Also I read there they are losing their SSL cert or something, so that might be how centralized, non-legal authority manages to shut them down. (Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.)

Service-providers giving the boot to « problematic » users is as far as I know as old as the Internet.

You were always perfectly free to go find a new account elsewhere if anyone would have you. But there was always a point where if you passed far enough beyond socially acceptable behavior, your Internet provider might choose to stop doing business with you.

This was especially true in the case of harassment, attacks on network infrastructure, and criminal behavior.

Eventually they are going to find that there's a limit to how much violence you can incite before getting slapped down, legally or otherwise.

This doesn't mean 'planning a coup' is one of these contexts, but you are focusing on a very narrow example of the broad social system impact of anonymity in online communication.

Other than anonymity, talking to people who have no incentive to karma-farm is very refreshing.

In websites like Reddit/HackerNews, the karma system gamifies posting. You "lose" if you post any wrongthink, and you "win" when you reiterate whatever is socially acceptable.

This means there are consequences to posting. In *chan websites, there is no consequence to posting your thoughts (or just trolling, because that's fun sometimes).

If you go into a store or cafe and start shouting at the top of your lungs, the owner is free to refuse service, kick you out and/or even ban you from ever entering their store again.

What's the difference between that store owner and an ISP?

You're free to go to any other store that will have you, and is ok with your shouting. If it turns out there are no stores ok with it, whose problem is that? Should store owners be prohibited from refusing service to anyone, no matter what their behaviour?

You can start your own store, so long as you can pay rent, have suppliers that will sell you goods, etc - but again, no one is obligated to do any of that.

(I get there's protected classes that prevent discrimination based on things like age, gender, ethnicity, etc, but that's a separate issue, and tangential to their behaviour which is what we're discussing here.)

Damn near every channel on 2010 EFNet or DALNet would be deemed in violation of most of 2020's TOS. To say nothing of mid-90s EFNet. Whoo-boy, the eggdrop bots logging those channels could get probably a thousand well-known, well-respected developers and network engineers working at FAANGs today fired, if someone took the time.

Repeat customers that would get DDOS too many times (cybercafes would fall into that category often) would have to either pay more to cover for the cost of the network engineers dealing with the DDOS or get the boot.

From what I remember it's quite similar with many service providers, including hosting providers. Their TOS will allow them discretion to stop providing services to anyone that may negatively impact their business, it's not like there's any law that forces them to provide service to a customer.

I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.

If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.

Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.

The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.

If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.

I've heard folks suggest making it criminal to share or sell user data, for instance, which would be the death of freemium services.

The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).

* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.

* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...

In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.

I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.

The thing is: left-wing radicalization is tolerated by the platforms, but right-wing radicalization isn't.

  EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.

Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:

https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt

Chapo was the largest by a large margin besides /r/darkhumorandmemes (edgy jokes).

And you are just straight up lying about /r/chapotraphouse2. It was banned the same day, as was /r/chapotraphouse3 through /r/chapotraphouse49.

"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

From Heavy:

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/the-donald-subreddit-moved-to...

Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.

You mean everyday?

Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.

A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me. And in the absence of any government action against these domestic terrorists (they have been planning exactly this violence for weeks), it's great to see private companies step in and take action.

So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.

You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.

It's wildly different from a website company running their public business on another companies infrastructure.

Alright, so then you'd be OK with some phone company, that has a monopoly on a certain geographic area or town, banning anyone who has made a public social media posts that is critical of the company?

Do you see any problems with this position?

But to answer your question, no, I would not be OK with that. Utility companies (in the United States at least) are typically contracted by cities to provide service, and regulated by a public utility commission as well as various laws. I assume denial of service over social media would violate a number of regulations or contractual obligations. And I agree with that.

Now if you're really asking whether or not various service providers should be regulated as utilities and obligated to provide service to everyone, that's a much more difficult (and vague) question that I don't have a easy answer for.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.

And the ones not taking selfies were running around with zip ties and IEDs. Just because some of them were idiots, doesn't mean they all were.

Edit: how do you think these "idiots" got in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20m04s&v=cJOgGsC0G9U

Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.

Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.

I wonder when people stopped thinking. By the same argument, should they be allowed to block all black people?

It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.

If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.

It doesn't really matter. If this starts being a problem, we'll use a decentralized web of trust for SSL. It doesn't have to be centralized.

However, context may tell a different story. It was known to anyone who follows Qanon conspiracy theories that Wednesday was one of the days of the predicted coup (of course, virtually every other milestone in the past two months have had the same prediction and came and passed without incident). It is totally reasonable to assume that some of the crowd at that rally were Qanon believers ready to participate in a coup, were listening for the magic words to start the coup, and took these words to be them. I actually expect some of the investigations to uncover people who followed this exact chain of events. In short, that people took his words to be an incitement to imminent lawless action is a conclusion that I expect to be substantiated by facts.

But even that is not enough to say that Trump fails the Brandenburg test (and this is why my personal legal knowledge starts getting shaky): it's not enough to say that people were incited; you have to demonstrate that Trump expected (or should have expected) that these people would be incited by those words. And... honestly? I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the knowledge of what happened later, it would now (to me) be willful ignorance to suppose those words would not be incitement, but I'm not sure I can say that the same is true merely hours before it happened.

On Wednesday night, I watched a livestream with several lawyers talking about what laws were and weren't broken [1] on Wednesday. When it comes to Trump's legal woes, the main phrase was "matter of first impression": no court has heard a similar enough case for there to be any guideline on how the facts and the law should be interpreted. Does it matter that it's the President saying these words? Does it matter that he is seeming to endorse attacks on another branch of government? There's no precedent... we don't know... and we can't predict.

[1] Definitely no treason, and it doesn't look like anything qualifies as felony murder in DC or federal law, although this was obviously before we knew a police officer died. Definitely sedition though!

A secondary problem seems to be selective recognition of this: people are easily able to see the potential second order effects of Trump's rhetoric and react to it, but the same levers are not being pulled as actively when other people take similar rhetorical risks that have plausible deniability as contributing to violence for the reasons I mention.

Are there nuances to be observed or the process is applicable regardless of the context in which it is implemented?

Source: https://www.vox.com/recode/22218963/capitol-photos-legal-cha..., and if you don't like Vox there's confirmation of this stuff all over Twitter; just search.

That's assuming that all parties involved are concerned about fairness.

Nothing good comes out of these places, regardless of where in the political spectrum you position yourself (except maybe downright fascists). Look at what happened at the Capitol, did he further the right's agenda? Of course not, if anything it put them in a much more awkward situation.

Reddit admins are enablers and they share a part of the blame. Remember how subreddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots were allowed on the website for months, if not years (among many others I can't be bother to remember, including some extremely explicitly racist ones)?

Then it's always the same thing, some news outlet or politician talks publicly about how Reddit hosts fascists/pedos/racists or something like that and within two days you have bans and a heartfelt post by the admins saying how they felt that it was their duty to do something and "think of the children" and all kinds of bullshit.

Reddit is 4chan wearing a tie to try to look more business friendly.

These subreddits and websites don't host free speech, they host hate speech. I have zero issue drawing a line in the sand here. "First they came for the fascists, and I said nothing because I'm not a fascist, and the world was a better place. The end."

Most people lurk. Lurking these sites has a lot of benefits despite the risk of being drawn into radicalization:

- It allows you to truly understand the motives of these kinds of people, and predict what they will do.

- Understanding these motives allows you to address root causes that lead to this extremism. For every radical who storms the capitol, there are a thousand people who have slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs. This is good to understand so you can contribute to finding solutions to any justifiable grievances motivating their higher order beliefs (some won't be justified, some will), to help pull them in the other direction.

- Seeing this stuff full-on and not heard about through second hand accounts demystifies it. There are people like yourself who look at this, get a sense of revulsion from it, and then that both hardens their mind away from it and also motivates them to counteract it when they see people in their own lives starting to echo similar sentiments. If you don't truly grok the mental models these people have, you lack the prerequisites needed to disarm any version of them in the minds of people you care about. This isn't a sure thing, but anyone who doesn't will have no effect.

The people with slightly watered down but directionally parallel beliefs certainly exist in huge numbers, but they're the reason why such places are so harmful; they're much easier to radicalize than deradicalize, and they're the ones getting the content recommended to them or being swept along by the enthusiasm other people who share some of their views seem to have for it. And it'd actually be easier to understand their justifiable grievances if they weren't encouraged to connect them to pizza parlours or Jews.

Hate when that happens..

I'm not preaching tolerance here, but the more you understand your opponent the more you approach the inevitable conclusion: people are creatures of convenience, rarely going out of their own way for the sake of concepts like good or evil. If you want to change the way people act, the only way to really do it is to change what is convenient for them. Or to take certain conveniences away.

I don't go on 4chan anymore (or any social media outside HN [1]) and have mellowed out but it gave me the courage to call BS from either "side".

My theory is that 4chan hasn't become more extreme in the last 10 years. It's that "judgment-zones" like twitter and reddit have caused everyone else to become softer.

[1]: I'm serious, I didn't know about any stuff happening in the capitol until I saw it on HN.

You are right to worry - I remember reading an article about (FB?) moderators on anti-vaxxer pages finding themselves inadvertently internalizing that worldview, despite previously consciously not believing in it. The human mind appears to absorb information after repeated exposure, despite any conscious efforts not too - I assume it's similar to how the placebo effect works even when the person "knows" it's a placebo.

It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).

My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).

These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?

It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.

But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?

Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)

I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.

And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.

Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.

Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.

30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?

Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?

It is true that 30+ people died, some of them from police, some, of them from being shot and murdered (chop/chaz/portland), some by other means. It doesn't change the fact that many people died as a direct result of ongoing chaos and anarchy that was largely dismissed as justifiable by the most prominent news organizations and pundits (cnn, nyt, wapo). Two wrongs don't make a right, we need to disavow all violent protests across the board and stop with double standards.

What do you disagree with?

No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.

And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.

But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.

This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.

Big tech companies are largely left-leaning internally (which isn't surprising since California is the most left leaning state), so there is nothing to fear as long as you lean left yourself, (i.e. I guarantee you won't be censored for left-leaning speech any time soon).

Also, I find the idea of classifying FB as left-leaning to be laughable.

Your list was pretty narrow in scope until this one. ToS could contain anything and be used to censor speech for any reason.

I’ve not heard any legitimate, evidence-backed claim that any of the major sites are enforcing their rules unfairly. Instead, the claims are usually along the lines of:

“I got banned for saying we should do violent stuff! And yet they allow this other ideologically opposite person to have an account!”

“Can you point to a specific post where the other person is saying we should be violent?”

“No, but everyone knows they support it!”

Well, “everyone knows” isn’t evidence.

Suppose it's a white family but they're wearing MAGA hats and the restaurant denies them service. That's nearly acceptable among a broad swath of the population today.

Now suppose it's your mom wearing a MAGA hat (you may not like that she wears one but it's her right, no?) and she gets denied service in a Starbucks. Maybe someone gets violent with her and knocks the hat off her head. Maybe the server spits in her coffee. All of which has happened. Are you still comfortable with "private property"?

Suppose you wander into a restaurant wearing a "Biden-Harris" T-shirt and they say "Get out!" Are you okay with that?

I could keep going, but you get the picture. We can't have a "freedom for me, not for thee" attitude. It has to be universal.

Also in practice, there is way bigger outcry over right wing reedits being banned then left wing reddits. Each time reddit banns a bunch of subs, there is discussion about right wings ones - including on HN. Nobody cares about left wing subs being banned, that discussion never appears.

For the record, I am fine with both left and right reddits being banned right now. But I have yet to see free speech advocates to fret about toxic leftist and feminist places being closed.

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1320078487970041856

Just throw out anything that doesn't fit your narrative and keep your message on repeat and your audience will fall captive eventually since most are not open to doing their own fact-checking.

Please forgive the language it is verbatim and I think threats of violence are more offensive than bad words.

> You had better be ready partriots! It is go time very soon. We must attack all central communications to big cities are democratic cities. Fiber optics telecom bridges supply routes we can starve those motherfuckers to death. The people are ready it is time.

>We got to give it until Monday but after that partriots we must take the fight to them, make that rally look small. Load your magazines gather your things it's time to go and take out the sorry bastards.

While we worry about the very legitimate question of what the limits of free speech are and how we ought not to create a situation where anyone serves as the gate keeper they are planning to kill us and install an autocracy.

Let's shut them down, shut them out and generally rebuke them. History shows that higher order ideals generally need to be preserved with actions when words have failed, and make no mistake we are past words with these folks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Shutting down anyone talking pro trump in the whole country will have downsides, and just make them more angry. Prohibition isn't an answer that will work.

Hopefully sending all of the insurrectionists to jail will help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

"Maybe 2,000" was a precursor event to the rise of Nazi germany.

You mean, the things a tiny handful of people post there. Most posters are center-right and don't advocate violence.

I would also note that there's been plenty of talk of violence against conservatives on left-leaning platforms, Twitter especially but many others. These people are never called out even if they talk about "rounding them up and putting them in camps" and similar Nazi-like talk, even killing them seems to be permissible. I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.

Do they also condemn or apply moderation to violence being advocated? Or is it condoned? Honest question, I have not even remotely invested enough time (nor do I plan to do so) to understand this facet.

> I've reported lots of such tweets and sometimes they're taken down, other times, not.

I agree that such messages should be taken down and condemned just the same.

My personal "favorite" of such: "this country is not safe for you". Not a threat, just stating a fact.

Say 45% support their party

70% believes in the lie that the election was stolen

20% believes that violence is warranted

10% is willing to do violence.

Start with a population of over 330M and you get over 2 million insurgents.

Peace requires those funnel steps to be way smaller.

"de-platforming right wing voices" is such a bad faith interpretation of what's happening and I'm getting really frustrated that the right continues to pretend they're being censored.

You can have different opinions on plenty of political issues. Taxes, healthcare, abortion, gun rights, military spending, education spending, etc. Arguing in favor of low taxes, eliminating funding for public healthcare, banning abortion, etc. will not get you de-platformed.

What gets you removed is racism, bigotry, and inciting violence. Of course, nobody thinks they're racist. Even Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer denies being racist.

I agree, that it's unfair to (a-priori) castigate free-speech-absolutist platforms; there are good-faith, civil-libertarian reasons for them to exist. Nonetheless, they inherently act as a moth-flame to specifically those people that are banned from more mainstream platforms; after all, what motivation would non-controversial communities have to migrate? I absolutely the right of such platforms to exist, but from Voat, to Gab, to now Parler, in practice they quickly skew towards conspiracies and "hate speech" and the like.

I consider SSC's heterodox "Culture War Thread" [0] to be the canonical case study in this pattern: "It's very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse... But once you remove all those things, you're left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that's the scariest thing of all."

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

I will agree that "Voat" is a nasty place, but I'm not comfortable with shutting them down either, or cutting them off from pay processors and certificate authorities. This kind of game tends to come back and bite one in the ass. It's the old "First they came for xxx and I said nothing".

The line is very tricky, as to what constitutes colorful metaphor, vs. explicit calls to violence. (My favorite satire on this dilemma: https://youtu.be/eg3_kUaYFJA) Regardless, the emotional energy and goals of that community on Jan 6th was extremely clear: to alter the due process of law by threat of force.

All that said, I'm quasi-absolutist on free speech issues, for the slippery-slope reasons you describe. Free speech doesn't end at 1A: it's a cultural value as well. Yet, it's also a tall order to enforce that value proactively: if a newspaper is not obligated to print every letter, should Twitter be obligated to let everyone have an account? There's a good argument for a "digital commons", and regulating tech giants as utilities; but the balance between an individual's freedom to share offensive views, and the freedom of service providers to choose to whom they offer service, is extremely murky.

Speaking of gatekeepers, however, I wonder, how soon Google and Apple will boot Parler from their AppStores?

"BREAKING: Apple is currently threatening to ban Parler -- the free speech alternative to Twitter -- unless the service enacts draconian censorship policies demanded by left-wing Big Tech oligarchs, according to two sources familiar with Apple's threats."

[1]: https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1347660160806825984

Of course, attempt to engage to improve the situation and help someone obtain ground truth on their own from legitimate information sources, but when it's obviously hopeless insulate yourself against those who could harm and move forward. You don't have to support the establishment, but you also don't have the right to violence because you feel slighted.

Yes, you are inherently fighting in support of the establishment if you are censoring ideas that the establishment doesn't support. You can't have it both ways.

Violence is one thing, but you're also lumping in violence with conspiracy theories, which in turn constructs its own form of orthodoxy. This is why I don't support censorship to such a degree that it invades the public space; all it does is promote a religion of some kind, whether it be Christianity or "the science is settled". By the way, violence only ever seems bad when it goes against your sensibilities. If violence supported your world view, statistically speaking, you are likely to justify it. America was founded on violence, and lots of people throughout the political spectrum believe that the violence was justified. If you build a system that is so technologically perfect that it extinguishes violence from the public space, then you have created a system of slavery.

Let's stop pretending that we're against violence and admit that we're against violence of certain agendas.

I intuitively get the point you are trying to make (sovereignty, "government has a monopoly on violence," yadda yadda), but I don't think it reflects the real, both contemporary and historical, systems of slavery.

Chattel slavery in the antebellum South's relied on extrajudicial violence. International sex trafficking is inherently violent. Modern slavery most often occurs in areas with widespread, violent conflict. Why should we be worried about "benevolent AI overlords" going rogue when historically civilizations with high percentages of unfree people were extremely violent?

I think you're making a false comparison. There's at least 2 different kinds of unfree regimes, the first being monarchies and dictatorships that use force in a top-down manner to control their subjects, and the second being the system of mind control which enslaves people by feeding them simulations that convince them that they are sufficiently free and safe. The latter version of an unfree regime still benefits from creating a form of slavery, but it's slavery of the mind. Imagine a civilization comprised of figurative Uncle Toms of the system. Sex trafficking is concerning, but it's a form of slavery that can only work in the 21st century by staying underground

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.

I'm a bit confused by the figurative language used here. Did you have a specific example of this, or is this a hypothetical? I think this type of thinking has its, but I think it's important to contextualize it. For example, you can say that a gambling addict gambles against their will, but I wouldn't say that they are enslaved to gambling institutions (unless I was purposely being hyperbolic). But I agree that many systems of slavery had a degree of self-regulation among the enslaved.

> Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your point.

My framework is this: violence is a necessary part of slavery, because to a certain extent enslavement requires the enslaved to choose between continued slavery or extreme violence/death. If you remove state violence from the equation, slavery still usually exists, and often flourishes due to the lack of a countervailing force. In "top-down" situations, where a system of slavery has implicit or explicit state support, the state doesn't have to explicitly enact the violence itself, it can simply declare a certain segment of the population "extra-judicial.

I think authoritarian, low violence states like Singapore have numerous human rights issues, but I wouldn't go so far as saying that the entire body politic is enslaved.

This is completely wrong, China and India top the list with 8 million and 3.8 million slaves respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#St...

From the linked source:

North Korea has the world's highest rate of slavery, with about one in 10 people enslaved, followed by Eritrea (9.3%) Burundi (4%), Central African Republic (2.2%), Afghanistan (2.2%), Mauritania (2.1%), South Sudan (2%), Pakistan (1.7%), Cambodia (1.7%) and Iran (1.6%).

In retrospect, I should've said "violent conflict OR extreme poverty"

Why do you want to go to great lengths and "educate" people on your point of view?

And is there proof that there wasn't fraud? Does the burden of proof fall upon them or the government?

I think you can, to a certain degree. For example: by making the mail-in system more trustworthy, or by eliminating it.

My country (Chile) only uses on-site voting and no one alleges fraud because we know that it would be incredibly hard to steal an election with this system. The system is transparent, votes are counted publicly the same day of the voting.

The electoral service is one of the few public institutions that I deem competent and actually trust in my country, and I think I'm not alone.

To be honest, now politicians are trying to impose mail-in ballot system, but that not the electoral service's fault. That's idiot politicians trying to ruin something that works.

This is a man who, in what any normal person, could admit was a mistake when tweeting about a hurricane having effects in Alabama. Instead he doubled down, tripled down, forced federal employees to make statements that he was right. He even drew sharpie on a map to extend the prediction cone because it didn't show what he said.

There is a clear pattern of behavior here.

Additionally, those who are alleging massive voter fraud in public did not make those statements in court, because it would have actual consequences. Every state certified their results, including those with republican leadership.

So you either have to buy in to extraordinary claims of all kinds of (in many cases provably false) of voter fraud and a massive apparatus (Deep State) working against Donald Trump or accept the much more obvious and plain result.

If you listen to the call with Georgia, when the Secretary of State pointed out that they had investigated several of the claims, Trump's response was that the investigators were either incompetent or actively working against him.

It goes beyond the pale.

I mean... why is it that if someone tells me that Sun rises in the west virtually everyone just ignores this as an obvious nonsense, but when someone says... a more nuanced but nonetheless proven-false controversy (I'd intentionally refrain from any examples - even the ones that were already provided - to avoid even a possibility debating any of those), some don't outright dismiss it.

Maybe I'm a weirdo, and maybe it's simply not possible with humans - but I still hope for a society where (argh, okay, let's invoke Godwin's Law) the next Hitler won't happen not because of some speech laws but because simply no one would listen to the lunacies seriously.

Or because their opinions leads them to construct bombs or shoot people.

Not even month ago. Ignoring yesterday, there was plan and attempt to execute Mitchigan governor last few months. There was Nashville boombing, likely due to whatever conspiracy theory that man believed.

Even Elliot Rodger had opinions largely from incels chans.

Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?

The very same situation has happened across all of South America throughout the 20th Century.

[1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...

The only strawman in this thread is the one made by you in the comment I am responding to now.

Trump praised China for paving the way to make Xi Jinping's presidency permanent

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-china/trump-praises...

> “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump’s remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.

Which IMO implies support for a one-party state.

Who exactly is "they"? Anyone who disagrees with you? Anyone who votes for a Republican candidate? Trump supporters? Some subset of Trump supporters who say the election was fraudulent? What about Trump supporters who say the election MAY have been fraudulent -- do they also get silenced?

This is a slippery slope. You either have freedom of speech, or you don't. Muzzling people who have ideas you consider dangerous has a way of blowing back in your face; in fact it almost guarantees violence, when people feel they are not allowed to vent.

Posts like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691491 and many others you posted in these recent threads are not acceptable on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We ban this sort of account, regardless of which politics they're battling for. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

Please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political battle—it's against the guidelines and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), again regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.

They are also proud boys starting fights. It is not like US would have shortage of organized political violence lately. It is pretty easy to find "they".

The Nashville bomber was one guy committing suicide and he even warned in advance.

The Michigan kidnapping plot was about 5-6 idiots who did not represent some kind of farflung organization.

The Proud Boys have not started fights, to my knowledge. They have marched peacefully down the street holding U.S. flags and the like, and been violently attacked by antifa elements. They show up at left wing/antifa demonstrations but don't attack; they fight back when provoked. They've been demonized by left wing news as "white supremacists" ironically even though their leader is a black guy.

So when you say "it is pretty easy to find 'they'", you need to support that statement. It's pretty easy to make stuff up, too, and I believe a lot of people are being censored on the basis of hearsay and madeup nonsense.

Pretty often the new technology was the vector by which those came, simply because bad actors seem to be quicker to take advantage of new technology.

Also historically, censorship and gatekewping were overall succesfull strategies. I am not saying that it is good thing to do all that much, there is danger in overdoing it, but historically it was effective in suppressing viewpoints.

good luck on forbidding all religious speech and fiction on the internet!

Note well: I am not at all saying that Trump supporters are right. I am saying that you are not omniscient enough to be qualified to decide what should be blocked. Nobody is.

The second part of that is hard/expensive, but it is a path forwards to some level of discourse between the people using these subreddits and everyone else. Driving these communities to different sites means that people get in much stronger filter bubbles, that's probably not a good thing.

To take the example of /r/conservative on reddit right now, the subreddit currently bans anyone who says anything at all critical of Trump, and mostly only let's people who have a history of saying supportive things talk. That's not good for reddit, or the country as a whole. But if reddit just removed the current batch of moderators and those rules, and had someone enforce some reasonable standards of discourse but not enforce politics, I think it could turn into a force for good.

To put it in your own terms, my preferred solution is to try and make it possible to "have intellectual discourse with people who are fabricating reality or deeply believe in conspiracy theories", instead of just making it so those people go fabricate their reality elsewhere.

I'm not claiming this is a perfect solution, I'm sure you're right there would be complaints, and I'm also sure that no perfect solution exist. It's just not that easy to deradicalize people, and it's just not that easy to deal with people actively attempting to deceive and radicalize the public. I do think it would probably be a superior solution to what is being done right now, where there are even more complaints, and you get increasingly "strong" filter bubbles.

I suspect we're not very far off. However, completely anonymous, decentralized, uncensorable network ideas like Freenet, TOR, I2P never really took off only because they needed a critical mass to support them: they're not technologically infeasible, they just didn't have enough support to get off the ground. If half the users of the "normal" internet are banned from it, they're going to start discovering peer-to-peer systems - that's what happened with the internet itself, after all.

It does mean that they cannot effectively find other people with the same opinion, cannot organize, and cannot spread their opinion effectively. Suppression of opinions _works_ (unfortunately, I must say).

Taking that option away from people scares me a lot more than the MAGA mob. People storming government buildings can also be a good thing (uprisings against oppressive governments). It wasn't in this case, obviously, but the damage this mob caused, including the lives lost, is nothing compared to the absolutely terrifying situation of a totalitarian government and all communication platforms being "curated".

If we look and find that freenet and tor hidden services are only full of kiddie porn, drugs, and crazy we haven't swung to far towards censorship.

Right now the crazy is right in the open and hidden services are only for things that are actually already illegal like child porn so it is premature to suppose we are being too restrictive. Based on the fact that we almost lost our democracy we probably need to Crack down more on the hate, lies, and inducement to violence.

When you have to go somewhere secret to hear someone suggest we need to massacre some jews we may be approaching an actual balance.

Have you never heard of the DMCA?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682785

Wikipedia was threatened for having B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD on a web page.

ISPs are frequently threatening to disconnect customers who serve files, and sites that are large enough to have their own connectivity have had this for 20 years.

This one for example

https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/11/0153247/microsoft-asks-s...

"Under the provisions of the DMCA, we expect that having been duly notified of this case of blatant copyright violation, Andover will remove the above referenced comments from its servers and forward our complaint to the owner of the referenced comments. "

Agreed - though I find it's more of a headache than scary. On end, I don't like the fact that increasingly internet infrastructure is acting as a de facto judge in deciding what speech is and isn't allowed. I empathize with both parties. ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent, and I'd probably do the same thing were I in their position.

I'm much more accepting of platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, et. al. taking down groups and banning members than I am of infrastructure providers doing the same. The former kicks people off of large communities, but people can still put together their own websites. When it gets the the point that I might not even be able to serve plain HTML that I wrote myself, because nobody will even let it go through the wires that's when I start thinking utility regulation in ISPs, DNS, etc. is necessary.

Cloudflare's CEO was very humble when taking down sites. When talking about taking down the Daily Stormer, "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet... No one should have that power.” [1] I largely agree, though I'd offer the caveat that something needs to have this power but it should be an institution like the courts rather than individuals in corporations.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...

But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company?

After all, they are private companies! /s

I'm no lawyer, but I think the distinction is in utilities. The postal service, for instance, can't just refuse service to people they don't like. Same with power companies. I'm not sure how phone providers and ISPs fit into this. But I think it may be useful to have ISPs, payment providers, and maybe also DNS and DDOS protection providers be considered utilities. My basic measuring stick is that putting HMTL and CSS out on the internet should be protected akin to the ability to send letters through the mail.

Democracies usually protect the freedom of initiative too, but it's a different protection, with very different exceptions, and companies usually have it much more restricted than speech.

They're granted immunity from lawsuits from the government because they're a dumb pipe, but then they censor/promote as if they are a publisher.

A business can't sue facebook for allowing a BLM riot to organize on its platform that destroyed their storefront, and similarly they have no recourse when said business gets a facebook page deleted because they complained about it.

Freedom from compelled speech is the default. Requiring people or organizations to host speech is the exception, and is limited to things like utilities and cigarette health warnings.

Making Facebook or Twitter a utility is very coarse grained. They would have to allow all legal speech. They wouldn't be able to ban users for nudity or porn, or explicitly espousing Nazism (actual Nazism, not the much more expansive post 2016 definition of "Nazi"). Both of these things are legal in the US, and a utility would have to permit them. If social media is made a utility, then social media is going to become 8chan.

That's why I think it makes the most sense to apply utility status at the infrastructure layer not the application layer. Social media companies can still moderate, people on the fringes can spread their message on niche applications or on sites they build themselves.

I don't emapthize with the ISPs here. Internet access has become a utility which is required to participate in many parts of the economy and society. Utilities should not be allowed to refuse to service someone who is using the service legally.

If someone is hosting illegal content, that's a different story.

If Trump had been competent, he wouldn't have attacked net neutrality, he would have said net neutrality is a wonderful idea, and extended it to other layers of the protocol stack.

He would also have got on board when people like Elizabeth Warren talked about breaking up Facebook and Amazon.

Presumably violent threats?

Following the arguments put forth in the rest of this thread, it is possible to support free speech while still arguing for exceptions and being against free speech absolutism.

Such an argument against an entire whole does not logically follow from the given argument that specific exception should be made.

Would you support the silencing if leaders of the Augusta Civil Rights Riot were using forums, or Reddit, or FB, to organize themselves?

There is a reason why freedom of speech, without any limitations, is so valued in the free world. Those in power will always use "crime" and "think of the children" as tools to sway the public into weaponizing the government.

Do you believe it is OK to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of the domestic terror is the seat of our government?

Do you believe it is OK to do this, in order to disrupt their planning? Do you believe it becomes not-OK if the target of domestic terror is a tyrannical government?

[1]: https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/kidnapped-why-an-...

> constantly DDoSd

Hmm...

JFC. It's a circus of terrible thinking and baseless anger over there. If that site is getting a lot of traffic, you folks who consider yourselves above such things better start fighting for what is actually true and good, because what is not true and not good is exactly what is festering over there, and if they don't get their vote, they WILL get violent again, just see how they attacked Lindsey Graham at the airport just now for breaking rank on principle... and sweeping these folks under the rug will not eradicate the cancer

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win

Over the last 90 days it has gone from a global Alexa Rank of 6000, to 2400. And is apparent about 400 in the US.

In my subjective opinion that is a large amount of growth.

They allowed the group to build and grow then once they moved off they killed the sub?

It's utterly fascinating.

http://ourfakehistory.com/

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win

Hacker news is 6500 globally, and 2600 in the US, if that is any kind of context.

Alexa is one of the oldest analytics companies to publicize top rankings for websites. Today was the first time I noticed they've been bought by Amazon.

You can look around their top 50, (which they are calling top 500 for the clicks) for global and country level web traffic here: https://www.alexa.com/topsites

There's something odd going on with their traffic. I've been on the front page of Reddit and thedonald.win at the same time, and either virtually nobody on that site reads the articles or the upvotes counts are being massively inflated: the upvote to pageview ratio is waaaay lower on thedonald.win then I've experienced on Reddit and HN.

I bet they are violating multiple (inter)national laws since years.

I read thedonald.win daily too. It feels like r/watchPeopleDie, some sort of morbid curiosity. Currently they're claiming Trump's concession video yesterday was deep faked. Very entertaining and scary at the same time.

To be afraid of being "judged" for your relatively tame and objective comments speaks volumes about the state of our increasingly polarized culture.

Everyone IMHO should be peering into other bastions of thought

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thedonald.win

For reference, this is higher than infowars (#507 in the US) but far lower than Breitbart (#72 in the US), to name other, um, right-wing conspiracy-promoting sites.

This is also lower than amazon.ca in the US (#354), apparently. That probably says something.

My point: Fine indeed, as long as they "stay there". But they won't. This goes for any online community: it has effects outside of that community.

It isn't an offence thing. It's just ... boringly dumb. It's just like I'm not going to start a conversation in this thread to review my basic backstitch.

Companies like cloudfare are supposed to be dumb infrastructure, not your political cudgel.

I can be anti-Nazi and pro-free speech.

Will Cloudflare continue to protect thedonald[.]win? I think we should call Cloudflare out.

https://twitter.com/philipithomas/status/1347621982758719489

--

[1] https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/

I'll say it out loud: though I despise Trump and mourn the damage he and those enabling have caused, I spend more time online looking at pro-Trump, conservative and Republican focused material than anything else. I downvote none of it, even the legit crazy/scary stuff, and in the rare cases I comment, it's carefully worded to be neutral or even sometimes conciliatory, though always honest.

It scares me that many people feel the need to apologize for openly admitting that they looked at material from 'the other side'.

More often, people will refrain from posting their actual, perhaps nuanced views entirely, due to the fear of being judged/attacked/whatever. Didn't Paul Graham write an essay about that?

My wife was writing a research essay to present to our local Toastmasters group, which she is a relatively new member of. She was going over the talk with one of the senior members, one on one, on zoom, and she mentioned, in passing, that our family is going to delay getting the Covid19 vaccine a couple of months, because we've been exercising (essentially) phase 0 (extreme) lockdown consistently since last March. We can do that because we're blessed with the ability to work and (for our son) go to school from home.

The person my wife mentioned this to just lost her shit, and went into a verbal rampage about how to delay getting the vaccine is akin to being an anti-vaxer, how it was immoral to not get it as soon as humanly possible.

To be clear: If any of me, my wife or son came into contact with other human beings with any frequency, we'd get the vaccine as soon as possible. We're not afraid of it.

But others need it before we do.

However, that 'nuance' was entirely lost in an emotional, knee-jerk reaction which reminds me of so many other things we see today.

Was there voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election? I'd bet my life on it; that there was at least a single single incident of fraud. Did that fraud in any way change the outcome of the election? Of course not.

Apologies for the tangent.

I want to encourage everyone to consider looking carefully, deeply and compassionately at what 'the other side' writes and says. It's not easy to do, but I believe it's a necessary, critical work that all of us need to honestly engage in.

Quality post. Thanks for it.

However, the paradox of tolerance fully applies.

I fear that it happens a lot more frequently than most people are willing to admit.

They were openly writing about throwing liberals off helicopters etc...

70 million people voted for Trump. Understanding them better is not a bad thing.

Does not mean agreeing with them.

And yes, same.

I personally am very liberal when it comes to speech.

And yes, all communities are good for understanding people better. Does not mean agreeing with them.

It does mean being able to know who one is dealing with. That matters to me.

Your average Trump voter is just a normal Republican. They voted for Trump because there was an R next to his name and defended him because he was on their team. The Democratic voters would be no different if the dems ran an equally ghastly candidate. (They obviously have not done so, and I am not making the claim that's random. I'm not saying 'both sides are the same' in this post.)

It might be useful to understand the thedonald.win crowd, but it ain't 70MM of your countrymen, Americans.

I'd say overall the majority on TDW are leaning more towards libertarian than conservative. Certain things like freedom of speech, 2nd amendment rights, limited government and spending are shared ideals. Other things like pro-marijuana, pro-life, Christianity are depicted and respected but differ between supporters and less popular then the ideals everyone agrees on.

I hate both extremes and I don't want to risk the thugs from either side (nazis or communists) bashing my skull in or trying to get me fired.

The only fascism I see is the censorship going around.

How are they Nazis or fascists? Most want limited government, and no censorship. Trump supporters don't own the media and aren't silencing people.

I don't see why you have to attack me or my account. You're the one calling people fascists and getting flagged. I just wanted to point out that name calling gets you nowhere.

the difference is that r/the_donald is more violent. They cordinate gatherings, "attacks", a violent protests.

r/politics which is liberal bubble is more peaceful but both these communites censor opposing views and is dangerous to democracy

Why not just tour your local Psychiatric Ward?

Please keep downvoting. I bathe in Maga-Moron tears. Poor Snowflakes.

(It’s easy for me to say ofc, I have no horse in this race)

Their worst right now is much worse than expected, I would be ashamed to be associated.

I think the vast, vast majority of people believe in non-violent protest and giving people room to express their views and hurt and frustration in non-violent ways.

I think politicians and the media is largely responsible for trying to paint groups they don’t like with an overly broad brush, and we should outright reject that as Americans.

The political flame war has to stop. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are in fact reasonable, kind, loving people who still believe in America even if it’s no longer popular to admit it.

The challenge is the fringe voices are amplified a million times more than the center-mass.

I read an interesting Twitter thread last week on how housing policy in SF is basically totally dominated by 6 people, private citizens, who scream down anyone who would dare to offer an opposing view, and are successful in setting policy with these tactics. I don’t know if that’s fully true, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

This doesn't follow. Trump has been promoting violence since 2016. There have been multiple attacks carried out by Trump supporters. Most Republicans think the election was stolen thanks to Trump. Anyone who was surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to the blatantly obvious signs that have been on display nor to the repeated warnings by many, many people saying this is where things were headed. I'm in no way surprised this happened. Why were so many other people?

And to be fair their stance is not totally unreasonable. On both isles of the political spectrum most voters for some candidate ignore at least part of what the candidate says _and_ does. No candidate perfectly matches up with what you think should be done, that's normal and expected, democracy isn't perfect. A part of this process is trying to guess what the political candidate really thinks/believes vs what they say just to gain political capital. All people living in a democracy learn to do this early on. I guess for many Trump supporters they guessed that even with all the seemingly violence inducing rhetoric it wouldn't end up with a mob assaulting a federal government institution. Mistakes were made. :)

And it's a lot more complicated than who you voted for out of two choices.

And the real problem is first past the post, not the way you look at the votes.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

That being said, identifying that the support for Trump is about 50/50 does not _really_ tell the right story here with thedonald.win -- this isn't a representative of the ~half of us in the US who voted for Trump (or would if we voted)...it's a representation of a small, extreme culture, part real and part just trolling.

I doubt OP would have apologized quite so hard for watching Fox News. Fox News's editorial content is somewhat to the right of the average Republican voter, but not by nearly as much as thedonald.win -- that's something that represents mainstream Trump voter (aka Republican voter) worldview.

The problem here is that the leader is going out of his way to specifically engage and this minority group by committing as many atrocities as possible.

This is one of the top threads on that site RIGHT NOW. Its easy to judge someone participating in that discussion.

No, they didn't.

According to Pew, the non-voter block is much less white, less educated, and poorer than the voting population. You can probably make several cases for which way that block breaks, but I would certainly not say they would vote proportionally the same as voters.

And the assumption that people who choose to vote have an equal distribution of political views to those who choose not to vote is ludicrous; people who, if they voted, would only vote for someone who isn't a major party candidate are going to be vastly overrepresented among nonvoters simply because they are more likely to feel participation is futile; it would be less inaccurate than assuming equal distribution—but still inaccurate—to assume every eligible nonvoter is equivalent to a vote against at least all of the major party candidates.

or did you count in people not eligible to vote? like kids and foreigners?

23.5+% voted against Trump.

Edit to add: Downvoting facts?

I dont have a horse in the race neither other than stock market.

It's not that strange. It's why elections are supposed to be confidential. Public opinion is always going to shift. During Clinton's reign we had the clinton crazies who hated him. George W bush? Did anyone like him? Obama derangement was readily labelled racism. Now Trump derangement is very strong. Biden will have his haters, that's coming.

However, the derangement is real and even the illusion you're for trump will gain you hate.

Because so much of it was tinged with racism

> Now Trump derangement is very strong

Yes some people are under the mistaken impression that there's anything good about Trump and therefore suprised when he doesn't seem to care for the future of our democracy and our country even a tiny bit

So even winning, it doesn’t really need to be that close to half of the U.S.

Not to say that isn’t a sizable chunk or anything.

Hacker News is a news site so I imagine little to no one on the Trump train is here.

[1] https://www.theroot.com/white-supremacists-killed-more-peopl...

Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)

That is to say, the US attitude towards free speech is not somehow the result of some very wise collective, it simply hasn't had the history to affect its attitude towards it in the same way that European countries have.

Ask a Native American (or one of dozens of other groups whose vilification enabled their oppression and murder), or maybe read a history book? We Americans aren't less experienced than Europeans; we're just more committed.

I think you may be right that ethnic genocide alone may not be enough to change a whole population's opinions around free speech rights, that there may be additional factors required such as general awareness of how bad it was to engage in such acts and what contributed to those acts.

Free speech protections weren't obviously relevant to the genocide as it has occurred, although it wouldn't surprise me to learn e.g. that a native counterpart to Frederick Douglass had been silenced unfairly. As for speech in the other direction, the worst things were said (and done) by the "greatest statesmen" [0] so I doubt that corporate speech codes would have been much help. If it isn't too presumptuous of me to observe, it's unlikely that such things would have done much to slow down Hitler or Mussolini either.

[0] https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/nice-day-for-a-genoci...

That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.

Are you talking about donald trump or joe biden?

> People who voted for Donald Trump should be ashamed of their vote.

Using your logic, those who voted for corrupt biden should be ashamed as well.

> That said, reading what people are saying in an effort to understand and to de-radicalize is not something to be ashamed of.

Have you taken a look in the mirror. People like you are what's wrong with the country. Extremist and blind to their own faults.

We had two choices this year. Maybe I'll phrase it in a way you can understand. On the one hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male" and on the other hand, we had a "corrupt, evil rich privileged white male".

People like you whine about rich privileged corrupt white males all the time and yet are slaving over a rich privileged corrupt white male.

On the other hand, one candidate lost a son to drug overdose. One candidate had debunked conspiracy theories regarding their other son's interactions with Ukraine.

Do I think that Biden is perfect? Gosh, no. Do I think he is a good person? I don't know if it is possible to be a truly good person while holding any high office. Do I think that Biden is a better person and a better choice than Trump? Absolutely.

That's what Republicans and Trump supporters say too. You are tired of it because it's true.

> One candidate refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.

Neither candidate committed to it. The DNC was going to do exactly what the RNC did.

"Hillary Clinton said in a new interview that Joe Biden should not concede the 2020 presidential election “under any circumstances," anticipating issues that could prolong knowing the final outcome."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...

> One candidate has a history of racial bias (Central Park 5, apartment zoning, Judge Curiel, etc.).

Yes and Biden help push a law that sent millions of minorities to prison.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-controversial-19...

> One candidate openly asked for and received aid from a foreign nation.

Are you for real? Biden and his son's ukraine, russia, china, etc endeavors are just as bad or worse.

> One candidate built up a mob and pointed them at the Capitol in an attempted coup.

Right. And no rioting from biden's side.

The only people who think like you are brainwashed political zealots. You are part of the problem. The only difference between you and a tea party or trumpist is political party affiliation. That's it. And it doesn't really matter because DNC and RNC are ultimately on the same team. They serve the same master. And it isn't the american people.

But whatever, you do you and keep up the good fight.

I may be mistaken, but you sound like the type who cries about "privileged white males". But man, you sure do love Biden.

The false equivalency narrative you're spewing is tiresome. Trump's record is an unprecedented disaster. There is no equivalent.

It is clear, simple and harmonic.

Kudos for the design. I wished reddit would like that way.

Wow, that sucks. What ISP is that? Why can't they just take the money and host the service without censoring other people?

Not to me, because free speech, even in the US, was never "absolutely free" speech - incitement to riot is punishable by law, for one.