> “I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of ns, just so you know. You act like white ns. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
> “Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your fgots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a nr, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
IIRC the context of that tirade was that he was complaining about the literal white supremacists who harass him - and was directing their language back at them. (Supposedly it was also those white supremacists who reported him to Patreon) Major tactical error here, but I can't entirely disagree with the sentiment. Attacking someone with their own stated beliefs is something I'm a big fan of.
So you have not gone to the trouble of listening to him before commenting?
If the answer to the first is "yes", then why is the answer to the second "no"?
They have mostly lost this influence and power, only to be replaced by something equally distasteful, your explanation not withstanding. You sound exactly like the supporters. Sure the details differ, but you've nailed down the "ends justify the means" spin, just like every other movement that wants to push their world view and morality. The kicker is the whole "it's not enforcing morality" or defending a world view schtik. It's deciding not to do business with various groups of people, under pressure from other groups of people. As a JFK democrat, and individual, I say fuck that. Good riddance.
Patreon runs a business. You'd force them to do business with people they have no desire to do business with. You're the authoritarian in that picture. There's no reason to think that there's any mysterious group forcing Patreon to act.
I'm neither of the right nor the left, this is a choice of the business, they chose not to do business with someone being actively hateful. Not someone taking a political stance, but someone spewing out prejudice, hatred and bile. I fully support them.
(I cannot reply to the below, being rate limited. The cake thing is discrimination on who someone is, not what they do. Different things. And this is hardly a freedom of speech issue, nobody is denying them the ability to express themselves, I am not obligated to bring you lemonade and let you shout hatred from my front yard in the name of FoS. )
It's like Free Speech. You can't just allow free speech for things you want to hear or it's not free.
Patreon has chosen to not allow free speech, and it's their right as a private entity to do that. The market should decide whether or not to support this principle.
Another company could come along and say that they won't discriminate against people based on political ideology or anything like that, and a lot of people would support that, even if it means the company would be helping projects they find offensive.
If you can discriminate against someone based on their political views, or even ... "something they once said" -which seems to be the substance of all this patreon deplatforming and nazi-calling, you can do so based on their race, sexual habits, color of their shirt, gender, religious identity, ethnicity, cut of their jib, or what city they live in. So, like, welcome to the legal arguments used by "whites only" restaurants and hotels in the south under segregation.
FWIIW someone like Ron Paul who is a "freedom speeches zealot" agrees with you that the whole public accommodation thing violates the rights of businesses.
Freedom Speeches™ is just like weaponizing the 14th amendment (equal protection clause) to protect corporations. I have to tolerate racists, pedophiles, rapists, thieves because corporatists have feelings too.
When we have to tolerate intolerance, everything falls apart.
"So, like, welcome to the legal arguments used by "whites only" restaurants and hotels in the south under segregation."
Uh huh.
Punching up vs punching down. It's about the power imbalance. These specious false equivalence arguments always ignore the context.
When Freedom Markets™ zealots (like Ron Paul) weaponize the Bill of Rights, it's in the service of corporations, not people.
Lastly, you're equating intrinsic traits (gender, ethnicity) with learned behavior (hate, intolerance). Nice.
PS- WTF is "deplatforming"? The SJWs definitely don't have a monopoly on learned victimhood.
Your views as to what is good or bad are not absolute, and, I hate to break it to you, there is no legal principle behind them other than that which used to back up blasphemy laws. We decided as a society in the 1960s that there's no such thing as blasphemy, and that providing a public accommodation means you have to serve everyone who isn't violating the law.
Yes I agree with you, people like you and Ron Paul attempt to weaponize civil rights at the service of corporations, not people. Look at you telling me that Patreon has every right to deny service to people you disagree with. I'm pretty sure if they denied service to, say, atheists, you'd change your mind!
Corporations are people and have the right to speech, above all else, when it serves the plutocrats, hate mongers.
But they're godless oppressors of free speech whenever they refuse to serve haters, thieves.
Which is it?
Pick a side.
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No.
Patreon is protecting its brand. No different than Apple, Disney/ABC, Hobby Lobby, reddit, Hillsong. What you'd call "discrimination", because apparently there's a shortage of outlets for hate speech.
I also noted that brands are a proxy for trust. If Patreon bans haters, that's a signal to me that they are the kind of people I want to do business with.
Whereas I'm voting with my dollars. If I disagree with Patreon's choices, I simply don't do business with them. What the Freedom Markets™ call the market place of ideas.
But apparently I'm not allowed to make such choices for myself. Because Freedom Speeches™. My bad.
--
Look at you, telling me that there are no ethics, morality. Just what's legal vs illegal. Aka might makes right, dog eat dog.
If you want a might makes right world, which, whether you're capable of understanding it or not, is what you're advocating for, you should at least figure out which side has the guns and tanks. Pretty sure it ain't Patreon censors!
I'm not being clear enough.
Those who insist corporations are people, but then get grumpy when corporations act like people, are hypocrites. Or worse.
All I'm saying is that so long as corporations are people, I will continue to vote with my dollars. (Call it a reverse boycott.)
We might be on the same side here. If so, my bad.
As I said, if some schmuck (an individual business owner) has to bake a cake with a message he profoundly disagrees with, because not doing so violates someone else's civil rights, Patreon (an actual corporation) can suck it up and allow people to make contributions to people who use harsh language on youtube. It's really quite simple.
You don't control your gender, you don't control your sexual orientation, you don't control your race, you don't control where you are born, etc...
Theses aren't the same as being a Nazi, which you certainly control. You decide to push racist propaganda. You aren't born with that speech, you chose to do it. You chose to hurt people with that speech.
That guy that was removed from Patreon is free to use another platform for its hate speech and use Patreon for something without hate. You can't simply change your skin color to be able to go to a "whites only" restaurants.
Would you mind if instead Patreon was removing videos showing a murder? What about child pornography? I'm curious to know where's your line.
"You do you" as people say these days :)
I'm not arguing that these folks shouldn't be able to say their piece, and shouldn't be able to get contributions from their followers, however hateful and misguided
Just that the likes of Patreon are under no obligation to help them out.
We're allowed to do that as a society. Or do you not want same sex couples to be able to get a cake? (half /s)
> but someone spewing out prejudice, hatred and bile.
This is called freedom of speech. Hate speech is still protected speech (at least in the US).
Most of my consumption is virtue signaling. I actively seek out curation matching my values.
Certified fair trade, organic, wild caught, living wages, journalism with actual fact checking & double sourcing, local & family run, etc.
Of course, I have to make exceptions. For example: Home Depot is always my last choice, after my other options have been exhausted.
PS- It's just branding as a proxy for trust.
Piss Christs; naked statues; slaughtering a horse (in public) to protest the Vietnam war; putting ones shit in cans and sell those; etc are all things that artists have done that pisses people of.
Heck in the US you could be called an arse (or worse) if you salute the flag or if you don't.
They may still be able to legally ban them, political opinions (so long as they are not caused by a religious mandate) is not a protected class (though looking at how devided the US is, that maybe the end result), but given that a big target marked for your business is artists, why would you?
The problem is that even after removing oneself from patreon, there is still a large company in charge of one’s payments ... a credit card company. Would Visa or MasterCard do the same under heavy social media or political pressure? Probably. So how would someone effectively mitigate this funding threat? Cryptocurrency maybe, if it was more stable and widely used.
This caused a backlash; some believed the account closure was politically motivated (Sargon is an anti-feminist, pro gamergate commentator). Some have also found it alarming that Patreon has essentially decided to police their speech in general (e.g. comments made in a youtube video, in a tweet etc.), rather than just on their own site. A number of prominent content creators have closed down their accounts in response, stating they can't trust Patreon to not deplatform them in the future for some perceived infraction. Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson are probably the most prominent of these (13th and 16th highest patron counts respectively). Here's what Sam Harris said:
"As many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform. While the company insists that each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I don’t share the politics of the banned members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon’s 'Trust and Safety' committee."
And here's a NYT article on the issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/technology/patreon-hate-s...
Unfortunately, the term has become so devalued that "Nazi" means "Anyone that supports Trump".
I would imagine the purpose would be the same as when Obama implemented a similar ban - prevent terrorism.
Free speech does not apply to private business. Enforcing free speech to a private business is closer to a form of government oppression than it is freedom.
The United States has done a great job of brainwashing its population to think that "freedom" is universally the best thing. It's not. In many scenarios freedom actually comes from oppressing someone else (and it's no surprise that oppression is basically the cornerstone of the United States).
There are just about zero websites out there that adhere to truly "free" speech because it's nearly impossible. Doubly so if you want to make a profit. Even 4chan has rules about what you can say there, believe it or not.
Hmm. AFAIK the only thing forbidden on 4chan is child porn because that's outlawed really really everywhere and will drive anyone away.
Wild isn't it?
Do you have an example of this?
Note, this is not /r/liberalpolitics, or /r/progressivepolitics, but /r/politics, and yet it is an extremely one-sided exercise in herd behavior.
The former has many threads that are marked "conservatives only" which auto delete any comments from anyone not tagged as conservative by mods. t_d will just delete your comments and ban you if you dare to speak out against Trump.
And all this is not even counting the downvotes you get for speaking your mind in rightwing or alt right places.
Inciting violence with your speech is a crime, and all the free speech in the world will not protect you from the backlash from private citizens and organizations. It just means the government can't lock you in a cage for saying something idiotic like "the Holocaust never happened."
Only if you go ahead and openly shout "kill that Jew", for example. The hidden ways to incite hatred in the masses with speech are perfectly legal, most of these even in Europe.
> It just means the government can't lock you in a cage for saying something idiotic like "the Holocaust never happened."
Denying the Holocaust is not just idiotic, it is an outright denial of provable facts and an immense disrespect to all the victims of the gas ovens at Auschwitz and the other KZs.
In Germany, Holocaust denial is expressly forbidden by law for the latter reason.
Even more than that, it contributes to creating an atmosphere where it could happen again. Simply existing as a Nazi or white supremacist is a call for violence, and silencing them is justified self defense.
Denying provable facts shouldn't be a crime, it should label you as an idiot. Being disrespectful shouldn't be a crime, it should label you as an asshole. I don't want to live in a world where being an asshole and an idiot is enough to get you put in prison.
Silencing has the opposite effect to what you wanted. It's the Streisand Effect. Your act of censorship only serves as arsenal for the people you are censoring, because they can point at it and say "look, if they didn't have anything to hide, they wouldn't restrict us from talking about it."
This is why I won't call for silencing communists, even though I vehemently disagree with their ideology. I have a bit more faith that humans can recognize bad ideas themselves and do not need to be told what to think.
2. Do you know what happens when you DON'T pay your taxes? The government exercises its monopoly on violence and throws you in jail. If this tax analogy is the best your mind could conjure up to prove "communism is non-violent", your thought process is just as much of an unsurprising failure as every other Communist implementor to come before you.
[1]https://www.libertyheadlines.com/new-mexico-civil-asset-forf...
Well, if it's coercive, it's no more coercive than capitalism, which likewise relies on state use and threat of force to defend it's model of property rights.
Fortunately, humanity came to agreement about which of these two were acceptable at the dawn of civilization. Stealing is not acceptable, and property rights are essential for freedom. Capitalism does not rely on any "state" to enforce violence. It requires that people go about their lives without interfering with other people's lives except through mutually beneficial trade. States have developed as a means for people to collectively secure their freedom to cooperate in this way so that they don't need to be constantly under the threat of invasion from cavemen who do not share any of those values.
Of course, I am willing to concede that states do not have impeccable records when it comes to utilizing its violence - but if anything, this only adds to the argument for small government. Big government has more resources to squander on wars and less ability for the constituents it purports to represent to have any effect on its policies. A communist government is the biggest form of government you can get. It is also unaccountable, because you can't vote them out.
Ultimately, while regressive thinkers exist, there exists a need for people to collectively pool their resources to defending their freedoms and their properties from those who would like to steal and enslave them.
No, I'm comparing people forcibly, by way of the state, defining property one way and depriving people who disagree with that definition of what the dissenters see as their property rights to people forcibly, by way of the state, defining property a different way and depriving people who disagree with that other definition of what this other set of dissenters see as their property rights.
That you happen to prefer the capitalist model of property rights doesn't change the fact that it is imposed with state violence on those who disagree with it's parameters.
> Fortunately, humanity came to agreement about which of these two were acceptable at the dawn of civilization.
Humanity did not come to a universal consensus on a model of property rights at the dawn of civilization, and various models of property rights have gained and lost popularity in the intervening time with many (including as recent examples, but not limited to, the Leninist Communist model and the capitalist model) having been imposed through state force at various times and places.
Communism in itself does not imply violence towards minorities or putting people into Gulags. Nazism or fascism always does, the demonization of those not in the "Volkskörper" (or deemed too weak to be worthy) is the core ideology.
While I agree that autoritarian Communism has failed and those who still adore Stalin are morons, there are many more Communist views that do not resort to authoritarianism.
This is why communism simply cannot work. If you give people choice, it turns out they generate wealth not only for themselves - but they generate wealth for the societies in which they live too. This is what Adam Smith calls the invisible hand. Free markets economies are prosperous because people's self-interest leads to innovation and improved standard of living for everyone.
http://freedomschool.us/how-an-economy-grows.pdf
Communism is rooted in jealousy. Even though people owe their standard of living to the merits of the capitalists which built their societies, they're bitter because they are not among the most wealthy. It is no surprise that there are now countless examples of it being tried in the real world and it leading to all around suffering. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" is always going to be controlled by bitter people, and they're going to use their newly found powers to extract wealth in attempt to cure their own bitterness.
It's very easy to make the same argument for Muslims. Yes, there are millions of peaceful Muslims in the U.S., but their religion dictates that they need to conquer and subjugate infidels. There's 1400 years of history to back that up. It is absolutely arguable that just existing as a Muslim is a call for violence.
Should we ban them as well?
What about "Antifa", who exist entirely to wreak violence on people they disagree with, and even do it with impunity. If we should ban Nazis and white supremacists, we need to ban Antifa as well.
I'm just trying to apply your principles consistently.