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.
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.
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?
edit: To expand, observing and noting key similarities between two different sets is not equivalent to saying the two sets are equivalent.
"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.
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]
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.
I may also be simple coincidence.
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.
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-...