We don't censor the opinion that people should be able to have sex with children.
There is a very clear line and it's called the First Amendment.
We censor child porn because it is a crime that involves a victim.
The Daily Stormer was all talk.
Once you start talking about censoring people who might cause people to commit crimes, you've crossed a philosophical boundary into policing thought crimes.
There are a few other examples of people getting in varying amounts of trouble, but that one stands out.
if i said someone was secretly a nazi, i would definitely be causing them harm.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/lawsuit-against-...
Talk is not all safe nor is it all protected, even under the First Amendment in the U.S. You can't slander people; you can't say fraudulent things (this elixir cures cancer!); you can't yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater; you can't assist or encourage people, though talk, in the commission of a crime.
Talk moves armies and nations, to good and evil, and in fact is far more effective at it than anything else. Talk encouraging ethnic hate has a very well-established track record of causing great harm to people's lives and liberties in large numbers. Arguably, nothing has done more harm in human history than ethnic hatred. To try to minimize it as "all talk" is dangerously misleading.
(OTOH, I do believe we should be very careful with limiting speech, and that monopolies and oligopolies are the wrong people to do it.)
No. You're not. You're just (legally) attacking the principles upon which your society is built.
Western democracies like Germany, the Netherlands, or Canada (to name a non-european democracy) might disagree there.
The US government, by the first amendment, can't legally censor your speech.
That doesn't mean they have to give you a bullhorn, a soapbox, and a corner to stand on, though.
http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Article 19
I assume you'll be filing suit against Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and The Economist for failing to publish your articles?
Seriously, I would bet that "impart information and ideas through any media" doesn't mean that you have the right to use others' equipment, venue, and name.
Now - if the Daily Stormer paid for services, and wasn't refunded their money after their access was pulled, that's one thing.
But if the money was returned to them, and they were told "We won't sell you this service any longer, because you have violated our terms of service" - then the company offering the services are free and clear to do that.
If the DS wants to continue broadcasting their speech, they are welcome to set up their peering services, dns providers, and DDOS prevention and CDN services themselves. And, if someone violates their terms of service, they are just as free to stop providing services to them.
But companies aren't required to give someone a bullhorn to amplify their voice.
Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Make no mistake: The ideological basis of WWII was the protection of individual human rights. In WWII and all through the 20th century forces on the extreme right and the extreme left crapped on individual human rights. Some bad actors acting on behalf of all of the major countries did the same. The cast changes, but the story is the same. Non-violent vs. violent. Good vs. evil. Freedom vs. authoritarianism. Rational intellectualism vs. silencing and baseless accusation.
If you would speak truth to power, look at who is exercising power. Look at who resorts to fear and intimidation. Look at who is silencing instead of engaging. Look at who resorts to violence. Look at who revels in the power of the mob. Look at who resorts to appeals to emotion in spite of logic and facts. If you would speak truth to power, speak to those actors.
Erm, then why did we hand over Poland and other Eastern European states to the USSR? Why did we let France re-establish their colonies in French-Indochina and elsewhere?
You're dramatically oversimplifying things in order to make this some kind of cosmic fight between good and evil. Stop forcing a narrative by cutting out all the bits that get in the way.
Those are clearly failures of human rights. In the current international legal framework, the United States holds sovereign power and grants human rights to its citizens. The United States can grant human rights to persons within its borders. It cannot do more than play international politics on behalf of people outside of it.
You're dramatically oversimplifying things in order to make this some kind of cosmic fight between good and evil. Stop forcing a narrative by cutting out all the bits that get in the way.
Sorry, but you're the one who is "forcing a narrative" here. You have defined the sides, such that all "sides" have crapped on human rights. It is possible that you want to define sides this way because you know that your "side" is morally compromised and has crapped on human rights. (And if you are a member of the far extreme left, there is a good chance that your "side" is morally compromised and of authoritarian bent.) You can instead define your sides to be the non-violent against the violent, or individual human rights against authoritarianism. I suggest you do this.
The USA is certainly not perfect. No sovereign nation that has ever existed has been perfect. This is why Free Speech is important, so that criticism can be levied against those in charge. This is why democracy is important, so that the voices of people can be heard and things can change, without further unnecessary violence. This is why genuine public discourse is vital, and why tactics of namecalling, shame, and intimidation are harmful -- it puts society in a position where "good" can only be accomplished by the commission of evil. Let us instead work towards a world where violence is no longer necessary.
> "Sorry, but you're the one who is "forcing a narrative" here. You have defined the sides, such that all "sides" have crapped on human rights."
I consider my views to be Independent, not left, right, or center. I don't think things can be boiled down to two subjects easily as there are often many more considerations that need to be made when making a decision on what to do. If I did have to advocate a side, my side would be in the interest of trying to talk about things in as complete a manner as possible. That means I generally try to resist boiling things down to dualistic evaluations.
I'm not arguing that all sides have crapped on human rights and that somehow invalidates the good actions of the USA. I'm saying that what you claim to be the ideological basis of the war is untrue. Doesn't mean that the war wasn't necessary and a good thing. If anything I'd make the argument that we really messed up the post war and betrayed a lot of people who were looking to us for help. I still consider it rather ironic how Ho Chi Minh was originally a supporter of democratic instutions and a friend of the US, until he decided the independence of his people mattered a lot more.
I think I can understand why you went to the conclusion that you did, but I don't think you're arguing against what you think you are.
The ideological basis and the geopolitical basis are two entirely different things.
I still consider it rather ironic how Ho Chi Minh was originally a supporter of democratic instutions and a friend of the US, until he decided the independence of his people mattered a lot more.
That's a place where the USA really f'd up!
Geopolitics and ideology have to be considered hand in hand when making decisions at the scale that Roosevelt and Eisenhower did. Before Pearl Harbor, even though the general US populace knew what the Nazis were doing to some extent, even Lend-Lease was hugely controversial. It took a surprise attack on US soil to galvanize people into action. To me, I think survival of the US is a much easier sell as being the prime ideology. Everything else such as protection of rights and freedom were good partial truths. Otherwise things like the internment of the Japanese, rationing, censorship, propaganda, and so on become harder to explain.
Again, none of these encroachments take away from the rightness. I just think it's important to acknowledge that the ugly and the good and everything else can stand together all at once.
I think it's also worth mentioning that when I'm thinking of WW2, I'm also thinking of WW2 as a whole. Not just from a purely US centric perspective.
Please don't confuse motivations with ideology. Ideology is a philosophical thing. Motivations can be ideological, but they can also be apart from ideology. Fighting "to preserve our way of life" is effectively an ideological call out. It certainly was in the 1930's and 1940's America.
To me, I think survival of the US is a much easier sell as being the prime ideology.
Fighting to protect your home is rather at a more basic level than the ideological basis of the USA, which is that of individual human rights on the English model. American GI's, German Wehrmacht, and Red Army soldiers -- all 3 of them were motivated by patriotic defense of the homeland. However, all 3 groups had widely differing ideologies.
Ideology needs special attention. Especially at times like this.
Not a good look for progressives and antifi, it would seem.
(Nor genuine Nazi skinheads, but they're in the minority.)
Updated to be more accurate in response to a reply. Use of the term "literal Nazis" in my original post was arguably not appropriate.
But the moment our society makes it a practice of punishing people for throughtcrime and for what they might do or have yet to do, then we've become a literal dystopia from Science Fiction.
More to the point, you're engaging in the slippery slope fallacy. Being a Nazi and espousing the ideology is actually a crime in Germany, and they haven't descended into some dystopian dictatorship.
Criminal conspiracy is illegal. If you can make such a case against neo-Nazis, then by all means, do so! They would be vile people guilty of a vile thing.
More to the point, you're engaging in the slippery slope fallacy.
It's been shown historically not to be a fallacy. The Nazis didn't have to change the constitution of the Weimar Republic very much to put totalitarianism in place. Every law that was the basis of human rights in the Weimar Republic had an "out" clause, in case of the greater good or in case of other laws being passed. When it comes to law, the formulation of a meaningful law cannot allow for ill defined exceptions. When it comes to human rights, it's not a question of slippery slope. It's a matter of a well formulated law. There is no slope. It's a bit-flip. An abused exception is an exploit, and governments, especially the judicial system, are precisely the actors who have power that can be abused.
Either your code has an exploit in a given function, or it doesn't. Either your legal code has an exploit in a given section, or it doesn't. No slope!
So, would Antifa making specific plans to get away with breaking the law apply? Would calling for the overthrow of the US government or the nullification of the US constitution apply? I think yes. I'm all for the prosecution of criminal conspiracy. However, we need to keep a clear distinction between politics and criminality.
Flaunting the rule of law is criminality. Making specific plans to break the law is criminality. Operate within the law, and you should be fine.
If the extra-legal persecution of Nazis is a good idea because they were such vile people who committed crimes against humanity, then why not the extra-legal persecution of Marxists and Anarchists? Those ideologies have been responsible for the sparking of world wars and the deaths of about 100 million people in the 20th century. People in the Gulag system weren't gassed in mock showers then burned in ovens. However, they were worked to death while freezing to death then blindfolded and bound and loaded on carts while still alive, to be dumped into pits to be buried alive. Not because the masters of the camps were cruel, but rather because it was found to be more efficient to move people around while they were still alive -- and because in the Dialectic Materialist ideology of Marxism, what did a moment of suffocation and horror matter if all flesh is bound to turn back into soil anyhow?
Postmodernism is just a cut-and-paste homomorphism to "good old" Marxism. And that stuff isn't about benefiting the people. It's about undoing the current social order and systems of value so you can seize power. Both Nazism and Postmodernist Social Construction explicitly say these things! Just read what the thought leaders say! All attempts to push collectivism to the level of sovereign power have historically resulted in mayhem, millions of deaths, and totalitarianism.
(Collectivism on the small scale is fine, when it doesn't try to take over the monopoly on violence, because then it can be held in balance through human relationships. Pure collectivism always fails when there are more than about 350 individuals, though such grouping can be affiliated in a larger bureaucratic framework. But such frameworks can't manage something as large and complex as a national economy. Just look at history. It always fails!)
(EDIT: You are correct. While commonly called "anarchists" in popular accounts of history, The Black Hand were a nationalist paramilitary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hand_(Serbia) )
You can also be certain that Marxists allowed the mass rape of civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
They are also responsible for the deaths of millions in Russia, millions in Ukraine, millions in China, and millions in Cambodia. They are directly responsible for emotional scars borne by my mother and father which affect them and my family to this day. It doesn't matter "who started it." It very much matters who craps on Human Rights. It very much matters whose ideology explicitly says that individual Human Rights do not matter.
"Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-...
If the best you can say for an ideology, is that, "They started it!" and "The other one was worse!" it's time to throw away that ideology.
(And make no mistake, anarchism can only devolve into collectivism, generally resembling communism. Other than that, its only contributions are crimes, murder, and mayhem. You can look at the historical examples here too.)
That and the parent said "literal".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California come to mind. Obviously these involve government censorship but the idea that you "know it when [you] see it" seems to apply for Nazis...
From Jacobellis:
"Stewart wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material... But I know it when I see it"
From Miller:
> "However, the Court acknowledged "the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression," and said that "State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited."[12] The Court, in an attempt to set such limits devised a set of three criteria which must be met for a work to be legitimately subject to state regulation:
> whether the average person, applying contemporary "community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
> whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law; and
> whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.[13] This obscenity test overturns the definition of obscenity set out in the Memoirs decision, which held that "all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance . . . have the full protection of the guaranties [of the First Amendment]" and that obscenity was that which was "utterly without redeeming social importance.
I don't think many average people are fooled by groups that try and hide behind the principles of free speech when they walk through the streets chanting slogans associated with the ideology of the Holocaust.
I have tended to think Stewart was being disingenuous with that statement.
Simply because he seems to imply that only what he thinks is pr0n is pr0n.
He doesn't seem to realize that anything and everything can be and is pr0n. I've often wondered, upon showing him an image or video of woman's foot in a high heel shoe crushing a wine glass, if he would think that was pr0n or not?
If he said "No, that is not pr0n" - would he ever realize how wrong he was?
A foot crushing a glass is just that. But the classification and regulation of that image may be different if the context is sexually explicit versus first aid.
To use the Nazi example - someone with a SS flag might be a collector or history nerd but if they start marching through the streets with it while chanting racist slogans they will likely be interpreted differently.
Defining that in law is difficult but most people know the difference, including those hiding behind free speech.
cough, communism, cough