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Comment by illuminati1911 | Hacker News Reader

illuminati1911

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.

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.

View on HN

Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.

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.

To be fair, anarchists didn't exactly make anyone their friends from the late 1800s forward. There was an incredible amount of political violence at the time.

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.

The anarchists in Russia, and a substantial proportion of the communists fought against the Bolshevik coup, and most of them ended up murdered or in exile for it. Or both.

Trying to paint them all with one brush is ignorant.

Well yeah, but they made a deal with the devil.

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 idea of treating anarchists of all people as one singular, cohesive unit, when even the elitist, strictly organised Bolsheviks with their high party discipline took many years to manage to fully purge/murder even the opposition within their own party, is beyond ridiculous.

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)

The US dropped its blanket ban on anarchists and communists well over 20 years ago. I personally know people in both camps who have visited the UK and one who has permanent US residency.

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.

>And I will argue that communism is fundamentally a good ideology.

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.

> 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.

They commemorate soldiers who died in the largest war in American history, and were mostly funded by veterans.

Like I said, they celebrate traitors and terrorists, and they were mostly erected by racist terrorists later on during the days of Jim Crow, the KKK and the Civil Rights movement.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-real-story...

They largely went up in two waves, in the 1890s and the 1960s, as explicit symbols of white supremacy. They were not erected shortly after the war to commemorate soldiers. They falsely evoke a time right after the war when Southerners held great respect for confederate "heroes," but that's misleading. I was surprised to learn this too.

http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a12015570/... https://www.google.com/amp/jezebel.com/confederate-monuments...

I don't find these articles terribly convincing. It's typical for monuments to be built decades after the event they commemorate. The world war 2 memorial in DC wasn't built until 2004.

I find it difficult to believe that it's just a coincidence that most of these monuments were erected during the eras of Jim Crow, and then the heyday of the KKK, and later still during the Civil Rights era.

There is basically no correlation whatsoever: https://i.redditmedia.com/IE4gFFzTylcD63F5V9xixn0Nh4ESSuWVoK...

Bollocks: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-real-story...

>This is a dangerous thing to say publicly!

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.

You missed my point. I was saying that if a red scare happens again, you could be persecuted for having written that comment. I admit it's a bit implausible. But not completely so, when you consider US history and the declining respect for freedom of expression.

Yep I missed that.

In that case I'll just hope I've inherited something from my grandmother (who was a resistant during WW2). ^^

> declining respect for freedom of expression

... 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?

The US is much more polarized now than in previous decades. Look at these graphs: http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizatio... The free speech zones you complain about have increased, not decreased: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

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?

>The US is much more polarized now than in previous decades

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).

> Is that really your argument? That black people had less free speech in the past, so we should get rid of free speech now?

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?

> Anarchists and communists have long been banned from entering the US. And I've noticed a strong push back against most of the more mild socialists ideas. The US have not been "the land of the free" for a long time.

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.

You seem to be rebutting a rebuttal without having read the grandparent comment. "What about the nazi ban?" is a non-sequitor in context.

Yes, I am rebutting the comment I replied to. Not every reply to every comment needs to assume the grandparent comment as necessary context; it's perfectly fine as far as I know to start tangents.

Also, the grandparent comment did not discuss immigration policy, so by your standard the parent is an irrelevant rebuttal.

> "Unless you agree with my radical leftist agenda you are a nazi/racist/<some_imaginary_word>"

Calling for persecution of literal inciting of violence is hardly a "extremist left" idea. In fact it's not even left-or-right issue.

Inciting violence is already illegal and no one is defending it.

Just like the right to free speech is useless without a spirit of tolerance in the population, the same goes for inciting violence being illegal.

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.

Because you can't operate systems as big as the internet on a case by case basis. People are concerned that this action could lead to other, more noble, speech being suppressed by corporations like cloudflare.

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.

Fair enough. I agree in that I think it's lame it had to happen this way, but I'm still glad it happened this way rather than not at all.

> I'm happy they're offline for the moment, but I wish it was because of a court order focused on specific actions

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.

Heh good point, let me clarify:

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.

The problem is for the most part very few (no?) people are calling for explicit violence, even really abstract violence. Calling for muslim bans, border walls, deportation of illegal or even legal immigrants, restricting immigration to "white" countries and honouring racist war "heroes" are all abhorrent and racist views, but they are all clearly not inciting violence in any way.

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.

The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first. Neonazi and white supremacist are betraying this social pact by furthering the idea of a superior race and the extermination of the different, that's why they're walking a really thin line when it comes to their right to First Amendment protection.

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.

The First Amendment was instituted by literal slave holders. When did this requirement to (intellectually) respect the rights of others appear?

It's bloody common sense. If you don't respect my rights, there will come a time, as history has shown time and again, when I will gather enough power to be able to not respect yours. And so, slavery was abolished.

So not respecting rights leads to the abolishment of slavery? That sounds pretty good.

LOL This statement really frightens me. But doesn't surprise me. Which frightens me even more.

Careful about assuming opinions I didn't actually express :)

All political ideologues think their opposition wants to take away their freedoms. If you make the rule that people who want to remove freedoms don't get them, you create a tool for any party in power to silence their opponents.

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?

> Neonazis are spoiled rich kids that get everything they want

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.

> All political ideologues think their opposition wants to take away their freedoms. If you make the rule that people who want to remove freedoms don't get them

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.

Who gets to determine that? The abortion debate is essentially about both sides claiming the other is taking away a persons rights. On one side it's bodily autonomy on the other right to life (and maybe some religious freeeddom too).

> The right to your own ideas is not an absolute. It's a pact you have to respect and it involves respecting other people rights first.

You just defined a thoughtcrime.

Did you never read 1984?

What are you talking about? You shouldn't have the right to setup an organization to proactively further killing just because you're not actually killing all the time. HOW in the world is a white supremacist different from a radicalized muslim american citizen who never wore a suicide vest but is strongly convinced that all the infidels should die? Why isn't he allowed to express this thoughts freely? Do you see the double standard here?

This has nothing to do with 1984.

Er, he often is allowed to express his thoughts freely?

It's critical to draw the line at clear action. The FBI doesn't arrest people for declarating jihad, it arrests them for attempting to detonate fake bombs.

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.

I invite you to read this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Problem is - we need the line. If someone is openly calling for someone else's death, is it ok?

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.

> radical leftist agenda

Being anti-nazi is "radical leftist" now?

Yea. Holy shit what the fuck is wrong with people.

Libertarian nerds.

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.

Taxation is slavery!!

But who pays for the roads?

The invisible hand of the market or something I dunno. TAXATION IS...

No, the "radical leftist part" is that anyone who disagrees with what cloudflare has done is a "nazi sympathizer", I have Jewish parents, biracial, queer, and a communist. I'm about as a far from a "nazi sympathizer" as you can get.

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.

I'm beginning to think that as soon as someone says the word 'agenda', you can safely ignore what they have to say. That word is never used constructively in political discussions.

You must have seen my grandparents - the ones that have witnessed the real horror of nazisme/ww2 - radical to the bone. Doing all dangerous violent stuff with their walker and wheelchair. A whole life of attacking "good people" from the extreme right or whatever orange buffoons choose to describe them these days.

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.

Isn't perjury a crime? What about death threats? It's all speech, and it's the type of speech hate groups use - the type that is already a crime and we want to protect under some strange interpretation of the first amendment to your constitution.

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 is always a line. Nearly everyone, every company, has a line.

Heck, this website itself asks that you don't be mean in comments.

> 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.

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.

As a "radical leftist", it's certainly not on my agenda, and in fact I hold views that they'd likely denounce.

Would you say the same about a takedown of an ISIS website?

Most ISIS content is already illegal for things like inciting violence. If the Daily Stormer is breaking the law by inciting violence, then it should be dealt with the same way. There is an existing legal process and it doesn't require the discretion of Cloudflare's CEO.

Would you argue the same for the takedown of a marihuana promoting enthusiast website?

The first sentence 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.

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.

> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.

Not to defend Nazism but the death toll of WWII was between 50 and 80 million.

If you add the lives lost in the slave trade, you'll get pretty close to a 100 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Human_tol...

You guys are quibbling over terms now.

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.

Fascism rose well after the Atlantic slave trade ended.

>Whataboutism

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.

I am not qualified to analyze the rest of the comments, but the last/first sentences strikes dear to me. In succession they were:

> > > 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

I Akujin is right. Often I have the feeling we moved from the left-right spectrum to a triangle, where the "middle" from before has become its own extreme, that is touting the "free speech for Nazis" over and over again most because they fear of taking any sides.

Again I'll provide a real example of how hard it is to draw a line : is discussing the number of casualties resulting from the Nazi agenda during WW2 (discussion which you can for an example find in this precise thread) considered pro-nazi or not ?

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 haven't heard any touting from the middle in support of any agenda. But the free marketplace of ideas doesn't work if there are exceptions. Dumb ideas should be loud and clear so everyone has the opportunity to hear how dumb they are. If you think an idea is so dangerous that just being heard will convert people, then I think you should be concerned about how you feel about that idea.

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.

I don't think the tolerance of intolerance is the way.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHaIFwbV0AEDV8u.jpg:large

That's a nice infographic and all, but we're not talking about that level of tolerance. Tolerance of a website that has some words and pictures on it, or tolerating someone saying something you disagree with on a college campus, is a lot different than tolerance of Germany invading Poland. We have laws against violence, harassment, and even defaming in some areas that cover when these things go past just talk. At that point everyone is onboard with enforcement because it's gone too far.

> Nazism is literally responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths world wide. Fact.

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.

We have come to the point where comments in here is accusing an other HN commenter of being a shill and doing Whataboutism. Maybe we should take a step back and focus on what, if anything, the disagreement is about?

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.

I think there's two paths that seem like they might be worthwhile to pursue:

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.

> Ban specific iconography such as swastikas, white hoods, etc

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?

That has very little to do with banning the symbols or not though. The swastika was highjacked regardless of whether the symbol was banned. It's unfortunate, but I don't see much of a solution beyond resisting any attempt to highjack important symbols before they're associated primarily with Nazis / white supremacists / whatever.

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...

Sounds reasonable. Here in Sweden we have both, through we also have organization which people would identify as Neo-Nazism, and they also demonstrate and get into fights with counter-demonstraters.

>There's literally nothing radical or leftist in what I said.

"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.

Please don't accuse other users on HN of being shills.

_Especially_ without evidence.

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.

And communists just want equality. The rsult is tens of millions of people dead.

Actions speak louder than words and BLM's are very telling.

It seems people have no idea that Nazis are actually extremely violent people. I'm not talking about your average racist, but people that identify with the Nazi party. Violence is central to their philosophy. If you actually met any modern-day Nazis, you would know this. It took me about two days of hanging out with Nazis before they literally tried to blow me up.

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!

A couple of things:

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.

If you didn't want to be arrested, then you shouldn't be a member of a group that has waged war against the US?

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.

Only if they are actually being violent, there is no reason to arrest people because they might be violent. Now let's apply your statement more broadly. Islamists successfully destroyed the World Trade Center. They have actually caused more death than those 'neo nazis' in recent times. If you were to apply what you are advocating for fairly, then every Muslims would be arrested in the US. After all it's members have waged war against the US, and some of its members still do. It would be more appropriate. Now I don't agree with arresting every Muslim as I don't agree with arresting every stupid neo nazi. If someone espouses arresting those protesters but not Muslims, then surely they are a hypocrite, who only applies what they preach very selectively.

What part of "the Nazi party has already waged war against the US" do you not understand?

We literally declared war against them, and killed them wholesale. Are you saying we should stop declaring war against Nazis?

> We literally declared war against them, and killed them wholesale.

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.

Actually, the US granted amnesty and asylum to a shit load of Nazis and brought them to the US.

Look up Operation Paperclip.

I don't think comparing state actions against other states is very useful or instructive when you're talking about non-state actors. We don't "wage war" against domestic political groups. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything, but I hope you realize that military action is an extreme response to what amounts to a relatively small (but worrying) group.

Whbat part of Islamists have waged terror that you did not understand. I am not advocating arresting Muslims for simply being Muslim, just as I am not advocating arresting neo nazis for being neo nazis. We don't want laws that are different for certain groups, or how rich someone is. That the law applies equally to everyone is something that is valuable to preserve. We don't want to go back to the old days where blacks were treated by the law as inferior. Suggesting you do this to any groups because you don't like them is a travesty of justice.

> If you were to apply what you are advocating for fairly, then every Muslims would be arrested in the US.

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.

Did you realise the point of my comment was not to criticize Muslims at all, just showing where the 'Just arrest them' mentality would actually lead to. There is a reason why I put both Islamist and Muslim in my comment, which was to separate them, because I know the difference. You somehow didn't understand that. So what you are replying to is not what I meant or wrote.

I don't think your comment was designed to criticise Muslims, but I think you did a sloppy job making your point, and equivocated (maybe accidentally) the wrong sets and members.

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.

To put it simply, I do not agree that it is an appalling comparison like you say. I think the perpetrators of 9/11 thought of themselves as Muslims, just as other Muslims thought the 9/11 perpetrators as Muslims. So yes, they identified as Muslims, and were part of the group "Muslims".

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.

Person A is nazi and killed someone during a protest. Person B is also nazi Therefore person B potentially killed someone during a protest. Therefore we should arrest all nazis

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

This is a false equivalence. I think it's much more like, Person A is a nazi and killed someone after being indoctrinated by violent nazi rhetoric, therefore we should stop allowing violent nazi rhetoric to be spread.

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.

The difference isn't the violence at any one rally. The difference is that one group (the one with the swastikas) actually advocates genocide. As in: there were people in Charlottesville who openly told reporters that they want to send jews/blacks/muslims to gas chambers. And even if there were only a few of those, the swastika, "heil X", and nazi salute are undeniably linked with the history of the Nazi party, the holocaust, and WW2. I just scrolled through a few pages of pictures, and I think it's fair to say that the protest were pretty homogenous in that regard. I don't see many history professors among these people demonstrating to preserve the value of confederate monuments for science. It's also somewhat telling that I'm having trouble finding a single woman among that side of the protest.

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".

Action can and should be taken against individuals that make a credible threat. We certainly don't want to have people fearing for their life. I don't think that "openly told reporters that they want to send jews/blacks/muslims to gas chambers" is in the slightest bit likely top happen, fortunately. Also, you don't go after a group because of one guy; imagine if that was applied to blacks, it would be horrible.

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.

What about anti-nazis that constantly cry out how every nazi is an armed, dangerous criminal that should be killed or arrested wholesale.

My opinion about those?

The good thing about that argument: nobody who has anything to say in this world is ever going to take it seriously. Not only does it miss the point of the argument that it pretends to reply to, it also lacks common-sense and good judgement.

Well done, sir. This is why nobody takes libertarians serious.

Amen! Wow I'd like to hug you for these words (libertarian-nerd theory world: right on the money!).

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.

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