This is more and more like China's social credit system.
'There is no cancel culture. You are just being held accountable. People just don't like you. You have no right to social media. Make your own app/cloud/host..'
The problem with China's social credit system is that it is a codification and automation of the prejudices of the system designed to maintain power.
This example here is just the old fashioned display of the prejudices of the organization.
Accountability must be open.
Comparing that organic system of social appraisal with anything like a mass scale surveillance social credit system, or international communications censoring organization like ICANN, is deeply unreasonable. It is clearly not the same thing, and centralized control of reputation by a government arguably poses huge totalitarian risks with zero offsetting benefits for citizens.
I don't see how size or organicity are useful factors to appraise actions by certain institutions as "unreasonable". If you have ever read the Scarlet Letter or the Crucible, those "smaller" centralized institutions (i.e. families, towns, schools, etc.) have played the part of censorious zealot just as much as the bigger ones.
https://www.propublica.org/article/service-provider-boots-ha...
"First they came for the nazis, and I defended them because I am a staunch supporter of free speech.
Then the nazis exterminated me and my entire family, just like they had always promised they would.
The end."
It's also unclear what 'underground' means here. Most communication (and particularly political organizing) happens over the Internet, and people regularly gain access to ideologically-bent forums. Was Parler 'underground'? Is a closed Facebook group 'underground'? At first glance, it seems that such groups being 'underground' is actually what we want to happen. More caution to conceal their activities and spread of information would limit the number of people getting into such a movement.
If the ideas are out in the open, we have to accept that there will be points at which rhetoric wins out over 'ideas', and that even if the marketplace of ideas produces correct results in the long run, we're still left dealing with incorrect results in the short run. Maybe that's a reasonable judgement for a libertarian point of view, but it's equally reasonable and understandable that someone may not want to make that concession at all.
This isn't the goal of such laws; the goal is to hobble the spread and reach of those ideas, not to change individual peoples' minds. It's forward-looking, not present-looking. It is also a show of the state's policy towards a particular ideology, and it carries the state's discursive authority with it. In a similar way, the point of laws against child pornography isn't to change the mind of the child pornographer, it's to slow and aim to stop the spread of the material, while attaching the state's authority to the idea that child abuse and its recording and distribution is wrong.
As a counterexample, it's documented that segregation laws had two effects; the first is keeping blacks and whites separate, the second is the authority of the law, as crafted by the sovereign body of the country, enshrined the inferiority of blacks, which reflected in the attitudes of whites and the psychology of blacks at the time. Something being legally enshrined has a very similar effect to how taxes discourage the goods they are levied on in the marketplace.
1) https://twitter.com/KSoltisAnderson/status/13646149211163443...
> “And so, I established in 1919 a programme and tendency that was a conscious slap in the face of the democratic-pacifist world. [We knew] it might take five or ten or twenty years, yet gradually an authoritarian state arose within the democratic state, and a nucleus of fanatical devotion and ruthless determination formed in a wretched world that lacked basic convictions.
> Only one danger could have jeopardised this development — if our adversaries had understood its principle, established a clear understanding of our ideas, and not offered any resistance. Or, alternatively, if they had from the first day annihilated with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.
> Neither was done. The times were such that our adversaries were no longer capable of accomplishing our annihilation, nor did they have the nerve. Arguably, they furthermore lacked the understanding to assume a wholly appropriate attitude. Instead, they began to tyrannise our young movement by bourgeois means, and, by doing so, they assisted the process of natural selection in a very fortunate manner. From there on, it was only a question of time until the leadership of the nation would fall to our hardened human material.
This isn't the claim; the claim is more moderate: Nazis gaining political power, and not necessarily inevitably doing so. Nazis are only an example here; you can substitute any 'wrong' idea to see the analogies, from climate change denial to anti-vaxx to flat earth theories. Further, political power is only the end goal. I think most people would agree that a society where a large percentage of the population consists of (Nazis/anti-vaxxers/climate deniers) who don't vote in themselves would have negative discursive effects socially or politically on those who do vote. The state has power, but it does not have absolute power, and that's a good thing.
For many, some more balancing between the ideals of speech autonomy and democratic equality is strongly justified - see some regulation in Europe for example.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/#DemCitPor
Like we want to know who is planning to blow up someo building. Why wouldnt we want to know?
But the pirate bay co-founder Anakata says in this interview below that he defends the rights of pedos to have a website about their views (i think he clarifies at he doesnt allow pedo material but only a webiste about their "political" views), and that he is fighting for that right. To have their views in the open. So my question is, do you "progre" also agree with Anakata that aside Neonazis the Pedo politicians should also have their say in public view? And if you believe yes they should, can you elaborate why?
What if Steve is Bob's conpetitor and conveniently accused Bob of being a Nazi?
Suppose Bob is a nazi but hasn't commited any crimes, how far can we go, what else can we deny, can we refuse them a website? A mobile phone connection? electricity and running water? School for his child?
Really?