Anyone know what he actually posted? I'm trying to find that to get some context. I'm sure it was awful if it was on the Daily Stormer but, I'm interested to see how awful.
Edit:
I found one of the articles referenced in the complaint[1]. They allege he wrote 800 articles for the site but that's the only one they're associating to him as far as I can tell? However, I'm not very good at reading legal docs.
If we equate keyboard warriors with the people who actually commit atrocities, we're in a sense lowering the severity of those atrocities to be equal to being a sad edge lord.
Spreading ideas on the internet is spreading ideas to other meat sponges. I wouldn't consider most of the mass shooters of the past decade to be anything more than sad edge lords, but they've ended a ton of lives and ruined far more. Most skinheads are in loosely organized groups, not American History X or Sons of Anarchy with massive financial backing and tight-knit organization.
If it was true that merely being exposed to an idea had the ability to take over and control a person like a mindless puppet, then democracy would simply not work, instead the only viable option would be strict control over thoughts and communication prevent harmful ideas from taking over peoples minds.
People are very susceptible to ideas. That's the premise of political propaganda and the entire advertising industry. It's not clear what the solution is but most people are consumers of ideas, not producers.
I'd agree here and I think there's a big flaw in how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers.
Generally a high-school level of history (assuming you're paying the normal level of attention) leaves you with the impression that Germans got sad and mad and poor because of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the 'German martial spirit' or something and then Hitler appeared out of nowhere to do bad stuff.
Reading "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans was eye-opening in this regard. The Nazis did nothing more than tie together several existing culturally accepted themes more successfully than other fringe groups in Weimar politics. The swastika as a far-right symbol wasn't even 'invented' by them.
The Nazis to some extent were incidental, or didn't represent a step-change from the thoughts, politics and speech that were already circulating broadly in pre-Nazi society. This is what free-speech primacists seem to neglect. The Nazi ideology didn't arise from nowhere, death camps weren't the start, they were the end of 30 plus years of increasing acceptability and propagation of far-right ideas (stab in the back myths, casual and scientific anti-Semitism, anti-communist and anti-left propaganda, mainstream scientific eugenics, etc).
> how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers.
By placing the word _victorious_ in quotes, you clearly have some alternative viewpoint about military victory in mind. Given that Germany tendered its unconditional surrender to the Allied forces in Europe, I don’t see how that’s in question; but maybe I’m missing your point.
I think he means to include places like Denmark, France, Norway and other nations that weren't militarily victorious but for whom post-ww2 regime change was a reversion of what had been implemented by Nazi Germany and who generally teach that period of history the same way Britain and the US do.
This is a reminder that free speech laws are different in Canada. Canadians do not have the right to free speech the way Americans do. Property rights are also missing.
do you mean Canada actually has laws to define what you may say or not ?
I'm always upset with Americans companies when they moderate the content with their ToS and arbitrary moderation.
Often they even delegated to users, by threatening to ban them if they didn't delete something they don't like.
They don't even properly define what they don't like, so that you delete any controversial content and just chase likes.
And these American companies or their users just take down whatever they want, even if it's legal. That's not free speech.
In Europe, you used to have proper objective laws, and a court had to decide if a content was illegal.
Even nowadays, I can report hate speech, scams, and other forms of actually illegal content to the police. They will properly investigate and the author can go to trial, like this man in Canada. That's proper rule of law.
In the USA, the moderation would just delete the content like nothing happened, and then hater speechers are free to go to the Daily Stormer or other companies with compatible ToS.
What is objective about a law? It still comes down to judgment calls.
First Amendment aside, I fear that restricting speech would result in a backlash from Neo-Nazi types, or worse, a national situation like The Gulag Archipelago describes.
How about teaching to think and write more accurately instead. "I would not have subjected my child to the humiliation of wearing a slave collar and manacles, and then photographing him, and then publishing the photograph. He is clearly shying away from the camera. He appears to be at a critical age developmentally. He may grow to resent this experience rather than learning anything from it."
Sending them back to high school-level English to read Roots and Black Like Me, and then write a paper might work. Framing it that way as a court-mandated punishment does not sound great on its face.
I suspect that some keyboard nazis just need to be exposed to more moderate discourse. However, that will not happen if they silo their discussions in sites like The Daily Stormer.
HN does not let me edit now, but I regret using the derogatory term "keyboard nazi", lest somebody take it as a challenge to prove they are more than that.
Disaffected people have largely the same insecurities as everybody else, such as housing, job, normal human relationship and sexual issues, and addressing them is key, as opposed to allowing blame-shifting and scapegoating to fester.
>do you mean Canada actually has laws to define what you may say or not ?
Yes in several levels.
The one violated in OP is hate speech. You're explicitly not allowed to say anything which may incite another person to "hate" anything at all. As a good person, you generally avoid doing this but it has become a tool in politics. In Canadian politics, to silence a politician, you simply assert they are racist or some sort of hate identifier.
The newer level, the one which gave Jordan Peterson his fame is compelled speech. You are compelled by the government to speak certain words in certain situations.
Edit:
I found one of the articles referenced in the complaint[1]. They allege he wrote 800 articles for the site but that's the only one they're associating to him as far as I can tell? However, I'm not very good at reading legal docs.
Located here[2].
[1]: https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2018...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804012045/https://dailystor...