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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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

>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.

> 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...

Fascism rose well after the Atlantic slave trade ended.

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.

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.