I used to think it was fairly easy to identify who was/is a "Nazi" or Nazi sympathizers (The Daily Stormer obviously passed the smell test). What I'm concerned about is that the scope of who's included in that group seems to be expanding. Immediately after Chancellorsville plenty of Liberal pundits, on and off Twitter, explicitly stated there was no difference between Republicans and the NRA and Nazis, which is of course a ludicrous statement. But people don't think it's ludicrous anymore. It seems a reasonable expectation at this point that this expansion will continue, because anyone who doesn't sufficiently condemn/signal their agreement with policing speech in this manner might find themselves branded a "Nazi sympathizer". Is this where we're headed? I sincerely hope not, because it's going to lead to a frightening trend of self-censorship. This is a sign of a seriously unhealthy political culture.
That's exactly were the USA is headed. The vocal minority wants the civil war to happen. They want to affirm their own epic narrative (https://sivers.org/drama). David defeats Goliath, for the common good.
A lot of young people can't get a hold of their identity, so they grab on to their gender, race, being liberal, whatever. They make a virtue out of anything they already are. Then the journalists exploit the collective search for meaning by selling outrage and a scapegoat. Some people need the "nazis": their identity depends on it.
Isn't that also what the Nazi alt-right people are doing: grabbing a radicalized ready made identity off the shelf because they don't know who they are?
I see a ton of this today. Maybe it's the social media version of the couch potato. This is what it looks like when people lose themselves in social media.
> This is what it looks like when people lose themselves in social media.
No, this is what it looks like when you have a racist country that doesn't address its institutional racism for decades combined with a racist political party that panders and dogwhistles to them for (at least 5, more like 20) years combined with broken ideas about free speech.
The Democratic vice-mayor of Charlottesville has publicly said he hates white people. Racism goes both ways and some people in both parties are guilty of it.
He has since apologized for and disavowed those tweets. He wrote them before he was in public office:
“I sincerely apologize for the inappropriate things I posted to social media many years ago,” Bellamy said in his Facebook post. “Elected officials should be held to a higher standard, and while I was not in office at the time, in this instance I came up short of the man I aspire to be.”
He attributed the tweets to an immature phase of his life.
“At the time of the tweets that I saw posted on the website, I was a young man in my early 20s living outside the Deep South for the first time,” Bellamy said. “In the course of trying to mature and find my way I came to some false conclusions about the world around me and made them known.”
According to the ACLU and ABC, police allowed the violence at the march to happen.
> [ACLU Tweet:] Clash between protesters and counter protesters. Police says "We'll not intervene until given command to do so."
> Video replayed over the weekend on cable news and social media appears to show long brawls between protesters and counter-protesters that went uninterrupted by police.
Whilst I can't defend him saying that, I will point out that it happened in 2009 and it's possible his opinions have changed since.
(Also mildly amusing that the person highlighting these tweets was one "Jason Kessler", a local Charlottesville bloggerm and now presumably the same one enjoying worldwide fame for organising a Nazi-themed march which left someone dead.)
Yeah, he did say plenty of stupid things 2009-12 but the "I hate white people" was 2009. Not that I'm giving him a pass for any of this - they were legitimately dumbass idiot things to say anywhere, much less in public.
He also filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But he outlasted his "Dixiecrat" origins and repeatedly expressed regret and apologized for his past views. Still, he was never a very progressive party member and not really representative of the party overall.
Other Dixiecrats, like Strom Thurmond, switched to the Republican party when the found the Democratic party no longer in line with their racist views.
> a racist political party that panders and dogwhistles to them for (at least 5, more like 20) years
Closer to 50; the Southern Strategy started with the 1968 Presidential election.
And, really, it was longer than that, in a sense, the Southern Strategy was just the Republicans taking up what LBJ closed the door on Democrats ability to exploit in the South when he backed the Civil Rights Act.
This is a pretty thin slippery slope argument. No one is arguing the Republican Party are literally terrorists. The idea that they often flirt with white nationalists far more than they should is not tantamount to a call for banning their websites. It is a call to hold them accountable for their words and actions.
I mean yes, with 140 characters, you get some hyperboles. Before 2017, when we said someone was basically a Nazi, we didn't mean it literally. It'll take some time for our lexicon to catch up, but that doesn't mean this Tweet is saying there's literally no difference between the NRA and the KKK.
Sounds like he is saying the NRA and conservatives are Nazis to me. The same kind of garbage deranged conservatives said about Obama throughout his presidency.
This "hyperbole" or sometimes "humor" defense is often pulled out to justify all crazy things said by Trump, conservative talk radio hosts, and so on. Always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This is serious stuff. Should we be exaggerating it or joking about it? If we assume Moulitsas' tweet is hyperbole, the nicest thing you can say about the tweet is that it is completely devoid of content, as apparently its only assertion is just hyperbole. In which case Moulitsas was just name calling.
I feel as liberals we have strong, rational arguments as to why conservative policies and ideology are harmful to our society. Let's stick to those and drop the name calling.
> Sounds like he is saying the NRA and conservatives are Nazis to me.
The NRA, recently, has taken a hard shift in the alt-right direction recently; they are clearly, area minimum, drawing inspiration from and making common cause with the Nazi and affiliated organizations gaining power on the right.
Call me when the NRA starts advocating genocide. I have no love for the NRA, but comparing people and groups with the Nazis is a rhetorical disease. People have increasingly become unable to differentiate between ideas they disagree with and genocide.
I think what annoys people is the doublestandards, as in that people on the right have to regularly denounce the radical elements while the extremes on the other side often gets a pass. As we saw over the weekend, even moderate pacifists that condemned all political violence and the president were labeled sympathizers because they didn't denounce the 'bad guys' hard enough.
I mean one side was literally advocating the extermination of all/most minorities in this country and chanting things along those lines.
If there are people chanting and advocating the extermination of all white people on the left I haven't really been exposed to it, and I'm 100% confident that around 99% of people on the left would denounce it in a heartbeat.
He has a decades-long reputation for being anti-POC. I'd be amazed if he wasn't a sympathiser with the people sharing the same views (and still most everything he says and does points to him being a sympathiser.)
> He has also received awards for his work helping POC.
Those I'm not aware of. Can you give citations or links?
> I value someones actions over what others think of them
Ok, how about him being sued for racial discrimination in 1973?[1] Or his extremely racially charged ad about the Central Park Five?[2] Or his comments about Mexicans?[3] Or his "Voting Rights Commission" which exists largely to disenfranchise POC?[4]
So do you judge him on convictions against him about not selling to non-whites? About hiring the man who ran the self-described 'beacon of the alt-right'? Of constantly calling perfectly rich places 'crime-riddled inner cities' beacuase they're less than 90% white? Of claiming that am American-born judge can't be unbiased because his parents are Mexican?
After the election there was a commentator who attributed Trump's win to "whitelash". If true, I think one could say in the media we're experiencing an aggravated allergy to anything that does not toe the PC-line.
No doubt the most of the protestors were white supremacists and sympathizers, but to equate everyone who coincidentally shares anything with them (they vote R, they support NRA) is automatically binned with such groups is just as bad as what the left complains about when people on the right equate people who share some values with extremist-terrorists as equal to being a member in those kinds of groups.
And there are plenty of hammer and sickles at left leaning marches, but nobody argues that they're trying to reinstate a soviet state and put millions in death camps.
You have not addressed the point though. If you're saying the flags and chants of "blood and soil" mean something else, you should just say that and substantiate the claim.
What he means is all this is a far cry from an actual Nazi movement. I don't think you really appreciate what the NSDAP was. The NSDAP was build on a very strong military base (disenchanted veterans) and was using very strict military rules. They were not fat morons parading with tiki torches, but trained assassins organized in armed militia used to impose their order through authority and fear. Labeling a bunch of morons Nazi because they are white, they chant and they have a Swastika flag is a moral fallacy, an insult to all the people that suffered actual Nazism, and a gross oversimplification.
When people are being called Nazis, it's about ideology, not skill set.
Though the modern white supremacist movement does also include a fair number of disenchanted military veterans [0], who are often influential in their organized groups and militias (and, the NSDAP itself included and was supported by a lot of other disaffected citizens that weren't “trained assassins”.) So, even aside from being dubiously relevant, the distinction you try to paint is at best overblown.
It's not unreasonable. The point I am trying to make (and at which I am obviously failing) is that it's not because Nazis carry one kind of flag, perform one kind of salute and chant one kind of chant, that people doing the same things are Nazis.
Historically, all this folklore was a mean to an end. But the end came first. There was a plan to overthrow the government, a failed coup d'état, an relatable ideology, a strong, trained and motivated leadership, a propaganda, active enrollments and daily militia marching. In two words, actual politics.
Given their complete lack of all these, it seems to me very hasty and politically motivated to call these morons Nazis. Instead of dealing with these people for what there are - lunatics, it creates a fear for something that simply does not exists.
Just because they're not currently very good at what they do doesn't preclude them from being one, especially when many of these groups self identify as neo-Nazis. It's the same intent with the same goal. The Nazi's in Germany in the early 1930's were pretty much a bunch of screw-ups when they started. Many Germans at the time regarded them as fringe "lunatics", but we all know how that turned out.
Right. Nothing like these fucks. What you are showing me are boy-scouts. Cosplay enthusiasts. I am talking about this: http://bit.ly/2fKTuib. And this: http://bit.ly/2i6UZrK. And this: http://bit.ly/2fLS46Y. One of us is being purposely dense. I am probably biased but I don't think it's me. Get real.
EDIT This is not a qualitative comparison especially since my point is that both instances are not comparable.
> Immediately after Chancellorsville plenty of Liberal pundits, on and off Twitter, explicitly stated there was no difference between Republicans and the NRA and Nazis, which is of course a ludicrous statement
First, it's Charlottesville. Second, given the massive shift to right-wing, authoritarian, racist politics of the Republicans, and ESPECIALLY their role in getting Trump into office, it is an exaggeration to call them Nazis, but certainly allowed in my opinion.
Also: whoever in the Republican party does not want to get called a Nazi, must condemn Trump, Bannon and the entire alt-right/tea party mess. Everyone who allows these guys to remain in the Republican party or the Republican-led government acts as an accomplice of Nazis and thus deserves to be called a Nazi and be treated as such.
> This is a sign of a seriously unhealthy political culture.
No. Calling out racists, sexists, white supremacists, KKK and alt-right as Nazis is not an "unhealthy political culture", it's the last line of defense a civilized society has. Shit's been accepted for YEARS now since the birth of the Tea Party movement and later the alt-right, it's time to dump them on the trash heap of history where they belong.
Racism, sexism and all other forms of hating against minorities must be condemned, no excuses.
I wouldn't call the GOP the same as the neo-Nazis, they're more analogous to the Conservative party in Germany on the eve of The Third Reich, they thought they could control the Nazis and use them as part of their voting block but quickly found out they had lost control, this is quite similar to what appears to have happened to the GOP.
You are essentially saying that about, or slightly less than, half the US is nazies? If so then either a) the label has been expanded and watered down so much it is essentially pointless or b) you have already lost the fight (in 33 "only" about 30% voted for Hitler) and must therefore be sitting at a minimum in house arrest.
> You are essentially saying that about, or slightly less than, half the US is nazies
25% of US population voted for a known sexist and racist all while knowing that he was backed by neo-Nazis. Still, right now, 36% of US (per http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-app...) approve with Donald Trump, and thus, with a man who openly supports Nazis. In fact, I believe that the "alt-right" is the only base Donald Trump still has - just look at his economy advisors, they're jumping ship left and right because no one wants to be associated with this.
> you have already lost the fight
Which is something that is very well possible, I am afraid to say. I'm a German - and while our local neo-nazi party has recently lost poll rates from 25 down to 7-8%, their major positions got incorporated into the positions of our center-right parties CDU and especially CSU, and even the center-left-ish Social Democrats have shifted to the right. The neo-nazis don't need to actually win elections to succeed, they only have to succeed in getting their positions into the "mainstream".
you have to know that every single time you bring up sexist and racist that someone is going to retort, very reasonably, with Bill Clinton, and how his policies affected black people in the 90s.
> You are essentially saying that about, or slightly less than, half the US is nazies?
Republicans are only a quarter of Americans. [0]
> you have already lost the fight (in 33 "only" about 30% voted for Hitler)
Weimar Germany had a different electoral and political structures than the US, which directly contributed to the Nazis ability to take power with that little electoral base.
> there was no difference between Republicans and the NRA and Nazis, which is of course a ludicrous statement.
It's reaching, sure, but it's not ludicrous - the GOP has an avowed platform of disenfranchising minorities, punishing them through punitive taxes and withdrawal of services. Sure, they're not using guns but they're committed to effectively wiping them out.
Please, please, point us to this in the GOP party official platform documentation.
This is the sort of hyperbole bandied about casually by liberals that so infuriates the right-leaning and empowers Nazi assholes to attract "mostly normal" folks who would otherwise never consider such a thing.
Reading those references... you basically admit inflammatory, hyperbolic, and inaccurate characterization of the GOP? Not a single one targets any ethnic group or minority.
I'm not a GOP supporter, but you are not helping the situation.
Make a reasonable argument with supporting evidence in clear language if you want to change someone's mind. Stop contributing to the bipolar political bullshit in this country.
By your logic one could easily argue that the Dems target minorities for repression as well. They want to keep some minorities in poverty (progressive taxes for higher income) and steal from other minorities (rich people).
I think the growing Nazi movement is a far more serious sign of an unhealthy political culture than some anti-nazi hyperbole on twitter.
I agree we should be careful not to paint with too broad a brush but it's obvious the GOP has a very very real Nazi problem (the man they elected President went on tv yesterday and normalized them). Maybe some of the hyperbole will serve as a wake-up call to the fake centrists who whisper "I'm against Nazis" and shout "the reaction to Nazis is the real problem here".
I believe growing right-wing sentiment is a partial reaction to a PC culture that doesn't allow for any discussion of certain issues.
Oh, you're against illegal immigrants taking lower class jobs? You're a racist.
You don't like the idea of multiculturalism diluting the culture of an area? You're ignorant.
You don't like outsourcing because it's hurting you and your family? You're a bigot that doesn't think of other people.
You believe biological and psychological differences between the sexes may lead to differences in career preferences? You're fired for creating an "unsafe work environment."
All of this is also amplified by the fact that most people outside of big cities have been experiencing a declining quality of life. If moderate people with nuanced opinions that differ from the left don't have an avenue of discussion, they will tend towards extremism since that is the only way they can express their opinions. Combined with a growing sense of anxiety from the declining quality of life, and you get what is happening now.
It's not that you can't discuss issues. It's the extremists who twist issues and promote falsehoods to support their racists ideals that are the issue.
Maybe there will be increased self-censorship, or maybe words like "Nazi" will lose their power as more people stop caring if they're labeled with them.
To me this is not that different from state censorship I experience in Russia.
I would argue that the internet is the primary medium for exercizing one's free speech today. The technological change made printed medium outdated. If you are not on the interent, you will not be heard. If the the government decided to configure the crucial internet infrastructure (domain name resolution) in a way that private companies can censor speech(registrars and verisign), then it's effectively a violation of the first amendment. Because what this ammounts to is government saying that the medium of public protesting or sharing printed material is protected, but the medium of electronic communication is not, because we decided to privatize it. It's like saying you can't protest here because we decided to privatize all the public squares and paved roads, their owners don't want to see you, and the fist amendment does not protect you there, you can protest on a dirt road in the forest(TOR etc) where no one sees you.
I feel very uneasy about these events, because it's a precedent. Censorship of the interent in Russia began with pedophile histeria in the media to justify the laws, and now it's used to censor opposition supporting media.
Considering the changing tastes of upcoming college graduates in the US, in terms of interpretation of what constitues free speech and what doesn't, the political censorship could become intstituionalized in the US through "TOS violations". And through this censorial normalcy could eventually pave way to the end of the current absolutist legal interpretation of the first amendment. Which would be very bad IMO.
> It's like saying you can't protest here because we decided to privatize all the public squares and paved roads, their owners don't want to see you, and the fist amendment does not protect you there, you can protest on a dirt road in the forest(TOR etc) where no one sees you.
This is why I've always been skeptical of the whole 'no one owes you a public platform' thing. Because prior to the internet, they kind of did. Public property meant your protest would likely be visible to a large audience, even though those who may disagree with you or wish you'd go away.
Even in cases that would probably horrify a large percentage of people on social media sites:
> To me this is not that different from state censorship I experience in Russia.
This was not done by the United States government, but by private companies, that do not need to protect free speech. We just went through this with Damore, and the answer is no, companies do not need to respect your free speech.
ACLU position on this is also interesting. They actually fought in court for the permit for the rally.
"The First Amendment is a critical part of our democracy, and it protects vile, hateful, and ignorant speech. For this reason, the ACLU of Virginia defended the white supremacists’ right to march. But we will not be silent in the face of white supremacy. Those who do stand silent enable it. That includes our president."
That's an interesting position. And I understand it. It's not easy. But it exposes the discomfort they have with defending the first amendment.
It's like saying you support the right to an attorney but since someone is a murderer you hope the State Appointed defense attorney is a lackey or they don't appoint any.
John Adams volunteered to represent British soldiers accused of killing civilians[1]. He made some good arguments about fairness. Even if they're guilty of crimes, it's still not fair to abuse them, pile on more charges, or take shortcuts when gathering facts. They also still need to be sentenced fairly.
For example, if the guy who ran over and killed the woman in Charlottesville didn't get fair representation or trial, both sides could rightfully argue "the system is rigged."
This is the fundamental essence of classic liberalism. Specifically, the meta-level things like strongly preferring that the system is working well over all situations rather than getting the correct result in any particular one. Also, avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, which causes more damage than getting things wrong.
It's also the key insight of rule utilitarianism over act utilitarianism.
>I also wondered a long time about why would an attorney defend someone which clearly seems to be a criminal.
Because even the worst criminal deserves his due process rights, a fair trial, etc, etc; this is fundamental to our American society. It is a cornerstone of our judicial system.
Unfortunately, like much of American society, it's a theoretical pipe dream that falls down flat in reality as minorities don't get access to due process, fair trials, etc.
It's because in the US justice system you are considered innocent until proven guilty. "Proof" requires an adversarial test to ensure you're not only getting one side of the story.
Without defense attorneys, nobody could be "proven" guilty because a show trial proves nothing.
If you want someone to be eligible for punishment, you should thus WANT them to be defended.
>But few really oppose the basic predicate of these removals: that private companies can and should be arbiters of permissible speech on their platforms.
I am proud to count myself among those few. Social media is the modern public square and must be treated as such.
You're interpreting the first amendment as "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech on the speakers chosen platform." I rather like the idea that the New Yorker rejecting my work could be considered a violation of my rights.
Why is this canard such a common response in discussions like these?
The only explanation I've come up with so far is that the people saying stuff like this are profoundly stupid, and I really hate it when my only explanation of a POV is that facile and self-serving. I don't mean to pick on you in particular but I'm hoping you can explain this to me and try to steelman this common refrain.
Free speech as a concept (or a spectrum) exists independently of its codification in our Constitution. It's not something the founders accidentally wrote down and now we're stuck with it: they did it for a reason that some people (myself and the parent comment included) find compelling in contexts other than simply "when the Constitution forces us to".
It's fine to disagree with its relevance to specific contexts, but what on earth compels you to think that "The Constitution doesn't force us to!" is a remotely relevant response to "I think free speech is a good idea in this context"?
> Free speech as a concept (or a spectrum) exists independently of its codification in our Constitution. It's not something the founders accidentally wrote down and now we're stuck with it: they did it for a reason that some people (myself and the parent comment included) find compelling in contexts other than simply "when the Constitution forces us to".
Yes, but the reason was intimately connected to their view of the role of government and the liberty people should have with respect to the application of their own voice and property. Restraining that liberty to compel those who own mechanisms of communication to be neutral rather than applying their own discretion is in tension with that ideal.
There's certainly a case for such compulsion as part of the regulation of monopoly providers without meaningful substitute as a communication mechanism, and there is certainly cause for some focussed regulation for public accommodations in general, in any field. But those are exceptional cases.
> Restraining that liberty to compel those who own mechanisms of communication to be neutral rather than applying their own discretion is in tension with that ideal.
I didn't interpret the comment in question as claiming that the government should be compelling open speech. He disagreed with the quote "private platforms can and should be arbiters of permissible speech". I too vehemently disagree with this idea, but that doesn't mean I believe that the govt should enforce their neutrality.
I agree that the bar for govt action compelling speech is very high and don't think that this meets it. I just consider it an ethical imperative for Facebook et al to reject the idea that they should be an arbiter of permissible speech.
Free speech as a concept (or a spectrum) exists independently of its codification in our Constitution.
Free speech exists as a concept, but protected free speech doesn't. You can't have protected free speech without the laws that protect it. The point I made slightly flippantly is about the extent of the protection. Most people interpret the law as protecting the right to speak, not the right to speak on a specific platform.
As with all things this is best explained with an XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/1357/
If we didn't have laws against murder, would murder not still be wrong?
Just because the government is prevented from creating laws that infringe on free speech, that doesn't mean that individual infringement on free speech is morally permissible.
The problem is you are casting individual exercise of free speech by delining to amplify speech they don't approve of as “infringement on free speech”.
Free speech certainly includes the right to try to convince people to amplify your speech. It generally does not include an entitlement to have them do it for you without you having to convince them.
You've entirely missed my point: sorry if I was unclear.
> You can't have protected free speech without the laws that protect it.
The claim the parent comment was rebutting was "private platforms can and should be arbiters of permissible speech". It's entirely consistent to think that (eg) Facebook shouldn't pick and choose what you're allowed to say on its platform, without thinking that the government should enforce their neutrality. Again... You may disagree, but that claim need not have anything to do with government.
Part of the confusion here may be that you're interpreting his comment as requiring the government to enforce said neutrality, and I'm not: specifically because the statement being argued against includes the notion that Facebook should be an arbiter of acceptable speech.
And fwiw, I think the xkcd comic is as stupid as the parent comment who posted it does.
No he is not interpretation any admentment. He is saying that he has political believes (which I happen to share) that is not yet inscribed in the constitution, but that good people should act as if they were.
Free speech excist as a concept outside the constitution and did not come into existence magically from nothing when the admentement was ratified.
But free speech as an ideal is made to protect people from the unique threat posed by state censorship. This may have applications to platforms with influence as widespread as Google or Facebook, but it certainly doesn't apply to most other private entities. Absent such an overwhelming imbalance in power, what most people consider "censorship" is more often than not just counter-speech and holding people accountable for their words and actions.
When the constitution was drafted, there were no companies like facebook or google. The state was the largest and most powerful entity. The first amendment is a product of its times, if it was drafted today it would be different to reflect the massive power that corporations hold over people.
But there's an important issue we're over looking. Should a social media platform/company be required to carry content that promotes illegal activities? Should Twitter be required to allow pedophiles to promote their cause? And social media is not a public institution. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are private companies owned by individuals. They're free to do what they want with their company and your free to go start your own site or company. It's property rights. You're free to put a sign promoting your ideals in your yard but I'm not required to allow you to put it in my yard.
Sigh. We went through this 70 years ago with literal nazis, are we going to have to live through it again, this time from the far left? Didn't they learn this poem in school?
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
To be clear, I don't agree with what nazi's say, but like voltaire I support their right to be able to say it.
I do not support the Nazi's right to say what they want. Nazism resulted in the murder of 30 million people. It engulfed much of the Western world in a war that ravaged nations and killed millions. It calls for ethnic cleansing and racial oppression. It is literally the opposite of the liberal democracy the United States is based on. It runs counter to the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and it does not promote freedom, equality, and justice for all. Much of the same can be lodged against the people who support the Confederacy.
I'm for dissent and speaking out. I do think, however, there is speech, which while is not libel and slander, crosses a line that should not be tolerated in a free and just society. Slippery slopes, intolerance, etc. A good litmus test is to ask if your speech calls for the killing or enslavement of those who are different than you. Considering we waged 2 wars over Nazism and the Confederacy, I'd say those ideas fall into that category.
I think you (and that article) completely missed the point behind the idea of free speech.
The fundamental idea behind speech is that it is a reflection of our mind and our reasoning. It is NOT the same thing as the actual 'reason' in our mind. By restricting speech, you do not 'change' anything of real significance.
If you force a man to only look in a mirror which shows a distorted view of his body, then not only he will be unable to do anything about his body, whenever he would want to do something about his body, he would go in the wrong direction.
When someone says 'gas all kikes', it isn't that by him not expressing that thought, you have permanently altered his reasoning. He is expressing that idea (assuming he meant it seriously, and not in 4chany way), out of the feeling of hatred and anger in his mind.
Similarly, when someone hears 'gas all kikes', and he thinks 'damn right', it isn't that without him hearing that vile statement from the first person, somehow the feelings in his mind won't really arise.
Now what about a more reasoned structured argument made by the first person, instead of just some call, for instance systematically blaming a certain group of people, and presenting 'proof'?
Again, if the speech is free, then it can be tackled down by other good people, explaining things. To every 'Mein Kampf', you can write 'Your Lies', or something else to appeal to anyone who wants to 'truly' believe in anything.
Finally, irrespective of what you may think, it is not possible to successfully curb speech, if someone writes a hateful book, it is spread in the underground circles, credited to anonymous groups. And when people receive that literature, the first question they ask is "hmm.. I wonder why some people are so insistent about not wanting anyone to read this? I wonder what evidence of wrongdoing is listed in this book against the other group. I wonder if what this book says is right, because otherwise the rulers wouldn't be so interested in preventing others from reading this". And I have first hand experience of this.
If by banning intolerant you can make people tolerant, if by forcing them to interact with others, you can make them like others, if by banning certain kinds of speech, you can change people's minds, then go for it. But since I know that's not possible, I am against restrictions on any kind of speech.
I'll have to disagree with your assessment. The reason we have freedom of speech in the United States is to prevent the government from silencing critics. The Founder's most definitely did not have the Nazi. Much of your argument resembles the same one used by critics of gun control, which is essentially that banning guns won't stop criminals from getting guns. I understand the sentiment, but I also think a society needs to draw lines around what it will tolerate and what it won't. Nazism and the Confederacy were harmful mindsets that killed people and tore apart nations. The only way to kill it is by education, but that doesn't mean we should let it fester.
So I take you to mean you supported Hollywood's blacklisting of suspected Communists? And would support outlawing allowing Noam Chomsky from speaking publicly in the United States? After all, Communism is responsible for more dead people than Nazism...
No, its directly on the nose. Either your argument that its different because "Nazism resulted in the murder of 30 million people" is valid or not. Your predicate is what is at question and therefore not whataboutism.
K, fine, we'll play the whataboutism game. Chomsky is not a communist, he's more a socialist, and he has, in fact, spoken out against the Soviet Union and Soviet communism. Since he's not advocating for racial and ethnic cleansing and oppression, he's not quite the same as the neo-Nazis.
Notice you ignore the blacklist, which is the more relevant point.
As far as Chomsky goes, this is actually a great illustration of the problem. I think he's a Communist, you disagree. Well guess what- a lot of the 'protestors' in Charlottesville were white Nationalists with Nazi overtones, some were hardcore Nazis, some were dabbling alt-righters. So who decides which or any of them gets to protest/speak? You, me, the government, Google?
Its not just a slippery slope, its an avalanche of stupidity to try to do viewpoint censorship.
That poem is indeed literally about the Nazis, but it's a warning about any extremist group that gains power by attacking other extremists, wherever they fall on the political spectrum.
The first line, "First they came for the Socialists", is about communists, another despised group who certain politicians in America have targeted to their profit and our lasting shame.
The remaining lines are about other groups the Nazis attacked by associating them with communists, in the same way Hollywood was once associated with communists in America.
In our hatred for Nazis, let's not forget our basic values the way we once did when McCarthy waved communists in front of us like a matador.
> it's a warning about any extremist group that gains power by attacking other extremists
I believe you may have misinterpreted the poem. It's not about preventing "attacks" towards other extremists, it's about _suppressing_ them. It's one thing to argue with someone, fight with them, make your disagreements known, and whatever. That advances the conversation. It's a completely different issue to silence and suppress your enemies. That leads to authoritarianism, whether from the left or the right.
In my opinion, it is right of the majority to make their disdain towards the Nazis known. It is right of them to denounce their behavior. I personally don't feel it's right to suppress their ability to express their views, however.
I have a problem with people who focus on the worst. Advancing the conversation isn't possible when "the conversation" is each side claiming the other is represented by the worst people imaginable.
It's the same thing as claiming BLM is represented by cop killers, or Islam is represented by ISIS.
>To be clear, I don't agree with what nazi's say, but like voltaire I support their right to be able to say it.
So, as long as we're talking about Charlottesville, you support their right to say it outside synagogues and black churches, without a municipal demonstration permit, while dressed in fatigues and pointing guns at the building?
I've been really uncomfortable with this whole thing. I get why offensive people get booted out of communities and social networks, but I don't feel like infrastructure/platform providers should be in the business of content moderation.
From what I read, it was suggested that it would be hard to even figure out what The Daily Stormer could've done 'wrong' according to Google Domains' Terms of Service.
Please don’t downvote ocdtrekkie just because you disagree with him/her… that’s what replies are for. Downvote comments that don’t add to the conversation.
I’m here to say I am uncomfortable with e.g. GoDaddy censoring their users, too. I’m uncomfortable either way.
Because I remember when another web host, BlueHost, which happens to be owned by Mormons, decided that it could not in good conscience host (non-pornographic) websites for lesbians, and deleted their accounts without warning.
I’m not trying to make a false equivalency, but… should your web host decide whether they approve of your speech? No.
OTOH, should companies profit off hate speech or Nazism? No!
It's also worth noting that “hate speech” is hard to define! SPLC is the best-known authority here and they have absolutely fucked up and mis-categorized non-hateful religious criticism as “hate speech”. Would you like to see GoDaddy start deleting ex-Muslim bloggers on “hate speech” grounds?
Edit 100% not to detract from anything said previously, but it’s valid to say that the line exists at “direct incitement of violence”
> OTOH, should companies profit off hate speech or Nazism? No!
I really hate this point. I was (am) a "webhost" and also happen to be a staunch free speech advocate. My rule when I owned my own company was if I didn't have a court order and the content wasn't blatantly obviously illegal (e.g. child porn or outright specific calls for actionable violence) you stayed on-line and I would vehemently defend that right for you. As expected, as you gain such a reputation you tend to draw some really shitty people.
I will tell you that the "problem" customers cost far more than they ever made, and it wasn't even close. These were customers I truly despised, but I would actually be subsidizing their platforms due to those opposed (e.g. ddos attacks, constant support phone calls harassing my staff, fishing expedition warrants that needed to be fought, etc. etc.) intentionally costing me money in an attempt to shut down their speech. I found those actions more contemptible than the content they were opposed to - and much of it truly was vile.
This is not a profitable segment of the industry to be in, but I still feel it's an extremely important line to never cross and am saddened by the state of telecommunications as a neutral platform/common carrier today. We've lost so much in less than a generation.
And there are quite a few quasi-political quasi-religious groups in the US that people outside the groups would consider hateful. Some Baptist, some Islamic, etc. Do we shut those people down?
I'm afraid this can go the way of PC speech. First it's really odious stuff, then it's can't say controversial things that might trigger others.
The problem is that these kinds of content based bans/service boots/kicks/what have you are all based on human emotion and responses to the given content. It's easy to create a policy to address something like file-sharing, for example; it's a website distributing content it doesn't have the rights to distribute. So take that down, easy.
Next we have a website promoting porn. Well, some people have objections to porn, in fact quite a lot do, but a lot also don't. So we'll be alright with that, just make sure kids don't look at it.
But then you find a rape video on the porn site. Well that's obviously illegal, clearly this is footage of a heinous crime. Delete it!
Well wait, no it turns out that actress was paid and signed a document saying she was participating of her own free will. I guess that's fine then, even though it would be offensive to many there really isn't anything wrong with it.
But then you find out that the video was scraped from another website's paid section...
And on and on it goes. There are infinite different directions this sort of thing can go, where content that's offensive and horrible can still technically be perfectly fine to host. Ultimately this is the sort of thing that's going to be incredibly hard to get machines to figure out properly, mostly because in our century-ish of "rating" media for audiences and appropriateness, we still haven't even figured it out ourselves. And that phrasing implies there's one given moral set, which is also of course not true; even what passes as "safe for TV" between Europe and the USA is quite a large gap.
Ultimately I think this is something that needs to be handled on a case by case basis by the individual hosts. I refuse to believe the Daily Stormer and disgusting websites like it will have a hard time finding someone willing to host their content. There are plenty of hosts that look the other way, and failing that sort of thing, you can always build your own server too.
Sadly that's the downside to the democratization of the Internet.
In reality Twitter isn't really doing anything noticeable. You can gauge that by the amount of blue checkmark people that post death threats, incitement and doxes daily.
Welp, then GoDaddy or Google should email the Daily Stormer to take down the posts they disagree with. What I am trying to say is that it is ridiculous for a domain provider to make editorial suggestions.
Just shows how far their tolerance for free speech goes as soon as pressure builds up.
It's in Twitter's best interest not to do this as it drives up all metrics they care about. They may have a fig leaf of diversity but they have also made it very clear they see themselves as an unopinionated platform and don't remove content just because it's upsetting.
They only jump into action when not doing so creates enough negative feedback to potentially harm them.
>From what I read, it was suggested that it would be hard to even figure out what The Daily Stormer could've done 'wrong' according to Google Domains' Terms of Service.
The Daily Stormer is a very small customer that probably only pays google $5 per year, but brings negative media attention that'll cost significantly more than $5 per year.
It's obvious what they're doing wrong, they're not paying Google enough money for it to be worth keeping them as a client.
If you're costing a business money you really can't expect to remain their customer for long.
Disturbingly, you would seem to be saying that any registrar business should cut off any customer that causes them any problems whatsoever. What if I’m hosting a pro-LGBT blog for Russians and the Russian government starts filing complaints with my registrar? Your argument is that this is a fine time for me to be cut adrift.
It's an unfortunate reality, but luckily there are providers who specialize in ensuring delivery even for such troublesome content.
Fact is that if you're getting a bunch of complaints (or, really any at all) you're a very special kind of a customer who needs a specialist service provider.
Check out https://njal.la for example, they charge a bit more but they won't shut you down right away.
But if you don't set a precedent for removing "troublesome content" they won't bother to attack it. Once a precedent is set that you can get websites removed from the internet by pestering the registrars, lots of people will come out of the woodwork to try that.
>Once a precedent is set that you can get websites removed from the internet by pestering the registrars, lots of people will come out of the woodwork to try that.
Uh, this precedent has been set a very long time ago. People have been doing this for ages, I've seen multiple IRC networks have to change their domains because of false abuse reports sent to their registrars.
I've personally had several domains taken down by registrars because of utterly ridiculous legal threats.
I mean, practically speaking, yeah, that's probably what would happen if your registrar cares about the Russian government's opinion of it. Most businesses will cut off "problem" clients.
I don't think GP is making a moral judgment there, that's just a practical description of what often happens.
The Daily Stormer read like a parody of the alt-right. But, unlike ISIS videos, it had zero persuasion power. https://web.archive.org/web/20170813051230/http://dailystorm... If anything, it was a testament to what's wrong with the movement. Leave the website up, for everyone to disprove and make fun of.
It's not persuasive to you (and me). But look at how many people are staunch, almost religious, defenders of ridiculous alternative facts. A lot of people believe what they want to believe and will only look for evidence that supports their believes.
You might want to enclose a term such as 'alternative facts' in quote marks; without them you legitimize the concept. The use of the adverb 'ridiculous' and the gist of your comment imply that you do not subscribe to the notion of 'alternative facts' yourself.
I wonder when this "lawfare" (really more like TOSfare) on registrars, hosting providers, CDNs, payment processors, and fundraising sites (like patreon) will escalate into the use of censorship-resistant/distributed alternatives (like bitcoin, or onion services or whatever) among people with extremist political views (of any flavour).
Well this is an interesting situation. I don't mind reading absurdly offensive things that I disagree with, so I went looking for what happened to them. Seems they were rejected a total of 3 times for registrars for their .com domain, and were briefly online via a .wang domain which they claimed to have discovered was superior, but has since been shut down also. They are currently online via a Tor hidden site, and they still seem to have a Twitter feed, for now. They claim to be actively searching for a new .com registrar. They also seem to have been dropped by several other cloud services, including Zoho, Sendgrid, and Discourse.
Obligatory disclaimer - open Nazi-ism, every bit as offensive as you think it is. Browse at your own risk to your sanity and browser history. Thought about posting the Tor link, but honestly, you can find it with a couple of Google searches.
As someone else here said, I'm not so sure that defending the right of Nazis to speak and publish websites is the hill to die on here. But this does raise the question of who they will go after next. Exactly how offensive or outside of the mainstream do you have to be to get 90% of registrars and cloud services to terminate your services?
It does tickle me slightly to see people with generally progressive sentiments become flaming supporters of private property and free enterprise over the issue of objectionable political content, smugly pointing out that free speech doesn't apply to businesses and more likely than not linking to that stupid xkcd comic--as though the debate being held over "free speech" were strictly a legal one.
I don't know. Defending Nazis isn't the hill I'm going to die on, but I'm very wary of the "let woke tech corporations root out hate" approach. ToS violations are very malleable things and can be leveraged against other controversial viewpoints as well. There's a communist youtuber who has had his material taken down multiple times for making a silly song about the shooting of Tsar Nicholas II. Making light of a 100 year-old regicide is hate speech in Google's eyes. Reddit has likewise targeted very neutral and scholarly attempts to document jihadist media. Free speech is not compatible with free markets.
I wonder why you got voted down. I'd rather see a counter-argument to this than a greying of it.
Of course, the burden of justifying cutting out speech falls on those with the power and ability to do it. Today we all agree that white supremacy is evil and so on.
But in the 1950s half of America didn't mind that the other half had fingers pointing at them that they were communists. Jobs were lost, reputations sullied, jailtime given. It felt really righteous at the time, because, it was said, the communists were traitors and even potentially spies. A police state was established, perhaps not as severe as that of Soviet Russia or East Germany, but a surveillance state nonetheless.
During World War I we passed the Sedition Act, which made it a jailable, criminal offense to oppose World War I.
Go ahead, let's pile it on the white supremacists. But what happens when the same forces come for you? The same precedent: to protect the public, your views will have to go underground.
I speak as someone who is for all intents and purposes anti-fascist. However, I also speak as someone who recognizes that technology can make a far more repressive dystopia of limited ideas than Fascism of the 1930s was able to achieve.
I wish people had a better reading of history before they beat their chests with this shut down of hate speech.
You didn't reply to the item you used the Reply button on, and went on a tangent, but I'll continue anyway. First of all there's no legal backing, and no philosophical backing to your claims below or your analogy. It all sounds like political rhetoric with a few weasel words thrown in ("everybody knows"?). But let's move forward:
It's because everybody knows that this has nothing to do with free speech.
I believe this is called the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy. It's also a tautology, "everybody knows" plus <insert my premise here>. If everybody knew that, we wouldn't be here.
Let's say two people are in a chat room, Alice and Bob. Bob has decided that Western civilization is collapsing and so to do his part to defend it he spends several hours a day constantly spouting hatred against women and minorities. Alice doesn't agree and, quickly realizing that Bob can't be reasoned with, she leaves the chatroom.
Hasn't Alice's "free speech" been violated?
No, Alice's free speech hasn't been violated, because, "free speech" isn't the freedom to "not hear" something. And a chat room isn't a strong analogy to a public square, but let's continue: Alice left the chat room, so I don't see what the problem is. You can argue that she was harassed, which is not covered by free speech, but a chat room with a political discussion going on (like this one) where parties are all willingly partaking would be difficult to constitute harassment. Additionally, Bob has every right to spout hatred against women and minorities, it's covered speech. In the United States -we are discussing the U.S. here, right?- at least. What's not covered is an imminent threat to women and minorities (Brandenburg v. Ohio). I'll elaborate below.
And isn't this exactly the plan of the alt-right? To create an environment of such extreme fear and hate that eventually everybody shuts up but them? It sure worked for their heroes the Nazis. And for some reason I don't think all these rallies are just a way to get more Vitamin D.
Tepe, this is a discussion of philosophy, it's a question of what laws we should and shouldn't have as well as how to apply the current laws and circumstances to the Constitution, so I say, what the "plan" of the alt-right here is has nothing to do with questions of fairness of permitted and non-permitted political speech. If I want to clamp down on your ability to express your unpopular opinion, I have to try harder than to suggest what your hidden or not-hidden intent is when you are stating it.
And see, this is exactly the point where all of Bob's (male) defenders will rush in and declare that Alice doesn't have the right to feel safe, that she needs to toughen up and that, at the end of the day, fuck her feelings because Bob's free speech is sacred even if that means her speech goes away.
It's not "fuck her feelings", it's very specifically: _If we clamp down on unpopular opinions in 2017 that I happen to dislike, what happens in 2027 when they clamp down on other unpopular opinions that I might have_? And _who is the arbiter of what is speech that causes people to feel safe versus speech that doesn't_? What happens when the shoe drops off the other foot, and political opponents now switch the definitions of safety and so forth?
And no, Alice in your example has no "right" to feel safe. What does that even mean? How do we quantify feelings? Don't we all have varying sensitivities? I could go on. But legally, no, no such right.
This is what the brave defenders of free speech really want to accomplish: an environment where they can say the most vile things possible without consequence such that everybody else shuts up.
That sounds like many people's desired accomplishments, to get their political opponents to shut up, including yourself apparently; but this is outside the scope of a discussion about freedom of speech; something is either permitted speech or it isn't, period, there's no "what they really want here" arguments permitted (in a legal or philosophical context anyway).
And here's the thing for somebody claiming to have read history: the founders of the American republic knew this very well. This is why they weren't concerned about "free speech" as the bad faith position described above, they were actually much more concerned with freedom of the press and this is what all of them spent their time writing letters about.
Anyways I could go on but let's be clear: we all know what the heroic defenders of free speech are really trying to accomplish. The "free speech" is just another bad faith distraction. Once that doesn't work they'll go back to blaming everything on the Jews.
No way. First of all, Founders Intent is a debate topic and it's been debated by the Supreme Court for two centuries. Your "protecting journalists" idea probably stems from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan ? Where malice has to be established? If not that, then where is your source?
To sum up this entire discussion, Brandenburg v. Ohio establishes that speech is protected unless there's an imminent thread being made. End of.
> > It's because everybody knows that this has nothing to do with free speech.
> I believe this is called the "Appeal to Authority" fallacy.
Appeal to popularity; different fallacy.
> It's also a tautology, "everybody knows" plus <insert my premise here>. If everybody knew that, we wouldn't be here
A tautology is something true by definition. You seem to be suggesting, however, that the statement is false, and refuted by the existence of the debate on which it is offered. That's not a tautalogy, even were it true, and also, in this specific case, flawed logic of it's own, since it is possible for a dishonest debater to knowingly use a false premise, so the claim that everyone knows that this is not about free speech is not disproven by the existence of a debate in which some claim it is about free speech.
The issue seems to be that people are conflating free speech with discrimination.
Legally speaking, businesses and people are free to discriminate against anyone that isn't part of a protected class[1], but many fail to understand that and assume it's some sort of slippery slope.
I argue that the progressives you mention have no issues with business discriminating against certain groups, provided they don't do it against protected classes. Objectionable political content, like inciting vololence or discrimination against certain groups based on their race has already been ruled by society as not ok. Hence why they're a protected class.
Certain groups such as LGBT are in need of further clarification as a protected class by the courts, as there are conflicting interpretations depending on jurisdiction. This is why the Colorado baker case is so important [2].
> smugly pointing out that free speech doesn't apply to businesses
Unless it is about wedding cakes, and then the business has no right to self-determine what they can or cannot put on the cake. I have a hard time understanding how a bakery is a public accommodation, but an internet registrar isn't.
I don't think the difference there is bakery v registrar, but protected classes v arbitrary groups. It's like at-will employment: you can be fired for any reason except these specific protected reasons (retaliation, age, race, pregnancy, etc).
A Gay couple isn't a protected class under under federal law, there are 7 protected classes based on: race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status.
As you notice "gender" or lack there off and sexual orientation are not defined as protected classes.
Indeed, it also is more complicated than that since protected classes in the US (on a federal level) are defined by multiple laws and their protection status is not universal across all cases.
You may argue that familial/marital status is a protected class in the case of the gay wedding cake, the problem is that AFIAK (IANAL) applies to housing opportunities only.
You can argue in court that familial status extends beyond married/divorced/single/widowed but also to the type of marriage and then argue that the protection under title VIII of the Fair Housing Act sets a precedence for familial status being a universal protected class(this has been done for other protected classes in the past also).
But in either case this is a matter for the courts, until there is a ruling not wanting to serve a gay couple isn't a crime just "abhorrent but legal".
As a liberal I would much rather see the free market take over, and before people say well a free market didn't help to combat the discrimination against African Americans it wasn't the lack of a free market but regulation where you had local laws that demanded a 7 ft barrier between black and white areas in a restaurant and many other abhorrent local laws.
A bakery that wouldn't want to serve gay customers will be at a disadvantage in a truly free market as they lose business from people that they do not wish to serve and people who think that behavior is abhorrent.
I would also like to point out that on some level if I were in there place I wouldn't want to get a cake from a place that didn't want to make one but was forced to do so.
A wedding is an important event, a wedding cake as silly as it might sound is a big part of the tradition, I would much rather take my business somewhere else than have someone who doesn't want to make a cake to be compelled to make one.
It tickles me in exactly the same way to see people with generally conservative sentiments becoming flaming supporters of free speech and denouncing censorship over the issue of a non-governmental business making a business decision.
What happened to Bat'ko (if this is the Communist you talk about) on Youtube isn't good. But I think there is a clear difference in what he was saying compared to, for example, The Daily Stormer.
But it's possible on a matter of principle to be against Nazi speech and applaud when it is removed. Being the victim of suppression of speech designed to liberate people (Socialism) does not mean that you must also be against the suppression of speech designed to advocate genocide and racism (Nazism).
Yes, that's who I'm talking about. And you're absolutely right about the difference between the two.
And believe me, I'm shedding no tears for the Stormer. If it never comes back we're all better off for it. I'm just unsettled by market-based countermeasures against "extremism" and the way some people seem to be cheering it on. In the case of Nazis it's not so controversial, but what if sites/accounts associated with Hezbollah or the PKK were targeted under the same terms? These are US-designated terror groups but there are plenty of people who see them as positive forces in their respective regions. Not to mention those who might have an unbiased scholarly interest in them.
EDIT @ ue_/etplayer below me:
Looks like people also can't directly reply to you lol. I agree with 100% of what you wrote.
I agree then; but it's partly out of the fact that we're using centralised technology to share ideas. It's right to be concerned when the discourse is controlled by a small number of peoeple who act out of the desire for profit, which is what's happening here. The quicker we can dispense of the idea that the "popular" Internet offers a "free market of ideas", the quicker we'll see people losing trust in the controllers of the "popular" Internet, from Youtube to domain registrars.
Reddit and HN don't help either; they propagate this idea that if your comment is with a negative score (disapproved of by two or more people), it's not worth listening to. They do this by taking measures to obscure your comment, such as making it hard to read (on HN) or hiding it below a button (on Reddit). The idea that an idea is only worth listening to because of its popularity is only less pernicious to the idea that an idea is only worth listening to if it brings the messenger profit.
Truth is being commodified.
(I'm the person you replied to but this is my alternate account, because the HN moderators have put a flag on my account since many months ago which stops me from commenting too quickly; it activates if I comment more than 3 or 4 times within half an hour, and then stops me from posting more than twice every two hours. How ironic.)
Going by the No Platform argument mentioned a lot in this thread, or by the right to choose how to do business, people should be putting pressure on Amazon to stop selling it.
As backwards and ignorant as I think no-platformers are, this isn't really a good example. There's at least a micron of self-awareness among people who support no platforming, and there are generally exceptions for things of historical significance.
EDIT: I see that you've been down voted and I just want to make it clear that I didn't do that: I appreciate your polite question, especially in response to my insultingly phrased initial statement.
Ha, it was pretty late when I wrote that; the language is probably a little harsher than I would use right now.
I'm pretty deeply concerned by how rapidly my social and political circles have decided that the foundations of post-Enlightenment peaceful pluralistic society should be discarded in favor of short-term political wins.
Concepts like a free marketplace of ideas are pretty remarkable social technologies; spend five minutes reading the history of literally anywhere at literally any time and compare it to the functioning of a liberal society, and it should be obvious how valuable these norms are. For some reason, people now assume that peaceful, orderly transfers of power are somehow natural in human societies and don't take the sometimes-difficult work of adhering to these norms. It's a hugely childish, short-sighted approach to the world to throw away one of mankind's greatest achievements because you can't be bothered to understand why they're there.
Concepts like the marketplace of ideas don't have exceptions like "except for people who are wrong", because that presupposes the ability to judge your opponents' views as wrong (spoiler: everyone thinks their ideological opponents are wrong. that's what the word opponent means). This isn't a simplistically universal rule, as exceptions for things like directly advocating violence are generally accepted as part of the principle. But the minute you start stretching that to "but their views are _basically_ the same thing as advocating violence because [insert personal interpretation]", you're only pretending to be tolerant and you've opened the door for anybody to decide that anything is violence, as long as they can provide their own twisted interpretation of your views.
It's not fun to defend the right of people to march with Nazi flags, but there's no way to avoid doing so without eroding the norms that protect far more important views. It's a sick joke that the most regressive among us these days are the ones who pretend to care for the marginalized: history tells us exactly who the burden of suppressed speech falls on in the long run (hint: it's not those with power and influence).
>peaceful pluralistic society should be discarded in favor of short-term political wins.
I don't think that's a fair characterisation given the post-WWII attempt to truly be discarded of these pernicious racist ideas which some try to suppress today. I don't think that it's enough to stick with such post-Enlightenment ideas if it means defending the right for people who advocate genocide to speak.
>Concepts like a free marketplace of ideas are pretty remarkable social technologies
They would be if they truly existed, but they exist only in the mind of their proponents and almost nobody else. It's sort of funny how even when we talk about ideas we're relating them to markets, a sign, to me, that ideas are these kind of things that you buy and sell and trade, like figurative commodities.
>people now assume that peaceful, orderly transfers of power are somehow natural in human societies and don't take the sometimes-difficult work of adhering to these norms
I don't know why people assume that. Capitalism came into this world 'head to toe in blood' as Marx put it, for example.
>throw away one of mankind's greatest achievements because you can't be bothered to understand why they're there.
If you're referring to empowering Nazis to say what they want as being one of man's greatest achievements, I don't agree.
>presupposes the ability to judge your opponents' views as wrong
I have no qualms about saying that the view of genocide of innocent people beacuse of their skin colour, religious heritage or opinions is wrong, just as I am fine saying that the view of FGM is wrong, or the view of child rape is wrong.
>but there's no way to avoid doing so without eroding the norms that protect far more important views.
I disagree, for me important views almost wholly contain the pursuit of justice and the elimination of unjust hierarchy - something which can be pursued without letting Nazis have their say.
>It's a sick joke that the most regressive among us these days are the ones who pretend to care for the marginalized
I disagree; refusing to tolerate regressive views is exactly what makes such people progressive, in realising the futility and backwardness of certain views.
I find it quite funny the little play here; Nazis say they want to kill people. Liberals reply with "I don't like that, but I'll defend to your death the right to say it". The Left says "These things shoudn't be said." and suddenly it's the Left who are regressive. The people who say this may also believe the Jews could have been saved had they only debated the Nazis. Holocaust survivors tell a different story.
>you're only pretending to be tolerant
There's a wonderful essay about 'tolerance' by Marcuse, it's very biased. Its core thesis is that we should be intolerant of those views on the right. And I think that it makes the convincing case of permitting tolerance of Left struggles and not permitting Right struggles - because of the character of the struggle, the character must be subversive, for in tolerance then even subversive character must be tolerated. This subversive character has prevailed where there was before no tolerance for it, and indeed it should prevail, if history is to go by, where there is tolerance for it. I have four quotes from it listed below, if you will bear with me, though the essay makes sense in whole, here: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetole...
>The liberating force of democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work--of the human existence in general. The toleration of free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly.
>Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.
>Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.
>However, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process [in the US] is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy. Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance.
This is a pretty long response, so my apologies that I'm not addressing every part of it: I used to do that in Internet conversations but it gets untenably long pretty rapidly.
> I don't think that it's enough to stick with such post-Enlightenment ideas if it means defending the right for people who advocate genocide to speak.
As I mentioned, I'm comfortable with drawing the line at calls to violence, and the Daily Stormer's "gas all kikes" certainly qualified on its face. Do you also feel the same way about "kill all men", "kill all whites", "die cis scum", etc? Do you think that all domain registrars should be blacklisting Twitter, which condones far higher volumes of sentiments that are exactly as violent, and hide behind the same exact justification of unserious provocation? If you do, then you're to be commended for your intellectual integrity, but know that you stand more or less alone in your consistency. If, like everyone else calling for legal speech to be no-platformed, you have an unprincipled exception for those whose politics are more aligned with yours, then pretending that you firmly stand against "calls to genocide" even when the callers claim they're joking is just a fig leaf for shutting down speech that you dislike.
> They would be if they truly existed, but they exist only in the mind of their proponents and almost nobody else.
Did you just assert that the concept of an open marketplace of ideas can't exist, without bothering to justify this extraordinary claim? What a bizarrely fart-in-the-elevator approach to discourse. The fact that a pure, ideal free marketplace of ideas doesn't exist couldn't be less relevant to the concept that we should aim towards it anyway.
> I disagree, for me important views almost wholly contain the pursuit of justice and the elimination of unjust hierarchy - something which can be pursued without letting Nazis have their say.
And this is exactly my point. People pretending to be high-minded and just, but the minute you poke at their philosophy, it comes down to the arrogance of assuming that their worldview is so much more correct than everyone else's that they don't even need to hear anyone else. As I said, literally everyone in history thought they were the good guys, and it was only until we figured out techniques for coexistence between differing ideas of goodness that we stopped murdering each other every time a new POV gained political power.
Marcuse is falling prey to exactly the same thing I'm describing above (and was frankly kind of an idiot). The medieval Catholic Church, any number of Islamic terrorist orgs, Stalinism, the Nazis: all of them had high-minded descriptions of why those who didn't share in their ideology weren't worthy of the privilege of expressing their ideas openly. Given that they assumed their values were just as correct as you assume you are, their explanations were just as compelling.
There's a reason the European wars of religion were among the bloodiest in history: when your opponent isn't even present inside the personal moral framework you're too blind to see outside of, they're unpersons that you can do whatever you want to. Just because you can't see out of your tiny, narrow view of world doesn't mean that everyone else is similarly blind: more people like you terrify me a hell of a lot more than neo-Nazis currently do. People aren't born neo-Nazis, and marginalizing everyone to the right of you as not part of civilization is only going to swell their ranks.
Would you please stop using HN for ideological flamewar? It's not what this site is for and it damages what it is for. (What it is for: gratification of intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
After reading this entire thread, I am amazed at the mental gymnastics elicited to defend the silencing of a group or person with distasteful views... I fear for out country.
Reposting pieces of a comment I made yesterday: Defending freedom necessarily requires defending undesirables. Because undesirables are the people who benefit most from freedom.
Think of the history of freedom enabling technologies. Copyright violators are the first people to adopt torrents. Pedophiles are the first people to adopt tor. Hackers and drug dealers are the biggest adopters of bitcoin. Undesirable extremists are going to be the group to benefit the most from the open web. Defending any of these things requires defending their undesirable users.
Sure, it starts with the most extreme, least defensible things. Like stormfront. But you really think it will stop there? Where will the line get drawn?
What happens when the next red scare happens? Politics is like a pendulum - it goes back and forth. Just a generation ago Communism was the persecuted ideology. People on the far left were blacklisted, silenced, and discriminated against. Was that ok with you? You want it to be 10x worse next time, by establishing a culture with no tolerance of differing opinions? Because that is where we are heading.
Not when the explicitly stated goal of those undesirables is the removal of freedoms (and in some cases, life) from a larger group. Then defending freedom means defending the larger group.
Yes and you can say the same thing about communists or whatever political ideology you don't like. "They want to take our freedoms!" is a popular expression in every political ideology.
There is nothing in the first amendment about losing the right to free speech if you don't support freedom yourself. Monarchism was a serious threat at the time, but the founders didn't remove the rights of monarchists.
A registrar or caching provider withdrawing service to a customer is essentially sending a message, and from that perspective the action should be covered by free speech. So I would argue that yes, if GoDaddy or Cloudflare were offended by Breitbart, they should be able to cut them off.
Note that in this case, the provider would not be infringing on the customer's free speech, because there are myriad other providers they can use.
If they were "sending a message" to a BLM or an LGBT group would you still support their rights to do so?
If the internet existed in the 1950's and the apparent (at least as a public face goes) vox populi would favor and crave for both self and institutionalized censorship as much as they do now the civil rights movement would've been dead in it's tracks.
It seems that people are busy yelling Nazi's Nazi's rather than having an actual good look at history.
When ever ideas are being silenced much much worse things tend to follow.
Yes I would. In fact I sided with the cake shop owners who didn't want to make a cake for a gay couple. They should have simply taken their business elsewhere, or made their own cake.
The fact that these guys can't find anyone (out of hundreds if not thousands of options) to host them is useful feedback about how opposed our free society is to their message.
>If we ask these small companies to take on content removal obligations, we should not expect nuanced decision-making or robust appeal processes. We should expect legal and important sites from across the political spectrum to go down because someone complained about them.
This is a ridiculous statement. Domain registrars are already required (by ICANN) to receive, investigate, and respond to abuse complaints.
I was just pointing out that specific statement. I've got thoughts, but no specific perspective on the rest of the article. It definitely raises interesting questions.
It is very important to distinguish something like Facebook blocking an account / Medium taking down a blog from a domain registrar refusing to cooperate.
You are free to create a room where only some ideologies are allowed, but it's dangerous to play the same game with the ability to create the rooms.
First the domain registrars, then networks say that they don't want to peer, and then we end up with a fragmented internet.
It is not wise to pretend that an opinion that you do not want just simply does not exist. The extremist in the room who everybody pretends is not there, is eventually going to do more radical things to be noticed. In the echo chamber of extremism, there is now no moderating thought; and the world loses empathy to understand these unpopular perspectives that still exist.
It is insane that we are allowing GoDaddy, Google and tech companies to be arbiters of free speech.
As a kid, I used to associate google, yahoo and the whole of internet as a bastion of freedom.
It is shocking to me that liberals ( a group I used to identify with until fairly recently ) are the proponents of censorship on the internet and in america. It is shocking to me that google, godaddy and the internet is now synonymous with censorship and propaganda.
Not only is censorship giving daily stormer and neo-nazis more sympathy/credibility, companies like google, godaddy and the liberal movement is making a mockery of liberal principles.
My first philosophy course in college was with a jewish professor. We were discussing free speech and the rights of neo-nazis/kkk/hate groups to free speech. I clearly remember her saying that protecting the rights of neo-nazis/kkk to free speech is the only way to ensure the rights of speech speech for everyone. Free speech rights exist to protect "offensive" speech - whether it be pornography, atheism or hate speech.
What has happened to the tech industry? What has happened to the liberal movement? How did the tech community and the liberal movement get hijacked by anti-free speech and oppressive extremists?
If conservatives are pro-censorship and now liberals are pro-censorship, what future is there for individual rights, free speech and the liberal world order?
I'm against free speech in certain circumstances; free speech is idealistic, for it assumes Bad Ideas will be shot down in fair public debate, and people are rational. When people say things along the lines of "I don't like what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it", they're really saying that they don't care about the consequences that may come of that speech out of principle. It's a very reductionist mindset.
This is a fantasy, and I think a level of control is needed to stop the rousing of genocidal ideology propagated through rhetoric and providing its proponents platforms to speak on.
> This is a fantasy, and I think a level of control is needed to stop the rousing of genocidal ideology propagated through rhetoric and providing its proponents platforms to speak on.
The Nazis you dislike would agree with you, and tell you we need to outlaw the speech of what they believe to be hateful open borders communists who, to their minds, promulgate the genocide of the white race.
The world has a long history of those who push for the restriction of speech ending up on the receiving end of restriction of speech. One good turn, history tells us, very often deserves another.
The fact that other people would also like to censor some speech in other circumstances is irrelevant to me.
>open borders communists who, to their minds, promulgate the genocide of the white race.
What's in their mind is irrelevant. I'm clearly not advocating genocide, it's not my business if they see it that way, they ought to educate themselves. There's a clear difference between advocating that the workers of the world unite and advocating killing Jews. As it also turns out, the Nazis would kill Jews whether or not the workers agreed with it, you can't say the same about any of my actions.
>The world has a long history of those who push for the restriction of speech ending up on the receiving end of restriction of speech.
I agree, so it must be done carefully; there's no causation, merely there might be correletaion between these two groups.
What exactly is the difference between the Nazis and the Commies (responsible for the death of millions in USSR, China and across the world - death camps, labor camps, starvation, cultural revolutions, terrorism...)
Killing has nothing to do with Communism. I don't defend those who have killed in its name, and I don't want to do the same as them. As far as I know, Nazism requires forceful removal or killing of people.
Why am I not surprised to see this in your profile.
Communists killed many millions more than national socialists and is also a genocidal ideology, propagated by rhetoric. It's absurd to think you have any moral high ground over Nazis. Shouldn't your speech also be shut down according to your own logic?
> I'm against free speech in certain circumstances; free speech is idealistic, for it assumes Bad Ideas will be shot down in fair public debate, and people are rational.
So bottom line, you don't believe in free speech. You seem to believe a central authority must dictate which speech is free and which is not. Presumably this authority will be more rational than "the people" you mistrust to uphold a fair public debate.
>Communists killed many millions more than national socialists and is also a genocidal ideology
Sorry, but you're wrong. The Nazi ideology hinges on the idea of forceful removal and killing "inferior" people. The Communist ideology does not; I'm not responsible for the actions of what other people do in the name of Communist ideology. I subscribe to the works of Marx, Engels and the social anarchists (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon); if you can find any intention of genocide in there, I'll agree with you.
>Shouldn't your speech also be shut down according to your own logic?
No, because I'm not advocating harm or killing, only the potentially forceful removal of private property from landowners and capitalists.
>You seem to believe a central authority must dictate which speech is free and which is not.
No, the community should be able to regulate itself if sufficiently advanced. There may be a transitionary period in which an authority which suppresses certain speech or actions may exist, though I don't support its permanent existence.
How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
Freedom of speech doesn't override the immediate harm of hate speech. If all you care about is the utterance of words, great, but we can't (and don't) decide policy based on one dimension.
>you can't have it both ways and choose who can speak freely and who cannot...
Why not, exactly? I hear that people say "it's a slippery slope", or "who decides?" as if this puts an end to the argument. It doesn't. If one can formulate a set of rules and further judge on a case-by-case basis, there is little ambiguity left. I am against giving people who advocate or defend genocide or killing people for their ideas/race/etc. a platform to speak on. There's nothing ambiguous about this.
You won't find me "defending to the death" the right for people to advocate killing of my friends.
Their "freedom of speech" impinges upon the rights and freedoms of others. Their position forces a choice of one side or the other. I choose to "oppress" nazis.
> Anyone can relatively easily become a domain registrar.
Relatively easily? It isn't exactly a cheap venture: e.g. $4k+ per year to become an ICANN registrar.
I think people shouldn't have to pay that much to exercise their free speech.
> It seems strange that someone would expect a registrar to defend them for the couple of dollars per year you generally pay.
I think that unless a registrar is legally compelled to unregister your domain name, they shouldn't take it upon themselves to unregister your domain name just because other people are offended by what you put on the web server that your domain name resolves to.
>Relatively easily? It isn't exactly a cheap venture: e.g. $4k+ per year to become an ICANN registrar.
I'd say that's relatively easy yeah, perhaps a bit much for individuals but in the end not everyone needs to be a registrar. This is still accessible enough that rather small groups of people can set up a domain registrar to serve their own needs.
>I think that unless a registrar is legally compelled to unregister your domain name, they shouldn't take it upon themselves to unregister your domain name just because other people are offended by what you put on the web server that your domain name resolves to.

Oh, absolutely. And that's not what's happening here, registrars are simply forcing Daily Stormer to transfer elsewhere. They're not just deleting the domain.
> This article neglects to mention that anyone can relatively easily become a domain registrar.
Remember this suggestion when registrars start taking this kind of action against sites on the other end of the political horseshoe, and don't complain. You can be your own registrar, after all...
I think this author either misunderstands the issue or is trying to pull a fast one. They start out by reviewing net neutrality and how it affects ISPs:
>At the same time, if the people I talk to are geeky enough, they usually support Net Neutrality. They believe that ISPs, as providers of core Internet infrastructure, should not get to be arbiters of content. ISPs should allow the bits to flow equally -- not suppress or favor particular messages or sources.
And then leaps into talking about registrars and hosting:
>Two of the intermediaries that rejected the Daily Stormer, Go Daddy and Google, were only acting as its domain registrars. They did not host the site, they just made sure that dailystormer.com was associated with the right IP addresses, so users typing the domain and clicking links to it would get there.
ISPs should transmit bits neutrally but there's no reason a registrar or hosting service needs to host those bits if they decide not to. There are plenty of registrars and hosting services, market effects will shape behavior. If GoDaddy doesn't want the bad publicity, they should make the decision that suits their business. There are not that many ISPs and it's not their role to police content for exactly the same reason the phone company isn't liable for connecting a call that results in a bomb threat or wire fraud.
