cases where companies (a) don't apply their ToS to people they agree with, and (b) over-apply their ToS to people they disagree with.
See Vidcon && Sargon for the most recent example.
i.e. When given the choice, the groups that value "inclusiveness" and "tolerance" and "due process" violate all of that...
Except I never really seen a 'neonazi' saying "punch a communist" I never seen mass media encourage such behavior either.
Do you not realize that this is cyclic reinforcement of behavior? (Antifa says punch nazis, nazis punch back, antifa ups their game with HIV needles and guns, nazis up their game etc)
Both sides are disgusting, but the fact that the media covers up for the leftist violence makes me stand on the side of the so called "right wing extremists".
Responding with actual violence in turn is not the right approach, but when we see large armed mobs forming and declaring themselves pro-genocide, it's absurd to call the people protesting them the 'real problem'.
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. - Elie Wiesel
Replace like 3 words in your comment, and I could make it into a rant advocating persecution of Communists. Which has happened before in the US. But it's ok now because it's against your political enemies?
Second, no they are not. They are a tiny tiny percentage of the population. They have been losing power and numbers for decades. They get little representation in the mainstream and in the media. When they speak up with their beliefs or attend a protest unmasked, they often lose their jobs. They are not even remotely a serious threat. Just like communists during the Red Scare.
If by "it's against your political enemies" means "it's against people who want to overthrow your society and replace it with a repressive one" then the two cases are exactly the same in principle and only differ in details.
So yeah, I'd say that they're both OK, under the exact same logic.
Given that the United States is a free country where most of the social institutions have formed through voluntary free association, it also follows that overthrowing those institutions would require ending people's voluntary support of them. Because most people have no reason to end their support of social institutions voluntarily, this eventually requires instituting a repressive society.
Thus, it is not a matter of opinion that communism would create a repressive society within the American context. Nor is it a matter of opinion that Nazis would seek to do the same; I hope I don't need to outline that for you.
I have doubts that SCOTUS will ever consider 'The Nazis vs. Cloudflare'.
For example, someone suggested that the German Nazi party was advocating mild socialist reforms very similar to modern social democrats, entirely ignoring "minor details" like that the SA actively beat up people on the streets and spread terror wherever they showed up, that the nazis attempted a Coup d'Etat, and that socialists and communists later went to prison and concentration camps for their political views. Not to speak of killing 5-6 million Jews and being responsible for the death of about 25 million soldiers and 55 million civilians in WW2...
The largest cognitive dissonance is with those people who suggest that jihadist propaganda should be interrupted but Nazi propaganda should be allowed to thrive unconditionally. That sounds very crazy to anyone who knows a little bit about history and can compare orders of magnitudes.
No matter how evil some group is (may they be pedophiles, satan worshippers, nazis, whatever...) silencing them and assaulting them is a crime and is against freedom of expession. The problem with making these exceptions like "Let's have freedom of speech but not for these and these people...yadayadayada" is we can never be sure where to draw the line.
(Neo-)Nazis are sure dumb as hell but as long as they have peaceful protest and they don't harm anybody physically (unlike their counter-protesters) it doesn't matter. And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
If we were to ban nazis and far-right organizations because they are racist and apparently a "threat" then what about anarchists? They also are extremely violent and want to overthrow the government. (and in the US officially categorized as terrorist threat) What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.) If we start going down this slippery slope will have shitloads of organizations and ideas to ban.
And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na...
PS: statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years. And political bronzes are not art, they are at best political camping and grandiloquence.
Russia saw tens of millions murdered because the anarchists and communists (of that day) got exactly what they wanted in the overthrow of the old regime. It's weird how communism and fascism seem to appear out of the ether together and fight with each other.
How many states were destabilized by that combo in the last 100 years? Russia, Germany, Spain, at least, South American countries, etc. Fascists and communists are like pb & j.
There must have been a lot of normal people who just wanted to live normal lives but saw them destroyed by extremists who knew the right way to live.
Trying to paint them all with one brush is ignorant.
The anarchists in Russia were murdering thousands of people a year from 1904 forward. They killed one of the few liberalish emperors in 1881. Russia could have been a very different place in 1915 without their action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnaya_Volya
Here's a long list of the infamous actions of the anarchists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Notable...
The sailors on Kronstadt who supported Lenin during the July Days and were one of his strongest bases of support ended up getting put down and executed when they rebelled after the revolution.
Guess it suggests that making friends with violent people is a bad idea, regardless of convenience or agreement.
The Russian left was deeply divided to start with, and split further as the Bolsheviks intentions became clearer, leading to a number of uprisings against them from the left as well [1].
Frankly, it is deeply offensive to the memories of the many thousands of them who ended up laying down their lives to try to stop the Bolsheviks that you're lumping them all together and trying to assign them blame for things they fought to the bitter end.
Some of them had at some point made the fault of trusting Lenin, at a time when the Bolsheviks had not yet demonstrated much willingness to oppress, but most had not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th... (with the caveat that the page contains a number of statements about specifics that to me seem overly biased in favour of the Bolsheviks, but the specifics of which groups opposed them looks reasonably correct)
I'd argue that while the US has many problems when it comes to its treatment of the left, things have moved in the opposite direction of what you indicate. E.g. the far rights attack on Obama coupled with generations now growing up who never experienced the cold war combined to make words like "socialism" far less scary.
This is a dangerous thing to say publicly! As you mention yourself, the United States has had red scares just a generation ago. Who is to say it won't happen again? And that is exactly why you should support freedom of speech and tolerance of differing ideologies. Or the next red scare will be even worse.
>statues of Lenin and Stalin were removed without much second thought, only USians would keep statues of their (war criminals)|(rebels) for 150 years.
As far as I know most of the USSR world war 2 monuments are still standinding. The US is removing even monuments to soldiers that don't feature any specific general or leader. By your logic we should tear down the famous Vietnam war memorial because the US lost the war.
Nonsense, the statues are not being removed because they are from the losing side, they are being removed because they commemorate terrorists and traitors, and were in many causes erected by racists later on.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-real-story...
http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a12015570/... https://www.google.com/amp/jezebel.com/confederate-monuments...
It doesn't cost me much, apart from internet points. And really the ideas of sharing, equal laws, global humanism and opposition to the centralization/concentration of capital genuinely seem good to me. And I'm not from the US, having those opinions seems quite mild to me.
But yeah, I've made several political comments on HN these past few years, and the amount of votes (in both directions) seem to vary wildly according to what countries are awake, generally more downvotes when the US are awake.
In that case I'll just hope I've inherited something from my grandmother (who was a resistant during WW2). ^^
... as opposed to the glory days of... when? A few decades ago, when blacks could say whatever they wanted, as long as they said it at the back of the bus?
... or was it when women's opinions weren't taken seriously at all, not when men were speaking?
... or was it more recently, with Bush's 'Free Speech Zones'?
When was peak free speech in the US?
Sure a century ago minorities had less freedom. That's a great argument to increase the freedom of minorities, not decrease freedom for everyone. Is that really your argument? That black people had less free speech in the past, so we should get rid of free speech now?
I've seen this and I believe the data behind it, but I also think that while the US politics are very polarized right now, the actual spectrum of politics represented at the national level seems very narrow, and very right leaning (Reps and Dems).
No, that would be you putting words in my mouth. I'm asking when was this supposed time in history when freedom of speech was much higher in the US than it is today; what peak is the respect 'declining' from?
American citizens are perfectly free to hold those beliefs. They are also free to determine what kind of people they want to allow in their country, just like every other country on Earth can. That they choose not to allow people who openly advocate destroying all existing social institutions (which is the end goal of communism as stated by Marx in The Communist Manifesto) to enter the country does not mean that the country is not free.
> And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology. While fascism has never leaned on the good side of human nature.
There are 100 million people who died in the 20th century who would disagree with you.
But, even if we ignore that, the US does not allow Nazis to enter the country either, for very similar reasons. As a matter of fact, if you apply for permanent residency today, you still have to sign a statement that says you're not a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party or adhere to any of its beliefs, even though that party is defunct and most of its members are dead.
Also, the grandparent comment did not discuss immigration policy, so by your standard the parent is an irrelevant rebuttal.
Being anti-nazi is "radical leftist" now?
You see this a lot in engineering circles. Too much hope, idealism and theory, not enough real-world socialization.
We have to identify and solve the problem of libertarianism wherever it pops up. There's something wrong with these unsocialized libertarians. The result is Nazi marches.
But who pays for the roads?
The invisible hand of the market or something I dunno. TAXATION IS...
Yet I still think that what cloudlfare has done is wrong because the same social norms that lead to such behavior, would have in the past lead to people stifling the communications of things I am very much for (civil rights, gay rights etc...)
Sure, Nazi's are obviously evil. But so what? In the past lots of things we think of today as "good" were in the past "obviously evil" and it took a great deal of hard work to turn those tides around.
There is a cost to letting people we hate have easy communications. But there is also a cost to making it hard for people we hate to share their ideas. The cost is that when we as a society hate wrongly, as we have done in the past with respect to people of various races, sexuality, and gender, if the people we hate have a difficult time communicating, we will not be able to progress as a society.
So yeah. I think the kind of thought that leads to what cloudflare has done, is dangerous because it makes it will make it difficult for society to have moral progress. And according to you that makes me a "nazi sympathizer".
So yeah. That is what people are condemning for, and rightly so. Not for being "against nazis", for saying that anyone who disagrees with what cloud flare has done is a nazi sympathyzer.
The notion that anybody that is anti-facisme - which for me should be natural for anybody with some minimum of values - is a radical of extreme-whatever is plain ridiculous.
You know how I know you're actually a shill?
> And don't even start with the car-thing. An individual psycho does not compare to organized widely accepted violence.
Whataboutism in literally the next paragraph:
> What about BLM which is openly racist and violent (July 2016 anti-white/police sniper attack, riots, assaults, highway blockings etc.)
99.99% of all people who have ever been to a BLM protest are peaceful. Blocking cars is called Civil Disobedience. It is literally what the Nazis are doing when they demonstrate in a liberal town in which they don't even live. It's just as annoying when they close down the center of a town for Nazis as it is when BLM blocks a street in Baltimore.
You are literally equating Nazis to people who want universal healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and to not get shot at by police for the color of their skin.
We're only talking about Nazis. Not the right wing. The Nazis claim they are "alt-right" or whatever but someone who is advocating for lower taxes and a decrease in government spending and for abortion to be illegal isn't the enemy. Nazis are the enemy. Stop conflating Nazis with the legitimate right wing of the nation.
Not to defend Nazism but the death toll of WWII was between 50 and 80 million.
You are talking about raciscm and white supremacy in general. They are talking about Naziism itself, which didn't arise until the early 20th century in post-WW1 Germany.
This is not what the parent is employing. The parent commenter is saying that if you enable arbitrary lines in the sand that those in power WILL ENGAGE in Whataboutism, taking the corner case of "we're just going to ban Nazi speech" and stuffing the precedent down the throats of the courts until it sticks close enough.
As the parent commenter said, there is enough evidence to show that there are violent sects of BLM and other groups that promote equality, and that might just be enough to get the corner case precedent to hammer and crush the same freedom of assembly we just happened to carve out for white supremacists.
> > > The idea that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies is laughable. The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups.
> > The last sentence is the main reason why the world is so fucked up today. "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"-mentality and the complete unreasonability of the left is the reason why normal people are fed up with all this crap and are voting for Trump, Brexit etc.
> The [previous citation] is the main reason we are so fucked. There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said. Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.
The radical part of your first assertion, Akujin, is that it is hard to interpret your statement as anything else than "person A saying that Cloudflare is a public space requiring the protection of the first amendment from a company's policies implies that A is a Nazi sympathizer". These kind of statements are highly polarizing, hurtful and anger-inducing, because they deny A to have any rationally positive reason for their statement and instead generalize A to belong to an undesirable group. Notice how arguments structured in this way will never convince anyone that is not already of your opinion and will increase the outrage of those readers that are already of your opinion. I would call this radicalizing.
Mildly relevant video from CGP Grey "This Video Will Make You Angry": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Should this discussion be shut down ? Some people are convinced that discussing a number is just the foreshadow of radical negationism and therefore should be banned speech.
These are (in my opinion) really hard questions.
I really think BLM supporters, for example, fear this white-supremacy propaganda because it's so similar to their own tactics and agenda. Their goal is to sweep across the country by taking hold of the narrative, so they think this garbage has the potential to sweep the country too. But the average person is at work and paying bills, trying to live a peaceful life, and sees all this stupidity for what it is.
Not true. "hundreds of millions" implies >= 200 million. According to wikipedia, total deaths during WW2 were 70-85 million. Not all of these were to do with the actions on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, so the total bodycount for fascism would be c. 50-60 million.
This is a lot, but considerably less than your overblown claim.
How would you formulate a general law which forbids only neo-nazi organizations and neo-nazi demonstrations? The first thing that comes to my mind is a law against organizations that write that they intend to use violence, but then you just end up with organizations that don't explicitly write that down anywhere but still practice it. If you applied it more flexible, like for example that any organization which members ever express an intention of violence, you would very fast find that doing a test run on history would catch a much large number of organizations than intended.
You could define it as "anything classified as a terrorist group by the state", but again many groups has been classified as such in the past, the state has occasionally change their mind, and animal right activists is an famous example that the FBI classified as "serious domestic terrorist threat". That leaves the system that Germany currently have, and leaves the details to the legal system to figure out what is nazi and what isn't.
1. Remove the "imminent" requirement of the incitement restrictions on free speech. Currently, speech is already prohibited if it's an incitement to imminent lawless action and is likely to result in lawless action. I personally don't see all that much reason why "Go kill that specific jew with this bat" is substantially different than "All jews should be killed".
2. Ban specific iconography such as swastikas, white hoods, etc. I don't think frankly this is all that effective, supremacists can easily just take on a new symbol. But there's precedent in other countries and I don't think there's a slippery slope if every icon requires seperate prohibitions.
Note in both of these cases these ban the speech / symbols themselves, and not the groups. I don't think there's any way you can ban an organization altogether in any reasonable way.
Funnily enough the ADL has done this for a long time (well, not specifically ban but add icons to their list of hate symbols) and have been criticised for recently adding Pepe the frog to their list. I'm sure we've all been on the internet long enough to see someone with a Nazi Pepe profile picture so it clearly is used in reference to the alt-right, but at the same time it's just a generic crap meme that's been hijacked. What stops other symbols that have more meaning than a stupid meme (like the swastika, which originates from Hinduism I believe) being banned in legitimate use because it's been hijacked by Nazis?
If your point is that banning will also restrict the non-racist interpretation of that symbol, context and reasonable interpretation when enforcing these laws can be used. I'm no expert on Germany / other places that ban iconography, but I would guess that a swastika clearly used in it's original context would be allowed to be displayed.
FWIW, Hindu swastikas are legal in Germany: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-Hindu-swastika-permitted-in-Ger...
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by /pol/ and other Nazi sympathizing groups"
Can be expanded to:
"There are people in the world who disagree with me. It cannot possibly be that there is a rainbow of opinion and some people draw different lines in different places. Nay! My opinion is clearly infallible and indeed no less than the very standard of all educated men, so all who disagree must be members of organized hate groups infiltrating our pristine website."
This clearly implies the follow on sentence:
"And therefore we should gag them all to prevent their hateful agenda".
Expanding it that way makes you sound like a prat, that's my bias shining through. Take a guess on whether I agree with you on whether we're the victim of a sustained nazi infiltration conspiracy or not. That must make me an evil internet-nazi spearheading the covert assault on the hacker news psyche. Stand clear people, I'm dangerous and infectious.
He did already accuse the commenters defending free speech of being Nazis though, so compared to that "shills" doesn't even sound all that bad.
Actions speak louder than words and BLM's are very telling.
And neo nazis - just by embracing the historical association - seem to be ok with crossing any line.
Of course it brings other problems, as any regulation ever (e.g. calling nazi anyone you disagree with), but society needs to set at least some limits. Enforcing them will be always subject to debate, as is natural and (imo) good in democracy.
Calling for persecution of literal inciting of violence is hardly a "extremist left" idea. In fact it's not even left-or-right issue.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesv...
Why does this story about CF dropping the Daily Stormer have not simply one comment saying "Good."? Why is there even a discussion? No one is defending it explicitly, but many do implicitly.
I'm happy they're offline for the moment, but I wish it was because of a court order focused on specific actions (eg incitement of specific violence) rather than a single person's disapproval of their (really quite terrible) message.
but
> you can't operate systems as big as the internet on a case by case basis.
So - you want such pages to be impossible to persecute for illegal activities in practice?
Anyway - having a website on a particular server is not a human right. If I come to your newspaper and demand you put my stuff in there - you can say "no" and don't have to explain yourself, and it's not a violation of free speech.
The violation of a free speech would be if somebody forbid you to print your newspaper at all. It's not the case - daily stormer can put servers in basement and publish their propaganda from there. So - free speech is irrelevant to this case.
It's simply about people refusing to do business with assholes, and I am quite confused why would anybody oppose that attitude.
Private internet companies should operate with scalable, predictable rules. They should be required to operate without discrimination against legally protected classes, but otherwise are free to deny service to anyone.
Courts should punish people and organizations that produce violence, discrimination against protected classes, and/or libel. This production may be direct or indirect; Judges draw the line. When those people/organizations are punished, all their outlets should be effected.
Mostly I just want these actions to be super credible and super effective. The fascists are crying unjust censorship left and right... I want social decency enforced in a way that undermines that argument.
For example, I wish the Charlottesville counter protest was 10,000 people standing together, in silence, holding signs saying "SHAME" and "Liberty and Justice for ALL." Then the Nazis would have no grounds to claim their speech was suppressed, and also no grounds to claim that they represent anything but an angry, alienated minority.
How do you restrict the speech of people who advocate for white supremacy in non-violent ways? You could specifically ban white supremacy, but such a narrowly targeted law would probably lead to more radicalization.
This isn't some free-speech issue where you debate politely and sip iced water and other frippery.. this is actual people killing other people. This is how the the real world actually operates, instead of libertarian-nerd theory world.
And you know Nazis would be extremely violent people because no rational person would self identify with that group, so already they're batshit insane, which means they're likely to be extremely violent. And sure enough, when hundreds of Nazis gathered this weekend in Charlottesville, you actually ended up with an event measured in terms of "death toll".
We have to treat these people like armed and dangerous criminals, like you would ISIS or any active shooter.
And we all need to understand that government limits speech in many, many ways, not just the "fire in the theatre" example, but with things like sedition and other criminal conspiracies to more mundane things like copyrights and libel.
People forget that we went to war against these people and used to kill Nazis wholesale less than 80 years ago, because the Nazi party went to war against America. Identifying with them means you've actually declared war against the US. Not sure how much clearer you could be in declaring yourself to be a violent and dangerous criminal than that.
Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
1. I was watching the news and in a picture I noticed one of the counter protesters using some sort of spray can as a flamethrower. I also saw the counter protesters beating up a spokesman for the protesters before the police saved him. So violence goes all around.
2. Arresting people just because someone like the parent here calls them violent is a really bad idea. As in, it's horrendous. If all someone has to do is call you violent to have you arrested, then boy can it be used to silence people that say things inconvenient to whoever wants to silence them. Saying "arrest their member" about a political group is extreme, ignores any legal precepts of innocent until proven guilty, and can be used by the most authoritarian groups to silence anyone they choose.
That said I do find protesters very unlikable. The counter protesters I have found a little bit more likeable but still unlikable, because they seem somewhat hypocritical and dishonest, given they have been somewhat violent as well, and have said that it doesn't matter that they were violent as well.
It's a good idea to arrest violent people. Don't be the libertarian theory nerd that thinks of people as academic concepts only. In the real world, people are violent and dangerous, and they get to be arrested.
Government limits rights and freedoms of individuals to deal with the real world.
We literally declared war against them, and killed them wholesale. Are you saying we should stop declaring war against Nazis?
Except we didn't kill them wholesale. The United States pardoned or looked the other way for lesser Nazis and Imperialists in Japan to run their respective postwar governments. How do you think these countries functioned after the war? It's not like they systematically shot every remaining Nazi.
Look up Operation Paperclip.
No. Just no.
Islamists =/= Muslims
The honest comparison would be to ask if anyone who professes to be a member of Al Qaeda or ISIS, is considered a criminal by simple association.
And if they provide "material support or resources" (like organising/publishing/translating, at the lower end of terrorist criminality) they would be so.
Charitably, your comment reads that people who call themselves Nazis today are as far removed from (and do not bear the mantle of) the Nazis of WW2, as Muslims are removed from Islamist terrorists.
Again, charitably, that is an appalling comparison. Because it implies the reverse too; that Muslims are as responsible for the crimes of 9/11 as one believes modern Nazis are for bearing the history of the National Socialist movement - which of course they (modern Nazis) are.
More clearly: The perpetrators of 9/11 are only tangentially part of the same group as Muslims in general. You may as well group these NeoNazis with the set "Americans", or "White Men", as their motivations have as little bearing as regular Muslims and the men who brought down WTC.
As before, the better comparison is to ask if non-violent members of ISIS or Al Qaida can be assumed criminals/terrorists, as their violent companions are.
You know why I made that comparison, because someone was saying arrest them just for associating with the group, I was showing how it would apply more widely, indeed it could apply to people who associate with BLM, it is terrible to throw away due process like that.
I think that the people who carry swastikas and the like are morons, who have a fantasy view of what actual Nazis were. They are certainly not part of the Nazi Party, because it died at the end of WW2. If you think my view of them is wrong, then please correct me.
How hard is this to understand the following
GROUPS != INDIVIDUALS
You're advocating to punish individuals by what group they belong to instead of what they did.
Sounds familar?
Person A is a jew and lends money and is rich by "stealing" money from the borrowers via interest Person B is also a jew Therefore person b "stole" money Therefore we should arrest all jews
And even then it's not actually that, because a private company has decided to stop hosting the content, the government/law enforcement was never involved.
Given such a protest–and even if you disagree with the above, please entertain this as a hypothetical–what would be the makeup of the group of people opposing such a protest? It seems to me that, in principle, everybody who disagrees with the far-right ideology of these protesters could, or even should, be among the counter-protesters. You can be a Nazi, or you can be against Nazis. But I'm having a hard time imagining someone being neutral: "I think the idea of sending the jews to the gas chamber has potential, but I will reserve judgement until I have studied it in more detail" just doesn't seem like a common opinion.
And that's why people are so outraged with the President's "there are always two sides" equivocation: one side wants genocide, the other wants "no genocide". Even if both sides had been similarly violent (which they were not: only one committed a terror attack killing someone), they aren't comparable. Because for these Nazis, the opposition is in the way of their fantasy of a whites-only country, whereas for these opponents, the step after keeping the upper hand against the Nazis is "going home".
One can criticize both groups and still not be neutral. As I have stated, I do not like the neo nazis (not sure if all the original protesters are that or if only a few of them are, either way, they all seem quite unlikable).
What I have really been against is the "just arrest people for being seen in a group" which is what my comment was really replying to. Asking for discriminatory laws like this is backwards, harking back to when there were discriminatory laws against people with black skin. Although I know this is not what you were replying to, this is just to show why I made the comment in the first place. Also I seem to be being called a libertarian just for disagreeing with what I replied to, I don't think I have ever actually agreed with anything that someone calling themselves a libertarian has said, that I remember anyway.
My opinion about those?
Just ban them. Arrest their members. Don't be the socially inept libertarian nerd that thinks only in terms of theory without any real-world experience. It's perfectly fine to limit rights and freedoms in the real world. You can do it!
Well done, sir. This is why nobody takes libertarians serious.
In the end it doesn't matter if it is a leftist or a rightist organization that calls for murder or other criminal or sedituous behaviour: if we can be sure that you use your means of communication to murder people and destroy society, then this has consequences. In Germany I know as well of leftist as rightist groups/activists who were prosecuted on these grounds, so this is by no means something that is just used against nazis.
However: almost all nazi-groups are concerned by this, as violence and hate are constitutive for their movement, while almost all of the leftist groups go uninvolved, since their fundamental interests are compatible with our basic humanitarian values etc.
So, to all you libertarian-nerds: stop whining (and seeming stupid thereby) that it would be sooooo hard to detect speech that is used to murder people, poison the civil society and destroy the democratic form of government. There is nothing valuable about hateful agitation, we can do fine without it. And please stop acting as if it didn't matter: the whole point of the Charlottesville-demonstration was to show that people can be motivated by hateful agitation and propaganda on the internet to go out and intimidate the rest of the world. That people can be motivated to let go of all inhibitions if they see day after day that it is okay to talk about killing jews, homosexuals and afroamericans, that other people kudo them when they deride minorities themselves.
Oh and by the way: go and check your priviledges. It is easy to act as if hateful speech wouldn't matter if you aren't affected by it (or are intelligent and eloquent enough to turn the tables). But: hateful speech harms the people that are affected by it and can make life a living hell for them. I mean: it is obviously the aim of it, isn't it? I deride and intimidate minorities, so that ... they feel derided and intimidated. It's just that simple.
Heck, this website itself asks that you don't be mean in comments.
You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
There is no prerequisite like that in the first amendment. Go read the thing. Monarchism was a serious threat to the founders. Monarchists don't believe in many freedoms including freedom of speech. But the founders didn't specify it only applied to non-monarchs. Because they knew such a feature could be abused.
>You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.
What on Earth are you talking about? Neonazis are spoiled rich kids that get everything they want? Freedom of speech is a luxury like icecream?
They aren't. They are what was once the middle class, which has been chipped away at for the past 40+ years.
There's systems of misdirection that have been set up to convince them they are coming up short not because of how the rules are constructed by those in power, but because of a dis-empowered scapegoat.
This redirection trick away from the powerful to the unfamiliar outsider is literally (and literarily) from antiquity. It's part of an ancient bagful of common political slight of hand tricks used to fool people.
It doesn't work on everyone, but those it does work on...well we've seen what that looks like yet again.
So just as we wouldn't allow people to go around and seriously promote say smoking in front of infants for the health of the baby, we should think twice about allowing dangerous political nonsense to be spread and entertained as if it's true - especially ideas with a history of inciting mass murder.
Analogous would be "if you make the rule that people who you think want to remove freedoms but actually don't" -- instead you're switching goal posts mid-sentence.
You just defined a thoughtcrime.
Did you never read 1984?
This has nothing to do with 1984.
Similarly, it should be legal for these fascist assholes to spew their garbage, but they should be locked up as soon as they demonstrate clear intent to hurt someone.
If a group is threatening the security of non-white people, some even going to the extent of carrying guns (as is their right) whilst they make said threats and spread lies, I don't know what else you need to shut them down.
There's no problem here. You have freedom as long as you don't hurt other people. Different nuances of what "hurt" means which are not covered directly by law are decided in courts of law by judges.
Be careful of this. There are very few actual national socialists in the United States, and they certainly aren't all part of a single organisation like Al Qaeda.
Even among them the majority are probably against genocide since they all deny the holocaust.
What you say does however apply to The Daily Stormer. So I agree that they're a threat and should have been taken down years ago.
Can you make this case more clearly? I get that it's anti-semitic (the lying point) but not how it's pro-genocide.
Believing some Jews and other enemies of the Nazis (e.g. Allied governments) lie is not the same thing as believing Jews should be exterminated.
I'm not convinced that's the case. I think progress requires a more nuanced approach than "punish the baddy," but an examination into the psychology and a discourse that shows you understand the frustrations that are being channeled into blind-rage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
IMO this is the ideal rebuttal to the 'be tolerant' argument.
Interesting to think about how we should behave in this context... If I recall correctly, the ideal behavior would be the copy-cat?
This seems to validate the 'intolerant of intolerance' objective.
So by your own argument, should we start tossing Google executives in prison, for tolerating intolerance?
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
It's an interesting point, but at what point does the intolerance of intolerance become intolerance in it's own right?
If the compromise on things we stand for (Freedom of speech, due process, equality for all) where is the line where we cease to be the things we claim to stand for?
FWIW I'm all for charging Nazis with crimes and putting them in jail whenever they commit them. I would be happier if they weren't covered in the media at all. I'd be over the moon if they didn't exist. But if we allow mob rule (which negates the rule of law) to take over, then we risk claiming to stand for things that we do not.
Popper's Paradox illustrates the theoretical. I would argue as a counterpoint that we're successfully as a society not tolerant without limit because of the rule of law.
In some European countries, you were (and well, still are) not allowed to say certain politically incorrect things out loud, which in some countries gave the far right a lot of votes and almost a majority. So people didn't grieve their concerns out loud, but the resentment came out amplified in votes and by other means... While an open debate would likely have created a better atmosphere and perhaps have presented some solutions.
In the long run, you are doing yourself a disservice not pulling everybody into the debate, including terrorists and people sliding into that direction.
I think censorship should be avoided, unless there is a direct and unambiguous call to violent action or a clear violation of other peoples' personal privacy (e.g. "doc'ing", releasing personal information that harms a person).
Cloudflare here admits that large companies are increasingly gatekeeps to the internet, especially in the case of controversial content. They have made a trade-off, and this is probably more about philosophical considerations or personal ideology, but I'd have put freedom of speech and neutrality before censorship of questionable content.
Then go ask them. If there are people that you think probably hate you nearby, I am almost sure there are places in a city where you could go to talk to them.
I know, personally, there has never been a time where I couldn't call the right evangelical church and find out exactly why I am hated.
I've experienced my share of drunk homophobic comments in my direction that do occasionally get violent. I certainly now where to go to find out 'exactly what and how the people who "hate" me think,' I don't for a minute believe they need the internet, let alone cloudflare, to achieve this goal.
This is an extremely frightening statement to me. I'm terrified by the fact that you'd paint me as a Nazi sympathizer because my meta-level beliefs that text and speech should be protected are stronger than my object-level beliefs that Nazi philosophy is evil.
The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
To be clear, this is a separate question from whether major internet infrastructure providers should be considered de facto public systems and fall under the 1st amendment. I don't think they should, so I think this falls within Cloudflare's rights (although I wish they had done otherwise). I'm just objecting to the characterization that the only people who could possibly object to Cloudflare here are neonazis or their sympathizers.
For what it's worth, I tried to find the Daily Stormer site to see what it is they actually advocate for, but I was unable to. I'm not sure if it's because of the domain name issues, Cloudflare, Google search or what, but it's a little disconcerting to me that ideas can be so easily expunged from the internet. So much for the "right to forget" controversy - I guess it is possible after all, if the companies were motivated to do so.
Free speech does not protect dangerous speech.
This type of psychological attack is precisely the issue at hand with counter-nazi progress online at this precise moment in time.
Here's a quick and current take on the issue from Eugene Volokh: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Sufficiently dangerous speech is not protected (Schenck v. United States, Dennis v. United States). Whether or not this speech was sufficiently dangerous is a matter of debate, but the comment you're replying to is correct.
'Fighting words' as defined by the courts is a very very narrow definition, however, and I've seen a lot of really naive comments referrencing that exemption.
I think it's important to point out that almost every time you think speech is 'fighting words', it's not.
This has been proven in the courts over and over. If some idea or words really anger or disgust you, I can almost guarantee that it's protected speech.
It's doubtful that the case would even be decided the same way today.
It's true that the definition of 'fighting words' has narrowed considerably over the years, but the Chaplinsky case is foundational to the debate on what counts as free speech and has weighed heavily on subsequent judgments.
It's been nothing but a hypothetical argument from the grab-bag of people looking to silence speech they don't agree with by people who write newspaper op-eds. It's never actually been used to deny anyone freedom of speech.
If I'm wrong, then cite its use.
'Kill all the <insert chosen group>' is not.
'Kill those <specific bunch of persons> over there right now' is... probably...maybe.
Dr. King himself was labeled as "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security"
Which is why it is important to have equality of speech.
"Slippery slope" is a poor analogy for restricting speech. A more accurate analogy would be a double edged sword which cuts both ways.
You can keep saying that it will be applied to both good and evil until you're blue in the face but it won't make it fact.
If we allow the government to punish people for rape, next thing you know they'll be punishing people for consensual sex. It's a double edged sword.
That's really how ridiculous the argument sounds.
>You can keep saying that it will be applied to both good and evil until you're blue in the face but it won't make it fact.
How are you so sure corporate censorship can never be used for malicious purposes?
Was the war in Iraq a good thing? Because MSNBC censorsed/fired their popular TV host Phil Donahue for questioning it.
And they'll gag be back up by tomorrow no doubt. "Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes." What restraint.
So intimidation and threats of violence are ok? Are you really commending these people for their restraint in not using AK-47s at a demonstration?
One of the lessons from the first round of Nazis is that, by the time the threatening talk turns to actual large-scale violence, it's too late. When Hitler got out of prison in 1924, he made sure that he would be seen as an "all talk" kind of guy by those who could have shut him down.
Freedom of speech (and in fact a lot of the Constitution) is constructed to curtail governmental powers so that dangerous groups in charge aren't able to fundamentally re-shape the country. Why would you want to undermine that when the country is arguably very close to being in that position?
(Personally I think CloudFlare is within its rights to fire a client it doesn't like; non-governmental entities don't have first amendment obligations, just a requirement not to break certain class-based discrimination laws. I don't know if neo-Nazis are a protected class in that respect but it's difficult to see how they would be, since they are not a political party or recognized minority group.)
edit: parentheses
The freedom of speech thing matters not one bit to the alt-right and the Nazis longer than it takes them to overthrow the present order, after that it will go out the window very quickly.
Democracy can be destroyed, it has happened before and it likely will happen again, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it could not happen in America.
Anyway, this whole discussion isn't about free speech to begin with, it is about hate speech and inciting to violence.
I agree that there is no reason why such destruction could not happen here. That is why I believe it is particularly important not to argue for narrow exemptions to important constitutional protections on the grounds of a perceived acute threat. Those protections are shields against the kind of 'democracide' that we may face, so why would we take them apart ourselves?
Furthermore, I think we're safer for having these Nazis out in the open. Their ideas are more easily ridiculed; they are denied the romantic attraction of being driven underground; and their members are more easily monitored (and infiltrated) by the FBI such that any planned atrocities are more readily stopped. They are not an existential threat to the republic, rather, a tiny minority of dangerous people who need to be monitored and arrested whenever they break a law.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Maybe you would like to update it to present day knowledge?
You see Wednesday as a sign of an emboldened neo-Nazi movement, an indication of a growing threat, a sign that a formerly dormant group has begun taking direct action.
I see it as a new national awareness of a group of people who have been here all along, a desperately sad act of murder by a damaged man, and a discredited and clumsy president managing to align himself publicly with an evil ideology decried by everyone except those same neo Nazis.
And you're advocating for, well, I'm not actually sure, but some sort of legislative change to tackle the threat you perceive because you believe it will make us safer. I'm pushing for the opposite, because I believe that your way will drive dangerous people further into the shadows while undermining those defenses we talked about above.
Probably there is a middle way, maybe involving using existing laws such as those used to combat gangs to break apart specific groups of neo Nazis, or quietly increasing the funding of those parts of the FBI which are responsible for domestic extremism.
Probably I am wrong and you are right. I do not think I can convince you, but perhaps you can convince me.
No, I'm not advocating for that at all.
For the rest I would class your assessment as 'mostly accurate', but the devil is in the details.
If you would like to take this off-line I'd be more than happy to converse with you, jacques@mattheij.com.
So people should be allowed to say anything? So you can organize any imaginable crime, threaten people and promote false information as long as you don't do any physical harm?
I agree that just objecting Cloudflare's decision doesn't make you anything. One being a potential Nazi sympathizer just because they don't see any limits to where free speech ends can just be a very crazy conspiracy theory - nothing else.
Well, your theoretical beliefs are now put to a much more practical test, sympathizing with the Nazis in any way shape or form, even if it comes down to just sympathizing with their 'right to a platform' is an excellent way to see how strong ones beliefs really are.
If this is the first time you are in a situation where your strongly held principles are put to the test then I sympathize with you, the longer you live the more this will happen and the more likely you will end up in a situation where there is a conflict between a strongly held belief and a negative consequence for yourself.
Note that bringing weapons (loaded or not) to a march sends a message: we're an army, and we're armed. Not using those weapons should not get them points. One of them brought his car and did use it, the damage was as bad or even worse as if he had fired a rifle.
> The Nazis are not reviled today because they had disgusting beliefs. They're reviled because they actually murdered millions of innocent citizens.
And they would do so again in a heartbeat if they knew they could get away with it.
> I'm okay with neonazis saying disgusting things, as long as they play by the rules and don't commit any violence. (Hell, people brought AK-47's and AR-15's to Charlottesville but didn't use them, despite the violent clashes.) Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
Neo Nazis only say disgusting things because they know they are still living in a society where they can not get away with doing more but make no mistake, the overthrowing of that very society is their goal and I'd love to see you arguing for 'free speech' in the society that they wish to create.
You'd be up against the wall faster than you can say 'jack shit'.
It truly is to me as well. It's something you expect nazis to say.
Imagine if the comment was
"The idea that I'm seeing any of these comments arguing to the contrary means HN is already infiltrated by israel and other jewish sympathizing groups."
It's a form of intimidation to silence groups one disagrees with. I can't believe his comment is the most upvoted on HN of all places.
All the pro-censorship people here are behaving no differently than the neo-nazis they claim to hate. Not only that, both groups share the hatred of free speech and the principles which kept the US from being a nazi germany.
Everyone here is forgetting that Nazi Germany happened because germans supported censorship. Censorship allowed a minority group like the nazis to take over the government and silence everyone else. If the germans had an appreciation for free speech back then nazi germany would have been impossible since most germans opposed hitler and the nazi party. Nazi germany happened because of censorship laws which allowed hitler to ban all political parties and all speech he disagreed with.
But nobody learns history or philosophy anymore it seems.
> Whatever happened to "sticks and stones"? Do kids not learn that mantra anymore?
It seems like kids are taking gender studies instead of philosophy and that is frightening. All the arguments are based on emotion rather than reason.
Would you please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines like this?
Your post is incredible; you are stating that advocates for free speech are Nazis and shit posters. You are stating that there are no good faith defenders of free speech.
If you're not with me, then you're my enemy. Spoken like a true Sith Lord.
Are you serious? "And anyone who disagrees with me must be a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser."
Combined with the fact that the rest of your comment seems to be calling for Nazis to be silenced... I don't think I'm comfortable with where this is going.
What it comes down to is that the people arguing for "free speech" here feel safe in this world, with a growing neo-nazi presence.
They don't feel threatened--they're not a target, the system will protect them, maybe they even have guns or plans to live off the grid, whatever.
They can argue that neo-nazi speech is OK because it isn't an existential threat to them. They may even look at the terrorist car attack in Charlottesville and think "lone wolf, random unplanned attack," but what it comes down to is: they're going to be OK. Cops will protect them, their stuff, the system is on their side.
Those of us who are OK with Cloudflare shutting down the Nazis, we don't trust the system to keep us safe. Cops won't protect us, the system is not on our side. We see the actual threat of nazi violence and death coming our way, and the "free speech" people are doing nothing to stop it.
I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past. But there are actual talks about further restricting freedom of speech in America being put forth by some groups because of the attention that's being given to white supremacists and nazis right now with seemingly little attention being given to identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups actually have in the modern context.
[1]http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
I'm a big fan of SSC, but this thesis is not holding up very well
I mean, Nixon's FBI tried to blackmail civil rights leaders and drive them to suicide. Strom Thurmond was in the Senate until 2002. The Klan endorsed Reagan, regardless of what he said in reply.
I agree that Trump has been frighteningly slow to condemn white supremacy, and that it holds more sway now than it did a decade ago. But on any time window longer than perhaps 15 years, I think it's fair to ask whether Trump is consequentially worse than his peers. Less diplomatic and more overt, to be sure, but is he actually driving more racial violence than Nixon did? I don't think so. The bar has been set horrifyingly low for a long time.
There seems to be a large excluded middle. Arguments that Trump's actions are not racist in consequence look downright absurd, but the claim that they could only be caused by Klan-level racism and are entirely dissimilar to similar modern politicians seems more like rehabilitating other racists than condemning Trump.
(I'm referring to "racism in consequence", I think speculating about his subjective inner state is pointless)
Eh. The statistics about nazism is clear: they have killed a few million people over the last 100 years.
That is more than about everyone else except maybe the various communist regimes who together are in the tens of millions range IIRC.
Almost anyone that argues Hitler was agreat guy and nazism is great and should be ruling today are also arguing for continuing to kill people.
Further, it wasn't simply nazis in the abstract that killed those few million people, it was nazi controlled Germany. It seems dishonest to ignore that aspect of the history because you gloss over all of the political maneuvering allowed the nazi party to become the force that it was such as the Reichstag Fire Decree. On top of this you ignore the history of antisemitic racism in early 20th century Europe that allowed the nazi party to gain enough popularity to attain traction as a political party.
Your point that anyone supporting the spread of nazism is supporting the actions of the nazi party that existed in Hitler's Germany is valid. However, in America this sort of speech is not as distinctly illegal as it is in much of (all of?) Europe and so from an American perspective a discussion needs to take place about how to approach the topic because for us blanketly outlawing nazi groups because of their beliefs would erode some part of the general freedom of speech that we operate with. Whether that erosion represents the loss of anything of value is debatable, but it would none the less represent a decrease in our overall speech protections. This is where my point about evaluating and qualifying the reach and influence that groups like this actually have becomes relevant, because a rational discussion would be dependent on this sort of information.
Radicalization of people is quite literally spread like a disease. The internet has allowed this disease a means of spreading unlike ever before in the history of man.
Being tolerant of such communities that call for the violent overthrow of the government, institution of a fascist government, and the genocide of entire populations of people is like allowing a cancer to spread.
This train of thought is quite literally a cancer on humanity that needs to be chemo'd out of existence.
It's literally worse than Child Porn by many orders of magnitude.
Che Guevara’s face is plastered across all manner of pop culture and products yet that face represents communism and for some reason, it’s culturally acceptable?
Racism and genocide is at the heart of Nazi ideology. It is steeped in the ideas of racial superiority. This is why their symbols are culturally unacceptable: they literally mean "I am better than the Jews therefore they should die".
Both Nazi and Communist regimes have killed staggering amounts of people in horrible and brutal ways. They're both repulsive.
Like, who really cares whether your ideology has hate as a cornerstone if you still commit genocide by starvation and throw millions in gulags to die? "Oh man, I'm dead but at least they didn't hate me while they slowly starved me to death!"
Communisms fault is that it's far too utopian in practice and easy for someone like Stalin to hijack the process leading to what you describe. In fact, communism as defined by Marx looks nothing like what the Soviet Union was.
I am a democratic socialist. The USSR was a socialist republic. Do I support what the Soviet union did because I'm a socialist? Hell no! Do I support Nazism because they were called the National Socialists? No and I reject any association of that nature. It's flat out wrong.
Nazism, on the other hand, is pretty clear. Non-whites are vermin and must be exterminated. It's their ideology and if you fly their flags you support that view. It isn't a case of association because a bad actor was affiliated. It matters because it is rotten to the core. It matters because of intent.
Karl Marx never intended for millions to starve in gulags. There is no mention of this and it isn't communist by definition. Genocide was Hitler's intent and it is Nazism by definition.
The reason I think it's important to identify terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Nazism, Christianity, etc. with their respective belief systems is because it empowers us to ask 'why'. Why are so many terrorist organizations affiliated with Islam, RECENTLY SPEAKING? Why has white supremacy become more visible in the American social space including the pre-charlottesville social space? I don't have the end all be all answer. But I think asking the question is important because whatever the true answer is, I think it's fair to say that it's probably regionally rooted, potentially linked to the economics of certain groups rooted in those regions, and because of the regional nature of many Islamic terrorist groups and white nationalist groups, I think it's fair to say that there is a cultural BUT NOT UNIVERSALLY CULTURAL element to it. I would make a similar assessment of the IRA in Ireland, Christian terrorists in Africa, and by now you can probably see where I'm going with this. Acknowledging the affiliations of these organizations and their beliefs is important because it explains THEM. It doesn't inform us about their beliefs, but it allows us to analyze why they have chosen to affiliate with those beliefs in a hopefully honest fashion.
None of that is meant to imply that Nazism should be viewed as American, or that Islamic Terrorism should be viewed as a sub-element of Islam, but acknowledging that these contexts exist with regard to SPECIFIC ORGANIZATIONS is important in my opinion because the root of these issues is often multifaceted and can only be combated, in my opinion, with a comprehensive understanding of these groups and their spiritual as well as political influences.
Edit: I will acknowledge when I edit an argument in the face of something that someone has pointed out. This post has already been heavily edited for my own satisfaction however because while modern examples of significant terrorism are obviously not evenly distributed across cultures, that does not mean that one culture is implicitly prone to terrorism and I'm trying very hard to keep my grammar and framing of arguments as neutral in that respect as possible while acknowledging the current configuration of terrorism, hate, and extremism across the globe.
Your post makes it clear: no matter what belief system, there are bad actors that use it as a justification. There exists Buddhist extremism. There is absolutely nothing to suggest in their doctrines that violence is the answer. In fact, with the focus meditation it should be surprising there is any violent extremism.
My point is that we cannot blame something for the actions of bad people if that thing does not in anyway support those actions.
My point is that because there are American Nazis, it does not mean Americans in general are to blame. By extension, Communism isn't to blame for Stalin distorting the ideology to his own ends in the USSR and that being repeated in Cuba, etc.
On top of that, I say Nazism is a special case in that if you associate with it, you are a problem simply because it supports extreme violence. The Nazis of old explicitly supported the kind of actions seen in Charlottesville.
I think this is the biggest flaw with today's left: it's natural to think people can't handle the truth. It's often even correct. But once we start lying to people, we lose all credibility. I think that's what's lead to this upsurge of the extreme right.
...which means (or, at least is should mean) absolutely nothing.
won't let me.
I think there have existed communist-like experiments that kind-of worked.
Edit: Note that I am not seeking to defend the Soviets here - just questioning whether antisemitism was actually part of their ideology.
This was why I concluded with the argument that we should at the same time be focused on identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups. Because in the wake of an extremely upsetting event it's important to emphasize the need for intelligent debate and evaluation or else the discourse becomes volatile and incapable of rational decision making.
Generic ideological tangents are a pox on HN to begin with, let alone when people are having flamewars about Nazis, and this is flamebait to the point of being a parody of flamebait. It has the effect of trolling whether you're intentionally trolling or not, and the effect is all we care about. Please don't post like this again.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032574 and marked it off-topic.
At the emotional frequency everyone is operating on, do you really think you'll win? No one will win because everyone will lose. Let me explain why.
I think it's time everyone admitted their biases and that their biases if not TAMED will only serve to antagonize their political opponents.
Before I go on, here are my biases...
I'm a black libertarian(with a strong affinity for classical liberalism) and a supporter of Trump's presidency so words like 'uncle tom' have been thrown at me. I wasn't always a libertarian. Initially a liberal, I didn't pay much attention to politics but when I begun to think about the role that politics has in my life (at zero option), I realized that I was naturally inclined towards conservatism i.e. fiscal responsibility & frugality, tighter immigration control, less government intervention, anti-eminent-domain, pro-personal freedom and liberty, anti-common-core, and then some. I'm huge fan of Peter Thiel and Hans-Hermann Hoppe - I read them a lot. I no longer feel the need to watch CNN because their ability to hide their skew towards liberalism is all but gone
You should note that there's no where that I mentioned violence as a chosen means to get my voice heard. I don't support it but I fear that's where the world is headed in order to resolve this political conflict that's in the ether right now.
What we have today is a left that is too far gone - who mostly don't realize it - and a right that's intentionally too far gone also.
Just as much as there is a far-right, you best believe that Trump is right and there is a far-left (it is telling that today on the web, you'll find two clones of Wikipedia all skewed towards either leftism or rightism because neither trust Wikipedia - see Conservapedia & RationalWiki).
As much as Trump has been touted by some as a symptom (I agree), I think that Obama's presidency was also a symptom. Putting his(Obama) race aside, we had an American president who once said that [sic] between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate...You should just decide what works.
This shows that the world had once again reached a point where systems like communism which were disproven - when America won the cold war, the soviet collapsed, the Berlin wall came down and Fukuyama wrote the words 'End of History' - could now be viewed in a relativistic manner. As though it didn't matter what the world had gone through historically. This was one of those fatal flaws because, if you forget history, you're undoubtedly bound to repeat it.
I also subscribe to some Burkean views which espouse that, change in a society should be introduced gradually. Gradual change while all the while testing to see if there's truth in your claims. This is not what we're used to in the tech scene; we prefer disruption but disruption comes at a cost. You cannot have a Bernie without a Trump. You cannot have an Alt-Right without an Antifa.
We must all tone down our views. We must all tame our desires for instant political gratification. Revolutionary change comes at a painful cost. Let's all embrace gradual change. If we don't, right or left, the Daily Stormer will win whether you like it or not because there will be a race war as per their slogan. When this happens, it will all turn into rubble and only a few will be left to pick up the pieces.
The questions we should be asking is what can I cede (politically) in exchange for you ceding something of equal magnitude until some balance is restored. We aren't headed in the right direction otherwise.
He is also effectively saying that since he can and will remove sites he personally doesn't like, that he personally approves of every other site using Cloudflare.
The excuse he uses for terminating TDS is an absolute crock; if TDS genuinely did falsely and sincerely claim that Cloudflare supports them, then Prince could and should have simply asked them to remove that claim.
It's an outrage that businesses that want to enjoy all the benefits of selling to the public can discriminate against members of that public for any spurious or bigoted reason they like.
Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
The damage of libel is reputational damage. Getting the libelous claim retracted after the claim has been seen by the public doesn't undo or erase the damage the claim does. Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim, if you want to regain the lost reputation.
Anyone know where that evidence is?
The public posting was probably on their website, which is now likely blackholed due to being DDoSed after they were no longer protected by a CDN.
The Internet is broken when some terrorists can get together and decide to blockaid someone else; even if that someone else is nearly universally agreed upon to vile.
I agree with that user on Twitter that wants to make (the racist) individuals /infamous/ so that they can receive the blowback they deserve for their public behavior.
Yes, that something is called suing for libel and proving it is libel in a court.
Simply claiming something is libel (which Prince doesn't even do in his blog post) doesn't make it libel.
> Usually you have to do something drastic to actively disprove the libelous claim, if you want to regain the lost reputation.
Because of Cloudflare's action there are now 1000 times as many people, including myself, who are aware of TDS's claim who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it.
I get what you’re saying and agree with you, but please don’t compare gay people and neo-nazi. They’re not same or even similar.
I agree with you, but many people do not, making it a political statement. Things get very complicated as soon as you abandon the bright line test of "you must serve the whole public."
Let me change it to an example more dear to my own heart:
> Don't wanna hire old programmers or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
I certainly didn't choose to be an old programmer! It seems to have just happened, maybe by some law of nature. But I'm not offended by being mentioned in the same sentence with pro-Nazi sites. It's pretty obvious that no comparison is being made between the two.
> comparing two well-known instances
> from different parts of the political
> spectrum
When your speech impinges on the safety or rights of another citizen, you are not covered by free speech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
Free speech is not carte blanche to invite violence or call for a genocide. Please watch the recent vice documentary to hear what and how the Charlottesville white supremacists prepared for. It's truly vile and genocidal.
If you want to see a society who has been much more firm holding against racist nonsense, see Germany who has legislated against Nazi symbols and propoganda. Do you see why allowing indimidation and hateful violence run rampant is a bad idea?
That said, Schenck is an awful example of them, considering:
- it does not advance your argument at all - Schenck was an anti-war protester who was trying to distribute flyers. Where's the "impinging on safety or rights of another citizen" there?
- it has been rejected and abandoned as a doctrine, most notably via Brandenburg vs Ohio.
(See https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...)
Even in the US, freedom of speech is not unlimited. Perhaps we're finally learning that the freedom from discrimination trumps the freedom to preach discrimination.
It's about time we lost our naivety. Our European brethren learned this lesson during WWII.
Essentially any political viewpoint can be described in such a way as to fail this test. Do you really want to set the standard that if the execution of a viewpoint has a negative impact on some group, it's OK to use violence against anyone who holds that viewpoint? I guarantee you this won't play out how you want.
> Our European brethren learned this lesson during WWII.
The US has strong protections on free speech and other fundamental rights because "our European brethren" didn't, and therefore treated their colonies so poorly as to almost universally engender armed insurrection. Nothing much changed in this regard then or in WWII, so I'm not really sure what "lesson" you think you're referring to; that Germany should have more aggressively censored anti-incumbent sentiment in the aftermath of WWI? Yes, what a lovely lesson.
> Essentially any political viewpoint can be described in such a way as to fail this test.
I think it's an essential question about where to draw the line. Obviously there must be limits to speech: You can't shout 'kill all the X' to a group of people with baseball bats threatening a group of X (or commit slander or yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, etc.). Generally, it's almost always hard to find a clear, simple rule that applies effectively in all cases of reality - morality and law are like algorithms in that respect. That's why we have judges, juries, and sophisticated laws.
But here's a proposed, relatively functional solution that is simple: Draw the line at intolerance - the only thing we should not tolerate is intolerance itself. A few reasons: 1) Intolerance is a parasite on the rule of tolerance and free speech; it tries to stop others from having those rights. 2) It violates the basic social contract: You tolerate and respect me, and I'll do the same for you. If you break that contract, why should I keep tolerating you? 3) Look up the "Paradox of tolerance".
> if the execution of a viewpoint has a negative impact on some group, it's OK to use violence against anyone who holds that viewpoint
I didn't see anyone mention violence.
The law should be codified hypocrisy?
By this logic, we should we be allowed to steal from people who believe in communism because they don't believe that property rights are morally justified. If they don't believe in private property, why should they get it?
Here's a better idea: don't start shit, and if someone starts shit with you, you can do whatever needs to be done to protect your rights. This has the advantages of A) not being absurdly hypocritical and B) not violating people's rights in an effort to preempt behavior you think might hypothetically emerge from the expression of those rights.
> I didn't see anyone mention violence.
How do you propose to enforce censorship laws? Ask nicely?
The reason you don't go down the path of Europe in this regard is because Europeans are already losing representation, and democracy fails when people aren't free to speak their minds and express their ideas, love it or hate it. That's how a truly free society actually works.
And even though I happen to life in a country where anybody waving a swastika in the last 70 years went to jail, I can still criticise the Government in any way I want.
In fact, the Economist, not usually suspected to harbour communists, considers most of Europe to be more democratic than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...
What does that mean?
In my particular part of Europe we have rather more political representation than we did even 20 years ago.
It's not uncommon for religious people to think that the principles of their religion are so obvious and universal.
This seems like a very similar attitude. But really, you're just used to it. That's all.
As a person who was not born into western culture, I find the concept sort of weird in some way. Although I do accept it as a given in western cultures, I can't see it as either obvious nor universal.
Ratified by 48 nations, no votes against and 8 abstentions.
http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/inde...
Everyone assumes for granted that there are limits to that. Your freedom ends where mine begins.
What does this even mean? Free speech is severely limited to the point that I can be fined for singing most songs in a public place. What I can say to or about people is limited, and I can be charged with various crimes based on the content of that speech. What I say to a child can be interpreted as abuse just based on its explicitness. In many circumstances, I'm not allowed to tell anyone any significant news about what's going on within a company that I work for or have any connection to, for fear that they might profit.
"Free speech" is about the government restraining people from political speech, and even that's been heavily restricted at different times - currently speech can be interpreted as giving material support to terrorists, conceivably opening one up for indefinite detention. We've jailed people for treason for anti-war speech.
Free speech is not about anybody being forced to help you say whatever you want to say. You can't just literally translate the phrase, it's a shorthand. If you want to fight for businesses losing control of their platform in proportion to their size, I'd be glad to support you. Expropriate and renationalize, I say. If Cloudflare is a public utility, I'd demand that Nazis have the opportunity to use it as freely as everyone else.
As for the rest, 1) there's no indication that Cloudflare can prevent them from thinking what they would like, and 2) non-discrimination is not a moral principle; if we didn't discriminate, we wouldn't need more than one word, or to learn our left from our right. Our norms are against certain types of discrimination, not the basic idea of distinguishing between things. There are differences between Nazis and Jews, for example. If we couldn't see them, we wouldn't be able to understand why some people wanted to murder other people, or discriminate accordingly when deciding who we should do business with.
Nazism is not a political position, it is a death cult. Nazis are murderers or would-be murderers who want me and everyone I love or care about dead. They are actively conspiring to make that a reality, sometimes achieving some fraction of it. Incitement to mass murder is not and should never be protected speech.
They are also actively conspiring to eliminate free speech, freedom of conscience and non-discrimination. Protecting the direct efforts to destroy those moral principles, in the name of preserving them, is an obvious contradiction and an obvious failure to uphold those values.
None of this is hypothetical or theoretical. We know what happened the last time they achieved real power. We know that they have escalated their violence as they have gained allies in power today.
We should protect the free exchange of ideas. We should not protect or give a platform to a conspiracy to mass murder.
In a democracy, the majority has limitless power. They can vote to oppress or kill the minority, which survives only due to the majority's good will and whim. Democracy is the angry mob. 'Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner', goes a saying.
The solution is constitutional democracy, which includes rules protecting the minority, via civil rights. In the U.S., these rules are the Bill of Rights. The rule of law also is essential.
But it's very clear that even those rights and laws are not sufficient: In the U.S., slavery, segregation, lynchings of blacks, and oppression of other politically vulnerable groups, including women and LGBTQ, has continued in varying degrees for over 200 years despite the Bill of Rights and rule of law.
The politically vulnerable groups - the groups the majority can oppress and kill and destroy - need additional protection. (That's why when people try to make some logical inference that oppression of white males is the same thing, they miss the core factor: White males are not politically vulnerable to the majority;, they are the majority (in terms of power); a quick look at a group photo of the people in power in every domain of American and European life will show you that.
Remember the last time that popular sentiment regarded a group of rich, influential people as not needing those should-be-universal protections because of their privileged position? And then decided that this group was the cause of all their problems? Let's not let that happen again.
It’s a constitutional republic. And there is a difference.
As far as protected classes; the U.S. Constitution makes each individual a protected class. The protection of individual liberty is the cornerstone of the United States. (Or at least it was.)
This idea that some groups need more protection is ludicrous. We are saying that some people are less equal than others. What is needed is a consistent and impartial application of the law – which, granted, was not always the case. But, the philosophical concept of protected class goes against the concept of equality.
Committing a crime against a gay person IS A CRIME. That exact same crime against a non gay person IS A CRIME. The idea that either one of those should be punished differently is more Animal Farm than US Constitution.
This idea of the thought police is obscene and the very opposite of John Locke.
A man should not be punished for thoughts. A man should not be punished because of his motivations. A man should only be punished for his actions.
> A man should not be punished because of his motivations. A man should only be punished for his actions.
To nitpick a little: The law absolutely looks at motivations. For example, pre-meditated murder (1st degree murder) is a worse crime than non-pre-meditated murder (2nd degree), which is worse than unintentional murder (3rd degree).
Did they?
Nazism didn't go through some kind of Martin Luther style academic and cultural reformation in the last 80 years. Neo-Nazis are the same as the original Nazis. They have the same ideology & the same ambitions. They're literally incompatible with Western liberalism & enlightenment.
Neo-Nazis are just late-stage Third Reich acolytes, sympathizers, and insurrectionists. They're still trying to fight a war that they lost to terms of unconditional surrender. It's frankly shocking that they're given the deference of being just yet another political voice in the diverse landscape of voices. They are not. Very, very few modern political movements were defeated explicitly at the tip of a spear instead of the stroke of a pen. Nazism is in scarce company in that regard.
There's no point at all to engage any of it as though Nazism is the same as normal political speech. Allowing for ideological recidivism and re-litigating WWII sort of defeats the purpose of having fought that war and conquered them to begin with.
It would make way, way more sense to consider them enemies of the state and deal with them as such.
Your implication that being gay has to do with biology and hence it has a hereditary component is at odds with what we are currently hearing from everywhere.
Which view is it the valid one?
To me these are exclusive so in the community should choose just one discourse.
As a member of the LGBTQ community I have met zero trans people who feel that they chose their gender expression, and zero people who felt they chose their sexual orientation, instead of being born and growing into their identities over time. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but I highly, doubt it's anywhere close to a plurality much less a majority.
Where exactly have you heard that most trans people are "choosing" their expressed gender? And why do you think there is one view for many people to "choose"?
Identification and expression, in gender and sexuality, are not the same as choice.
A gay person living in an society oppressive to gay men would not choose to identify as gay and may express themselves as being straight, but that doesn't mean their orientation is heterosexual.
They may choose to repress their sexual orientation or gender expression for the sake of survival, or other reasons, but the innate feelings behind the expression are typically not choice. Do you think LBGTQ people in countries where expression is punishable are death are just casually opting to risk the lives of thmeselves and their family?
Not coincidentally, LBGTQ people were persecuted and exterminated by Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_LGBT_people
Out of interest, if tomorrow it was somehow proved beyond doubt that being gay was a choice, would this make discrimination OK?
I don't think that Cloudflare (or any company) should be legally obligated to work with someone they don't like. (Besides, do you really want your wedding cake baked by someone who hates you?)
However, I think it's a moral and practical travesty that companies have the ability to effectively deplatform people from the modern internet. It's our responsibility as technologists to make sure that you cannot be silenced, whether you're a persecuted minority or someone who would persecute minorities. Having political gatekeepers to the internet is bad for everyone in the long run.
Not that you can't think that, but it's a weird personal ideology that calls for explanation and argument, not some pronouncement of what should or should not be done.
I'm pretty sure you can make the argument why gay people, women and racial or religious minorities shouldn't be discriminated against. Make the same argument for skateboarders if you don't want to make it for Nazis. Do you have an similar argument for why Nazis shouldn't be fired, or why we shouldn't consider whether the people that we do business with employ, or are, Nazis?
So if you'd like to nitpick over the semantics of "Nazi" versus "adherent of a Nazi-Party-of-Germany-inspired philosophy", be my guest. But I'll be busy opposing them with my every breath, because that's what we do to Nazis.
This coyness about the dilution of meaning is utterly irrelevant here. We're not discussing figurative Nazis or the erosion of the term. We're discussing people literally waving modern variants of historical Nazi flags, historically used Nazi flags, inventing new similar flags, chanting english versions of Nazi slogans, publishing extensive content about racially motivated violence that cites pre-existing Nazi dogma, and cheering acts of spontaneous and fatal violence against those that oppose them.
This is not some case of the excluded middle. The word "Nazi" is used judiciously here and no one seems to be feigning confusion except the people who think it should be okay to endorse acts that even our conservatively run justice department things could be categorized as hate crimes.
And forgive me, but it's difficult to not hear a note of falseness in this kind of protest. Many of these people in these rallies self-identify as Neo-Nazis, and use slogans that have been associated with violent white-supremacist movements for decades. A powerful deductive intellect is not required to make the connection here.
If all that's required to make this right in your book is the prefix "neo-" then please, let me offer you a chrome or firefox plugin to tighten up everyone's language to match one you'll understand.
So I ask: are you actually confused here or is this simply a rhetorical tactic?
And here we are.
- Waving a flag with symbols associated with nazi imagery?
- Deliberately using the "heil"?
- Chanting, "Jews will not replace us!" while making a salute?
- Wearing a conical white hood, open or closed, and white (and possibly scarlet) robes at torchlit rallies?
- Calling themselves neo-nazis?
Who is actually confused? Are you?
So, now, when people try to get others to understand that the Nazis we now have are almost exactly the same we had in Germany way back then, people don't really make that connection (even if they say they do) on emotional level. Instead, they associate the self-professed Neo-Nazis with the "nazi Republicans" and the not-really-a-nazi-alt-righters that have been cried at in the 2000's.
Source: many acquaintances who are clearly very, very confused on the matter.
People are not simple creatures, and things like crying the wolf actually do confuse us pretty easily.
Shut it down, "alt-left." Shut it all down. Someone was not precise and we can't use words anymore.
The only thing I said was that the term you are talking about most probably does not inspire the loathing it should (and once did) after all the crying-the-wolf. And considering that, I tried to hint that maybe in the future it might be sensible to take this effect into account before going down the same rabbit hole again.
To who? Is it implicit that I've misused the term? That I am misusing it here?
Who requires this admonition? If not me, then why are you burying this dire warning arm-deep in a comment thread on HN?
And, specifically, they annoyed you with their use of slightly-hyperbolic rhetoric, used to underline their contention that the Republican strategy of racial division and incitement of culture wars may create fertile ground for a resurgence of staples of the fascist ideologies? And that, if we continue down this path, America may some day start electing strongmen playing on feelings such as xenophobia?
Personally, I'm not even from the US, and find many of the policies of the Republicans almost absurd. Where I'm from, your run-of-the-mill republican would be considered so deep into the right wing as to be completely niche. Almost alt-right, if you wish.
Look, I see where you're coming from. But is it so hard to see that waving the nazi stamp around willy-nilly really will dilute the meaning and connotations of the term, no matter how much you think it was justified. Nazi's are probably the Satan of modern times, literally the thing people use to mean "the worst there can ever be". However Republican policies seem baffling to me, I see no reasonable way to stamp them with that kind of stamp. They're 50% responsible for running your country, for God's sake :)
There's also some confusion about terms, obviously. The meaning of Nazi has morphed and includes more than actual, card-carrying party members. The dictionary lists "a person with extreme racist or authoritarian views" as one of the definitions. It is also meant, and generally understood, as an insult, and a reference to a certain mindset (cf "Grammar Nazi"). And while neither Trump nor most other Republicans would be considered Nazis, there are some obvious tendency at play in the party that invite the comparison, such as the attempts to disenfranchise groups of voters, or, more recently, the Presidents' encouragement of police officers to "rough up" arrestees.
> - Chanting, "Jews will not replace
> us!" while making a salute?
> - Wearing a conical white hood, open
> or closed, and white (and possibly
> scarlet) robes at torchlit rallies?
They're all deplorable, and I'm sure there's a great deal of overlap between groups, but why sacrifice accuracy by calling them Nazis?
I do understand that GWB wasn't a Nazi. And maybe there was a bit too much wolf-crying. But even if the boy has had this annoying habit at crying "wolf" every day–does that render you unable to recognise a wolf when he's staring you in the eyes?
Someone waving a flag with a Swastika, non-ironically, yes, they're a Nazi. Someone calling themself a Nazi? Yes, they're a Nazi.
Holocaust-denier and notable anti-semite and crazy person David Icke? A delusional idiot, but not a nazi. KKK members who believed National Socialism was still socialism and battled Nazis in WWII? Racist fuckheads, but not Nazis. Francoist Faciscts? Probably not Nazis, although I'd forgive you for making a strong case for it.
We have words and phrases like white supremacist, anti-semite, racists, and Nazi. They all mean things, and there's plenty of overlap. I'm not sure what we gain by mislabelling one group as another, other than opening ourselves up to accusations we're crying wolf.
While the Klan has a long and inglorious tradition, it merges seamlessly with the pro-Nazi elements of the US in world war 2, for the most part. And Nazis are what folks had in mind when they say, "Anti-semite".
So I'm curios if YOU were ever confused. Or if this is for the rhetorical masses (who by and large don't seem too confused once they see a picture, that I can discern).
> If a collective group is doing
> all these things
> [the Klan] merges seamlessly with
> the pro-Nazi elements of the US in
> world war 2
> Nazis are what folks had in mind
> when they say, "Anti-semite"
> So I'm curios if YOU were ever confused
Duke acts in accordance with most of their principles, so yes.
> Milo Ywhatever-his-name-is?
He hangs out with some self-proclaimed Nazis, but we've yet to see him walking in a march waving the flag.
> Gamergate people?
I actually think most are sexist. I see plenty of post-gaters resisting Trump and decrying the violence we're discussing.
> The_Donald
The reddit? Or DJT himself? For the reddit, I don't even know what it is. It's like one of those lego advertisement cartoons that doesn't have to make sense so long as we all agree we should buy Legos.
As for DJT himself? I would have said no before last week, but that last press conference really left me wondering.
Thing is, the latter never seem to aim their ire at those who are actually stretching the definition of Nazi to tarnish their political opponents. It's always aimed at those who observe this happening and criticise it.
This is not true at the federal level, which is generally what people mean when they refer to "protected classes". However, there are some states that prohibit discrimination based on political affiliation, including California. [1]
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
I don't believe that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against anyone who is behaving in a lawful manner.
Is that belief what you're calling a "weird personal ideology"?
> Do you have an similar argument for why Nazis shouldn't be fired, or why we shouldn't consider whether the people that we do business with employ, or are, Nazis?
If someone's beliefs don't negatively affect their ability to do their job, why should they be fired for their beliefs? Should Democrats be fired? Should atheists? Are "Nazis" the only people capable of bias and discrimination?
Likewise, why should someone's beliefs be a factor in whether I do business with them? If I'm buying something from someone why would anything other than price and quality of the product or service even come up?
Okay, let's make an example. Let's make a really blatant one.
Imagine you're Jewish. Furthermore, imagine there are two bakeries in town: Bob's Bakery, and Pastry 88.
All of the people working at both of them are perfectly civil when you go in to buy a donut. But everyone in town knows that Al Hilter, the guy who owns Pastry 88, is a Nazi. And now and then Mr. Hilter takes out ads in the local paper espousing his Jew-killing views.
Bob's Bakery and Pastry 88 are right across the street from each other. You have a hankering for a donut. Where are you gonna go to fulfill this desire?
Let's make it a little more complicated: Pastry 88 makes an amazing lemon-filled donut, and Bob's Bakery Bob's kid has a major lemon allergy. So you can't buy anything with lemons in it at Bob's. And you love lemon donuts. Do you love lemon donuts enough to give money to someone who has said that you should be gassed and have your tanned skin used for lampshades?
Is it okay for me to buy donuts from him then?
I'm beginning to think that the only reasonable thing to do in the ridiculous hypothetical is to lease another corner on the same intersection and open up "Solomon Cohen's Pro-Semitic, Lemon-Friendly Bagel Shop and Delicatessen".
This principle doesn't seem very robust. Can a bar refuse entry to children? Can a cinema kick someone out for talking during a movie? Can a dance club have a dress code?
If it's legal for children to enter a bar, I don't see why a bar should be able to refuse entry to children.
> Can a cinema kick someone out for talking during a movie?
If they're causing a problem for other people in the cinema and refuse to stop, sure. A right to be access a product or service shouldn't override other people's right to get what they paid for.
So for "lawful manner" in my above post: "lawful manner, or manner that doesn't negatively impact other customers".
> Can a dance club have a dress code?
If a club wants to only allow a specific type of member then it should be a private club.
All clubs are private, they just have varying degrees of specificity in their entrance requirements.
That's really the entire point here. Private entities have the right to choose who they will do business with unless the law prevents them from doing so, as it does in many cases (sex, race, etc).
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
Work and business is an enormous part of human life: exempting businesses from Constitutional protections dramatically limit the scope of those protections. Should federal agents be able to raid a business without regard for the Fourth Amendment? Should Texas be able to take legal action against Amazon, Microsoft, etc. for speaking out against the anti-bathroom bill?
In America, you get to run a business with whatever political views you have, subject to very narrow restrictions of a handful of anti-discrimination statutes (which are, incidentally, all based on the much-maligned Commerce Clause).
Well... Yeah. I'm not sure why people think this is not how the internet works. It's a knit of private industry in most of the west and with the exception of a few (eroding) laws, private industries do all kinds of things.
The problem for DS is: there aren't many sites that WILL CDN them now that are as good as the alternatives that will surely not.
We can talk about strengthening guarantees of access to internet services and hosting, but that'd almost certainly be government mandated. Very few governments in a position to dictate this kind of policy to a global entity like the internet are terribly friendly to outright fascist, nazi policy.
So you can pick your poison: inconsistent rules from private entities or more consistent but more likely unfavorable and less mutable rules from government mandate (probably with the weight of government survey and law enforcement).
> Don't wanna sell cakes to gay people or host pro-Nazi sites? Don't start a business serving the public then.
The difference here is that neo-nazis make a decision to be bigots. They could stop. Most LGBT people consider their status to be a matter of birth.
Even for deeply held religious beliefs, we've long recognized a difference in fairness between discriminating on the circumstances and nature of birth vs. the circumstances and nature of choices made.
I think CDNs are a problem in general (their existence speaks to the self-inflicted wounds of an ultimately lawless internet, bad actors contained within gradually destroying it from abuse). It's a bad thing if they start consistently policing content.
But I think it's much worse to vigorously justify murder of people exercising their rights to free speech. Ultimately, people opting out of the tit-for-tat game of free speech and engaging in spontaneous acts of violence are opting out of society as a whole, and will start finding themselves exiled and imprisoned formally. And it's difficult to see any other way to proceed.
I don't understand why this argument gets thrown about so often. Obviously not so much about neo-nazis in particular, but whenever a comparison is made to LGBT people. And before anybody jumps to conclusions, I am not about to argue that sexual orientation is a choice.
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of all kinds, from all sorts of sources, there are people that seem to honestly believe the earth is flat. There is no way to make a reasoned decision to believe that. It must be something they are not in control of. It could be something they were born with, something in their experiences, or both, but it's clearly something they are not rationally deciding.
I'm not certain it can be said that the neo-nazis are definitely making a choice. It seems to be a pretty vehement emotional response, which would indicate it's not.
I don't mean to say we should tolerate neo-nazis in the sense that we just let them do their thing. But I do think we might be better off treating them as people that have some predisposition to being neo-nazis than as people that just decided to be one.
But then they would be considered an apostate by most of the people they have ever known, and some of those people may consider apostasy to be a capital crime.
Do you really think it that easy for someone who is immersed in a niche culture to walk away from it, particularly if it is an insular and unpopular culture? It happens, but not everyone is strong enough to overcome the cognitive dissonance and leave behind everything they have ever been taught.
It isn't a matter of expecting a neo-Nazi to suddenly decide to stop being one, but in getting one to a cult deprogrammer counselor and providing sufficient social support afterwards, as they will likely have to discard all previous friends and family in the process. It would be similar to a homosexual kid coming out to fundamentalist parents. "Mom, Dad... I have decided that all people are created equal, and I want to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." "I knowed we never shoulda sent you to no public school. Get out."
For most humans, leaving an accidental community requires subsequent joining of an intentional community. And the stronger the stigma and adversity against that original community, the harder it is for someone to believe they could be accepted by anyone else upon leaving it.
But that really only applies to the passive followers, who go along to get along. There are always true die-hard believers, for whom facts and contrary evidence simply dissolve under the light of their religious or pseudo-religious faith. They have intentionally excised their own capacity to question their beliefs. How much effort are you willing to expend to crack open that nut and "save" them? They are certainly never going to pull themselves out under their own power.
I have a problem with this, because in effect it is saying that if you want to be in business, you have to check your principles at the entrance.
I do run a business, and I do reserve the right to withhold service from people whose principles I find offensive. Just as as an employee, I would reserve the right to withdraw my service (resign) from an employer whose principles I disagreed with.
All this is very healthy for our society - it provides excellent feedback about your views, in both directions. The business owner losing business if they are overly intolerant, and the customer loses a valuable service if they are overly offensive. The system works pretty well - much better than any legal solution could.
For the same reason is not ok for a public business to not make cakes for gay couples, we should not allow public businesses to pick and choose who is allowed to be part of the economy. If you want to argue against that, that is fine, but you have to accept it when people with the completely opposite set of morals start discriminating against _you_
edit: In case it wasn't clear, I am not a fan of Nazis, but I don't want to even set up the opportunity for businesses to have the power to just exclude me from normal day to day activity just because the CEO has decided he doesn't like whatever group I am in
At what point in this process do you think it would be been morally appropriate for you to cancel your service to this group?
Let say a local youth group submits a proposal to have their weekly meetups in your venue. They then begin to shoplift. What is the rational behavior to address this issue?
I would start by calling the police and report the crime. I could then start denying service to them (which casinos are known to do). But if I start to do general statements about any people which share identity, belief, political membership, or sexual orientation with the local youth group then I am likely stepping a bit to far into the realm of discrimination.
In a perfect world I think Cloudflare should have filed a police complaint in regard to the daily stormer and then canceled the account. Such decision would have nothing to do with regulating content, censorship, vigilante justice, or freedom of speech. It would just be a simple matter of a customer not obeying the law.
On the other hand, allowing neo-nazis to go unhindered may quite reasonably result in people's deaths, so.
This thread is so full of false analogies, it's unbelievable.
Should any business be obliged by law to make business with and thereby indirectly support advocates of genocide and racism? Should any business be forced to make business with Nazis, Red Khmer, Stalinists, etc.? If your answer is Yes, then I have bad news for you. No need to spell it out, though, as it's obvious...
So a bakery making generic wedding cakes must provide them for everyone, and we as society are crystal clear that this does not imply the baker supports interracial marriage. However, a bakery providing custom cakes based on the couple cannot be compelled to write "Arranged marriage between children is beautiful" on a cake.
A web host is required to sell you webspace regardless of your content, unless it is actually illegal or contrary to technical and ideologically neutral terms of service. But a web design firm may decline to design a page for you based on its content.
I think this is a really good principle, and a great way to preserve both free speech and freedom of conscience.
Well, welcome to the club! Other noteable groups objecting to their principles being regulated by a government office include Masterpiece Cakeshop of Lakewood, CO, and Memories Pizza of Walker, IN. (For the moment, disregard the likes of Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, as their matters of principle-regulation are less directly relevant.)
I figure there are three-ish main options.
1. People are consistently required to suppress their principles, and do business with groups like the Daily Stormer.
2. People are consistently allowed to exercise their principles, and refuse service to gay weddings.
3. A disaster area of conflicting regulations both for and against the right of various groups to be served by various businesses, conforming to no consistent set of principles but rather to whatever is politically popular and expedient today, and hypocritical to the core.
My money's on 3.
(There's a theoretical possibility they'll actually nail down specific principles and not make it a total mess, but I don't think it's plausible.)
Your notable groups are not required or regulated in any way that would require them to print a swastika on a cake or a Hitler face on their pizza if the customer ask so. They are, however, required to serve queer and non-queer people of all skin tones. There is indeed a difference between these kinds of discrimination.
Religious beliefs seem to fall squarely in the latter category (at least to the extent that political views do). Are you really comfortable with people discriminating on that basis?
Basically: If your view demands anything of me or any other person I might know other than pure tolerance of your view, I can choose to discriminate against you. If your view only demands tolerance and only makes prescriptions for you, I can't. Obviously, the real world is a bit more messy since even a political moderate view that demands higher taxes to feed the poor infringes on my freedom to earn money - so the question where to draw that line is a matter of open debate.
Political views are sometimes similar in character to religious views, such that expressing contrary opinions results in shunning and being ostracized by one's family and community.
It's one of the major reasons why free and fair elections have to use secret ballots, aside from vote-buying. Around here, it's risky to even participate in partisan primary elections, because employers can look up your name in the voting records and determine which party's ballot you used, then engage in party-based discrimination at work that ranges from subtle to blatantly overt.
While this area seems to have more than its fair share of petty and bigoted persons, it can basically happen anywhere that requires a declaration of party affiliation during the primary.
My own spouse has turned a bit more left over the years, even as my siblings-in-law have gone more to the right. It has resulted in some rancor, as those four gratuitously post replies on Facebook for each other's posts and summarily delete replies by my spouse. They're really being a bunch of a-holes.
If you don't conform to the views of your local community, you're going to have a hard time. And the more homogenous it is, the more you can be punished for your non-conformity.
The rule is more like "don't randomly screw people". Ok, we've decided to screw this Nazi website. Hmm, is that a case of randomly screwing people? Nope. OK, move along.
The principle that applies is a basic Enlightenment one: everyone has the right to speak. You don't have to agree. You can not visit their shop. You can protest outside their shop. But you don't get to barricade their shop and cut its wires.
Thats the real danger here. A hysteric left and some right outliers creating the basis for continuously improving anti-terror laws. Oh.. too late.
Unless the people who own all the infrastructure disagree with you, and refuse to accept your money.
Also, did the website actually self-identify as Nazi, or were they just called that by other people?
Making things marginally easier for people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer
https://www.dailystormer.com/why-free-speech-and-free-internet-advocates-must-become-nazis/
Yes, it's pretty clear.
For anyone reading this thread, please know that this is NOT the majority opinion within the tech industry - not by a long shot. We are not Nazi sympathizers, and we do not think this is normal. It's not normal.
When I was a teenager and first read Chomsky, being anti-censorship was a left-wing thing. I don't think Chomsky has changed his opinion on censorship, or his political persuasion, and neither have I.
It's a pity that people who believe in fascistic ideals (censorship and discrimination based on political beliefs) are what is deemed "the left" these days.
IMO, if you believe in censorship and do not support free speech you are not left-wing.
> claimed that refusing service to Nazis was "spurious" and "bigoted"
Do you seriously need me to explain that "bigoted" referred to the cake example? Seriously?
As for the rest. Cloudflare did not refuse service to "Nazis". Had they done so, they would have not had to remove that service, under the entirely spurious reason that Matthew Prince woke up in a bad mood and claims they wrote something he didn't like.
They're still providing service to Stormfront, and who knows how many other "Nazi" sites.
Believe it or not, you can actually be 'left' or 'right' wing (or anything else) and hold more subtle positions than absolute, black and white. I think this is a huge problem in discourse in the USA right now. People believe that everyone is completely divided and polarised at opposite extremes.
It's incredibly ridiculous. You can hold many varying positions, and I think people who are completely absolutist are in the absolute minority. Just look at this thread.
Do you trust GCHQ?
I agree with the laws.
With all the secrecy around the law and its effects, its not such a tangent.
This my isn’t about Nazis. This is about speech and freedom, business policies, discrimination.
Change the word “Nazi” to “Communist” and I would be willing to bet you would not be making the same statements, despite communists being more murderous throughout the 20th century than the Nazis.
Is the ACLU a Nazi sympathizer? Of course not. Use your brain and stop being distracted by the “Nazi” part of the discussion. It isn’t relevant.
It's super-convenient to create an argument where you can just ignore the actual topic that's being discussed. To say that this isn't about Nazis, a few days after they splattered some peaceful pedestrian along a wall, is cynical to a degree where people may indeed mistake the free-speech absolutism as a badly-veiled attempt to cover actual sympathies with such terrorists.
I'm wondering where all these but-I-will-give-my-life-for-your-right-to-say-it-grandstanders were on Saturday, when muslims in Charlottesville were praying while fascist militia in fatigues, and with automatic weapons, were standing outside, chanting threats.
Edit: Ah, sorry! Those were jews, not muslims. And not even the police was willing to protect them: http://www.newsweek.com/charlottesville-police-refused-prote...
Of course this should not result in human rights violations and being restricted from communicating your beliefs to the world is one of them. Especially in infrastructure, we rely on private companies to fulfill basic needs that are protected by human rights.
If your infrastructure company is huge and as powerful as a public institution, and is able to single-handedly mess with people's human rights, you should of course not be allowed to have a political agenda. Not selling cakes to Nazis in your corner shop is something completely different.
A -> B does not imply !B -> !A
Example: if you eat an Apple, saying "hey, that's one good-looking Apple!", it does not require you to heretofore eat every good-looking Apple you come across.
A -> B does imply !B -> !A. The error in reasoning here seems to be that attitude towards a website is assumed to be a binary "like/not like" variable, while in reality one can also neither like nor dislike something.
A consequence of this being true is the Raven Paradox [1], seemingly the OP has solved the classic riddle in a HN thread.
I'd go a step further. If cloudflare were a branch of the government like the literal internet police, then it would be immaterial if an entity claimed they supported them. The response would be to simply ignore or refute the claim, not demand that they withdraw it lest they lose police protection.
Cloudflare is essentially performing the function of the police protecting the KKK's right to march, just like they protect the right of civil rights marchers to be free of denial-of-marchedness. The core issue here is that government-like functions on the internet are handled by an amalgamation of private entities, who are not bound to the same constitutional requirements.
Likewise, DDoS is a crime and TDS has every right to present a criminal complaint. Cloudflare is just the Internet equivalent of private security.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032227 and marked it off-topic.
You're a hypocrite.
Completely different when it's a modern ideology with people signing up today who want to see the extermination of minorities.
Yeah sure, it's hypocritical for men to support feminism because Ugg dragged his woman by the hair.
It appears you're trying to defend the indefensible.
All that is still there in the scriptures. Not many people are "doing horrible shit" to people in the name of those religions/ideologies today, sure (though do look at how the Islamic world treats apostates or women) - but nor are today's Nazis doing any extermination in practice. The idea that people in one movement whose core beliefs include support for genocide must really believe in it but people in another group whose core beliefs include support for genocide must be into it for other reasons seems rather dubious.
What you are in effect saying is that Muslims, Christians and Jews, whose scriptures all support some incredibly discriminatory things, are just as bad as neo-Nazis.
Let's be realistic here. Muslims today are not Muslims because they want genocide. What reason does a neo-Nazi have for supporting Nazism if they don't support genocide and racial prejudice? It is the only reason why somebody would support Nazism other than, say, conquest to further commit genocide!
Xenophobia is not a defining characteristic of modern Islam. Xenophobia IS the defining characteristic of Nazism.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15035271 and marked it off-topic.
And you're telling me this, why?
> We should be careful to a) not call everything Nazi
Oh I see, that's why. Well, you should be careful to c) not confuse me with anyone else.
edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer
That's where names like "Daily Stormer" and "Stormfront" come from. Educate yourself at least a tiny shred.
I think the sentiment GP is trying to communicate is that many seem to throw the label out there without any further investigation as to whether its justified.
As for the downvotes, it might be because your comment came across very hostile.
Also, I agree that it's easy to see that the Daily Stormer is neo-Nazi type stuff.
That's great, but totally irrelevant here, in response to me, in this context. When I call a dog a dog, I don't care that sometimes, somewhere, other people call a vase a dog. And it's incredibly rich in the context of "free speech" and whatnot: what use is my right to free speech, when people then also have the "right" to just replace what I say with some other anecdote in their mind? What use is being allowed to ask a question when people then just talk to each other about anything but the question? The protection of free speech arose in contexts where people suppressed speech because they otherwise would have to face it. If people don't face it anyway, there's no need to suppress any of it. And congratulations, too.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032510 and marked it off-topic.
Mandating tolerance is about as likely to work as using a sieve to bail water out of a boat.
I'm only here to draw light to hypocrisy.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032400 and marked it off-topic.
Are we going to call every road rage incident (1200/year in the US) a terrorist attack now? Please.
I'd encourage you to evaluate your agreement with each of my points on an individual basis; each idea either stands or falls on its own.
He got into his car. He started it. He pointed it towards a group of pedestrians. He accelerated into them.
This is factually identical to attacks in Stockholm and elsewhere which have been called acts of terrorism.
I'm attempting to prevent the cheapening of the term "terrorism", not adjusting my positioning on my high horse. Its a hate crime, not terrorism.
> Think of that one murder as a free sample of what is to come if these people get their way.
More of this will come regardless if these people get their way. Protests, tweet storms, and tearing down Confederate monuments will not dissuade hate. The only way to win is to drag the argument into the daylight where it can be fought.
I didn't use the word terrorism in my response to you so no need to bring it back into circulation, I've used your terms. The word terrorism (and terrorist) has already been cheapened beyond recognition, they're in a worse state than 'hacker', where were you the last 15 years or so?
I'm not sure that it's any more or less 'terrorism' than the vehicular attacks by Islamists in Europe. How would you describe those?
Premeditated violent acts designed to strike fear into the local populace. Far different then an angry protestor getting in his car to hit other protestors. I would even go so far as to say that most people will continue to think they're safe as long as they're not at a protest (whereas Islamic terrorists in Europe want everyone to feel unsafe everywhere, all the time).
The act in question was rage plain and simple, not an act designed to spread fear. Terrorism, by definition, is a violent act designed to express and spread terror in a populace, therefore I don't believe it warrants that definition.
Now of course we can't know if that's true but at the same time your 'roadrage' argument is ridiculous. Roadrage had less to do with this than it has to do with terrorism.
Agreed.
> toomuchtodo is trying to make the most accurate assessment possible based from apparent facts.
No, he's trying to reclass a murder as an incident of roadrage. When you drive a car into a crowd at high speed that transcends mere anger, that's murder and in this particular case the perpetrator is someone who deliberately came to a protest of a lot of people who are on the record as wanting to engage in acts of violence. So when they then do engage in those acts it is no longer simple anger.
Simple anger would be if a visitor to a bar would do something like this after being thrown out of a bar. Trying to recast this whole thing as a simple case of an angry protestor at some otherwise peaceful protest is significantly changing the story.
Do not put words in my mouth. I never said it wasn't murder. I said it was not an act of terrorism. Road rage can end in murder. It does not become a terrorist act.
Here is your comment from upthread:
> Are we going to call every road rage incident (1200/year in the US) a terrorist attack now?
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032455
Which has your name affixed to it.
So you are trying to equate this murder to one similar to roadrage, and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. This person meant to do bodily harm to many others and/or to kill them outright because they were counter protesting his happy family friendly outing with his Neo Nazi buddies. To try to equate this to roadrage is ridiculous.
> Road rage can end in murder.
Yes it can, but this wasn't roadrage.
> It does not become a terrorist act.
Indeed, roadrage does not become a terrorist act. But again, this wasn't roadrage.
Here is the definition of roadrage for you:
"sudden violent anger provoked in a motorist by the actions of another driver."
It does not include protesters in groups advocating violence against others going to their cars and subsequently purposefully ramming those cars into crowds of defenseless pedestrians.
edit: toomuchtodo's sibling comment is certainly relevant. Nuance is hard!
And I personally prefer it that way.
Did I miss something?
No, just like the fact that we call some attacks with guns terrorism doesn't mean every incident in which a firearm is discharged is terrorism.
The weapon used isn't what makes it terrorism.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032418 and marked it off-topic.
Saying that banning certain things is a slippery slope, and using that excuse to never ban things, means that it's ok to allow truly horrendous things to happen, just because of fear of overreach.
When we say we have freedom of speech, but then in the next sentence remind people that you can't yell "fire!" in a crowded space, we recognize that restricting some speech can be a slippery slope, but we do so anyway because not doing so would be much worse.
Nobody is banning Nazi speech in America. Private citizens are just saying they don't want to be part of it. As many others have said, the Daily Stormer will find name servers and hosting partners in the same part of the Internet that brings up spam and scam.
I'm not saying it _is_ acceptable to do that. But we are actually talking about political speech that incites people to violence, and I'm ok with banning that.
But -- we're not even talking about _that_ here. We're not talking about a government restricting speech, and we're not even talking about an essential, monopolistic company removing a party's only avenue to speech[1]. We're talking about a non-essential internet corporation (for which there are many alternatives!) deciding they don't want to help a hate group spread their message.
[1] If their single-option ISP cut them off, we'd probably be having a very different discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
"Shouting fire in a crowded theory" was actually put forth as a (succesful) argument for censorship of political speech.
I think it's something stronger than that: be sure there's a clear sharp line that you can draw that separates the things that you want from the things that you don't want. I think "clear and present danger" works as that kind of line. I'm not convinced there's that kind of line when doing something like this.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032574 and marked it off-topic.
Now, I have a little less respect for the companies who terminated their services, and a little more curiosity about Daily Stormer.
Congrats, you did nothing but give them free publicity while damaging your own reputation.
I always thought the balkanization of the internet would occur because of world governments not because of tech leaders personal feelings or corporate influence.
I expect tech leaders to be dragged in front of the senate real soon.
You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms.
First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented internet, cutting off all communication.
It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist. The extremist in the room who everybody pretends is not there, is eventually going to do more radical things to be noticed. In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought; and the world loses empathy to understand these unpopular perspectives that still exist.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
"Isolation only promotes extremism"
> In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought
This is not how any of this works.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032018
and maybe this for good measure:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15014737
I forgot nothing, I'd rather say I know things you haven't yet understood.
I completely agree for the need for boundaries, but I think we've done a most excellent job of setting them!
The current boundary is speech that immediately incites violence, I believe the supreme court interpretation has been very generous towards the notion of free speech, including hate speech, as it should be!
Here's why:
We should let the radicals be racist and make radical statements as much as they want. At the point at which they turn violent or call for specific acts of violence we should step in and shut that stuff down.
A blanket militant action against the whole ideology will no doubt show better results on shutting down the movement on a short term.
But the notion of freedom of speech is not meant to protect these radicals, it is meant to protect ourselves and the integrity of society! We cannot make exceptions to these rules just because it's more convenient to us now, because this weakens the principle. This is the whole slippery slope argument.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
If you wish to change the lines on which we use force, you must make a coherent case based on principle, not on convenience or anecdotes, as the principles themselves already account for, in a deep way, the history to which you allude.
Well good luck then. Just like Hitler famously wanted people to not wait for his orders, but distill his wishes and creatively go beyond in doing things in his spirit to get official support later, the guy who drove his car full speed into people didn't need anyone to specifically tell them to do that.
> At the point at which they turn violent or call for specific acts of violence we should step in and shut that stuff down.
Oh, so the second the car approaches the crowd, time just stops and it gets "shut down"? No wait, that's totally not what happened and also what will happen as this shit repeats under a president who implicitly supports it and a populace that would rather berate those who DO want to shut it down than those who need shutting down.
Only very few will call for "specific acts of violence", I won't join you in holding your breath for that. Read Hannah Arendt and Sebastian Haffner or don't. These aren't anecdotes, these are your betters, casting pearls before pigs. Pearls that were bought with suffering the likes of which neither you or I can even begin to imagine. But if you offer yourself as hostage to the Nazis, then you're out of what I consider polite society, too.
If ten people standing in a row have an idea, you cannot destroy the idea by shooting all of them in the head.
If one of them causes violence, you should not shoot all of them in retaliation.
What would be your judgement if this radical group was just sitting away in their homes typing out blog posts? Would you still censor them?
If they are specifically inciting this kind of violence, then yes, I think it is entirely correct to persecute all of them.
If they're talking about violence in abstract, then no. However, it should be sufficient reason for our security services to track the people expressing such ideas very closely, basically assuming that they're up to something, and ready to crack down on them as soon as those abstract ideas transform into any kind of concrete plan.
It's not, actually. Fire is much better, and even alcohol is preferable. That's why there's very little open-air surgery.
> It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist.
Reality doesn't support this idea. Every single country except the US has more stringent limits on what's acceptable speech. Yet among democratic countries, only the US has para-military right-wing terror groups in almost every state, and no country comes close to the dozens of deaths every year.
Yes, the US actually does have excellent lines on what's acceptable speech. In my not-professional judgement, it's speech that is the proximate cause of violence and incites it, and the daily stormer is outside of that. If you're talking about the US, you'd let the courts decide, and not corporations.
In the US, you let corporations decide how to exercise their right of free expression just as much as anyone else.
Freedom of speech means you are permitted to seek collaborators to help you spread your speech, not that others are obligated to disregard their own views to help promote yours. That kind of entitlement would violate the free speech rights of the forced collaborators.
Is it? Several wars have been fought over this particular ideology. Massive amounts of resources were expended with the sole goal of stamping it out. The goal then was to eradicate it, because this sort of ideology is the stuff that eats civilizations. We don't have an obligation to amplify it. There is no reasoning with it.
In the hypothetical there's a potential censorship issue which we can address when we get to it. But where's the line? The site called for and celebrated murder and terrorism. On a daily basis they spew actual neo-nazi propaganda. Why, exactly, should we let that be echoed unchecked? We're not even talking about a public entity/government stifling the nazi speech, but rather we're asking whether we should without thinking allowing them to use someone else's private resources to spread their message.
Joseph Stalin: Estimates range from 3 million - 60 million deaths.
Mao Zedong: Estimates range from 49 million - 78 million deaths.
All evil men. Why aren't the latter two nearly as reviled as Hitler or 'Nazis'?
The reviling comes as a reaction to the idolisation, and the use of that figure as a racist symbol to rally around.
Otherwise, you revile them while you do history in high school, and then move on with your life.
Today isn't the day the internet dies, today is the day Cloudflare dies.
Because it seems as if they have always had the ability to "control what happens with their networks".
EDIT: on second thought, I wonder if this is what Daily Stormer wanted all along. They have raised their profile enormously now.
With increased calls for Internet access to be a human right and for Internet providers to be treated as common carriers, the arbitrary punishment of lawful-yet-distasteful speech should be considered almost as repellent as the Daily Stormer.
Yet here we are. And down the slope we continue to go.
Should've resisted the urge to punch a Nazi and acted like a real American instead. We don't fight, we sue.
There have been a lot of these sorts of incidents; I didn't hear about the DOXing incident, that's quite sad, and of course, inexcusable, for any reason.
However, there was an incident [http://bit.ly/1MxG5S8] where a lady was good friends with a man and was a regular customer for years. She did not want her company's name associated with his wedding (sounds oddly similar to the OP), so she politely declined.
This all being said, I'm very curious how you reconcile the two situations, I'm interested to hear your viewpoint.
I don't think you can justify allowing a business to refuse service on the basis of sexuality using the logic that prevents businesses from refusing service to different skin colors.
In your opinion, how are the two situations different (CloudFlare vs The Florist)?
I have my personal ideals -- gay marriage is fine, racism is not -- but those aren't perfectly congruent with what I think a society should codify as law, especially where free speech is concerned.
I think a lot of the debate people are having is over whether they want a nice society or a free one. A completely free society isn't very nice; a perfectly nice society isn't free. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us want to be, but we keep getting hung up on hypotheticals and the ideals behind rallying cries like "free speech!" and so no actual progress is being made.
In this particular case, CloudFlare isn't claiming to be developing a new policy -- they aren't refusing service to all neo-Nazi groups -- and I would support any florist's right to refuse service to a couple if they showed up and went out of their way to piss off the florist, regardless of their sexuality.
But there's an awfully big gray area in there and frankly I support CloudFlare's position a lot more because I like lgbtq people a hell of a lot more than I like neo-Nazis.
I think there are at least two distinctions.
The first and most important distinction is that it's actually very feasible to write laws that protect LGBT people. You can't discriminate on that basis, and it's very clear what discriminating on that basis means (well actually all discrimination is thorny and hard to prove/disprove, but LGBT and race exhibit the same set of issues, and we seem to be in agreement that we should figure out how to make racial discrimination illegal.)
Conversely, political belief is an almost impossibly fuzzy line, since at the end of the day pretty much everything is political.
For example, I think we can all agree that I should be allowed to refuse to serve customers who are being completely unreasonable and hostile assholes to me. This happens every Friday night at bars across the country.
But what if those people are being assholes by coming into my Jewish-owned-and-operated pharmacy and loudly talking about exterminating the Jews while buying a bar of soap? Clearly they are being assholes, but they're being assholes by being political. So, can I discriminate and tell them to leave? And if not, is it the case that now any asshole can talk about raunchy sex is a family restaurant or be a complete dick to the bar keep as long as they find a way to weave politics into their speech?
(BTW, apparently the turning point in this case was Daily Stormer or whatever claiming that CloudFlare secretly supports them. So in my mind this was closer to kicking someone out of the bar for being an asshole to management, rather than political discrimination. "You can be a nazi in my bar, but if you go around telling people that just because I let you talk about killing jews in my bar I'm somehow in on the neo-nazi movement, then you need to never come back here.")
So, the first distinction is that protecting LGBT is about as difficult as protecting racial classes but protecting political speech seems pretty intractable, form a legal perspective, without turning public spaces into unusable cesspools.
The second distinction -- and I do think this is a distinction that a free and just society is capable of making -- is the obvious difference between being gay and being a Nazi. E.g., Germany doesn't tolerate public support of Nazis and it's a fairly free and open society -- in some ways more free than the USA, even with respect to certain forms of speech. So for me the jury is out on whether that's a good or a bad idea, but we should at least stop treating "silencing Nazis leads to a terrible unfree society" like an axiom, since there are clear and obvious empirical counter-examples. This assertion without qualification is just false, end of story.
Similarly, eating at a restaurant is an "opt in" event. Should you be able to discriminate at will in that circumstance?
Wait a minute... where did you see that? This is the first time I have heard this part of the story. I thought the owners simply said "no", and then got sued for several hundred thousand dollars.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-25119-bittersweet-cake...
Wait, how exactly would the precedent set by lawsuits under state laws forbidding certain private discrimination in public accommodations enable federal establishment of religion?