GoDaddy Boots AR15.com
thetruthaboutguns.com
thetruthaboutguns.com
Radical, like for example criticizing the party or leaders, would have landed you in prison/on death row.
More subtle creations, where criticizing is expressed via proxy of science fiction or abstract ideas would have never published, because every publisher and government censors would look at every sentence in your book as potentially having another meaning - critical of the party/leaders.
That’s when you would have to go full P2P blockchain with SAMIZDAT [1], manually typing copies of your text (using many layers of carbon paper) and distributing them in underground communities of intellectuals, hand-to-hand.
But if your unbaised view on USSR party/leaders/direction/methods was aligned with the party, then all newspapers, all book shelfs and book awards were yours to take.
Another artifact of the USSR is a mandatory line in your CV and references - that you were never involved in any anti-USSR meetings, protests and movements.
But, more importantly, we live in today. "full P2P blockchain" and "underground communities of intellectuals" are word salad; if you want to publish without restrictions, Bittorrent has been around for over a decade and is generally not blockable, and Sci-Hub is an aboveground rebellion of intellectuals against the publishers.
You're whining because a DNS registrar, and one of incredibly poor reputation for what it's worth, has chosen to stop hosting a violent hate group. But your own personal ability to publish, and indeed their ability to publish, has not been curtailed. Rather, their ability to use the resource of the DNS registrar to spread their hate is what has been removed, and that was a privilege to which they were not entitled under law.
First off, what exactly about AR15.com constitutes a violent hate group?
Secondly, do you think despots have ever said "We are punishing these perfectly innocent people because we don't like them"? No. It's always a "violent group" or some such other emotional rhetoric.
First, Parler gets kicked off because "They host violent, imminent threats". Never mind the sheer scale of terrorist groups organizing on Facebook, Twitter and enjoying free high quality encryption thanks to Whatsapp. Are we going to kick them all out of society unless they declare fealty to the ideas of their benevolent tech overlords?
Now, we have a forum of gun owners simply discussing things on a forum that they created to represent their connection through a shared love of a constitutional right.
Tomorrow, will it be okay to point a finger at any individual and have the equivalent of mass economic sanctions destroy their ability to be a part of society because they disagree with the broad interpretation of "values" these tech companies arbitrarily decide?
There is more power concentrated in Silicon Valley right now than all the governments of the world save for China and Authoritarian regimes. This is scary and intelligent people acting like political puppets is silly and dangerous.
I don't want GoDaddy to have the authority to remove arbitrary folks from the Internet. I want GoDaddy to not exist at all. I want large datacenter owners to be regulated like utilities.
However, the same political stance which desires all of the violence and hate against our government is also the political stance which insists that our government is useless and bloated, too big and decadent to achieve victories for the people.
Who do you think gave responsibility to Silicon Valley? Who signed up millions of Americans for Facebook, retweeted millions of context-free quips, opened millions of Google email accounts, and bought millions of iPhones? It was the American public, including the 20% of Americans who voted for an open fascist for president.
If you want an end to censorship, then you should also want an end to corporatism and capitalism. That's the cognitive dissonance that is worth examining.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-is-b...
I haven't seen too much consideration of the potential (more the usual scaremongering) but here's something that popped up earlier along those lines. Social media is a lever for politicians. Why not take the chance to deny that to extremism around the world?
What's with all the whataboutism here? Can you honestly not see the difference? One is an echo chamber of hate with a lot of calls to violence and support thereof, and the platform does nothing about it. The others have shittons of shit ( cat videos, porn, ads, anti-vaxx bullshit, etc) and hate and calls for violence, which are moderated ( not nearly good enough). Apple explicitly asked Parler to come up with a moderation plan or get booted of their store, and they didn't. Twitter, Facebook, Google heavily moderate and ban all sorts of hate-related content.
> Tomorrow, will it be okay to point a finger at any individual and have the equivalent of mass economic sanctions destroy their ability to be a part of society because they disagree with the broad interpretation of "values" these tech companies arbitrarily decide?
I don't know why you've suddenly decided that if doing X to Y is okay today, doing X to Z will be as well tomorrow. That's not how regular people work in most cases, and if tomorrow "SV"( if you're so intent on throwing them all together, as if they aren't composed of many people at different levels ( employees, managers, CxOs, shareholders) in different countries, with varying political affiliations or views) decide to deplatform something people disagree being deplatformed, people will complain, same as what people are doing together to defend the hate speech spewing fascists on Parler.
Certainly that would be the routine threats of physical violence against government officials.
Always prominently list your IP address! Further, go static, and v6! More than enough for everyone. The solution to centralized nameservers mucking up your visibility? Kick them to the curb. Build your own net location database and share it with your users.
Other tips:
Prominent standing out combinations of web content. Non-DNS sites do still get indexed by search engines. Keep something unique searchable on your page, and people will always be able to find their way back.
Set up a pipeline of communication to your users, and you can dynamically change what that content is in order to prevent trivial delisting by search engines.
This is a common slight of hand from folks with your political leaning: The constitutional right to speech is conflated with the right to popularity, a narcissistic delusion.
It would be lovely if the structure of the Internet did not require having an address. This seems to be something of a fundamental technical problem, though, and not one that can be fixed via strong political opinions.
One counterpoint is from 1964, not exactly the most thawed period of relations, when the Strugastky brothers published "Hard to Be a God"[1], which was a thinly veiled criticism of Beria (who was then deceased) and also of some key ideas about the material development of history. It was not particularly well received, but also was not stopped, and they were by no means blackballed. It was regarded as a silly story, albeit clearly with some satirical bite.
One of the brothers wrote about the experience and the climate at the time[2], and their notes were published along with a recent 'Masters of SF' edition that was published.
It's an enjoyable book. To be clear, it is not critical of 'communism', it's critical of some ideas that (as I understand it) formed part of the conventional wisdom of how Soviet communists were expected to see history, as a largely unflappable progression toward communism -- one take on the point of the Strugastkys was that all it takes is a certain kind of selfish brute to slip any society down toward fascism, regardless of where they were on their journey through history. If it could happen early (which they investigate in the book), it could also happen late.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God
2 - http://www.rusf.ru/abs/books/bns-03.htm (comments by Boris Strugastky in Russian, but google's autotranslate makes it quite readable. Very interesting perspective from an intellectual and author who was somewhat openly critical at the time of the more reactionary and traditional elements of the state, and just about their process!)
Can we find one or two examples that go against the trend? Sure. Does that disqualify the argument by the commenter above you? I don't think so.
A more funny (and sad) tale I remember from someone non-famous, is them trying to publish a children's book, and the censors saying it's good, but doesn't have enough communist spirit. Like, instead of there just being kids helping little animals, it could mention that the kids were members of the local communist youth chapter, etc. The author decided to not publish the book.
It's not a book or a newspaper column until it's printer as a book or in a newspaper. You were free to write a manuscript, even then you could get in trouble.
>More subtle creations, where criticizing is expressed via proxy of science fiction or abstract ideas...
could make you unemployable, locked up in an asylum, banned from major cities or imprisoned or even shot as an enemy of the people or a Hungarian spy, depending on the current leader.
>That’s when you would have to go full P2P blockchain with SAMIZDAT...
Which meant a single untrustworthy node in the chain could take you back to the previous paragraph.
>But if your unbaised view on USSR party/leaders/direction/methods was aligned with the party...
There was very little chance an unbiased view aligned with the party on anything important, especially party/leaders/direction/methods.
>Another artifact of the USSR is a mandatory line in your CV and references - that you were never involved in any anti-USSR meetings, protests and movements.
Unauthorized university poetry clubs, however removed from politics, have been classified as above.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/22109-cycles-violence-2020.html
There are much better arguments for why current events/actions may cause unintentional side effects and blowback than "it happens every 50 years".
Not many. Anonymous boards are some of such places.
Even if you think that some people are patently wrong on the Internet, dangerously and irredeemably wrong, it's more useful to be aware that such people exist, than to hide this fact from yourself in order to have a quieter sleep.
Freedom is, by definition, also freedom for those you disagree with, despise, even hate. If either side forces their (doubtlessly, virtuous and well-founded) views on the other (doubtlessly, misinformed and stubborn), I have a hard time calling it freedom. It's a standard ideological oppression.
https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/goebbels-on-the-reichst...
One thing is just speaking, another, speaking and voting in a parliament.
OTOH I like the idea that every new Parliament member should bring an idea which is currently illegal, and work on integrating it into the legal framework. Thus is how all change (to the bad and to the good the same) occurs in a peaceful way.
It's interesting to note how many now-mainstream ideas were fringe 30 years ago, and outright scandalous 100-150 years ago: universal suffrage, social security, gay marriage, legal marijuana, etc.
The rules are US freedom of speech which is much more liberal than Europe and hate speech definitions so the content on the adult boards is shocking to me and some may be illegal in Europe, but it's not illegal in the US.
There are worse sites but this one is the one that enters the less well informed public's consciousness ironically.
If you take an online community down, the people that made up that community will not all end up in the same place, they won’t bring the entire culture of that community with them, and some of them won’t make the jump.
Maybe you end up with three new chans, but you end up with three smaller, more fractured chans. Organization and relationships will evaporate because people won’t have alternate ways of recognizing or reaching their friends, may not use the same handles, may not end up on the same sites, etc.
Site administrators will get worn out and tired of dealing with it, and may run out of money to keep the site up.
I’m not saying that you should take down 4chan, just saying that if 4chan did disappear, it would leave a big hole that would take a long time to fill again. That, and any new chans would have a hard time claiming to be THE chan. There are already like twenty active “chan” sites or more. Besides 2channel and 4chan, the other sites don’t have much credibility or “pull”.
Parler was the top 180 website in the USA according to alexarank, before it went down the other day. This is just from mostly middle aged americans being frustrated with their facebook groups being deleted. It's pretty easy to start chans out of the box and the userbase will eventually congregate to one place
>>Maybe you end up with three new chans, but you end up with three smaller, more fractured chans. Organization and relationships will evaporate because people won’t have alternate ways of recognizing or reaching their friends, may not use the same handles, may not end up on the same sites, etc.
This is pretty irrelevant to anonymous communities. Mostly they just move to like boards, i.e. 8chan, 16chan, 2ch, 4ch, endchan, infinite chan, and more all have an /anime/ board. The point being that the board is more relevant than the chan site itself.
There’s a big catch, though. “Eventually” is the key word. It takes a long time, and the disappearance of one forum does serious damage to the community, and the community has to go through the work of recovering from that damage.
I’ll say that I’m not sure it happens.
We often get this idea that these online communities are like magical cockroaches that will keep coming back. Being a /pol/ user is not the same thing as being a cockroach. You’re just a person. At some point, if being a /pol/ user is inconvenient and frustrating, then maybe you give it up. Site operators go broke or get tired of the community.
The internet does not make communities immune to attack.
Until a week ago colo providers, reverse proxies and ISPs have been neutral but just you watch the next few weeks.
IIRC, it is actually owned by industry companies, which have an interest in keeping it relatively non-political.
I can point out one thing that changed in the last 4 years, and it is our President and the atmosphere of vitriol and gaslighting he has created.
Most of these companies were fine to tolerate this on their services when it was just speech, but now that speech has translated into actual violent action it's a different ballgame.
A play on broadway enacting a fantasy of Trump being stabbed, Julius Caesar style by masked men.
Another hollywood personality posting an image of her enacting a mock beheading, complete with blood.
Don't preach about "Threats" and "Violence". If you are in tech, you are intelligent enough to use logic and not emotion.
Logic recognizes that emotion has real power.
Erecting a gallow outside of the Capitol with a mob of angry rioters chanting about hanging Pence isn't really comparable. Those threats should be considered real, not performance art. It's not entertainment, it's real. Pull your head in mate.
Here's documented evidence of violence of an appalling kind outside police precincts and city halls: https://twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1289093614165831680?lan...
We must draw the line on behavior, not political affiliation. We otherwise risk irreparable harm to the fundamental freedoms we all enjoy.
Who said that?
> Here's documented evidence of violence of an appalling kind outside police precincts and city halls
Burning pigs heads, flags, and spraying monuments does not equal killing police in a riot. The pig head was most likely purchased from a butcher. How is that considered violence?
>Erecting a gallow outside of the Capitol with a mob of angry rioters chanting about hanging Pence isn't really comparable. Those threats should be considered real, not performance art. It's not entertainment, it's real. Pull your head in mate.
I'm linking you to a video showing a mob enacting an act of killing a symbolic cop and literally saying they'll do it and wearing Tshirts with the slogan "Kill Cops" or variants of that phrase.
You may choose to read this comment and instinctively pull up the reply box to try and justify your position and defend it further, but i'd implore you to realize that this is not about you or me. I assume the both of us want what's best for this country and what we're seeing here with two differing standards of judgement and law for two political positions differing only in political affiliation, is not something i'd expect you or anyone as intelligent as someone working in the tech sector to be defending.
Once again, BLM protests to my knowledge did not ever result in LE personnel being murdered. So I can't really see these sorts of things as comparable given on the one hand you have vague threats and on the other hand you have a police being bludgeoned to death. Saying your going to kill police could be protected as free speech as we've already covered; killing police is not.
Also, I find it curious you seem to want to a) take the high ground yet b) only use BLM/antifa examples in your conversation. Finally, your views about the tech sector seem wildly out of touch; you do realise that tech is predominantly a left leaning industry, correct?
Didn’t believe this, searched, found instantly. Not only is this true, it is still on Twitter and has been for years.
https://mobile.twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226...
We live in a beautiful country where one can used to be able to speak their minds without fear of intimidation. Seeing the current state of affairs saddens me.
Me too. I didn't say twitter should take down that post. They shouldn't take down anything that isn't outright illegal. They are abusing their power and I hope it bites them in the ass hard.
Credit where it's due: unlike, say, TheDonald or even r/conservative, it is a free speech zone. I don't recall them banning anybody for expressing a political opinion. If you were left-leaning you would definitely get dogpiled by commenters calling you an idiot or a shill, so you probably wouldn't hang around very long, but that's just what happens when the community is 95+% right wing, and maybe 50+% what you might call far right wing. You would not be censored just for going against the herd.
It's been moderated much more strictly in recent days, including moving most political discussion to a separate, paid-members-only board, but it still takes like 10 clicks around GD to find a post where somebody suggests it might've been good if some Democrats in congress died that day. Subtle and not-so-subtle race replacement conspiracy theory rears its ugly head now and then in GD too. If you're GoDaddy, looking at what happened and what type of rhetoric led to it, I can see why you'd want to distance yourself ASAP. It's not the call I would've made if I ran a DNS registrar, but I'm not going to pretend there's nothing there to justify it.
Including those who support and partake in domestic terrorism, I suppose.
Twitter and Facebook have to sell ads to make a profit which means keeping their platforms 'ad-friendly' and they are also designing everything about the site from the colors to the user experience. So it makes sense for them to moderate or even restrict content to even an arbitrary degree.
However, dumb service providers like GoDaddy and AWS make a profit and are designed around providing (generic mostly) services. When they step in to moderate content beyond what is necessary for legal purposes, it really undermines the whole institution of free speech. I think that in the case of GoDaddy is especially worrisome since DNS ought to be a impartial service and not an adjudicator of morality. At least AWS is 99% commodity and not a top down institution like DNS.
Personally, although I don't need to use it, I prefer nearlyfreespeech.net [1] for my domain name and minor hosting needs. Nearlyfreespech.net (NFSN) offers hosting/DNS for anything that is legal in the US (maybe some exceptions [2]). And NFSN offers no-frills DNS & hosting management as well as the best account security I have seen from any site. The prices are reasonable and very simple.
[1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse#offensive [2] Looks like the ToS includes any ToS that NFSN has to adhere to as well so it's possible that an upstream domain registrar could exert pressure on NFSN... not sure how likely that is. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse#offensive
Situations where the company doing the proactive banning is practically invisible are downright concerning. It's gotten to the point where B2B corporations go out of their way to signal their willingness to evict unsavory customers.
It's like if not only Chick-fil-A, but companies like Sysco closed on Sundays to signal their devout Christianity. Nobody asked them to, and probably most people didn't think about whether or not they worked on Sundays at all. Chick-fil-A is like social media companies, who have their logo constantly in the public eye. Sysco is like domain registrars. Most people don't know they exist, and yet they go the extra mile (in this hypothetical) to show their devotion to the cause.
If it gets as far as landlords, things are going to get really crazy really fast.
Oh please.
It's political speech, all right, but the difference here is that it's political speech in the wake of a bunch of guys with knives, bombs, and zip ties trying to storm the US Senate to subvert the democratic process, and the political speech is advocating more of the same.
This isn't just someone saying odious things, it's calls to make a second attempt at armed insurrection.
I'm speaking generally here, and more about companies like Twitter. I don't know whether that wider trend is what is happening here with GoDaddy.
Freedom of speech is one thing but when it finally translates into violent action it's a different animal.
If "defending free speech" takes us to a world where free speech doesn't exist, then you didn't actually defend free speech at all.
(You might disagree that free speech is at risk from people enacting violence against the government in an attempt to overthrow a democratic election - if so, make that argument, instead of repeating platitudes about how it's important to defend free speech you don't like.)
I’d advise you to read about:
- the paradox of tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- the “imminent lawless action” standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
If you can't allow an idea to be expressed, you are admitting that idea will overcome your ideas if it is heard. Can you really say that about the ideas that led to the Capitol fiasco? I hope not.
Lately over the last couple of decades, there has unfortunately been a new rise in fascism in Germany, due to financial crises and austerity policies. Further, the embers of fascist sympathies especially in the police and military have not been snuffed out like they should have been.
Keeping those ideas from hurting a society requires vigilance and effort, especially in history education and education of why reactionary ideas are morally and ethically reprehensible. Germany didn't try to hide away what happened or cover it up. There has always been a focus on education and telling the story of what happened, with historical references.
What was/is actually banned was the uncritical dissemination of reactionary and fascist symbols, ideas and beliefs. That's why you're not allowed to simply hang a swastika flag from your balcony, but you are very much allowed to hang it in a museum in a historical context that explains what it is, who used it and what it stood for.
That's why id Software was not allowed to distribute Wolfenstein 3-D in Germany with the original textures, because it was entertainment and not in a factual historical context.
Besides, if the best argument you have for saying something is "I have the right to say it" and not the actual content of what you're saying, maybe that says something about what you're trying to say. Ideas, not speech.
Communication, the lack of it, and the amplifying nature of that lack on social disorder is well supported relationship in modern history.
Remember, Hitler's first coup failed too.
Not only is it not effective, but it's very expensive and causes lots of violations of personal rights.
But from time to time we heard people banned traveling for "reasons" like having the similar name as a criminal.
False positive are unavoidable. I am not sure I want to pay that price.
I don't own guns, don't care for them, couldn't tell you the difference between an AR-14 and a AR-15, but the forums on that website did show up on Google search results quite often. There were some interesting non-gun discussions that I found via Google Search, kind of like Hacker News.
If GoDaddy nixed the site for a political reason - which is still not clear - I wonder if Hacker News could ever get similar treatment in another country, in the basis that "Hackers" and "hacking" has a criminal connotation.
IMHO, GoDaddy crossed the line here, and should be punished. Personally, I am already not using GoDaddy because they are terrible, but now I will actively discourage others from doing so.
Not very cool but a valuable lesson, not least of which is never ever use GoDaddy.
There are lots of other options so just forget about them and move on.
And the site... is up? What are we actually discussing here?
Edit: crawling around there's some evidence that they had to get it cleaned up fast, c.f. this thread: https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/POLICY-CHANGE-FOR-ARFCOM...
Note that there's reference to a politics forum which doesn't seem to be there currently. My guess is that they did indeed have a bunch of unsavory stuff, but managed to convince their registrar they had it under control. Their (presumably new) rules are quite clear that violent discussion isn't allowed. And while folks seem to be griping about that the site seems to be complying.
This is, IMHO, the way moderation is supposed to work.
It seems “slippery slope” arguments are not always fallacious. In the context of corporate censorship, what we’re going through right now even feels less like a slope, and more like a free-fall.
...or something like that.
Given the recent events, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of GoDaddy’s reasoning.
https://www.ar15-backup.com/forums/General/8000-Make-Friends...
Backup page: https://www.ar15-backup.com/
There are industry maintained forums, niche, antique, and tons of etc. It goes WELL beyond ar15 platform firearms.
FWIW... TTAG is relatively awful and I know no gun people that trust them.
Just like all forums, you'll find people from all backgrounds there - even people with disagreeing political viewpoints.