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Comment by yc-kraln | Hacker News Reader

Especially as congress has, for as long as I remember, been about the superset of infosec, society, art, etc. IMHO it's more along the lines of complaining about any ride that isn't a roller coaster at a theme park--no one is forcing you to go on any rides, other people clearly enjoy them, they're not taking anything away from your roller coaster, and having them increases the diversity of the crowd in an ultimately positive-for-everyone way.

Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today.

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Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground. That is the real problem.

> Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today.

You could never do that. A few years ago, some activists tried to make a fuzz with stuff like creeper cards, intervention teams and codes of conduct. But those were never needed in the first place, almost nothing ever happened at CCC that would have warranted those things. But "those white male hackers are certainly sexist raping pigs" is a firmly entrenched stereotype in certain circles.

The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out. Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't "hooray, more refugees", "hooray, more EU dictatorship" or "hooray, down with everything right of Rosa Luxemburg".

The problem has been the continuous purposeful rightward shift of the overton window as part of a wider strategy by the far right.

You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left". You see the far-right decrying our democratically elected government as "dictatorship", a classic Putinist propaganda move.

Don't let the right wing extremists set the narrative! Don't listen to their complaints about things being too "political" or "far left". It's all just a tactic in their march towards fascism.

You could use exactly the same rhetoric to make the opposite argument.

Sure, but you would be denying reality. Look at the political reality in Europe and the US.

How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?

> How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?

Since you asked the question, I assume you have an answer, and I'm curious to hear it. I imagine it will reveal more about your personal politics than any observable political reality.

Just because you don't see the "far left" doesn't mean it isn't there. Would you consider CDU in Germany to be conservative or even Christian right now? I've been far left all my life until I noticed how fake it all is. Sane goes for the right. now I'm just following truth. It's a lonely path.

All the best & I hope you had a Merry Christmas as well.

CDU is not far left. It's reducing immigration, reducing social services, and removing bike lanes to make more room for cars. Not things the left is known for - but they are things the right is known for.

The best thing the right has done to advance its cause is to convince so many people that the words "right" and "left" don't have actual meanings.

Double-replying to apologize for my previous comment! I saw what I felt was a leading question and answered it with a leading question in kind, but I got turned around reading the thread and realized much later that I actually agree with you and my answer would to your question would probably be more similar to yours than to the person you were replying to.

If San Francisco is what you get when you embrace the left, and opposition to that is fascism, I think a lot of us have just decided we must be fascists.

San Francisco is a right-wing, pro-capitalist place.

The left would be public ownership of the means of production.

Nah, this is just the No True Scotsman fallacy. San Francisco is FAR more left in their politics than most of the nation. For example, the new mayor described himself as:

> As a lifelong Democrat and San Franciscan, I am running for mayor to turn around the city I love

London Breed, the mayor before, was endorsed by explicitly Democrat or nonpartisan individuals (including Kamala Harris)

We could go on. What's ironic here is that this comment just reveals how disconnected this form of left wing politics is from the larger nation. They call even examples of the politics of their own "right wing" because they're so radically left

There is no left wing politician in power anywhere in the US.

Democrats are a center-right party, they do not argue for any left wing position - like nationalizing industry, abolishing markets etc etc. In Europe, their equivalents in terms of economic policy would be conservative parties like the CDU.

The fact you consider them left wing is only evidence of above overton window shift happening.

What in the quote screams left-wing to you? Is it just because he's San Franciscan? But that would be circular reasoning: SF is left because of its mayor, and its mayor is left because he's from SF.

Never been here, huh?

You mean the epitome, the nerve center, the capital and apex of 21st century entrepreneurial capitalism? That left-wing bastion? Ridiculous.

> You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left".

No, things have changed in CCC as well. Back in the day, free speech (in the US definition) and a firm opposition to any censorship were consensus on CCC. Nowadays, censorship is totally OK if it targets the right. And any kind of remotely right-wing opinion is declared "not free speech, not an opinion, thus not protected". This is also evidenced by quite a few talks on the topic, and cooperation with far-left activist groups like "Zentrum fuer politische Schönheit" sabotaging right-wing speech on several occasions.

Why is what right wingers do speech that should be protected, but not what the "Zentrum fuer politische Schönheit" does?

There's a certain hypocrisy in all right wing demands for free speech. They always mean freedom of their speech, not of people they disagree with.

There is quite a difference between "speech" and what ZfpS does. Their actions are often criminal, and not in the sense of "political crimes" but actually criminal acts that have nothing to do with speech or opinions. They have doxed people and called for violence against them, they have exhumed dead children and paraded around their corpses, stolen things, stuff like that.

Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

> Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

I do believe that providers of such services such as cloud, internet, ... have to stay neutral on such purposes under nearly all circumstances. If the team behind KiwiFarms did something illegal, this is a problem for the judicial system.

When CF continues to host 8chan and other groups that routinely trade monkey torture/zoosadism videos, but for some reason only KF goes too far... yea that doesn't make sense to me. I don't think they should be playing Internet police, and it's possible that (in the US at least) even doing so in the first place could nullify their Section 230 safe harbor protections, by attempting to moderate content that flows through them.

But also in KF's case I think it was not so much their content that got them "in trouble", but the people behind that crusade being so loud about it, like Liz Fong-Jones and Keffals, who relentlessly harassed every possible service provider even remotely related to any aspect of KF-related services at all, which included domain registrars, DDoS protection services, hosting/colo/DNS providers, IP space owners, upstream ISPs (and even Tier 1s), etc.

It was basically a master class in mentally-questionable retribution crusades for bringing their very ugly skeletons out of the closet and exposing all of their wrongdoings. LFJ was mad that their rape allegation was made public by KF, and Keffals was mad that their illegal bathtub-HRT scheme was made public.

The trouble comes when "speech" is arbitrarily defined and/or enforced to suit a narrative. The initial targets are always the lesser-favored extreme cases in order to have the least amount of people disagree with it. Then when the people are comfortable having them define what speech is acceptable, they slowly start eroding rights to include simply anything that they don't like.

That's why people say that taking away the rights of one group is like taking it away for everyone.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

- Wilhoit's Law

do you think the old-school CCC would be happy with a guy walking onto the stage and yelling the N word over and over, or would they kick him out? Because that's the quality of "speech" they now support "censoring".

Being (un)happy about something is totally different from creating and promoting an oppressive censorship apparatus, criminal laws and police actions against that something.

Imho: You don't have to like that person yelling that stuff. You don't have to like what they are yelling. But you have to accept that it has to be their legal right to yell that stuff. Because otherwise, any opinion will one day be a criminal thing to say, just takes one election...

You actually don't have the legal right to walk on stage at C3 and yell the N word repeatedly. The fact you think you have or should have that right means I am not the extremist in this conversation.

Well Joscha Bach's talk got removed this year because of that mail exchange with Epstein. But disregarding the content discussed, I found it indeed a bit off-putting how he basically licked the butthole of his sponsor between those lines.

> Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't [...] "hooray, more EU dictatorship"

There is a talk on Chat Control though?..

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.

I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.

> The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.

Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground

Which is fucking based. Being a radical leftist should be normalized even more and people like you need to be driven out of _every_ fucking public space.

There is no radical left or radical right; there is only right and wrong! If you don’t understand human rights and realize that you are not the only person or creature on this planet, you need to change your point of view.

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