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Comment by dawnbreez | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the political causes in question, it's nice to see that the CEO is being held accountable. And he seems to be a responsible person, judging by the concern he expressed over his own actions.

It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis. It's much harder to explain why we really should stop and think before trying to enact vigilante justice. This is one of the reasons why; vigilante justice is hard to enforce equally and fairly, and raises the question of how impartial and fair the vigilante is.

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>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis.

We fought the Nazis in 1941-1945. These guys aren't Nazis, they're angry, misguided white people trying to look tough. Why is this an important distinction? If we as a society are going to upend core values and norms, we need to have a damn good reason.

If I were a cynic (which I sometimes am), I would say this guy was trying to ride a political wave and it is now biting him (and us) in the ass. DCMA takedown without a warrant is bad for everybody. It sounds like there is a decent chance he just squandered that to score a political point that no one will remember 6 months from now.

Politics and business don't mix, regardless of how much of a "slam dunk" it seems.

I'm a german who spent 6+ years of his school life continuously learning about nazis, lived for the first 25 years of his life in a town where i saw people in nazi attire on my way home or shopping every single day and always kept a key ring at the read, and is from a voting district that voted 20%+ for a party whose leadership explicitly hires neo nazis as security for demonstrations, a town where the lamp posts on the 200m way from my apartment to the shopping centers call for violence against foreigners.

And i have to say:

Those guys are nazis. They believe in fascism being the good and right way of the world. They hate people who're unlike them.

Don't try to sugarcoat them.

The central issue here is 'content neutrality'. Prince the Cloudflare CEO is an attorney so he knew what he was saying when he disabled the dns.

There are huge numbers of people with strong political beliefs of all persuasions out there, including the racist isolationist nationalists you have to co exist alongside. In the US society where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, it is a very slippery slope to suppress that right to speech. I grew up alongside lots of violent skinheads in the UK (and got knocked about by them unless I ran very fast).

I am absolutely for protecting free speech, because for every apparently clear cut case of reprehensible online behavior - racism, child abuse, snuff videos etc - there is someone else with a legitamate voice who will be suppressed. Here is an example - syriangirl, who has been removed from Facebook. https://youtu.be/QvT95w6H59g Speking via youtube on a channel called russianinsider'

The lifeblood of democracy is free speech. We've ignored extremist dialog for decades, if we suppress it we glamorize it and it goes underground, not away. Allowing free speech means the ability to argue with people about their views as 'rock against racism' in the UK during the 70's proved before the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism That popular movement was inclusive to all and celebrated the anomaly that English skins loved jamaican ska and reggae. It pulled people to together and humiliated the far right fringe...

I'm not taking a stance on the CEO's actions.

Merely disagreeing with the claim that Daily Stormer are not nazis. They are.

I've recently been looking at the usage of the word fascism.

Italy was fascist. Fascism is extreme authoritarian nationalism.

They didn't really do much about Jews until after the Nazis moved in. They were primarily concerned with their nation.

White Nationalists, what people are calling Nazis, is actually concerned with wanting a white nation. They prioritize race, not the nation itself.

I'm thinking fascism isn't correctly used to describe them.

Here's what dictionary.com defines it as:

(fascism) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fascism

I don't know that much about them, but I think White Nationalists in the US want the nationalism and racism without the authoritarianism, but I could be wrong. I honestly don't think they've given it that much thought. The closest I believe any of those type groups have gotten to actual Nazis is when David Duke ran for office. Their primary objective seems to be "spreading the word." That's one of the reasons I don't like comparing them to Nazis. The Nazis were much more organized, intelligent and dangerous.

Yeah, I was going with this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

And using the actual Fascists (namely Italy and Spain) to determine what fascism means. See the very first sentence in the link where they define it.

It's not that these are good people, I just think there should be a better word to describe them. Perhaps just 'Nazi' is adequate? White Nationalist works too.

You guys are getting lost too much in domain-specific terms. At its core fascism is one thing:

The belief that a nation is like a living being and must do everything to protect itself as it is at that moment and try to grow, and that might makes right on a national scale. It's the belief that Darwinian principles of the survival of the fittest do not only apply to creatues, but also to nations and that this is also how the world should be.

Everything else is just the expression and logical conclusion of this belief.

And the nazis currently in germany specifically 100% subscribe to this. They do not want the national culture to be changed, they do not think other nations should be helped, etc. etc.

Even white supremacy is just a side effect of that. It comes from wanting the demography of one's country to remain unchanged.

>The belief that a nation is like a living being and must do everything to protect itself as it is at that moment and try to grow, and that might makes right on a national scale. It's the belief that Darwinian principles of the survival of the fittest do not only apply to creatues, but also to nations and that this is also how the world should be.

I don't mean to sound snarky, but this sounds an awful lot like US foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.

It's a good thing the USA doesn't have many direct neighbors.

I was specifically referring to the US flavor of Neo-Natzism. I'm unfamiliar with the current German flavor. The US flavor seems to be all talk. For example, the leader of the Charlottesville protests where the lady was run over and killed, cried on the internet when he found out the cops were going to arrest him. They act fierce, but when it comes down to it, they're all talk.

She was hit by a car but that was not the cause of death. She was morbidly obese and a heavy smoker.

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/heather-heyer-s-mom-delivers-m...

You heard that right. Heather Heyer died of a heart attack.

Heather Heyer, whom the media has told us again and again was killed after being run over by a white supremacist. While that statement might be strictly true, generally people assume that when someone dies as a result of being struck by a car that the death is a direct consequence of injuries sustained due to being struck by a car.

EDIT: Note that James Fields, the driver, had a history of mental illness, he was denied his request to enlist in the US Army because of history of taking anti-psychotic medication.

The media deliberately used a 10 year old picture of Heather Heyer where she was young and beautiful and not morbidly obese to deliberately spark the outrage by creating the optics of "young beautiful girl tragically run down by an ugly white supremacist". That sells so much better than "a panicked schizophrene loses control, in the ensuing stampede a morbidly obese woman dies of heart attack".

Fwiw, i've read people say that that was fake to garner publicity. Part of the "spread the message to 10000 people even if it makes you look bad to most of them, if it means reaching the 10 among them who'd sympathize with it" thing.

Also, as a german again: There's no useful difference between action and talk, especially in peace times. The holocaust was at its root caused by words after all.

I think the 60 minutes interview with him did a much better job of disseminating his rhetoric. It probably had 10 million viewers on airing, and several million more after. This was of course a direct result of the antifa movement's attempt to protest / silence them in Charlottesville. I believe this is a textbook definition of irony. I guess my biggest protest against silencing groups like this is more times than not, it does the opposite.

>There's no useful difference between action and talk, especially in peace times.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Wanting to murder someone and actually murdering them has an ocean of difference.

> We'll have to agree to disagree. Wanting to murder someone and actually murdering them has an ocean of difference.

If unopposed both lead to the same result.

This doesn't seem to be the CEO being held accountable, seems to be another group who wants to razzle-dazzle the court by taking his words out of context.

I'm not sure how it's out of context. Once you're on record as saying you decided to police content in one case, it becomes a lot harder to use "we don't police content" as a defense in another case.

Except that's not Cloudflare's defense. Cloudflare's defense was "we're just a cache, not a provider, so we can't shutdown these sites, as they don't need us to work". And now ALS is grabbing the CEO's statement that they have booted the Daily Stormer off the Internet and going "aha, so you can shutdown sites". Which is a misleading interpretation - they still can't, they just know that in this case the Daily Stormer will be DDoS'ed to hell if they remove their protection.

The other side is not asking Cloudflare to shutdown the sites, just to terminate their accounts and not provide service to them.

https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-faces-lawsuit-for-assist...

Right, but Cloudflare's position is that they're not providers, they're just an intermediate, and therefore they forward DMCA takedown requests to the actual hosting provider. Not being able to shutdown the sites is a fact that helps establish their position as mere intermediates.

It's actually quite easy to defend, using another HN trope that somehow never appears in these threats: "Read 'Whataboutism' on Wikipedia".

Pointing out an apparent contradiction in policy - claiming one thing but doing another - isn't whataboutism.

Whataboutism would be, for example, CF attempting to defend retaining dodgy/illegal sites by attacking ALS for its dodgy/illegal origins.

>It's easy to say that we should take every opportunity we can to fight Nazis.

That seems to be the meme of the decade. Do you think all republicans are Nazis too? You're living in a bubble. Think for yourself.

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