

All You Did Was Weaken A Country Today - kareemm
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/10/all-you-did-was-weaken-a-country-today/

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gyardley
Arrington is completely inconsistent when it comes to the right to free
speech. For instance, when it comes to another unsavory free-speech issue,
Holocaust denial, he writes:

"Sure, we can’t shut down the dark places on the Internet where people are
free to hate Jews [...] But Facebook can take a stand and say it won’t happen
in their back yard. Holocaust denial is hate speech, and it cannot be given a
place to take root." (from [http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/facebook-remains-
stubbornly...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/facebook-remains-stubbornly-
proud-of-position-on-holocaust-denial/))

He could just as easily swap out prostitution for Holocaust denial and
Craigslist for Facebook, and make the exact same argument, no? After all, I'm
pretty sure sex traffickers are doing more damage to society today than a
handful of anti-semitic cranks.

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padmanabhan01
That's backwards.

Both facebook and craigslist have rights to block what they want. In
facebook's case they wanted to block. In craigslist's case they don't want to
block. Free speech is about letting fb or cl decide what they want to block or
allow in their site and it is not contradictory to support both: fb's right to
block and cl's right to allow.

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gyardley
Read the article. FB did not want to block and Arrington was arguing that they
must.

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dejb
Did he say they should be forced to block by the law or was he making a strong
moral argument that they should block? My impression is that both FB and CL
were (possibly inconsistent) moral arguments and not so much about the right
to free speech.

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guelo
Why doesn't the EFF publish a voter's guide?

Screw republican v democrat, these are the kind of issues that matter to me
but I'm too lazy to look up if my state's AG is one of the 17 that shookdown
Craigslist. Even if I did I don't know when that election is, and if it's 2 or
4 years from now I'll probably forget this issue. And there are other issues
and other candidates that I might care about but don't know about.

So I need an organization that I trust, like the EFF, to come out with a guide
each election telling me who I need to vote for or against.

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mattmaroon
Ironic he chose the quote from A Few Good Men since Nicholson in that movie
was arguing in favor of the forces for security, not the forces for freedom.
His character would have been on the opposite side of this debate.

~~~
lotusleaf1987
Perfect example of how we've become a soundbite nation. Nothing is presented
in context anymore. Post-modernism...isn't it great?

~~~
jraines
In the context of this particular thread of the meta-narrative w/r/t the
impedence of the distribution of control throughout the
legal/cultural/informational network by widely recognized but contextually
barren pop-culture touchstones, one can understand Arrington's outburst as a
performative reference aimed at the distracted postmodern crowd, with little
relation to the original semiotics of the sampled media. </pomo>

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nnash
Arrington's post seemed unnecessarily condemning of craigslist. Why should a
listings website be burned at the stake for removing adult services?

I can't make the connection between "that kind of emotion", or rather,
craiglist's decision to remove a section from its listings and "weakening a
country". I know that it is hyperbole, but is America really less of a nation
because craigslist doesn't have an adults services section?

