Bitchute Has Been Deplatformed | Hacker News Reader

Bitchute Has Been Deplatformed

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As a reminder, it's okay to oppose this deplatforming and dislike Bitchute as a platform.

I'm saying this because I'm personally nervous to share this story on social media because I fear people will suspect I support the content on Bitchute.

Macron recently spoke very articulately about why the speech itself irrelevant to the issue at hand [1]. If you believe in the principles of free speech you must also defend the speech of those whom you disagree with.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu0JRs1KrAk

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. --H. L. Mencken, US editor (1880-1956)

The Nazis openly mocked the democratic principles that they used (abused) to gain power to take freedom away from their enemies. It is a fact of life that sometimes the freedom of one party conflicts with the freedom of another. Every legal system acknowledges that. No freedom can ever be absolute for everyone.

The Weimar Republic was a half baked democracy though. There were too many tiny parties with 1-3% which weakened the main parties, making it easier for the NSDAP to gain mindshare.

Back then powers were not sufficiently separated and the president had more power than he should. Both the president and Hitler wanted a more authoritarian state and worked together. Hitler failed to get a majority but he wasn't satisfied with a coalition. He instead asked the president to arrange an emergency government to buy more time while Hitler used his goon squad to threaten members of the parliament to just quit or vote the way he wants until he finally got the majority of seats in parliament and then used that majority to abolish the parliament entirely.

There are competing tyrannies in every society: old/young, rich/poor, individual/society, etc.

>If you believe in the principles of free speech you must also defend the speech of those whom you disagree with.

The problem is that some people don't at all - either because they don't think the benefits outweigh the costs (quite a common point of view), or because such a freedom runs against religious dogma and religious law (the view to which Macron is responding), or because they think freedom of speech in its purest form, at least, is a dogma that is hard to justify philosophically (such people know what liberalism is, but reject it for one reason or another - they're not ignorant, and they publish their arguments, just as speech-defenders like Locke and Judge Easterbrook).

It's easy to dismiss religious funamentalists as a reasonable person. It's significantly harder to dismiss the other two categories of people. Whether a right or usage of that right is "worth it" seems to be a personal value judgement of what an individual wants society to optimize for, whereas the philosophy of freedom of speech is a complicated matter sensetive to political factors and the purported function (and actual function in the real world) of speech.

> I fear people will suspect I support the content on Bitchute.

Do you support the telephone company providing a service to child molesters?

We should have a Godwin's law equivalent for the "think of the children" argument, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter are the home of plenty of child abuse, I've seen it firsthand, shall we ban all social media? Shall we also ban all VPNs and internet companies as well? As well as TOR?

That's the beauty of due process. Once the child molesters get tried, convicted and imprisoned, the telephone company won't be providing them the service because laws say you don't get a phone line in your cell. What is happening now is attempts to replace due process with the "loudest mob wins" where the mob is also allowed to attack the witnesses and defenders of the accused. Economical lynching really.

I think you're getting downvoted because people think you don't support fully open telephone access. I don't quite understand which side you stand on though, good satire being indistinguishable etc etc, but I think you understand what's actually at stake.

I support freedom of speech.

Absolutely, as it's a utility

In the UK there is a permit you need to work with children. Are you saying all adults in the UK should need this permit in order to use a phone?

I'm not buying it. They're already back online after 90 minutes. What kind of deplatforming is that? Why not say who was responsible or post those juicy, juicy emails?

This is a bad fit for deplatforming and a good fit for outrage farming.

Yeah if it is true I want to read how they recovered so fast. That's an engineering feat.

A few corporations have replaced public commons, leading to inverted totalitarian rule by fiat with an illusion of alternatives.

Furthermore, the "liberals" nowadays differ markedly from the liberals years ago who wanted to and encourage debate. Instead, the circular firing squad keeps looking for the next victim to shout-down, take offline, and ignore completely because that's their strength: demolition.

I wish I had archived the chemplayer videos now. I could never find anything else worth watching on that site but it really sucked when they deleted all his videos from youtube. I watch chem demos to fall asleep at night and it works super well and I've already gone through nilered/E&F/dug's lab.

Nile Red is amazing!

I don't chemistry so most of the stuff I don't even understand, but I too, for some reason, enjoy watching his videos at night before sleeping.

Not really as a sleeping aid, but they are so much different than other stuff I watch that to me it feels like taking a break. I guess it does for me what chick flicks do for my gf... if that makes sense.

Who the hell flagged this? Even if bitchute is an irredeemable dumpster of hate speech this is kind of serious. This is part of the end of personal computers being a tool that extends yourself and the beginning of them being an ankle bracelet that corporations yank you back into line with.

Possibly because Bitchute may have not been "deplatformed"[0]. Bitchute themselves clarified in follow-up tweets that they don't know for certain why things went offline [1].

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24985221

[1]:https://twitter.com/bitchute/status/1323758225611608064?s=20

Nothing says you have to do business with people online.

Liberalism works at a international level because it is able to outcompete other alternative governments because it produces better outcomes. But at a national level liberalism is weak because liberalism is let a 1000 flowers bloom and anti-liberalism is about suppressing alternative memes. Liberalism can’t beat illiberalism at a national levels unless people are willingly to stand up and protect unpopular views.

On the night of election. How is this defensible?

It's all done in the name of knowing what's best for you.

For people who don't know what BitChute is:

"BitChute is a video hosting service known for accommodating far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hateful material."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in 2019 that the site hosts "hate-fueled material", and the Anti-Defamation League wrote in 2020 that "BitChute has become a hotbed for violent, conspiratorial and hate-filled video propaganda, and a recruiting ground for extremists"

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute

The SPLC's entire business model is calling other people racist.

The day they run out of racists is the day they go out of business.

And is you look into their finances, you'll immediately see that their business is extremely profitable.

The whole grievance industry is quite a grift. When one can't find enough racists, one simply creates them out of whole cloth. Either that or get your buddies at Miriam Webster and Dictionary.com to change some definitions around for you. Or simply have sympathetic allies in academia to create a new sociological their of victimhood for you, such as "microaggressions".

The money's so good, I'd consider getting into it myself if I had no ethics. Plus the author of "White Fragility" stole my idea.

What a fair, even, unbiased assessment.

https://i.imgur.com/pZFZUsw.jpeg

seems like a pretty fair assessment to me

These are copy-paste quotes from the first few lines of Wikipedia.

Yes, they are.

The ADL say that about ANY site that's even remotely critical of Israel. I've had the dubious honor of having my sites flagged by them as well.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is an activist organisation which will label just about anything as "far right" which does not fit their narrative [1]. Using them as a reference for something being related to far-right individuals and conspiracy theorists, and for hosting hateful material makes the claim less believable. This does not mean BitChute does not harbour such material - given the fact that BitChute does not censor content it is likely to be present, just like it is likely for it to harbour far-left individuals and conspiracy theorists - but SPLC calling something bad just means they disagree with whatever the something does.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-poverty...

     There are many other sources, just search for them

SPLC? Really?

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