Why is this happening? I see the argumnent that these organizations are private companies and can do whatever they see fit, including censorship, I see no reason why these should not be opposed on principle. Global expression of ideas should not be controlled by any one jurisdiction or board of directors.

When will we ever find a solution? Decentralisation is fun to talk about but almost impossible to accomplish in practice. So how do we create a compromise scenario that protects the free spread of ideas? I have no idea. I am so sick of all this.

It's happening because the USA has declared it illegal for any website to knowingly host any content that might be illegal.

As such they're pulling down anything and everything that might be even possibly illegal.

what about websites which are not hosted in the US, but for instance, in europe or asia?

This law wouldn't be in effect for them?

At least CJEU has ruled that austrian company running uk-hosted website is liable for damages due to copyright infringements occuring in france [1].

http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2015/02/11/cjeu-mere-ac...

It would if the USA has an extradition agreement in place, which we do with a majority of countries. So while you do not commit a crime domestically, if an American can access illegal content on your site, you can be sued in the USA and extradited.

You can't be extradited for purely civil matters.

@singularity2001 yes, Kim dotcom with MegaUpload

No its location of server that did it for Megaupload.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/12/28/extradition-juris...

In short, much of Megaupload’s servers were located in the U.S. This, for the purpose of jurisdiction, means two things. First, much of the alleged crimes took place physically in the United States. The infringements, the payments, etc. took place, at least in large part, in Virginia even if the people orchestrating it were scattered all over the world.

More importantly though, courts in both the U.S. and now New Zealand have ruled that these servers provide sufficient contact with the U.S. to give it jurisdiction over the criminal case. While jurisdiction alone doesn’t mean a person can be extradited, it’s a crucial step and this also explains why a man who never set foot in the U.S. can be extradited to it for a crime committed online.

However, this isn’t the first time the U.S. has used the server argument it’s been using it for years to combat securities fraud in the country.

> First, much of the alleged crimes took place physically in the United States. The infringements, the payments, etc. took place, at least in large part, in Virginia even if the people orchestrating it were scattered all over the world.

This logic is twisted and does not follow at all, except if you have a purely old world way of thinking (i.e. pre-internet), or are morally flexible when it suits your narrative.

The lesson is clear though, stay away from American servers.

are there cases when this really happened?

> the USA has declared it illegal for any website to knowingly host any content that might be illegal

Which law is this and when did it go into effect?

There isn't exactly a global shortage of cloud storage providers, so the solution seems pretty simple. Just never store your files in only one place.

Rather, never store any potentially problematic content in a storage service with a legal entity behind it.

Store encrypted chunks strewn across multiple nodes, so that each node can reliably deny knowledge, or even possession of a full copy, of the content. So they can't be sued.

This, of course, prevents making this content from being accessible to public.

This is the most fitting quote I've seen for all the things that irk me most today in politics and business. Thanks, will reuse a lot.

same. is there a shorter version too?

Indeed, progressive supremacists and feminist supremacists that seek to cleanse the world of "oppression" and "correct" past oppression are just puritans of a different flavor.

Decrying rape and helping actual victims is one thing, attacking all heterosexual males as privileged oppressors is something else.

There is great irony here. These supremacists are the same type of bully they are seeking to correct for: people who abuse socially acceptable ways to oppress others.

In the Middle East accidental innocent casualties create more enemies and terrorists, such that the army often displays greater restraint than our police.

The animosity being generated in the 1/3rd of the population (white males), who also happen to own most of the guns, is already being politically leveraged. I worry that someone will find a way to harness it further.

Someone forgot to take their soma. A gramme is better than giving a damn.

"Scolds" is my go to pejorative for those who are certain they know what's best for me.

"Moral busybodies" is better, I'll steal it.

I'm going to steal it, too.

Unfortunately it describes moderation on this site recently.

Seems like there are many moral busybodies trying to protect to greater good.

This rhymes with "Evil is created by those who think themselves are so righteous."

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies

Check out the HN thread where self-purported google employees are proclaiming google exists to improve society.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668375

In the past, it was the church and the priests who decided what was good for us. Going forward, it will be google and their employees apparently.

Lewis just turned in his grave at the context to which you've applied his quote

A nice quote and it sounds true - certainly robber barons are preferable to sjws - but doesn’t tell the whole story. The sjw tyrant he’s describing forms the “useful idiot” phalanx of the ones pulling the strings. Those kind of people (sjw types) simply aren’t clever enough to orchestrate the kind of long term plots needed to take control. The ones in charge are fully aware of what they’re doing, and they exhibit a cold calculating efficiency that seems inhuman.

He is not describing SJWs, which is a fairly modern concept and usually used idiotically by people who don't have the brain power to understand issue X. He's talking about those that might describe themselves as moral majority. People that get described as SJWs are usually arguing against oppression. By contrast, oppressors will happily force their morals on others (but not always themselves) and tell you that it's for your own good. Usually backed by some religious doctrine.

I think your understanding of the term "SJW" is out of date. SJW now refers to someone who forces their morals on other people and advocate silencing and censorship to achieve this. He is describing these people.

SJWs protest free speech events, advocate for hate-speech bans, advocate for compelled speech patterns in Canada, prevent conservative speakers for giving lectures on college campuses, among a litany of other such behaviors. They are largely moral authoritarians.

Of course the Evangelical conservatives are no different, but this quote is absolutely applicable to the American left.

>usually used idiotically by people who don't have the brain power

Please don't sink to this level

>People that get described as SJWs are usually arguing against oppression

That might be your description but many also include the people going around to open source projects to change the genders of code comments while simultaneously accusing the project of being sexist at the same time. They might be against oppression but their approach is so misguided it's destructive.

The behavior you described is a) merely annoying and easy to curb and b) far from omnipresent. OPs quote was about censorship enforced by state. I don't see how this is even remotely same caliber.

In my experience “SJWs” have their own religion and overwhelmingly seek out moderator positions on subreddits, forums, positions on the school paper’s editorial team, etc etc as their ideology fails when faced with the free flow of information. You can see this in just about any internet community, the only ones that are “left wing” are the ones that enforce strict moderation rules. Anything open course corrects right very fast.

The “Warrior” in SJW comes from their perpetual fight to ban, shadowban, moderate, de-rank, and delist opposing views.

You can deflect by suggesting these people are simply authoritarian, and not true social justice/left wing advocates. I would challenge you to investigate everything from reddit’s super mods to Wikipedia’s editor cartels. You’ll find they systematically infiltrate open communities and once in positions of power purge opposing views from leadership and begin to enforce ideological conformity. The people doing this are exclusively left wing soc jus types.

Outside of the internet I’ve seen this behavior in academia as well. It’s pretty amazing how downright fascist some of them will get when they think they’re in like company.

I'm not aware of the meaning of the three letter acronym and I'm not planning to learn it. willfullingly ignorant if you will

FYI, I vouched for this post that was dead.

For the record, I don’t personally agree with raja’s assessment of the situation, but I think it’s important to have an open discussion around these topics rather than just silencing a dissenting view via downvotes.

Please stop with this "SJW" nonsense

Despite some questionable uses of that word, I have to admit that it's a useful classifier for what has essentially become a consolidated political movement.

Everyone seems to know the ideology it's describing when they hear it, and I don't know of another term that does that.

On another tangent: "SJW" was originally coined by social justice warriors as a way to describe themselves. It only became an offensive word once people started lampooning it, but it's still a fair term to use given its history and original intent.

> It only became an offensive word once people started lampooning it

Yes, words only become slurs by being used as slurs, and many words that have become slurs were earlier terms preferred or accepted by the people it is now used as a source against.

The problem I have with it is it appears to be generally used to describe a wide group of people that don't really exist, at least not in the numbers that "SJW-haters" claim they do.

Rarely do I see people sincerely espousing what self proclaimed anti-SJWs claim they are. Rarer so do I see it in droves, as a generally promoted claim versus one person or a small group of people.

Preferred by whom?

Let's be real, it's a more descriptive term. Plus it isn't slang like SJW (and in many circles a slur). So yeah it's a better term when discussing these things.

Calling them "regressive" seems to be intended as an insult to me.

Regression is a very well-defined concept. What would be a non-insulting way to refer to someone who advocates regression?

I don't think any SJW would characterize their position is the dictionary definition of regression, and nor would I (despite not characterizing myself as one). Do people you consider SJW really say "life was better before?", I instead hear "life was bad before and is better now but hasn't gone nearly far enough: the trajectory of political correctness and minority rights needs to progress drastically further forward on that same line drawn from 1950 to 2018". It seems very difficult to attribute that sentence to the textbook definition of "regressive".

If a political position was literally "let's go back to how things were" then it would be fair to call that regressive. The closest thing I can think of is MAGA though, and for most other cases the goal of calling something regressive seems to clearly be "your politics will make things worse" not "your politics will return things to a previous state".

Whether you agree or disagree, I believe that the people who consider some SJWs to be “regressive” is that the system used to be that social conservatives used to tell people what to think, we had a period of open-minded exploration, and now SJWs are advocating moving back towards a system that people are told what to think, except it’s social liberals who are doing the telling. In the sense of someone telling people what to think versus a embracing a wide range of different views, it could reasonably called regressive — perhaps up one level of abstraction if you want to get technical.

Note that I am not supporting one view or another, rather I am just explaining how the term can be used to reflect one’s perspective accurately.