My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up
popehat.substack.com
popehat.substack.com
When I was growing up on the internet, everyone understood the value of pseudo anonymity. But then Facebook came along and everyone is shocked that attaching your name and face to your random thoughts is a bad idea.
And while a burner account is vulnerable to doxing, at least that’s universally viewed as going over the line. And maybe as an owner of a social media platform, Musk could prevent doxing with better privacy tools.
Not really. When the user database of Parler was dumped, the media covered that event quite widely and favorably.
But unless you have some evidence I've not seen any news organisations deliberately reveal PII data.
https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user...
containing a direct link to the dump.
- Scott Alexander
- Richard Hanania
- LibsOfTikTok (can't remember her real name)
And that's just in, like, the last 18 months or so.
They also love to widely report on cases where allied organizations do it, thus pointing everyone to the dumps. For example the home addresses of the entire German AfD political party was dumped online by Hessen Antifa and this was widely reported in German media (who they got the info from wasn't).
There is absolutely no code of honor in news organizations or NGOs. Their goal is to silence anyone who opposes them and they use their positions to do that.
but that only works for the everyday free-speech libertarian, not the actual egotistical. i watched the CTO of a prominent defense contractor cry "censorship" when they weren't allowed to present at an open source tech conference unless they removed all company branding from their slides. as if the arms dealers are the ones at the wrong end of the power struggle; as if Elon Musk with an audience of tens of millions is the victim of society. i don't know what to call that view toward individual liberties except for literal delusion.
Devin Nunes attempted to doxx a “cow” for example: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/devin-nunes-subpoena-ai...
If you don't like his opinions, let's hear your arguments.
The problem with the cancel culture people is their "working the ref," strategy launches a DoS attack on the participants in targeted discourses. I'm thinking what the equivalent is, like maybe LibsofTikTok, which is public mockery that likely crosses over into similar cancel-culture consequences, where there is a strong argument to be made that it is incitement. However, I don't think one can defend cancelations in principle without also defending LibsOfTikTok, or much worse, something like 4chan or kiwifarms, because if you are defending the incitement of a cancel mob, you're also defending one that uses mockery and that also results in some lunatic taking it too far.
Also, intent fits in here. The name itself gives a hint- denial of service as in taking something away from the victim.
What about the use of legal threats and NDAs by wealthy individuals and corporations to silence speech? Take what happened with the whistleblowers at theranos for example.
However, in this day and age unrelated interests are getting roped into the discussion and expressing their ability to make their own speech. This is better phrased as a Terms of Service attack. If you have agreed to use a service that can revoke your access for reasons you agreed to, then you are in a precarious position and your speech is not easily protected.
Is a boycott "denial of service"? I can't think of how that might be without stretching the terms to meaninglessness.
Is a bomb threat or getting someone fired a form of DoS? I'll agree with you there, and I also consider blacklisting a form of this.
If you ask me whether a company like Visa or First Data has the right to deny access to its services over political speech, I think it's clear that nobody has sued them successfully over this. But I would also argue that the payments market should be better regulated and require service for all legal transactions. At the very least, there should be a public option that is resistant to fraud, one where the payer initiates the transaction with an unshared secret, like with Pix in Brazil. The public option should support the free speech guaranteed by the government.
1. Tweeting that someone is wrong.
2. Tweeting that someone is bad.
5. A corporate Twitter account saying someone is bad.
4. One hundred thousand people tweeting that someone is bad.
6. A company withdrawing advertising from a businessman whose tweets they disagree with.
8. A company withdrawing twitter service from a customer whose tweets they believe are bad.
9. A company withdrawing email service from a customer whose (public) emails they believe are bad.
10. A bank refusing to process donations for a person known to speak things the management of the bank does not want themselves to be associated with.
11. An online marketplace refusing to sell to a public speaker they do not want to be associated with.
12. Most banks and marketplaces refusing to serve an unpopular public speaker, in such a way that they cannot obtain the basic necessities of life.
13. The government imposing a $1 fine.
The constitution kicks in at #13, but most people would cry out at an earlier step.
The context is someone is saying anti-Semitic things and others don't have to go along with it or deal with their business.
"Do you believe speech should have consequences" is just the type of spin political parties pay for research to manipulate the masses and will always sound murky or confusing or dangerous.
But censorship doesn't happen until 13.
The simple explanation is symmetry. Each one of these has a mirror action between the speaker and the responder to the speech. For example #12:
The speaker (and their sympathizers) can refuse to use those banks and marketplaces (i.e., a boycott).
As well, not allowing the marketplace to do that is forcing them to associate with that speaker. If I run a store, and I decide "I don't want to deal with Mr. X because I don't like how hateful he is.", why should I be forced to do business with him?
13 is the one that has no symmetry. We can not opt out of the government. That's why the line is there.
- A company cuts you off from their service, but you can't get it elsewhere because it is patented.
- Google closes your @gmail.com address, which you can't obtain elsewhere because they own gmail.com
- You build up a following on YouTube, but you end up with three strikes. There are no other long-form video websites with a fraction of the traffic.
In all of these cases, you have a limited ability to withdraw from the company, but you are completely replaceable to it.
You have alternatives as long as you haven't talked yourself into "I have a RIGHT to use someone's particular business.", because you don't.
- You're on the south pole, and the single supply depot becomes off-limits to you after a personal dispute with the attendant.
Also, I am curious about what you'd suggest as an alternative to YouTube for the content creators that thrive there presently. TikTok doesn't do long form videos.
Free speech does not come without taking legal responsibility for that speech.
Which ironically means that collectively speech will be more free if you prohibit certain types of it for all. A free society doesn't strictly have to tolerate anti-free-society positions like those of ISIS terrorists or neo-nazis — some (including Karl Popper) would say that a free society that wants to stay free, has a duty to be intolerant towards the intolerant.
Free speech, US-style was never about freedom, it was always about who wields the stick.
So I think it is very likely that applying all the old ideas to a new world will not get us far. But yeah, in the end having people that care enough to do something is always a precondition for keeping a society free.
Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulldorff [1] and Jay Bhattacharya [2] are a couple of people who were censored/shadowbanned on old Twitter for expressing opinions about the best way to approach COVID, that were different than the 'official opinion.' One is a Harvard biostatistician, the other is professor of medicine at Stanford.
In general I think anybody should be able to express their opinion, but we live in a society now where even the most qualified cannot freely express themselves when their opinion runs contrary to whatever the official narrative of a time is. That's highly dysfunctional for any society, but words cannot express how stupid this is in a society where freedom of speech has been held as a fundamental value for centuries.
And the biggest threat is not even the overt censorship, but the self censorship that's the endgame goal of censorship. You make an example out of a handful of people, to ensure the other millions keep their mouths shut, in an effort to try to make opinions that made be otherwise widely held, look fringe.
People who are part of LGBTQ community had to self censor themselves for multiple centuries. Victims of sexual harassment had to self censor themselves. Being a free mason means you cannot talk about it public.
As a society, we make rules and norms all the time about what is acceptable and what is not. Unfortunately, we are in midst of a massive cultural change and you can see its effects across all of the society. Eventually, one group will die out and we will have peace of mind again :)
Yes, freedom of speech has been a fundamental value for centuries, that people have unfortunately come to take for granted. In history all of the great causes you might have felt passionately about were able to openly debated and pursued in no small part because Free Speech. Abolitionism, suffrage, equality issues, and so on could all have, and probably would have, been easily censored in a US without Free Speech. And thanks to the US' historic role in advancing near to all knowledge and technology, these ideals that were able to be fostered and grown, also spread across the globe. The world as we know it today would likely look dramatically different had Free Speech not been enshrined within the US.
What you're talking about is something more like the Overton Window [1], which is related, but different.
The same way if I don't pay your electricity bill, I can't tell you what to use your electricity on. If I'm not having sex with you and I don't want to have sex with you, surprise! I don't have any right or should be expecting influence in that department cuz I have zero standing to demand it, and more importantly, why should I have any standing?
And why do I care in the first place unless I have an agenda like my gay conversion camp I'm headmaster/captain of +/or I'm a closet homosexual and I want to distract from the obvious ensuing hilarity of me trying to reinforce and hide that I'm a totally not gay-"straight" fellow...Like by riding a horse shirtless...That PROVES im not gay :/
Let's call it "mind your own business". If only that was a minted expression, they already love business...What's the rub?
Edit: converting people to tolerance should take second place to removig their power and abillity to capriciously have any influence in any matter of currency or effect on others but themselves. This is the way. Everyone needs to control and be controlled by nobody other than themself. Lets call it—I don't know—"personal responsibility"...That's catchy enough amongst this crowd of the usual offenders
I hate to use such trite debate bro topics, but isn't this a motte and bailey fallacy [1]? The motte is "we're just criticising Musk" while the bailey is "we're systematically contacting all of his advertisers and letting them know that if they continue to support him then we will campaign against them as well".
The whole point of cancel culture isn't to state your objections/criticisms of ideas, it is to attack the support systems of individuals. Like, calling their employer en masse and demanding that they are fired. Or pushing their bank, their ISP, etc. to remove their ability to conduct any kind of business. Or to mass-report their social media to get them deplatformed.
To phrase this as "we're just trying to criticize, why is he so mad and why does he want to silence our criticism" is a pretty manipulative take. Even to say "if advertisers want to leave they can" is a misrepresentation - advertisers are being extorted to leave, they are doing so under some pretty extreme duress.
As a free-speech absolutist, I genuinely don’t see any difference between criticizing a person and telling other people (advertisers) that that person did something bad. That’s what criticism is, telling someone you disapprove of something.
I mean that in the sense that a group of thugs might show up to a business and mention “this is a bad neighborhood, it would be a shame if someone were to break your storefront window”
They might argue they were just letting the business owner know a fact. They may even claim to be proponents of free-speech in an absolutist sense. But they are being manipulative and their claim to inform is an implied threat.
Further, the threat’s being made to Twitter’s advertisers aim to materially harm Musk, not to address or counter the bad thing he is claimed to have said.
I actually believe people have the legal right to do this. They often have a defensible moral reason. I just dislike that they obfuscate their tactics behind euphemism.
Brands don’t care if a small group of activists boycott their product. They are terrified of being featured negatively.
But at this point you’re just off in the weeds. This is all well-known tactics. Believe it or not tactics I don’t have much issue with. It just isn’t merely “criticism”. It’s an active and devastating campaign aimed to do as much harm as possible to bludgeon their adversary into the ground. It’s meant to inflict maximum damage to the recipient to induce fear in anyone who might consider following their example.
But hey, I guess if they call it “criticism” then we can’t criticize them for doing it. Otherwise we’re just being hypocritical.
.....or is that sort of thing only ok when it's done against enemies of the state?
On the other hand, if you selectively quote me, and/or my employer has no grounds for dismissal based on something that did not happen in the workplace, please don't waste your time.
[0] I'm self employed.
Elon Musk, especially when speaking in his capacity as owner of X, is unquestionably a public figure in a way that Hacker News commenter "medler" is not. (So is Media Matters.)
Elon is a public figure who is choosing to be a public figure and the statements he made were recent, so I think that’s fair game.
From a moral perspective, Popehat’s main consistent point is that you need to be very specific about what behaviors cross a line and actually apply that fairly, which Elon pretty clearly does not. He has no problems asking people to boycott companies: https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/28/elon-musk-calls-for-boycot...
The actions in question aren’t a criticism of the ideas of Musk. They are collective actions to harm him by harming his business.
The lawsuit will help determine whether or not those actions were legal.
Criticism and free speech generally includes that the criticism may convince people (including companies!) to change their behavior. Speaking about rhetoric, the point Popehat is making here is that all of the changes in advertiser behavior are in fact criticism. There is no Motte being retreated to, he is in fact standing firm at the bailey with the statement “criticism that results in financial harm and business action is still just criticism”.
That is different than “activists engaging in collective action to threaten advertisers to compel them to boycott Twitter are merely criticizing Musk”
As to legality, that will depend on the specific wording they used to compel the advertisers.
It's easy for advertisers to resume spending once the dust has settled than stand by the accused.
Some groups are keenly aware of this power dynamic and will exploit it to their own ends.
There may be no simple legal means to prevent it (to get ahead of the usual "oh so you want government to force people to do business with X" replies), but that doesn't make the problem go away. I suspect even the author would realize this if, e.g., speaking up for LGBT rights got you fired from 90% of all jobs. Which, ironically, is illegal, but I won't hold my breath on the author complaining what an unconstitutional imposition on the 1st amendment rights of free speech and free association the Civil Rights act is.
You’ve inadvertently stumbled on the exact reason that “free speech absolutism” is absolutely asinine nonsense (Musk’s incoherent/idiotic implementation aside), and why some speech restrictions should at least be discussed, even outside of a US/First Amendment context.
This neatly avoids the question of whether we should want advertisers and multi-billion dollar corporations to be gatekeepers of the public sphere. As usual, laissez-faire when things are going my way, anti-discrimination and disparate impact laws when they're not.
If you actually go into town IRL and talk in the public square, no advertiser will be able to silence you because the public square is actually public. Or if you use an actually public means of communication like the postal service, again you won't be cut out because some corporate advertisers consider your speech bad for business. This phenomenon of corporate advertisers being gatekeepers of the "public sphere" only exists in actually-not-public spaces.
I disagree with this.
A very common example is a person saying a thing outside of work, that thing being brought to the attention of their employer, and their employer firing them.
People know this happens, and it creates a chilling effect on what they say regardless of whether they're in a public or actually-not-public space.
You have misunderstood the meaning of the word "public", because it is often used for government provided things. Many private establishments are public spheres, the most common example are Pubs - short for Public Houses.
So you have completely misunderstood the word and arguing from your mistaken assumption.
I understand that it is conventional to speak of some places that are private property as being public, but they are not public in the sense that actually counts for the protection of free speech.
Other examples of public spheres in private hands are the internet provider you're using to read my comment and write your own reply. The ISP doesn't interfere with your free speech. E-Mail is another great example of a public sphere. You can freely send your opinion to any and all the people you want.
In some countries, all unexploited nature is considered public space. Trump's Twitter was deemed a public forum.
It has nothing to do with government ownership, even though most physical public forums are government owned, such as parks, streets and squares.
Not even the most repressive societies physically prevent people from speaking - they just impose distinctly unpleasant consequences on those who speak in undesirable things. The fact that we impose negative consequences for undesirable speech via different mechanisms than the direct actions of government agents does not make what we're doing fundamentally different. In some ways it's worse - a Thai accused of slandering the King at least gets their day in court and can make their case for exhoneration and/or plead for forgiveness, while someone who is passed around on a list of "terrible human beings" gets no such chance.
"Economic loser" is excessively trivialising very real harm - potentially life threatening in a country that lacks public healthcare and similar basic social protections.
Help me understand what you mean by this. To me it sounds like saying somebody was not shot, he just didn't step out of the way of the bullet. Do you mean people are not prevented from speaking because their mouths aren't literally sewn shut?
Exactly. So "just because something bad happened to you after your speech doesn't mean you didn't have free speech" is thoroughly fallacious.
I think trivializing harm is bad but at the end of the day I think you will concede that there is a speech line which can be crossed beyond which you will be fired. Otherwise people could just be cruel and mean to everyone around them and face no consequences. Once you believe that then really all we are doing is haggling about where the line should be… which is something we’ve been doing for generations.
Even if we’re not talking about official action and are talking about group vigilantism, I think we’d agree that if someone had well documented nazi and racist activities outside of work that it would be ok for people to ostracize that person? That just leads back to haggling about boundaries and that’s very hard to sort out without being very specific.
Plenty of respected countries with strong civil liberties don't have US-style free speech laws. Holocaust denial in Germany is a crime, but you'll absolutely get full due process first.
> I think you will concede that there is a speech line which can be crossed beyond which you will be fired. Otherwise people could just be cruel and mean to everyone around them and face no consequences.
Merely ten or twenty years ago it would've been very mainstream to say that people have every right to be as cruel or mean as they like as long as they don't cross from word to action, and that while private individuals might well shun someone who was known to be cruel and mean in their private capacity, it would be a bizarre overreach for an employer to fire them because they were cruel and mean off the clock, or a business to refuse to serve them because they were cruel and mean outside of their relations with that business.
> Even if we’re not talking about official action and are talking about group vigilantism, I think we’d agree that if someone had well documented nazi and racist activities outside of work that it would be ok for people to ostracize that person?
I think it's obviously ok for people to not want to be friends with a person like that, and to not allow them in their social clubs. Equally I think it would obviously not be ok to lock them up, confiscate their property, or deny them medical treatment - certainly not without full due process, and even then, political opinions (again, as long as they remain opinion and don't pass from speech to act) are something explicitly recognised as a human right in the UN charter. In a country with a strong social safety net, refusing to employ someone doesn't come close to any of that - but in a country where no job means no medical coverage and a real risk of losing access to food and shelter...
A real-life and current example I know of is a person who was fired from a HVAC-type job (fixing stuff outdoors) in retaliation for becoming politically active and running for office locally. I don't consider that a symptom of a healthy economy. In a healthy economy, you wouldn't be able to spare these kind of workers as a business. Note that this person's political platform was in no way agitating against his employer or against the interest of his employer.
It absolutely does. There is a fundamental difference between "go to jail because of your speech" and "people don't want to do business with you because of your speech". The former is making speech illegal; the latter is the fundamental right of every person to decide who they associate with.
"Illegal" is just a word; if the village locks you in a cage, or hangs you, it doesn't make any real difference whether they signed some pretty documents first or not. And if rather than hanging you they "exercise their fundamental right to decide who they associate with" and refuse to sell you food, or allow you to forage on their land, well, you end up just as dead. Extreme example obviously, but that's the direction we're heading in. We already recognise that enough individuals choosing not to associate with someone adds up to a denial of that person's rights, otherwise we would never have antidiscrimination laws.
It's really not. There's no slippery slope here; the slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason. We can, in fact, draw a line between "refuse to do business with someone" and "let someone end up dead", and say that the former is perfectly acceptable and the latter is not. This is not an argument against freedom of association.
> We already recognise that enough individuals choosing not to associate with someone adds up to a denial of that person's rights
No, we don't. We recognize that choosing not to associate with someone because of some specific protected characteristics is discrimination on the basis of those specific characteristics, and we've decided to create narrow exceptions to freedom of association to prevent discrimination on the basis of those specific characteristics.
There are many other characteristics for which you are absolutely allowed to refuse to employ someone. You are absolutely allowed to refuse to employ someone because they promote hatred towards others, for instance, just as you can refuse to employ someone because they can't or won't do the work you're hiring for.
That doesn't mean they should starve to death or get no medical care. Everyone should have food and medical care. By all means, let's fix that in our society, and have it not be tied to employment. That would solve many problems.
You've already got plenty of documented cases of e.g. person gets fired, loses medical coverage, has to start rationing insulin, dies. So the slippery slope is real.
> No, we don't. We recognize that choosing not to associate with someone because of some specific protected characteristics is discrimination on the basis of those specific characteristics, and we've decided to create narrow exceptions to freedom of association to prevent discrimination on the basis of those specific characteristics.
Right, and the rationale for that is that discrimination on the basis of those specific characteristics was so widespread that it crossed the line from freedom of association to denying people their rights. At least that's what I was told here.
(Also note that many lists of specific characteristics that should be protected, e.g. in the UN declaration of human rights, explicitly include political opinions in their list alongside things like race and religion; omitting that in US law seems like a historical oversight rather than real social consensus)
> That doesn't mean they should starve to death or get no medical care. Everyone should have food and medical care. By all means, let's fix that in our society, and have it not be tied to employment. That would solve many problems.
If and when you've fixed that, that will be a good argument for at-will firing. But until then it isn't.
There's a ton of evidence out there where he is very specific about the differences between the 1st amendment and free speech.
A 10 second google found: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...
People who are sincerely concerned about free expression, people I admire and respect, argue that we must avoid “manipulative” and “ad hominem” criticism to protect speech — without really engaging the problem that both the critic and the criticized are people with free speech rights and interests.
Where others see a problem (e.g. cherry-picking content from Twitter and framing it as the norm, or any other dishonest, manipulative framing, or complaining about the general culture of shaming), he throws his hands up with "technically not libel I guess". He wants a precise definition that could be written into a law or contract, before acknowledging any complaint as valid.
SCOTUS has essentially "solved" the problem by deciding that the government just can't ever decide how to draw the line. If you look at the history of free speech cases, SCOTUS almost invariably decides to permit the speech, pushing the bar for illegality further and further back. Private parties suing each other for violating free speech is essentially non-justiciable (okay, there's defamation, but the grounds for defamation are very extreme in the US so as to be almost never applicable, as Twitter will find out multiple times in the next few months).
If you're running a social media site, well, you similarly have to face these conundrums. But if you're reliant on advertisers for your income, you'll also find that you can't just nope out of it. Mike Masnick has a good guide on just how difficult it is for these companies (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...), which I'm sure Popehat would endorse.
At the end of the day, you can't win. You have to piss off somebody. And, personally, I'm not going to side with the faction that wants to deny my right to existence.
But if you do want to argue where that line should be, fine. I'll bite.
Advertisers absolutely have too much control over speech online. 404 Media recently published an article about how brand safety filtering has more or less defunded a lot of news coverage relating to the loss of reproductive healthcare and women's rights in America. So I can empathize with what you're saying. However, I can't think of a coherent legal argument as to what the advertisers are doing wrong.
In telecom law, we have the concept of common carrier regulation, which applies to middlemen that connect two parties together. e.g. your phone company cannot bill extra for the same phone call because it happens to be valuable to you[0]. We took a look at the balance of harms and decided that a phone network that cuts off businesses to extort money out of them is worse than the burden placed on phone networks to serve all customers, even the awful ones.
How would this apply to a situation in which the edge of the network decides they don't want to associate with you? We're not talking about ad exchanges cutting off Twitter, mind. These are individual ad buyers all looking at Musk's behavior and deciding "we don't want to give this person money because it makes us look bad if we do that". Do we force ad buyers to blind-buy ad inventory to get around this? Can that even be done? How do they deal with the potential brand damage of being forced to give money to someone that people think is a censorious antisemite? Do companies just eat the loss of goodwill or do we force people to buy from companies they hate to "maximize free speech"?
At some point we have to cut the chain of logic off, before the cure is worse than the disease.
[0] More generally, my personal opinion is that free speech should have a self-defense clause: i.e. that it should not afford speech protections to acts that are contrary to freedom of speech. I think advocating Nazi ideology would count as such an act; certainly most of not all of their ideology is a blatant middle finger to the 1st Amendment. Why protect that which wants desperately to kill you?
Yep, to often when i see these anti woke, cultur war, anti cancel culture critics.
What they are actually doing is attacking people's free speech and defending the authoritarians that are actually trying to limit speech and other rights.
They convinced themselves that free speech should protect them from criticism. When criticism is free speech.
The "anti woke cancel culture critics" are in fact concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific family of ideologies has today over the means of modern communication. Observe the similarity with the left themselves, who are concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific class of wealthy people have today over the means of modern production.
Massive advertising companies banding together to protect a specific narrative is as "free speech" as a bunch of colluding megacorps is "free market". And as much as the left resist the disproportionate influence of oligarchs on economy, the proponents of the actual free speech will resist the disproportionate influence of ESG-driven advertising giants on information.
And then perhaps contrast it with some concrete organic, overwhelming influence examples. But that's a bonus.
1. Chemistry
2. Farming/food (under one of various specifications)
3. An oddly-named composition technique in which phrases of music are built up using musical "Lego blocks", championed by Beethoven (and used by Sondheim, btw)[1]
4. I didn't do my research but I'd like to exhibit superiority to some other thing/group. (Otherwise, that other thing is more precisely described as "astroturfing," "fraud," "shills," etc.)
1: this used to be a bit superior, but it's old and obscure now so I grandfathered it in
Or maybe, just maybe, the simpler explanation is that they don't want their ads running alongside that trash.
Not really, because I specifically stated that my response was not about the Musk situation. "Jewish communities hate whites" does sound pretty antisemitic to me.
But so does the equivalent trash of "all whites are racist", which for some reason is a-ok for the advertising companies.
So... free speech? To the extent that advertising is speech, I guess?
After 160 years of the same political party fighting to rebuild racism, generation after generation, people are done hearing the moralizing excuses for why this time Democrats have the magic formula for virtuous bigotry.
Is this serious comment? There was nothing that happened in the parties in the 1960s? Maybe 1964? All of a sudden the people in the south just suddenly decided to no longer be racist, and joined the Republican party fighting _against_ racism?
After the Civil War, they formed the KKK and Jim Crow to circumvent civil rights.
In modern times, they implemented racial quotas then racial preferences, both of which were ruled illegal bigotry by the US Supreme Court. (At Harvard and UNC, just last year.)
The same party who called blacks “super predators” (Clinton) and whose current president described integrated schools as a “racial jungle” (Biden).
The same party whose supporters are in the streets today, chanting genocidal slogans such as “from the river to the sea”.
The former DNC chairwoman just this week mocked the name of someone born in the US with Indian heritage and told him to “go home!”
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4319012-vivek-ramaswamy-c...
That you think the Democrats are anything but persistently racist is a testament to how well propaganda works.
That's pretty much what happened. The CRA (passed despite the opposition of southern Democrats) shifted the social equilibrium away from racism and a segregated society being totally normal and state-sanctioned, and Southern states had to reinvent themselves along different lines. They broadly chose economic freedom starting from the 1980s (despite continuing opposition by Dems, who to this day favor heavy-handed state intervention and a highly paternalistic attitude towards minorities), which is what created the modern Sunbelt.
Eg, this racist policy by Democrats.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-farmers-loan-forgiveness-...
Democrats are also systemically racist to Asians such as at Harvard and UNC.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
I’d encourage you to stop taking your talking points from KKK meetings about how you’re virtuous for engaging in race-based discrimination.
Your modern apologetics for bigotry are as vapid as 1920s Klansmen talking about “protecting their community”.
"you can’t be racist against Jewish people. the definition of racism centers on power not the tone of dermis. read some different books (Mein Kampf, The International Jew) and open up that independent thinking some."
Pat yourself on the back I guess. Your blind hatred of White people has caused you to use literal Nazi rhetoric.
This framing has some nice results like the contortions around "reverse" racism and the whitewashing of "positive" racism as "not racism" aren't necessary. If you're engaging in collectivism based on race, that's racism - regardless of whether your intent is "good" or "bad". And sometimes that's inevitable (cf "dealing with a problem"), but that doesn't mean it's ever something to really be celebrated.
Back to the topic with that in mind - it's "a-ok" because the advertising companies are racist, as they've generally been. Group stereotyping is a deep part of human psychology and therefore a powerful marketing tool. The main things that have changed is what is considered aspirational and high class, and what is considered verboten.
Is it okay with them? Any kind of proof to back this up?
> that trash
... is defined ideologically, it's the point being made here.
Arguing over this false dichotomy uses up all the air in the room, when we should actually be focusing on the amount of control being exerted. The richest person in the world has plenty of options to speak his mind, regardless of big advertisers no longer doing business with him due to his apparent views. Whereas I'm actually more supportive of the ability of the original poster to post his racist diatribe while not being censored by Twitter [0], if for nothing else than so these racist shitheads don't think too hard before outing themselves.
[0] Not that this is even a concern with the current "X" for this particular type of content.
The richest guy can say whatever he wants; he's got the means to bypass the usual channels. But what about the average Joe? That's where our concern should be. It's not about agreeing with what's said, but making sure everyone can say it. We need to keep our eyes on the real issue: preventing anyone, government or corporate, from getting too much control over our free speech. It's all about that freedom, not getting bogged down in who's the bigger threat.
I will 100% agree that large-corp is a threat to democracy, and specific freedoms. But indistinguishable? Come on.
A government can prevent you from speaking your mind, via legislation and the judicial branch. In terms of raw power, they have the capability to throw you in jail, they can detain you, they can prevent protest, pass laws to make your specific actions literally result in incarceration, they have armies, and police, and state spies, and on and on and on.
Corporations may sometimes avail themselves of some of that power, but it is still the state wielding it. Corporations by themselves have little direct power, compared to states themselves.
And yes, corporations will perform tasks for the state, and the state will sometimes perform tasks for corporations. But that's not my point.
My point is, having a large corporation does not immediately provide for a massive army at the direct control of a CEO. It's just not indistinguishable, at all.
So yes, looking at the specific powers of each entity is a good idea. Just.. keep it in perspective.
Jail is certainly a pretty strong deterrent. But it's actually not as strong as say not being able to eat. Which is contingent upon there being enough competition [0] between providers of food such they can't exercise coercive power. And the surveillance industry has been steadily destroying that open market dynamic we take for granted, for example "the unbanked".
And thinking about coercion in hard discrete terms is fallacious as well. If the government illegalizes some thing, whereas cooperating corporations just make doing that thing such an uphill battle that most people don't do it, the net effect is quite similar. Resist the temptation to think "sure but you can still opt out", because while that can work for a handful of things that really matter to you, this won't actually change much. And conversely, you can actually still do anything the government has declared illegal if you're willing to possibly pay the price.
[0] or more accurately - not too much collusion. these are different measures
But each of these two controlling aspects of our lives, are different entities, with different ways to address, rebuke, curtail, and prevent that control. And the control they each exert is unique. This is why I replied, for even though you stated you didn't want to focus on the dichotomy, you brought it up, and waved it away, stating it was not relevant for this discussion.
But it is. It is, because each of these entities must be fought in unique ways.
I think we mostly agree here on the large points. It's just nuance we're debating.
There are of course differences in the ways you can "address, rebuke, curtail, and prevent that control" based on the specific details of the entity - just as there are stark differences between democracies versus dictatorships, and publicly traded corporations versus privately held. And when we're talking about pushing back, those details should certainly be mentioned.
But my point of emphasizing the similarities between the two large categories is to preempt this all too common pattern of people justifying corporate oppression by framing it in terms of voluntary association, while turning a blind eye to the actual coercive dynamic. I'm sure we do agree on a lot of things, but honestly your first comment is ripe with laying the groundwork for such type of justification. Corporations can certainly prevent you from speaking your mind - for example a geographic-monopoly Internet provider that censors based on content. The next step in the argument is of course "you can still speak your mind, just not using their infrastructure", but given that the sheer majority of speech is online today, that reasoning is specious - it's deliberately ignoring the power the company is actually wielding.
Or coming at it from the other direction - if it's definitionally impossible for corporations to exercise coercive power, then why is accumulating such power one of the tenets of business ("build a moat"), and why are so many people so damn interested in having certain corporations perform censorship?
An uncomfortable truth is that the main thing preventing corporations from having their own full-blown armies is the bona fide government. This circular dynamic is why I've come around to viewing freedom as a kind of logical reduction yin-yang rather as a unidirectional gradient - if the bona fide government disappeared tomorrow, the net effect would actually be the loss of much freedom, as those other aggressors would no longer be kept in check. Big-L Libertarianism sidesteps this by just asserting that having a singular military is one of the few necessary functions of government, but it's not clear why such an exception should only apply to one single topic when that same circular dynamic applies at other levels of abstraction.
Here's an example. Discrimination. Here's a factual phrase: women are less intelligent than men. That's not discriminatory, what is discriminatory, is if I use a minor deviation in averages, to look at $random_woman, and presume she is less intelligent than $random_man.
For example, there are many women that are more intelligent than many men.
My point is, we've had to "dumb down" discrimination, by trying to claim, in many respects, there there is absolutely no difference between men and women. This has led to detrimental outcomes for women, a key example being that as most medical volunteers are men, many models of the brain are predicated upon the male, and therefore? As people say "why, there's no difference between the male and female brain!", it has actually harmed women's outcomes.
I am concerned about the parallel here. That the more we lump things into mega-categories, the more positive outcomes for nuanced groups is lost. And that means that the best solutions may be unavailable, for if they cannot be applied to "overall group", then they may be deemed useless.
I know you're not advocating any of this. And I know your goal is to just ensure people fully understand the risks.
But my point is, much as the fight against discrimination has been whittled down to "there is no difference!", because the stupids cannot understand nuance, you seem to be in a trap of having to whittle down to no-nuance, for the same reasons.
Which is sad.
Hypothetically I can see this happening with my argument, but I'm only imagining more checked-out cynicism. Maybe you see how it's poised for something worse?
What I do commonly see are arguments in the vein of "it's impossible for a company to be coercive", which I'd say is the same exact dogmatic pattern you're describing. They're used to justify a state of affairs, and then offer a fallacious solution like "go start your own company". The wishful thinking here seems to be based on emphasizing the distinction between corporate power and government power [1], which is why I think it's useful to point out the commonalities.
[0] like only now that the mobs have passed, can you use this spicy but technically correct example
[1] see the common trope of people asserting that freedom of speech only pertains to the government, when it's just a general concept and the government-specific bit is the legal framing of the first amendment
It is the current state of the US, but I think it's not inevitable and more due to the circumstances of the US. Regulating billboard usage and advertising limits reach. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but a better online platform ecosystem with rich filtering capabilities could help. Lobbying is harder to curb, since corruption is corruption, but it can probably be done. I think then the big issue is if the corporations amass a private military or something, since they can't artifically extend their voice that much.
What “specific family of ideologies”?
What “specific narrative”?
If it is so specific, surely you could say what it is…
People were mocking actual censorship in the media, by repeating the phrase — often accompanied by “fuck Joe Biden”, as in the numerous tracks about the meme. Which were also censored at first (eg, on iTunes).
How you got from that to “self-censorship to prove a non-existent point” is mystifying.
https://apnews.com/article/lets-go-brandon-what-does-it-mean...
So, no, the crowd was not "censored" by a news anchor.
The adoption of "Let's Go Brandon" as a euphimism for "Fuck Joe Biden" may well have been tongue in cheek, but it wasn't mocking media censorship.
They were mocking the news anchor censoring the truth by lying about what the crowd could clearly be heard saying.
Just like I said.
Except companies don't communicate with each other and coordinate strategy.
They all saw the Media Matters report and individually responded.
Huh, I'm lost? Can you cite an example?
To be clear, "___ is a lunatic and advocating for bad things" is a criticism.
"___ is a lunatic and their message should not be permitted" is limiting speech
No. That advocates for limiting speech, but is not itself limiting speech. If I say meat should be banned, that doesn't actually prevent you from eating a burger. The distinction here is important.
Point is, I got lost in the parent's gyrations.
Edit: what would happen if you included [FLAGGED] as part of the title?
I'm unfamiliar with the author, Media Matters, or frankly Elon Musk (past unavoidable tidbits from his annoyingly incessant omnipresence in media). But unless I'm missing some assumed context, the author completely ignores Musk's positions in the tweets they reference, instead attacking a Musk-shaped straw man.
Musk is alleging defamation by Media Matters, with supposed proof of their deceptive practices, and is using the appropriate (i.e. legal) channel to litigate his claim. The author chooses to heave rather petulant and irrelevant insults at Musk in lieu of addressing Musk's position.
Side note: I disagree with flagging this article. It's about a tech CEO regarding a tech platform on the tech topic of online content moderation. The article belongs on HN.
The other side of the story is that this is intimidation and fraud, thus, it's not protected by free speech:
1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037
2. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1726653530218619018
3. https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1726671127840493811
What this boils down to is defending drum-head trials where the penalty is ostracism. To defend such a thing you have to minimize the outcome, claim that ostracism isn't so bad, or you have to generally agree with the outcome of these trials as "obvious". Both of these avenues are cruel and pernicious. There is little more painful than ostracism, and there is little or no justice in these judgements. At the very least, we all need to agree to a Geneva Convention on speech war where fine, we can personally ostracize someone but we cannot, will not put pressure on others to ostracize someone, too. That second-order pressure goes viral, spirals out of control, and its not fair not right and it's not just, no matter what your politics.
Tell that to the tens of millions of graves that Nazis and Fascists littered Europe with, within living memory.
All this pearl clutching about cancel culture is just a naked attempt to permit the normalization of Fascism, gay bashing, Jew hating, and pushing down the Blacks again, in order to energize the last vestiges of the aging-out conservative right wing.
'there is little more painful than ostracism.'
Following their defeat in WW1, the country fell into civil war which eventually led to the creation of the short lived Weimar Republic. Their economy then collapsed into hyperinflation and was stabilized only by even more lending (and thus more debt) from the West. Then in 1930 the Great Depression hit, which ended that lending, and their entire economy spiraled into destruction, with widespread unemployment and the rise of violent extremism across all political ideologies.
To think this could have been stopped by more censorship is not realistic. In fact censorship was one of the key ways the Nazis finally managed to consolidate power, as they were never especially popular. They never won a single election with a majority. Their best result in anything even vaguely resembling a fair election was in July 1932 where they gained a plurality with 37%. By November, when another election was called after they failed to form a government, they were down to 33%. They only won by shenanigans, and consolidated with censorship and totalitarianism.
This repeats several depressingly common myths. For starters, germany was "forced to accept all guilt" (several other countries were considered "guilty" by those treaties) because they were guilty. While not the sole participant, they actively encouraged the starting of the war and then immediately took advantage of it by invading france.
After spending 4 years of brutal fighting literally just to make the germans go home, the people defending themselves were more than a bit mad.
As to the famous war debt, for one thing its size wasn't much larger, relatively speaking, to the debt germany had just imposed on france a generation previously after france lost a war in which they invaded germany. This kind of war reparations was extremely common, and while obviously burdensome, hardly an excuse to launch another global war of conquest.
Much like france and its war debt, germany could have easily paid what it owed without collapsing. One of the thing the nazis and friends deliberately did was cause hyperinflation in order to both decrease the debt and to encourage anger among the populace to hopefully cause them to "rebel" against the existing leadership and support the extremists in thr nazi party.
Even after hitler took power (as you point out, at best semi-democratically) germany's economy was no worse off than any of the other major powers going through the depression, but instead of doing public works like america did, hitler deliberately allocated an unsustainable amount of money into war production, money that obviously had zero return to the german people. A large part of the reason hitler started invading when he did was because they had basically run out of money and their choice was use their expensive army or sell it off in order to buy food and oil.
Germany is only uniquely guilty there in the sense that the loser of a war is always the one who did wrong.
And the Nazis didn't cause hyper-inflation. They didn't take power until 1933. The inflation, that would quickly end up turning to hyperinflation, began shortly after the Treaty of Versailles in the early 1920s, in the Weimar Republic. Germany didn't have anywhere near enough money to pay off their debts under the Treaty of Versailles, which demanded payments in gold or foreign currency only. With their gold reserves long since exhausted, Germany had little choice but to begin printing money in order to buy foreign currency. And even that wasn't enough, as their currency inflated to the point of worthlessness causing them to default on their debt, which then lead France/Belgium to make things even worse by invading and occupying the [industrially key] Ruhr region of Germany in 1923, and responding to predictable German acts of civil disobedience by killing civilians. And as above - 'so forth, and so on.'
And you talk about fair recounting?
First off, every single war decision is made by humans. People seem to gloss over this when talking about history and countries, but even if you have a treaty with another country, you're still making a choice to declare war. You can argue that its always the moral choice to obey a treaty and declare war, but its still a choice.
Secondly, the austro-hungarian "terms for settlement" were deliberately designed to be refused, the terms were extremely punitive and made with every intention of provoking a war. This isn't speculation, this is what the people making the terms said to each other. Also a sizeable part of the reason austro-hungary felt able to make such demands is because germany was encouraging them and offering support, both via treaties and more informal communications.
After that, yes, treaties gave other countries reasons to get involved in that war, but I think there's a pretty clear moral difference between "serbia gets invaded so I'm going to honor my treaty to attempt to defend them" and "oh hey, my ally started a war by invading someone, I'm going to get in on that action and invade someone else!"
> that would quickly end up turning to hyperinflation, began shortly after the Treaty of Versailles in the early 1920s, in the Weimar Republic. Germany didn't have anywhere near enough money to pay off their debts under the Treaty of Versailles,
First off, "shortly after" is doing a massive amount of work there. Yes, in terms of "history of the world" it was a short amount of time, but that doesn't mean one caused the other. The inflation was a combination of poor economic decisions and deliberate attempts to destabilize the country. Hitler wasn't made leader until 1933 but the nazis (and more importantly, their backers and allies) had a large amount of power in the country even in the 1920s (see the beer hall putsch, it didn't succeed but just the fact it was possible says a lot).
Yes, the occupation of the ruhr didn't actually help, but the occupiers also left after 2 years and a new plan of repayments was agreed to. You can argue that its "natural" or maybe just "predictable" that germany would (essentially) start voting for the nazis after something like that, but its still a choice people made, and more importantly, the choice to start invading other countries was made well over a decade later.
The point I wanted to emphasize is that all of these wars were the results of people making choices. You're never forced or required to invade someone. You choose to do that, and germany rightly bears the blame for choosing to do so. You can argue that other people/countries could hade made different choices and those different choices might have influenced the choices people in germany made, but again, they're not controlling the people making the choices.
(Also this whole storyline is a great counter-example to the silly trope about "victors writing history" since there is a massive amount of, uh "myths" about ww1 and ww2 era germany written by the germans, who certainly didn't win)
As for inflation, "shortly" after isn't doing any work there. Hyperinflation began in the Weimar Republic in 1921 [1]. The Nazi party had only been formally formed in 1920 and had exactly 0 power. The hyperinflation is one of the means they managed to recruit as many people as they did. It created a large base of premium recruits: young, drunk, unemployed, and angry. But to claim they created said economic circumstance is, let's say, you perhaps mixing up this moment in history with something else.
Had Austria Hungary won, then a parallel dimension you could well be here arguing that the consequences e.g. Russia (or France or whomever else) faced were perfectly just and reasonable. You might say that it's one's choice to come to the defense of an ally, and choosing to defend an ally under assault for assassinating another nation's leader speaks bounds of your own integrity, or lack thereof. When looking at history (and the present and future) I endeavor to try to take a position that I think I would hold, regardless of who won and who lost.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...
I guess we'll just have to agree to differ on that one. Murder is a crime and the perpetrators should be punished... which they were. Many members of the groups involved in the assassination were tried and several were sentenced to death. Invading another country afterwards and calling it "just and reasonable" is more than a bit ridiculous.
Also, just for the record, franz ferdinand wasn't anyone's leader, he was the son of the current emperor of austo-hungary, and to be honest, most of the political elite who led the effort to start a war didn't particularly like or care for him anyways. Somewhat ironically, a large part of this dislike is because ferdinand was generally arguing in favor of peace.
As for "regardless of who won and who lost", my consistent point is condemning the invaders, regardless of whether they won or lost. Again, for example, france invaded germany a few decades earlier, lost, and had to pay reparations, and basically no one has ever brought it up again as some kind of excuse for starting a world war.
Simply suggesting Austria Hungary should have been content to simply let the state, which had just backed the assassination of their head of state, investigate themselves, and be happy with having caught the useful idiots at the end-point of the act, is beyond absurd. This is why their terms to Serbia included the presence of Austria-Hungarian investigators within Serbia. And ultimately I think that accepting a state backed assassination while opposing invasions is just arbitrary mental gymnastics. In many ways I think assassinations and other such acts should be treated vastly more harshly, as there is something particularly pathetic about those who act in the shadows, exploiting good faith and idiots.