And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech.
> It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And I don't think that the companies have any particular desire to censor. Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally. Dorsey seemed entirely blindsided by the pressures from the administration, three-letter agencies, and individual Congressmen based on the Twitter Files, and pushed back plenty. The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in the 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network.
It's being done in the open, and they're simply daring us to see corruption there. Hell, they've become conspiracy and foreign propaganda scientists, and they can detect the influence of the evil Russian and Chinese enemies of the state even in people who have no connections to Russians or Chinese people. It's their Russian and Chinese ideas that need to be eradicated, and all good communications channels and payments processors should be happy to help unless they are also secretly Russian.
Wow did they go from coordinating banning Alex Jones to banning the last President in record time. Let's see how long it takes them to get from Kiwi Farms to The Grayzone or Rumble.
[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope...
Where can I find more about this?
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/12/04/six-degrees-from-james...
[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...
[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa...
Here's another good source about Google's revolving door with government during the Obama administration: https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-rev...
This is not true. There has been at least two high profile cases where Cloudflare dropped their commitment to free speech when under no real legal pressure(kiwifarms and stormfromt). Maybe you think they did the right thing, but it's clear that they are not a neutral party.
I’m deeply ambivalent about a site like Cloudflare censoring anything but the logic here… absolutely not.
You can classify speech. It’s not terribly difficult to classify when something is an outright call for racial warfare. If I were a person calling for a ban to such speech my own speech wouldn’t automatically be subject to the same criteria.
We already have laws against speech that incites violence and you might be surprised how contested the lines themselves are. There are a lot of people these days who outright state that speech itself == violence and should carry the same consequences.
I'm not a free speech absolutist. When pressed, I don't think very many people are. I just think we need to be extremely careful when it comes to expanding those boundaries and that we're better off to err on the side of freedom because of the importance of what we stand to lose.
What's the argument against? Folks have been driven to suicide by targeted harassment and doxxing labeled "speech." The whole reason we have laws about public accommodation is because in a society you can drive someone to ruin by everyone collectively refusing to do business with them which was (and still is for the gays) backed by 1A. The threat of violence is violence, speech that is an implicit threat of violence is violence. Speech that makes people feel unsafe due that implicit threat is violence (say a neighborhood where every house had a flag with a black man hung by a noose). Verbal abuse is still abuse. Everyone who's ever been to school knows that bullying doesn't actually require anyone lay a hand on you to make you live in constant fear and that dynamic doesn't just go away when you become an adult.
Sure, we could coin a term like "diet violence" to mean actions that cause in people the behave as if they were under the threat of violence but which doesn't cause bodily harm but what would be the point? Legally it makes sense to do that to discourage escalation but to the victim the only difference is usually but not always the severity.
I'm sympathetic to folks when their messaging or iconography becomes recognized as an implicit threat of violence due to it being co-opted by others when they didn't mean it that way but if a bunch of people started flying communist flags and lynching people I would take mine down even if I was just really pro-workers rights.
No they haven't, not on Kiwi Farms anyhow. This is a deliberate smear intended to justify any extrajudical action taken against the forum. The reality is that it's just a bunch of assholes gossiping about other assholes, and one asshole in particular is doing everything he can to eradicate the site because it has documented, amongst other horrible things, his confession of rape.
Kiwi Farms has been more than just gossip. It's been used by people to harass people in the real world. People there have taken things way too far in the past, and that behavior has been encouraged and supported by the culture of the site. I don't think the forum should be silenced, but it's simply not accurate to say that it's nothing more than online gossip. It has at times been the source of outright harassment and abuse. I think we'd agree that it's an issue that needs to be handled with moderation and the law, but it's also a real problem.
And libraries have been used by people to learn effective methods to harass or harm others in the real world. Quick! Let's shut down all the libraries!
> I think we'd agree that it's an issue that needs to be handled with moderation and the law, but it's also a real problem.
We already have such a law. It's called Section 230. Forum operators should not be subject to tortious interference, criminal harassment, or other manner of extrajudicial punishment because they choose to exercise speech that you find repugnant.
You can put that straw man away. I made it clear that I didn't think the site should be shut down. I was only saying that its content and impact shouldn't be misrepresented as mere gossip.
> How about this then, I suggest, in order to both demonstrate freedom of speech and to entertain fans of KiwiFarms like content we create a KiwiFarms like site based on studying and publishing public facts on popular KiwiFarms members.
Sure, why not. Are there any potentially entertaining or ridiculous ones you have in mind, such that you feel it would be worth your efforts?
Yes, they have absolutely tormented people into suicide. That sounds bad so they deny it.
When they want to appear harmless, they call it a "gossip" site. It's not. It's a hub for stalking and abuse.
No, muddying up terms and words is not okay. The threat of violence is not violence. It's a threat. And I say that as someone who thinks that threats should carry a far (FAR) higher penalty than they currently do. This constant redefinition of words is done as an attempt to define a new morality but you know very well that there are many holes in it. And yet proponents of this new morality don't care to think about those holes. Being offended or scared can be subjective, therefore you cannot define threats and insults as violence. Otherwise the person which is most easily scared and offended wins. And what a surprise: That's how people already evolved under this new morality, how often do you now see people talk about how "terrified" they are of X or Y or Z or something their political opponent said. Obviously they are not actually terrified per dictionary definition but they use that word because they know that it gives them power under the new morality. Likewise being offended now equals power. You create a very dangerous system through these word redefinitions. Also by admitting that in a world where your views are the minority, you would define violence differently just proves what a problem this is: Whoever wins the social battle, gets to define what violence is. That is dangerous. Things must be based on objective reality.
If speech is violence then we have no means other than acts of violence to explore, discuss, and debate ideas. We need to be able to disagree with each other without it being assault and battery.
We need the right to offend, make uncomfortable, and challenge.
Exposure to an idea shouldn't be treated the same as being beaten with a fist because acts of violence are criminalized. Criminalizing unpopular speech is exactly what free speech is supposed to protect us against. Our freedom and ability to demand change depends on the ability to speak out against oppression without fear of being sentenced to prison just because of our words. If we need to speak out against those in power, we need the ability to use words they don't want to hear.
Blurring the lines between words that offend us and actual violence is dangerous and can only lead to actual violence. If there's something we disagree on, let's keep talking about it to reach a solution or at least an understanding of one another. If there is no difference between speech and violence we may as well just pull out guns instead and let might make right.
> The threat of violence is violence, speech that is an implicit threat of violence is violence.
Some speech really does rise to the level of threat and incitement to violence and we already have first amendment exceptions carved out in law to deal with that. We have laws against harassment. We don't need to expand that to include anything that someone doesn't want to hear. Even on the more extreme end, courts have tended to agree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
The OP’s assertion was that if I oppose censoring Stormfront then I shouldn’t be surprised when I find myself censored. But of course I would: the speech I (and the vast majority of the population) engage in is nowhere near as inflammatory.
According to who? History shows us that what people generally find acceptable or inflammatory has changed wildly over time. I think people should be able to love and marry any consenting adult they can convince to agree to it. That kind of talk would have had me crucified under McCarthyism.
You can't know what the prevailing opinion on the views you hold today will be even 5-10 years from now. People in recent times have been surprised to find themselves in very difficult situations because of that reality. In the US, our culture and values are less stable now than they've been in a long time. If you weaken free speech, as a right or an ideal, just to make yourself more comfortable today you might very well be surprised to find yourself censored or worse tomorrow.
The definition of a crime of violence[2] in the US also explicitly includes threats as a form of violence. "The term 'crime of violence' means—... (a) an offense that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, or (b) any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense." (18 USC § 16 my emphasis)
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/E-Stanko
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/E-Stanko/publication/24...
"Stormfront began in 1990 as an online bulletin board supporting white nationalist David Duke's campaign for United States senator for Louisiana. The name "Stormfront" was chosen for its connotations of a political or military front (such as the German Nazi Sturmabteilung (also known as storm troopers or SA)) and an analogy with weather fronts that invokes the idea of a tumultuous storm ending in cleansing.[11] The Stormfront website has been registered at Network Solutions since 1995 and was founded in 1996 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a member of the National Socialist White People's Party."
National Socialist White People = The American Nazi Party. That is literal. They changed from the NSWPP to the American Nazi Party in 1983. Their logo has a swastika on it. LITERAL NAZIS.
https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-history-taking-stand-fre...
If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.
If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.
?
"hunter biden laptop" was always a distraction tactic, just like "but hillary's emails". It was an attempt to muddy the waters and obscure the republican's long list of shit they got up to. Thankfully, we've gone from "fuck around" to the "find out" age now.
If Biden did a thing then the legal system will take care of it. That is all.
No, they aren't.
Freedom of speech is not the right to coerce others into relaying your speech. That is a violation of free speech.
You people built an edifice at law, called it 'public accommodations', went to great lengths to stretch it as far as possible into a concept of commercial neutrality, and now here it is being applied against you. No one will care whether or not your idiosyncratic definition of 'public accommodations' applies here either. The proletariat's sense of justice has been offended. You did this to yourselves. Choke on it.
Yes, it generally is in the US. Legally, there are a small number of narrow exceptions in public accommodations based in historically widespread societal persecution, but those exceptions would not be necessary if the general liberty you deny were not the rule, and even those exceptions which have been established in statute have not-infrequently been narrowed or limited by the courts for infringing on speech, press, and association rights when applied beyond certain limits.
I am not interested in your arguments predicated on what bourgeoisie law courts have said. They have natural rights the same as anyone else, and they are being trampled upon. No one is fooled, and no one is going to get dragged into useless arguments to authority with you.
A nitpick, but "bourgeoisie" is the noun, "bourgeois" is the adjective; it is either "bourgeois law courts" or "law courts of the bourgeoisie".
> They have natural rights the same as anyone else
“Natural rights” are a thought-terminating cliché to avoid justifying one’s view of what concrete legal rights people should have while simultaneously pretending that the moral conclusion on that question one is offering is a material fact.
Outside of use within a community within which there is a non-controversial moral consensus as a shorthand for positions not in debate within that community, it is never productive to invoke it.
And, certainly, the right to compel others in society to involuntarily relay your views is not a consensus position on rights in our society, even if you leave the law courts, of the bourgeoisie or otherwise, out of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debate.
To make it intuitive: the First Amendment is just as much a guarantee of a right to not speak as it is a right to speak. In other words: it is just as much a guarantee that the state is not empowered to make you do or say things. Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.
Freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. It (in theory) protects us from oppression by our government. Freedom of speech is also an ideal that we should strive for in a free society. One would protect us from oppression by forces other than our government.
Private businesses don't have an obligation to uphold people's rights the way the government does, but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't expect them to respect the ideals of freedom of speech. Because our country doesn't do enough to protect the people from what are basically monopolies we should apply extra pressure to companies who are uniquely positioned to oppress us.
I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options.
Once a single company, or small group of companies, can decide who has a voice that company has become a liability to our security and freedoms. Those companies should either be broken up or others must be allowed and enabled to step into that space to create alternatives. That might mean that certain barriers to entry will need to be dismantled. It might mean changing laws to accommodate newcomers into the market. As long as truly competitive options exist and/or can be created, freedom can exist.
Sadly, right now we don't really have truly competitive alternatives for things like cloudflare or payment processors and there are many places where single entities hold dangerous amounts of power when it comes to the internet. Imagine if ICANN decided to refuse to provide IPs or domains to anyone whose political views they disagreed with. When non-governmental agencies hold too much power, as Hurricane Electric does, we have to hold them to a higher standard, take actions against them, or put alternate systems in place to protect ourselves from them.
> I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options.
This maxim has not been violated in this case! HE is one of many ISPs; no evidence has been presented that it colludes with other ISPs[1] to stifle public expression.
And note: the logic of "reasonably equivalent options" doesn't entitle anybody to Internet access, for the same reason that the freedom of movement doesn't entitle me to a driver's license (or a horse). The government may not prohibit my expression; it is also under no particular obligation to supply me any particular venue for expression.
[1]: HE is somewhat famous for having long-standing conflicts with other, larger, ISPs with regards to peering: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mpetach/4031195041
It's one of a very small number of ISPs that form the backbone of the internet (Tier 1-ish) and that puts it in a rare position to censor. The website they are censoring has no direct relationship with HE, yet they are still being silenced by them. That's the problem.
They can host their content on other platforms, or self host.
Sometimes they cave, sometimes they don’t. But they’ve begged the public, and presumably the customers/investors pressuring them, to treat them as dumb pipes, not editors.
They are people.
And you disagree with them.
Free Speech doesn't exist for people to be agreeable. It's only purpose is specifically to protect controversial statements.
If you empower the good guys today with the wrong machinery, you will be crushed in the future by the bad guys.
This is not the hypocrisy that you’re painting it as.
I question the motives of anyone sympathizing with Nazis as “just a different opinion”
Suppressing nazism is not “suppressing freedom of speech”. It is suppressing people who seek to suppress.
Do you have any more alt-right copy pasta bullshit to spread?
Put another way: All men have a natural right to the freedom of thought and expression, and no one cares what dead old men thought when they drafted their particular laws. This is about what matters to us here and now. The proletariat has a need for public debate free of interference from the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-adjacent. Period. Full stop.
if you don't support unrestricted free speech that's fine, but don't pretend you do. i personally don't either.
They are the ones who are breaking it. Not me. Therefore, they are the ones who are removing themselves from the protections of freedom of speech.
To the Nazis perspective, Jews were like demons, capable of any evil, and so subversive and threatening that even literature sourced from them was considered radioactive in a sense. So while I hate to play the reverse card on this, I truthfully consider your perspective just as shallow, and far more dangerous. You see unlike the Nazis of today, your perspective is more popular and politically actionable.
In fact I genuinely consider, from the bottom of my heart, people such as yourself, who lack integrity, to be a far more realistic threat to freedom of speech than the shadows of a dead political ideology.
Also KiwiFarms had nothing to do with Nazis, they were further down the slippery slope than that.
When they uhh... eliminated free speech in Germany?
Maybe when they started burning giant piles of books?
I just meant that Nazi Germany, in comparison to any other authortarian regime, weren't anything special when it came to censorship, other than the racial focus making them easy to hate.
If we are trying to justify censorship as an effort to "protect" Freedom of Speech, then logically we would need to censor the more popular anti free speech political ideologies as well, and with higher priority even! But that wouldn't be free speech anymore would it?
The reality of it is that Nazis only get censored because they are unpopular, a dead political ideology. There is no nation that supports it, and none that can defend it, it's an easy target. People who want to censor Nazis aren't doing it to protect Free Speech, they are doing it because they don't like them, the argument is fundumentally dishonest.
If you just want to censor people you don't like, then you don't support Freedom of Speech. Just like every other autoritarian regime that banned whatever they disliked. The line is very clear here.
You characterize this as a difference of opinion. Despicable.
Private people, groups, companies though? Not only may they curtail speech more or less arbitrarily in places they own, I believe quite firmly that they may respond to the exercise of freedom of speech by exercising their freedom of association and refraining from further commerce with the speaker because of the information the speaker has revealed. And with very few, narrow, specific cut-outs, American law agrees with that premise.
"freedom of association" is what a lot of people who owned diners felt enabled them to deny services to black people. Maybe you still feel that they should have been able to refuse service to anyone for any reason including skin color. We collectively decided that society works a lot better when we infringed on the rights of diner owners in order to protect the rights of everyone who wanted a seat at the lunch counter.
There's an argument to be made that in exchange for the privilege of corporate personhood, any company offering services to the general public should be required to serve any member of that public no matter what their beliefs. I'm not yet convinced that's an ideal situation personally, but situations like this make me more sympathetic to the idea.
I'd rather see our government take steps to make sure that no company is allowed to be in a position to oppress the American people leaving them without recourse. I'd sooner see companies with monopoly power broken up or pathways cleared to bring in meaningful competition. That should help protect the American people from oppression by non-governmental agencies while preserving the rights of companies to discriminate according to ideology (if that's a value we think is worth protecting).
We notably did not and that is a key distinction. We carved out very narrow obligation upon business owners to refrain from refusing service in a very specific set of intrinsic categories that have no bearing on the content of one's character. At the federal level, we notably stopped short of things like political affiliation.
In most states you can be refuse service for being a Nazi. Hell, a police officer was recently refused service because the obligation he has to open carry a firearm on duty ran afoul of the establishment's "no firearms on premises" policy (https://www.insider.com/san-francisco-bakery-reems-refuses-p...). The key difference is intrinsic versus malleable properties; a cop can go off duty and put the gun down, a Nazi can stop advocating for the genocide of people, and a KFer can cease to associate with a site tied directly to organizing abuse.
You can make a case that promoting the common welfare is served by maximizing the corporate obligation to serve citizens, but if you're trying to make it the burden's on you to explain why it promotes the common welfare for a person to serve those they know wish for their genocide or actively organize hate mobs against them.
... Anyway, I'd love to continue this thread, but as this site owner exercises their right to filter the content on their own site, I'm limited to the number of responses I may give per period of time. And that is reasonable, it is their site. ;)
We have a very narrow carve out of service obligation that constrains businesses from refusing service for intrinsic properties. Apart from that, at the federal level: no, we don't and shouldn't obligate businesses to serve Communists. We don't obligate them to serve Nazis. We don't obligate them to serve the KKK. We don't obligate them to serve Democrats. A business that's too picky about the color of people's money is a business that leaves money on the table, and that is almost always counterweight enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37316078
But as demonstrated by it being flagged, in practice it's too often code for "I don't like this, so NOBODY should be able to see or reply to it".
Other than that it's fair game.
The author of that paradox also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols".
I have yet to hear an argument for genocide that can't be countered by rational argument. When hate groups commit acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that. We don't need to fear words. In fact, I much prefer it when racists make themselves known by their words rather than their actions.
Paradox of tolerance.
The author also states explicitly that his words shouldn't be used to "suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument" and that such extreme action should be reserved for situations where all else has failed and we're up against "fists or pistols"
Violence, not words, is the problem. Thankfully we're not tolerating their violence.
The luxury of liberal principles - facing the threat of the rise of fascism - really can only be exercised by those least affected by such a rise.
I'd be really interested to hear how you think Hitler should've been handled in the 1920s and early 1930s. Could a debate parler have saved Germany's democracy?
Popper's argument is essentially that tolerance is essential to open society and therefore to maintain openness, society must ironically be intolerant of those who are intolerant themselves or would spread intolerance. Nazis were specifically on his mind, WW2 having just occurred, and Popper uses them as an example of people who use tolerance by others to spread intolerance and therefore reduce freedom overall. For society to defend freedom, it has to not permit that.
Popper also states: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise." He only recommends such an extreme action when all else has failed and we're up against "fists and pistols". When hate groups are committing acts of violence (not just acts of speech), the US is certainly not sitting around tolerating that behavior.
There are people that believe the BLM movement are also domestic terrorist, see how dangerous is to try to classify every one you don’t like as such?
"Some people think" is not an argument. Much of life is gray, this is not one of those times.
Thanks to all this stupid nazi fearmongering and virtue signaling i am currently faced with a far right party possibly wining my next election as a reaction. With the government having gained unprecedented powers to quell and control dissenting opinions.
Is there a warrant out for his arrest? "Owing money but not paying it and/or avoiding the debt collectors" isn't exactly being a fugitive, otherwise many of americans defaulting on their debt would also be "fugitives".
Genuinely asking, from where i stand your simplistic view on reality is one of the most dangerous currents out there right now.
It’s not “because they’re not politically aligned with me”. It is that they desire the genociding and enslavement of entire groups of people.
You painting me being against that as “just a disagreement” is bordering on sympathizing, if not just outright sympathizing with weasel words.
That's behavior.
Is Ron DeSantis a Nazi? Is Matt Walsh a Nazi? etc.
Sure people get "labelled" as Nazi's. It happens all the time on the internet. Hence Godwin's first law of flamewars.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Nazi
I think maybe where you went wrong was asking what a Nazi is and expecting someone to actually answer it.
I guess GOTO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37316464
Why yes I do support the autobahn and universal healthcare.
Though I would say cloudflare isn't quite up to that level.
Edit: Seeing this downvoted is disappointing. Access to utilities needs to be treated as a right. Only the courts should be able to take it away.
It in fact might be kinder to deny them rights now than life later.
People who openly advocate for mass violence even if vague and theoretical belong in prison.
Okay, so put them in prison!
But if they're not in prison they should have electricity, mail, communications.
Hell, even if they are in prison they get those things.
They can leave the market at any time, but ISPs should not be making these choices.
>As some of their heirs openly talk about murdering us
> People who openly advocate for mass violence even if vague and theoretical belong in prison.
Wait.......didn't you just openly advocate for mass violence (denying them oxygen) against the philosophical heirs of Nazis, even if only in a vague and theoretical fashion?
> It in fact might be kinder to deny them rights now than life later.
Lock up the bad guys now so we aren't in a position where our only options are fascism or murder.
I very much agree but this is so one-sided. Would you support arresting Muslims who support Shariah? Would you support arresting Stalinists?
There are sadly so many groups that advocate for mass violence I think it's pointless how people only seem to care about the single one that's most vilified and defeated.
The constitution doesn't say you have a right to water, electricity, internet service, sewer service, etc.
Meanwhile the conservatives in the US are saying that corporations have a right to choose who they serve based upon their religious beliefs. See the SCOTUS Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling on whether they must serve a gay couple.
I'm pretty sure I could argue that Nazism is against someone's religious beliefs....
This gotcha only works when your opponent is pro business and you want them oppressed by businesses. However republicans are starting to turn anti-business. Take for instance the kerfuffle Ron DeSantis had with Disney.
But once those religious rights have been granted, it's possible for that pendulum to swing the other way.
Must a power company, say, give power to the NY State NAMBLA headquarters? That's the easy one.
The more complex one is arguing that the insurrection was against your religious beliefs (because your religion espouses non-violence), and then the power company could say cut off power to offices held by congress people that supported the J6 criminals?
Unfortunately you are misinformed. The baker was quite willing to serve a gay couple. The Supreme Court never said the baker can not serve gays if he doesn't want to.
What the Supreme Court said is a baker cannot be forced to engage in an activity (gay wedding) that he disagrees with even if it is as remote as a baking the cake. The baker made it clear if they wanted a plain cake he would have sold it to them.
To put it simply: Maybe if you'd just let people gripe away in peace on their little gossip forums you wouldn't have so many problems in the world.
Funny way to describe "swatting campaigns and content that is illegal in many countries" but ok
Do you have evidence that Null knew about people organizing these on KiwiFarms and openly endorsed them or at least tolerated them? Do you have anything to confer upon him some kind of liability for the actions of his users other than "I don't like him so fuck him"?
> illegal in many countries
No one cares whether it's illegal in any random country. Other countries ban lots of things for utterly cretinous reasons.
Attempting to characterize a gossip column as a "harassment" site isn't working. The EFF is openly commenting now because people like you who are pushing that narrative have failed, and have managed to piss off all the wrong people. You might want to consider rethinking your position.
I think website hosts should be able to drop people for most reasons, but that's not what's happening here
Speech that amounts to creating a conspiracy isn't.
Now, if you're a reasonable human being, you would think that dumping political snuff video sites would take priority over Stormfront. It's just virtue signalling.
"We detected a n-word in your comment - your Google account has been suspended."
Chrome already autocompletes form fields and does spell checking. Adding something like this would be trivial.
They are a private company and can choose to not do business with racists, right?
So while Cloudflare isn’t a diamond in the rough, you could say they’re a.. topaz in the rough.
There's a clear moral distinction between "I believe trans women do not belong in women's bathrooms" and "Here's their address, do your thing until they are gone!".
That might is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Do you have any evidence that this occurs?
It seems pretty clear they're doing that, no?
See also:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
"Feeling attacked, users of Kiwifarms became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site."
Seems weird that you can't just google this, I mean it took me 30 seconds to do this.
You claimed people "might" be using the forums to commit crimes, now you're saying "it's pretty clear". Again, what actual evidence do you have to back these claims?
> Seems weird that you can't just google this, I mean it took me 30 seconds to do this.
I aware of this blog post by CloudFlare. However, I am not aware of any actual evidence or examples that substantiate the claims made in it. The operator of Kiwi Farms has publicly stated that he received no notice from either CloudFlare or law enforcement about the alleged threats. CloudFlare has also never provided any specifics publicly. In my opinion, the CEO was overruled and forced to remove KF, and that blog post is a transparent attempt to save face after beating his chest about never backing down.
) However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
Sorry, I can't edit the original comment anymore. But thanks for pointing that out!
> However, I am not aware of any actual evidence or examples that substantiate the claims made in it.
Fortunately US Code doesn't require violence for cyberbullying to be a crime.
This is conflating two parts of my message. You cited CloudFlare's blog post as an example how it's "pretty clear" that Kiwi Farms breaks the laws. My point is that the blog post is completely vacuous and no evidence or examples have ever been shared with the public or the operator of Kiwi Farms.
I, for one, take CloudFlare at their word here. Do you not?
If he had evidence of something that constituted a threat to life, why didn't they share it with the operator of the Kiwi Farms so that it could be removed? If it was as damning and credible as he claimed, why did none of the authorities follow-up on it?
Would it be possible there's an ongoing investigation, and he was asked by authorities to not detail those posts for fear of letting them vanish in the wind?
My understanding is this is a common tactic used by law enforcement to prevent "spooking" the targets of an investigation.
Only Matthew Prince can shed light on the truth, but if he hasn't by now I doubt he ever will.
That's an interesting legal theory.
> Even the EFF's article says the site is full of crime and called on the cops to prosecute. This also means they won't defend your beloved website in court.
An organization making a claim is not evidence of the claim being true.
Only the claims you like are claims you will accept as true
My personal feelings are irrelevant. I judge claims based on the veracity of their evidence, as should anyone else.
I mean, anyone can create a new account on HN and post "I am literally going to kill Joe Biden tonight", and perhaps they actually plan to do that too, and maybe they'll even pull it off, but that doesn't mean HN orchestrated a conspiracy to kill Joe Biden.
The general policy is "look, but don't touch", and while I don't really trust the userbase in general to adhere to that, the people running the site (mostly this Null guy, as near as I can tell) seem fairly dedicated to this.
Personally I think the internet wold be better without the site, but I also think there's a sore lack of nuance here, and people accept certainly dubious claims a little bit too readily (turns out not everything on the internet is the whole story, or even true in the first place).
If they were actually a member of Kiwi Farms, why didn't they post it on the forums? The obvious answer, to me at least, is that they weren't, and they couldn't because KF had closed new user sign ups prior to that.
Go look at the front page of the site. There is a section named "lolcow cults" and 4 major forum sections created by the admins naming specific victims by name. I don't think I can even link to it without getting my HN account banned.
So if the biker bars are distributing child porn, or illegal drugs or guns, or using it as a place for conspiracy terrorism, then yeah, I say yes those corporations should have a say. Particularly if the biker bar, e.g., violated the company's Christian morals. This is supported by case law, today.
The decisions of who a business chooses as it's customer is actively being challenged by conservatives in this country. See the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling. In this case the decision was overturned on religious grounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
I would bet a significant amount that if an electric company didn't want to serve a biker bar on religious grounds, they probably would get away with it.
The Supreme Court ruling was not on using religion as an excuse not to serve. Supreme Court ruling was an about the commission violating a rule on religious neutrality. It set no precedent for the substance of the original suit.
> I would bet a significant amount that if an electric company didn't want to serve a biker bar on religious grounds (particularly if there was active criminal activity), they probably would get away with it.
You would be wrong. Electricity is not “creating expression”, which is what the lower courts were ruling on.
For the sake of argument let’s change it from biker bar to a LGBT bar. Say some customers may be doing illegal drugs, and the CEO of the electric company (Known for his stance against illegal drugs) got wind of it. Like the biker bar, they were never afforded due process, and were never ordered to shut down in a court of law. Instead, the CEO orders his company to shut off the power; the reason being, he knows it must be true because a local reporter told him so. Not only that, a friend of his went to the bar and saw people doing drugs.
The bar gets no jury, no trial. A structure without electricity is considered uninhabitable, and the bar is forced to close down. Do you still think this is legal?
The Masterpiece ruling was a 7-2 decision. We can get into if/buts etc.... but the way I see it, common carrier status is a congressional law, not a constitutional one.
Facebook is the mother of all censorship. Nudity, speech, political views just to name the top most. They only want people to post fluffy stuff on their website.
>It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
"Feels like"? This is clearly embraced as a necessary step to preserve democracy by a small-but-powerful segment of population.
And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
A lot of people on the right are talking about the US having a mental health crises when it comes to mass shootings. If that's really true, then yeah, that's how we get natsies.
> Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
Well I mean if there's a mental health crisis then yeah, people are going to say that. I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.
They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work.
I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hate that Ramaswamy made that suggestion in such an embarrassing, conversation-poisoning way.
The problem of course being that intelligence tests were used in the 60's to deny voting rights. But the founding fathers were okay with slavery, so would they have been okay with that for that purpose?
Originalism has a purpose I think, but, we've changed so much since then...
All the writings of the Founding Fathers are free and publicly available. You can learn all about it.
You don’t get smarter reading a few 140 characters tweets.
https://www.crf-usa.org/images/t2t/pdf/HowShouldWeJudgeOurNa...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
The founding fathers certainly did assume there were gullible voters even among the select few who could vote.
Protections such as the Constitution itself (that old archaic document!), the Senate, supermajorities, an independent legislative, executive and judicial, etc, etc.
I laugh when people say “Congress is deadlocked! It needs to be fixed!”. No, it’s working exactly as intended.
Are you talking about his "failed Civics 101" gaffe re: historical ordering of Constitution and Revolution?
I have been convinced for a long time that a test of basic civics and current events is a necessary (and possibly a sufficient) condition to fix most of the failings we see in representative democracy, but the Overton window is nowhere near it, and Ramaswamy is hardly the candidate I'd want proposing it.
The whole question and answer bank could even be given out online or in print cosr free - my bar is pretty low.
Currently I would suggest that most of the failings in, e.g., US democracy are coming from the Republican party and I'm pretty sure most of them will have passed a test of basic civics, etc., yet are demonstrably bad at governance.
Only for certain definitions of okay
I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).
That's quite a strong statement to just present as an axiom without even any evidence or premises leading to it. Can you justify this statement, or do we have to just accept it as an axiom?
Should you punish the children for what the fathers did wrong? Because whoever wronged the people are dead since long. The people who were wronged are dead since long. Do the children inherit the sins or the victimhood of their ancestors? Some say yes. They say to the youth: "Look how bad these people were treated long before you were born! Now it's your responsibility to settle the score and pay back."
Others say no. They say that nobody can be held responsible for the wrongs that other people have done, even if those people were their ancestors, or are considered their ancestors by modern measurements. The question is if somebody is to be seen as an individual and judged as an individual, or seen as a member of some tribe and judged as a member of that tribe.
It's worth to mention that things are usually seen in another way. What we're seeing right now is the end of christian morality, where a victim is held in high regard. This is not common through history or through the world. Once these kind of victim-revering morals don't exist anymore, the attitude will instead be: "Your ancestors were slaves, therefore you deserve to be a slave" or "My ancestors conquered your ancestors, therefore we have the right to treat you as we wish" and such awful things.
The word "harem" is derived from Arabic/Persian for "forbidden"; it was a place where men were not allowed, and thus a considered a safe space for the women within.
Little Boy turned actual little boys into carbon ash imprints on the concrete where they sat and ate lunch; it probably saved many more children from burning up in a sustained campaign of carpet-bombings.
To create a new power group to balance rights? It's unstable, but it also leads to things like "women, as well as men, get to vote" and "workers can organise their labour via trade unions, just as owners can organise their capital via shareholdings and loans".
I dont want to be part of a society with built in racist laws.
It’s also what was guaranteed in our founding document - depending on how you read it. That dubious piece of legal work managed to botch the key term ‘governance’ such that interpretation is required and it may, or may not guarantee Māori governance of the country.
Comparing NZ to apartheid South Africa is darkly funny. The oppression I face is underwhelming.
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-faqs#Whatdo...
It's all signalling. In Australia there are support and administrative bodies at all level of government interacting with aboriginal communities (often failing for different reasons, mostly budget). A 'Voice' (which is still vaguely defined as having influence but no power) does not magically create harmony between the past and future, it only continues the divide.
We are stuck in a world of trying to simultaneously give back the 'old past' while carrying on as-is otherwise. That is impossible. We must work towards a common, prosperous and respectful future for all inhabitants that recognises and admits the things we can't undo or change. We are trying to have it both ways, and it will leave the divides strongly in place.
Weird how you seem to recognize what culture is, yet in the same sentence it means nothing more than sharing a skin tone
The idea that pale-skinned people can't be Indigenous is mainly one that exists on the political right. In 2011, conservative Murdoch newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt was found (in a civil, not criminal, proceeding) to have violated the Racial Discrimination Act by authoring a newspaper column arguing that pale-skinned people couldn't "really" be indigenous. [0]
By contrast, my local federal member of parliament is Dr Gordon Reid MP [1]. He identifies as Indigenous, but his skin tone is pretty similar to my own, and (as far as I know) my own ancestry is purely European (mostly Irish, with some English and Scottish too). But, Dr Reid belongs to our main centre-left party (Labor), and the Australian Labor Party has zero objection to pale-skinned people identifying as Indigenous
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eatock_v_Bolt
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?...
If getting political, the ALP has no objection to anyone so long as they support their view... same as the Liberal party.
But this is the whole ludicrous thing; what are they actually identifying as?. Traditional landowners? Cultural martyrs? 'Aussie?' 'Neglected outsiders? It gets really tricky if they start to actually really dig into the problem.
It's like the argument is saying they're disadvantaged because they're not living their 'full modern Western life' while also supposing somehow 'we' will give back the old ways and apologise. Which is it? Hence I've been saying we need to work out what future 'Australian' is and all head towards that, as best we can. I don't even know what Australian culture is now, it's a mess of trying to be all cultures to everyone.
It also potentially results in two groups of Indigenous people – one group with majority Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in remote/regional/rural, who experience a great deal of social deprivation; another group with only slight Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in urban/suburban areas, who experience very little social deprivation. With all this talk of "closing the gap", counting both groups as "Indigenous" makes "the gap" seem smaller than it actually is, and if the second group is growing, that growth can create a false sense of progress of the gap being closed, even as little or nothing improves for the first group.
That's not my take on the requirement that one have ancestral DNA
Furthermore, the official definition is not phrased in terms of DNA, only descent. Many Indigenous communities object to the use of DNA testing in determining Indigenous status, and as a result it is mostly not considered in deciding these questions.
The official definition is ambiguous in using the word "descent" – while most commonly that is interpreted as "biological descent", it isn't clear that merely legal descent (as in legal adoption) is actually excluded. If an Indigenous person legally adopts a biologically non-Indigenous child (or has such a child through IVF, surrogacy, sperm/egg/embryo donation, etc), and the child is raised to identify as Indigenous, and their Indigenous community accepts that child as Indigenous – there is an argument they officially are Indigenous, and given the unresolved ambiguity in the official definition, I don't know how one can say that argument is incorrect. In practice, if the elders of their Indigenous community write a letter declaring them to be Indigenous, the government will very likely accept them (and their descendants) as such.
No way this could possibly go wrong.
I'm not necessarily defending these policies–just attempting to describe them accurately–if one is going to criticise something, it is important to accurately describe the thing to be criticised. This is an issue on which I have mixed feelings and can see both sides of the argument.
But to clarify, at least officially speaking, it is based on blood–it is not enough to simplify identify as indigenous and be accepted by a recognised indigenous community as indigenous, you also have to actually be of indigenous descent – a person with zero indigenous descent is officially speaking not indigenous, even if they identify as such, and even if a recognised indigenous community accepts them as such. The difference from American "blood quantum" laws, is there is no requirement for any minimum degree of indigenous descent – officially it doesn't matter if a person's ancestry is 100% indigenous or 1-in-256 indigenous – but officially a person with zero known indigenous ancestry can't be indigenous. In practice, people with extremely remote indigenous ancestry are unlikely to be able to find a recognised indigenous community willing to endorse their indigenous identification, but standards vary from community to community, and also change over time – sometimes it becomes a very political issue, with certain factions within a community advocating for much tougher membership standards than others, and so it can depend on the outcome of the political battle between those different factions.
In practice, Australia doesn't have any central list of "who is indigenous". Every agency makes that decision for itself. For statistical purposes, the government just uses self-identification, and doesn't require any evidence of descent or acceptance by a recognised community. When it comes to "affirmative action" (reserved jobs, admission to educational institutions, scholarships, etc) and voting rights in representative bodies (such as the "land councils" through which indigenous communities own land), agencies usually require more than just self-identification: generally a letter or certificate issued by a recognised indigenous community body (often a land council), although sometimes other forms of evidence can be accepted instead.
> No way this could possibly go wrong.
There is a lot of controversy in the Australian indigenous community over so-called "box-tickers", who identify as indigenous, despite having only very remote indigenous ancestry, or even no such ancestry at all. The requirement for a letter/certificate issued by recognised community can be a big hurdle for such people, although given the political controversies over the standards for issuing such letters/certificates (and even occasional allegations of corruption), we can't rule out the possibility that some people with zero actual indigenous descent have successfully obtained such letters/certificates. Officially speaking, such people aren't actually indigenous, but the system will treat them as if they were. However, there was a case (in NSW) a few years ago where a woman claimed to be of indigenous descent, and had her claim endorsed by her local land council, which then accepted her as one of its members – a competing faction on the land council insisted her indigenous ancestry was bogus, gathered evidence of her genealogy, filed a formal complaint with the state government agency which manages land councils, and successfully convinced that agency to revoke her land council membership.
You wrote an entire essay on a completely irrelevant point. Don't be a pedant. It's obnoxious.
And if by "race" you mean something which is neither ethnicity nor skin colour, then that is a concept with very unclear applicability to contemporary Australia.
Finally, your needlessly hostile attitude is obnoxious.
were having a convo on a internet board, not having an academic debate. People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about. And then write an entire essay about a non-point.
Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American and then steer the convo into an endless quagmire about semantics. Can you see how obnoxious that would be?
I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
> People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
You speak as if the "general concept of race/ethnicity" was identical in every country – it isn't. There are significant differences between how "race/ethnicity" is understood in Australia, and how it is understood in the US-to speak of just two countries. Do you understand those differences?
> The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about
Just because you don't care about a nuance doesn't mean nobody else does. Indeed, the comment you are complaining about was upvoted. And, I've posted many other comments just like the one you are complaining about in the 8+ years I've been here, and many of them have been upvoted as well.
> Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American
There is a big difference between spelling differences between different countries – which are trivial – and differences in how "race/ethnicity" are conceptualised in different countries – which are far from trivial.
Are you or are you not the one who misunderstood that distinction when you responded to my post using an American understanding of the phrase "skin color" (note the American spelling)?
> I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
lol mate. An obsessive focus on a netcode assembly doesn't make people experts on political matters.
The political conversations on HN aren't deep. Actually, they're very superficial.
What's the phrase? "Performative erudition". You aren't having anything closer to academic debate than anywhere else. Let's call it "performative academia".
Your comment was talking about Australia. There are significant differences in how Australians and Americans understand issues such as ethnicity, race and skin colour, and trying to apply American understandings of those topics to Australia doesn't make much sense – which is part of what my comment was trying to convey. But, rather than using this as an opportunity to learn about those differences – about which you don't appear to know anything – you just dismissed it as "irrelevant". If you aren't interested in understanding race/ethnicity/etc issues in another country, why are you commenting about them?
Well, to clarify, your comment did not explicitly mention any country. However, in the context of the conversation, it seemed to be primarily talking about institutions such as the proposed Indigenous Voice in Australia, and the Maori electoral roll in New Zealand; I don't think it was primarily talking about the US since "co-governance" is much less on the agenda there (and the existing institution of tribal governments would seem to cover much of the demand for it anyway). As such, you were talking about race/ethnicity issues in other countries, without appearing to have any understanding of the differences between how those issues are understood in those countries as compared to your own.
Look at the NZ approach of taking race into consideration when prioritizing medical care.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-surgeons-must-now-con...
(Similarly, if you think a teacher is being too authoritarian with their students, you won't make your case any more convincing by making comparisons with crazed dictators.)
That sort of equality was more palatable to many.
The argument is “we can right the wrongs of past racism, but being racist in reverse”.
It’s amazing how many people buy into that argument.
Unsurprisingly, we did try this for a decade or two. It was an extensive and expensive failure and is widely researched and written about [1].
A minor boost to Māori in a waiting list point scoring system for list prioritisation has caused a knee jerk dismissal of the scheme as we see here. Absent from the shouting has been a solution to Māori living shorter lives with worse health [2]. The new scheme also reduces the impact of race on list priorities, as noted at the end of this article [3]. Race is a couple of points out of 100, most being clinical.
The point scoring system is a small part of the large changes underway in the system at the moment. The moves are primarily towards more autonomy for Māori within the healthcare system [4]. The background to this is a recognised failure in the system after a successful court action claiming Treaty of Waitangi obligations were not being met. They weren’t and aren’t [5].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/new-zealand-st...
[3] https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2...
[4] https://www.futureofhealth.govt.nz/maori-health-authority/
[5] https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/news/report-on-stage-one-of...
Consider two hungry kids at lunch. Consider the difference between stealing the fruit from one kid's plate, and giving extra fruit to the other kid. Both are special treatment. Think about what you can see that's different in these two situations that you would call the same thing.
And your analogy is a poor one for what is happening in NZ with regards to healthcare. Healthcare is a limited resource, and what NZ is doing is letting race be a factor when triaged patients in an environment of limited healthcare resources. You could literally be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, the other person get treatment first.
So for your analogy, it's more like there are two kids. One hasn't eaten in 3 days, the other 2 days, but the one that hasn't eaten in 3 days is a member of an "oppressive race" (without having committed any oppression themselves mind you, just their ancestors), so the other one gets to eat first.
You need to learn about it before you make claims like that. This isn’t the case, as the links provided describe and as I stated.
Race already is a factor in healthcare - the system is biased against Māori and this is an attempt to even it up.
Patients are triaged for medical care, it's always been that way - it's based on medical need, with the sickest treated first, and those who are less sick wait.
The new system now prioritized people based on race. You could be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, you wait.
This doesn't "even up" anything. It penalizes people for being the wrong race.
You don't solve racism, by being racist. It's an absurd idea.
Clinical need comes first.
My above links may help you.
“Capital & Coast and Hutt Valley DHBs are prioritising Māori and Pacific in our surgical scheduling processes. The patients’ ethnicity is taken into account along with their level of clinical urgency and the number of days they have been on the waiting list within a given clinical priority band. It is unlikely that any other patients will be significantly affected as a result of this work.” - media statement, May 2020
The last statement "it is unlikely any other patient will be significantly affected" is laughable.
The goal is to affect patients - prioritize a specific ethnic group, so either the change does nothing (then why do it at all?), or it prioritizes certain patients (and if it does it must deprioritize others).
So someone is scored 70 out of 100 in clinical need.
Then someone else is 69. But once you make the race adjustment, they are 71 and get treated first.
So instead of treating the most needy patients first, we penalize certain people for their race.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
Māori and Pacific Islanders are being discriminated against by the system, it’s just that their race demerit points are not nicely documented.
So getting promoted on lists by a couple of points is an attempt to even it up via forced functionality.
I don’t think you and I are ever going to agree that positive description should be used.
Other things are being tried. Part of the massive and overdue restructuring that’s underway to our healthcare system is going to be interesting to watch. “In each local community, partnerships between Iwi-Māori Partnership Boards, Health New Zealand’s regional and district teams, and the wider community will ensure Māori voices are heard, embedded in plans and services, and that health equity for Māori is non-negotiable.” [1].
We will see how it goes. The structural changes so far have been rather painful and seem clumsy when viewed from my adjacent seat.
[1] https://www.futureofhealth.govt.nz/maori-health-authority/
Promoting one group by very definition penalized other groups. You can't have one without the other.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
That's fine, then fix those issues. It's bizarre that a lack of medical care in one group is solved by reducing access to medical care in other groups.
If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed.
Or not, as parliament is free to decide. I think my previous statement on parliamentary supremacy stands for itself. If you have something specific to talk about from that Wikipedia page, it's best that you spell it out for us.
Stuff like this may have a certain level of "might makes right" (similar question for Hawaii, although there it's obvious who would win in a fight) but not always (Irish independence at close to the peak of the British Empire, the Cod Wars, that the US didn't keep all of Mexico after the war, just Texas, Arizona, California, etc.)
Of course they have a casus belli. They’d lose if there was a war though so there’s that.
We don't want another Holocaust or Gulag camps here ever again. I'm fine with restricting some speech. It's a small price to pay.
I see all these arguments waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to... I don't know, give anyone power? As if we haven't had these debates before. We have concrete examples of policies and behaviors that are harmful on fascist/Communist (big C is important) levels. We can compare someone's rhetoric and actions to those of people who have done the kinds of harm we want to prevent. We can use reasoning to parse their arguments instead of reacting emotionally. People do this every single day.
If it's really your concern that we can't define what dangerous ideologies are, then educate yourself, because we can.
It's very difficult because calling someone "Nazi" means you get to attack the "Nazi". So people who want to attack others just call them Nazis to justify it.
It's happened a lot in US politics, but for an example everyone here can agree on, "Ukraine is infested by Nazis" was one of the excuses for Russia invading Ukraine.
Yeah, that's not true. That isn't something that happens.
I'd be surprised if you can find even one news article about a non-fascist being called a Nazi and then attacked and everyone being ok with it. Nazis don't get punched as often as they should.
Russia invading Ukraine is not a good example. Much of the rest of the world said "No, you're full of shit and we're sending Ukraine missiles." I don't think anybody has actually supported Russia's "anti-Nazi" justification, even those countries economically bound to Russia and unwilling to resist them. It's just something Russia said, that doesn't mean it worked.
Further, international invasions are extremely different from internal politics are extremely different from personal/public interactions. You're painting broad strokes as if the entire planet of 8 billion people has the same mindset that "you can call anyone a Nazi and attack them." That doesn't even make sense. We are talking about US culture.
Finally, I shouldn't even be replying since it doesn't seem you read the majority of my previous comment. I've already said this: we know what Nazis are. You can call anybody anything, but whether or not they're a Nazi depends on if they hold Nazi beliefs.
NAFTA or TTIP — unless I've fallen for the exact same propaganda that led to Brexit — would have been better examples.
You're welcome to not like the details of the democratic mechanism within the EU; ironically this is in part because some of the member state governments thought that making the EU more democratic would usurp the sovereignty of the member states.
• The Vatican (a "country" on paper; but seriously?)
• The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta; this lot have no territory)
• The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States
• The African Development Bank
• The Andean Community (another free trade area)
• Both the Commonwealth of Independent States (former soviet bloc) and the Commonwealth of Nations (former British Empire)
• The International Olympic Committee
…
The list of organisations sending delegations is pretty big, even just limiting to the ones important enough to get into Wikipedia; you can probably find a whole bunch more of small ones.
I did not use the word "just".
It is also a FTA. And unlike most (all?) other FTAs, it has democratic elections. All the funky stuff it can do is tied into that democratic process, because that is what the member states wanted.
> into a single country ("ever closer union")
The former is not the latter.
> which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe
Bothering with elections and MPs is a bizarro mirror-world way of doing that.
That aside: Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change; there's no way at all to forecast what this might look like given it's not even on the horizon yet.
They weren't even able to give UK citizens in the EU a way to claim EU citizenship despite several politicians wanting to make it available, because "EU citizen" is really just a shorthand for "citizen of an EU member state" rather than a coherent thing in its own right.
> because the EU is a totalitarian system
I work near to Checkpoint Charlie, I've been to the DDR and Stasi museums; if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The way you're using the word, I think 100% of all treaties would fail, given they are not (generally? Ever?) negotiated directly by parliaments.
MEPs are pretty much powerless, which is why the EP fills up with joke candidates who think the EU should be abolished or who don't even bother turning up at all.
Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change
Why? Since Lisbon was rejected the EU treaties have been "self amending" (i.e. worthless). The EU routinely goes beyond its treaty-granted powers without pushback. It just gave itself powers to censor things globally, a power that appears in no treaty.
Also the EU already has: borders, taxes, a civil service, an army, a spy agency, a diplomatic corps, law making powers that override all others, a flag, a national anthem, a president, a cabinet, a central bank, a currency and dozens of other country-like things I'm forgetting. It's already more than half way there.
if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The EU is a totalitarian system; the freedoms you have today that didn't exist in the DDR are because the EU has not yet been able to completely subsume the post-war countries and institutions put in place by the allies.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the EU is not a real democracy. In a real democracy, elections mean things. Elections to the EU Parliament don't because the MEPs aren't empowered to change anything. This reality was made brutally apparent when the self-proclaimed Parliament was entirely cut out of the process of choosing the leader of the government. Instead you got vDL, someone with no history as an MEP and who didn't campaign. Why did she get the job? Nobody knows! The tiny number of people who theoretically made that decision point-blank refuse to tell anyone how it was made. That's way closer to DDR style leadership than democracy.
Second: UK parliament theoretically has this power, but in practice private members bills are either trivial, filibustered, or both ("nurses should have free parking at the hospitals they work in"). In practice this is up to the government, and given how much of the uk government is "convention" rather than constitution, it's almost impossible to untangle it without at least a politics degree.
Third: can you name literally even one other trade agreement that tries? If there is one, and there may be, I've not heard of it.
this is based on the idea of streitbare demokratie[0]. Which basically states that the foundation of the state (bundestag, bundesregerung and courts) has the right AND duty to defend itself against parties/elements who wish to abolish the "freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung" (freedom/democratic foundation/order).
This concept actually is worked out in various different laws in the Grundgesetz.
It solves the problem of the paradox of intolerance quiet well in my opinion, and considering germany's history it is a very, very good system to have.
For those that don't know, so-called "deadnaming" "is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name."
And these kinds of laws also exist in more extreme "free-speech" countries like the United States (where the guarantee of free speech doesn't cover, for example, libel).
I'd be very surprised if the German law (if actually policed) expands to anything an individual might be insulted by, especially if the offense is one of self image.
You must make intentionally untrue statements with the intent to harm that causes harm.
The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected. If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected. If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected. If no harm occurred, even if you tried to cause harm, you are protected.
The standard is extremely hard to reach, possibly even too hard, and it is clearly qualitatively different than most other countries.
> The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected.
IIUC the truth is a perfect defense in most states, but in some states maliciously stated truths (insults, more or less) can be defamatory. For example, see Johnson v Johnson in Rhode Island, where one Clifford Johnson was required to pay compensatory damages for (more or less accurately) calling his ex-wife a "[redacted] whore" in public. (He was also initially ordered to pay punitive damages, but that was reversed on appeal.)
> If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected.
I don't think this is the case in most states. If you say something with reckless disregard for the truth, it can be defamatory.
> If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected.
I think this is typically only true of defaming public figures.
Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.
Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.
Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.
If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.
So unless you follow someone around and harass them - just saying someone's so-called "deadname" shouldn't be illegal.
I worry that we've started to use the ponderous blunt government legal system more and more widely for things that used to be resolved via society and community censure. The law should be restricted to the most serious and large scale community disrupting acts, not for policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying. It's very unsuited for the latter.
100% agree. But since public shame and censure no longer work for limiting people's actions[1] that negatively affect others, what else do we have?
[1] And any time anyone tries, people scream "CANCEL CULTURE!!!!".
Which would also apply to places like pre-Musk Twitter, reddit, tumblr and Facebook (and indeed every social media site), all of which have lead to targeted and sustained harassment of people, often for things they didn't actually do.
Hurricane declining to accept KiwiFarms' /36 into its BGP table is community censure.
On a local scale, 'community censure' may work well. But not so much on a global scale, where a few determined activists on the other side of the world can get a person fired, take away their Internet services, or even have their banking services removed, all over issues of 'speech', with no due process involved.
Not everyone is a world famous artist that certainly can hire a whole team of body guard h24 all year around if they feel like it's appropriate.
I'm not aware of the the law in question. It seems strange to me to target specifically naming the person with this or that name, rather than cover the case in a more generic way like creating threats on someone's life or social integrity through public release of intimate information.
Yours is not a remotely apt comparison of the situations.
You can still have an intellectually unhealthy society subject to groupthink and stagnation if you make it illegal to say many things.
It’s actually the opposite. Plenty of authoritarian regimes look awfully peaceful because the only acceptable views are the government approved ones.
Id take political strife any day over forced “political harmony”. Far better to “air the dirty laundry” than pretend it doesn’t exist.
Political harmony is a problem if forced, but a common vision shared by much of society is a strength if arrived at through healthy, intellectually honest debate.
Political debate is fine and healthy, but it should not be possible to end a debate by being louder, more obnoxious and more ready to do violence than the other debaters.
I prefer a messy, publicly conflicting government to a smooth running authoritarian police state any day
While I agree that making it a crime is a bit over the top, it's just not a good look to complain about it.
Not at all. It's the kind of right that should most be enshrined because what you deem "jerkish" behavior may be entirely different than what others deem it.
It's deliberately rude to tell Muslims their religion is farcical, and that following a false prophet known for extreme violence and pedophilia is not compatible with modern Western society. In this light, it's most definitely not strange to want to fight for your right to be deliberately rude to someone. Religions and bad ideas should be mocked.
Rude, maybe. But you're just stating an opinion of the Muslim religion, not the individual.
Deliberate deadnaming serves zero purpose. There's no reason to deadname other than "I have no respect for you as a person."
[2] (with an NSFW header image) explains that it only covers "[deadnaming] with the aim of harming the person" which is completely different from "deadnaming [is] a crime", right?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/germany-transgender-legal-registr...
There are always going to be people who are fearful and ignorant and looking for a convenient external something to blame their problems on. There are also the people who are raised with those views and others who feel excluded and find a place to belong with a group of "outsiders". I don't think we can ever get rid of racist ideologies. We've evolved to be tribal and distrustful of outsiders and some will struggle with those feelings more than others. We're always going to struggle with racism and that's going to include Nazis. That doesn't mean we're powerless against them, but censorship and oppression certainly isn't the solution.
> And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay
Germany is not okay. Personally, I think Germany takes things way too far and that state censorship really is dangerous, but I also recognize that they've been in a very difficult position since the end of the war. I can't really fault them for over-correcting, but I do feel for the German people who have to live under unjust laws.
To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly desire freedom.
It's worth noting that even in Germany and other EU counties that gave up basic freedoms in an effort to oppose racism there are still racists. Innocent people get hurt by oppressive laws and racists gain a talking point for recruiting that resonates with a lot of people. It's a lot easier to feed into a person's victim complex when they're actually being oppressed.
Most of these laws stems from a time where monarchy wanted to suppress unsanctioned speech.
The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into power.
> Also of note is that Germany already had and still has laws against numerous forms
> of speech, most notably anything that could threaten the public order, which you
> could mold into a justification to basically stop any speech.
There are laws against hate speech: "Volksverhetzung", a more direct translation: "incitement of the people", i.e. hate speech with the intent of causing mob violence or the persecution of minorities. There are also laws against disrupting the public order: "Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses", so "causing public offence", but those don't really target speech, they're more about taking your pants off in public and peeing on the sidewalk.
Also, neither of those laws are from the time of the monarchy.
> The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and
> censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for
> suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into
> power.
> Wir gehen in den Reichstag hinein, um uns im Waffenarsenal der Demokratie mit
> deren eigenen Waffen zu versorgen. Wir werden Reichstagsabgeordnete, um die
> Weimarer Gesinnung mit ihrer eigenen Unterstützung lahmzulegen. Wenn die
> Demokratie so dumm ist, uns für diesen Bärendienst Freifahrkarten und Diäten zu
> geben, so ist das ihre eigene Sache.
> We enter the Reichstag [Weimar Republic parliament] to stock ourselves with
> weapons from democracy's own arsenal. We become assemblymen of the Reichstag to
> take down the spirit of Weimar with its own support. If democracy is so stupid
> to supply us with hall passes and diets for this disservice we do to it, then
> that is its own problem.
I picked the example because it can collide with freedom of speech as you can imagine. If you demonstrating something and your placard is seen as insulting, the police can force you to take it down.
Laws against speech like "Volksverhetzung" were already in place in the late 19th century. The monarchy was ended in 1918. There is a constant with laws restricting speech and it is mostly those in power just wanting to do so. That was mostly the case in Germany.
> As Goebbels, the Nazi's chief propagandist, himself said
Perhaps he said that so people start to destroy democracy themselves. He had a knack for propaganda and fooling people.
> To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they
> lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com
> /news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis
> this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly
> desire freedom.
The reason Mein Kampf could not be distributed until a few years ago is because after Hitler's death, the copyright on Mein Kampf fell to the state of Bavaria (for convoluted reasons), and Bavaria just never reprinted it, nor gave license to reprint it. Therefore, any copying of the book was piracy and was prosecuted under piracy laws. Because German copyright ends 70 years after the death of the author, this no longer applies, and the book can be printed and distributed again.
Note that public distribution of the book for nazi propaganda purposes is still banned under German hate speech laws ("Volksverhetzung") - not because it is this particular book, but because all nazi propaganda in public is blanket banned. This is why the now-released official Bavarian-government-approved copy of Mein Kampf contains additional commentary by historians to situate Hitler's remarks in historic context.
Bavaria used copyright to enforce an "unofficial" ban on the book. It's ridiculous to try to paint the situation as one where Bavaria just never got around to reprinting it.
> To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example,
> they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf
Because it's essentially impossible to ensure that any particular advertisement will only be seen by adults, this however means that games not approved by the USK may practically not be publicly advertised at all. Because game publishing companies have a strong incentive to be allowed to advertise their games, they will often self-censor to ensure USK approval. This is done for commercial, not legal reasons; if the companies didn't want to advertise their games, they wouldn't have to abide by USK guidelines.
It is also illegal to advertise tobacco in Germany, and it is also illegal to sell tobacco to minors. Unless you believe that this constitutes a "tobacco ban" in Germany, it is hard to argue that video games are "banned" under this law.
That said, the 2018 change in USK policy that allows video games showing anti-constitutional symbolism to still be approved as long as the message is clearly anti-nazi is still perfectly reasonable, and probably a good development, as it aligns USK policy in this regard with policy that it previously took on other media.
That's a ban by any reasonable standard. That's like saying that a requirement that churches be built on the moon wasn't banning churches, or a requirement that Jews who own businesses pay a 95% tax isn't a ban on Jews owning businesses. In some technical sense it's not a complete ban, but if the government says that if you do X, you face so many restrictions that you'd go broke, that's defacto a ban. It's an excuse made by people who like to pretend that they're not getting their hands dirty by literally banning something, while banning it in practice.
In the US we have our own problems with censorship. I've had to track down copies of video games released overseas to get uncensored versions myself. Censorship in art is a huge problem, but it's a lot more dangerous when people can't even recognize when it's happening.
https://www.racket.news/p/madness-american-satirist-cj-hopki...
Just when you may have thought things couldn’t get any crazier: American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.
His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. He was first accused of this “crime” in June, shortly after Roger Waters was placed under investigation for wearing his clearly satirical “Pink” costume in a stage performance in Berlin. As I wrote when C.J. was charged weeks later, authorities claim that through the use of the mask image, C.J. was “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”
I am confused as to what this last sentence has to do with anything.
Germany treads very lightly when it comes to limiting speech, even for Nazi things.
They have plenty of far-right racist groups that model themselves after the Nazis.
As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.
Hell, there are still SS alumni groups in Germany. They arent banned.
No.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/13/afd-party-ban-ge...
"Consiers" can mean someone had an idle thought about it. It can also mean that the full apparatus of the government is able to do something, and is allowed by its own rules to do so, and just hasn't yet. This "considers" is the second kind.
That was my entire point.
This is the image it projects, and maybe it was even true in the past. But not any more.
https://www.racket.news/p/madness-american-satirist-cj-hopki...
American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.
His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.
They're literally punishing a guy for calling someone else a Nazi due to their political policies, under anti-Nazi laws. It's the wrong way around but they don't seem to care, the victim in this case was protesting against their COVID laws so down with those sorts.
Also remember the EU just handed itself the power to force tech firms to globally censor anything the EU decides is misinformation, which in practice appears to be anything that disagrees with their policies or ideology.
You're equivocating between two different meanings of "Nazi" in this sentence.
> And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff?
They aren't, they moved the Overton window so far via a ratchet effect that they're unable to calmly discuss immigration policy.
Newspapers/tv/radio were, and no one was giving nazi's equal time on every issue.
Newspapers only ever published what they wanted to, censoring any viewpoint they felt like censoring.
The truth is that before the internet, there wasn't really any genuine public discourse. If you wanted any reach at all, you had to go through a gatekeeper of some sort.
IMO public discourse is less controlled by private corporations/organizations now than at basically any other point in our history, with the possible exception of like, 10 years ago.
There was never previously any realistic method for a private citizen to gain a platform to meaningfully influence discourse. Traditional media _literally_ defined the narratives in play. I’d argue that a whole lot of the ideological carnage and polarization going on is directly a result of the “democratization” of public discourse.
While there was some oversight, the reality is that news media still had basically total control over whatever narrative they were interested in pushing.
In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the ideological chaos and subsequent censorship we have seen recently is precisely a result of private corporations losing control of public discourse.
In fact, the reason the First Amendment limits the government, exclusively, is that the ability to abridge free speech (to choose which forms of speech you support, spread, or disassociate from) is implicitly a part of individual liberty, held by the people. Free speech has never guaranteed anyone a platform.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Yes I am. If Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door I am perfectly within my rights to tell them to go away. I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. I'm perfectly allowed not to associate with racists and homophobes.
Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
>Not saying sites can't have a TOS, but an ISP should have a really good business reason for blocking you(illegal activity, spam).
I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
On the one hand, I get the free speech argument, but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
> Businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes, true, but being an asshole is not a protected class, and every bar and restaurant still has a sign saying they can refuse service to anyone.
Clearly I'm not talking about interpersonal association. We're talking about your freedom when conducting business, which is normal to regulate in the U.S in this way.
> I'd be willing to agree if I didn't remember the last few months of vociferous support for repealing Section 230, having the government take over social media platforms and make TOS's and most forms of moderation illegal. Even make "algorithms" illegal.
Do you think I support repealing section 230 when I said "Not saying sites can't have a TOS"?
> On the one hand, I get the free speech argument
Nothing I said has anything to do with free speech. As stated above, I think it's fine for sites to moderate themselves in a partisan manner.
> but on the other hand, there is a right-wing accelerationist agenda using that argument to push the Overton window of acceptable regulations far enough that it becomes illegal, de facto or de jure, for any site to engage in any form of moderation. I don't believe for a second that people are going to be satisfied with simply regulating ISPs, even if I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that they should be considered infrastructure than websites themselves.
There are other threats besides right wing extremism, like the centralization of power. Even if the power is wielded by some collective consciousness, I have interests that are not shared by the collective, so I don't want them having the ability to dictate my life. I think many people would also share this concern, so the government is a good way to solve that.
> For the time being, the market seems to be working. Conservative and right-wing alternatives are rising to take advantage of sites being pushed out of the mainstream, and I think that's acceptable.
That seems to be the exact opposite of what you want, doesn't it?Extremism is very popular and profitable.
I'm not? There are certain exceptions, such as certain police interactions, or a court order, or protected classes when I'm doing business stuff, but I don't think that's correct in general.
Can they ban someone for being black or gay? Do you think they should have this right, since they are private corporations?
Political belief does not, and absolutely should not, constitute a protected class.
The deciding factor is if your business revolves around facilitating speech. The law has some way to go to catch up with the current state of affairs, but right now the government is enjoying the power of censoring that speech so it may not be an easy path.
But the authorities and the justice system seem unwilling to do so, and - in the face of their refusal to act - you can't expect people to just give up and not defend themselves, not when they can exert other forms of pressure.
To me sounds like a conspiracy theory. If their crimes are so unquestionable and clear, it should be pretty easy and straightforward to prove it in a court of law. The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here, at least under the US law, and their actions, as tasteless and despicable as they might be, are covered under the american law and KF opponents are using corporations to censor legally protected speech.
I would like you to pay attention to the word "seem", which describe how their action - or lack thereof - appear to a third party, especially one which has been subject - and continues to be subject - to said "tasteless and despicable" actions, and to avoid jumping to conclusions.
> The other alternative being, of course, that there is no crime happening here [...]
That hardly sounds like the only other alternative. Even without assuming the malice of some hypothetical "conspiracy", it might be the case that
(1) the crime isn't happening here, on US soil, and thus the relevant authorities lack the power to pursue it (see also: spam call centers located in foreign countries);
(2) whoever is tasked with pursuing said crime has other, higher-priority crimes to deal with, and decided that the potential pay-off was not worth the cost of prosecution (see also: the whole US justice system);
(3) the prosecution is waiting to build a stronger case;
(4) it is not clear who should prosecute who (see also: diffusion of responsibility);
(5) the file was lost;
(6) the file got eaten by a grue;
(7) any other reason for why a large and complex machine might turn out to not be effective in dealing, in a timely manner, with a loose group of people who gather on servers hosted on foreign soil, which are not "KF opponents [...] using corporations to censor legally protected [sic] speech";
There even was a thread on that forum where the admin asked for advice about alternate hosting locations and could not find any.
The USA is the only country with speech laws permissive enough and data privacy laws weak enough for that site to be legal there.
In the US, related to this specific situation, the laws are called "Net Neutrality" and "Common Carrier" laws.
Such laws are well established and uncontroversial. Pretty much everyone agrees that it is a good thing that the power company can't shut off your electricity just because you said something that it didn't like.
In this case, the government forced privately owned malls to allow political protests. So yes the government has forced public squares to be open to the public and prevents private companies from censoring political speech in those public squares.
> or a mass communication system though
Common carriers quite literally are mass communication systems. What do you think common carriers "carry"? The answer is that many of them carry communication.
Things like the phone system are for mass communication.
So yes, we have laws that effect both the public square and mass communication systems.
ISPs are also communication systems and laws called "net neutrality" laws force them to do certain things.
In fact, this article itself is about how the ISP is acting illegally and is breaking existing laws about what the ISPs can censor.
You could always go yell at people in the street like a crazy person. You still can.
Our democracy is on the verge of collapsing because liars and frauds have grabbed their newly available megaphone and convinced a very significant portion of the population that any election they lose is rigged.
If our democracy even survives this, which is questionable right now, we really need to rein in social media if we don't want to live under a despot.
This is why monopoly power is dangerous as without it you could just move to a more tolerant competitor and be on with your business. The courts almost never consider the "secondary markets" that exist around these behemoths, and how all of our interests and independence are significantly damaged by allowing these monopolies to merge into existence.
Of course, even this feels like the conversation they would _like_ you to have, because the other side I never see considered is what does it take to buy an "indulgence" from these companies? Is it easy? Is it often done? How often are these "scions of social justice" actually just "turning a blind eye?"
oh no how _terrible_
'Inclusive' is also incredibly easy to abuse.
How? Seems to me that, like with corporate accountability, you're either doing it and it's good or you're not doing it but lying and saying you are.
Comcast has an all-women Open Source Program Office, which sounds like a way to include females in engineering. But they define women as "females and males who want to be seen as female" which doesn't help women actually get jobs.
The Scottish National Party has sex-quotas to achieve more-equal representation by men and women, but they let men who claim to be women take these seats.
Are either actually inclusive? Are they inclusive of women? If you have a daughter, do either of those measures better her life.
And yet both actions meet the 'Social' criteria of ESG scores, and serve to boost a company's rankings and thus lower its interest rate on sustainability linked loans.
What should happen is across the board equality of opportunity. While making sure the opportunity is truly fair, focus on stamping out prejudice and 'isms. You can't force immediate changes, but you can remove the barriers to equality to let the changes happen.
- Universal suffrage
- Proportional representation
- Voting for women
- Minimum wage
- Eight-hour workday
...
So you support them?
> play moral police at the moment
Moral fashion police
Apart from the obvious 1a violation.
Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market. We see this play out in reality.
This doesn't really apply in the same way in social media. Social media platforms organically turn into monopolies.
X and Facebook and Reddit and Hackernews and Whatsapp are all social media, sure, but they are not in direct competition. One does not start or stop using Instagram because they use Reddit. Same with Hackernews and X, etc etc. The product is different.
When you ban an ideology or a group from a piece of social media, they do run to competitors, but "competitors" which can never penetrate the market because they don't have the userbase, which is the main incentive of social media.
So far-right people get banned from Twitter and they run to Gab, but Gab and Twitter aren't really competitors because Twitter can't ever penetrate into Gab's market (they banned that market to begin with) and Gab can't penetrate Twitter's market (because Twitter is the more attractive platform to begin with, having more users)
The better product is better because of its userbase. There is no real competition, and as such, no upholding of freedom of speech due to it.
If the private sector is more susceptible to moral policing than the public sector, then (all things being equal) if public services are transferred to the public sector(ie: smaller government) then the attack area increases.
There are two conditions, and one conclusion. If you don't agree that the premises apply, then the argument doesn't really matter and also doesn't apply.
>That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
Eh, maybe, but don't most of these laws mostly fail to work across international borders anyway?
I mean, I haven't seen many cryptolocker authors appearing before US courts. And wikileaks remains online despite the best efforts of US authorities.
Surely anything that could shut down or block kiwifarms could do the same to wikileaks and pirate bay and sci-hub?
Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.
Then why do people who issue takedown requests get plastered all over the site and harassed?
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.
People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.
And requiring service providers to monitor private communications for organisation of harassment seems Orwellian to me. (Intuition pump: imagine the postal service opening every letter to check to see if someone's organising a letter writing campaign sending abuse to George Washington)
As does prohibiting people saying unpleasant things about semi-public figures in public.
You should read up on what actually happened, one a unbiased source. Which si not Wikipedia.
The sources that are allowed/disallowed and their respective biases (e.g. what they publish or don't say) are a big factor.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807942
[2]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
[3]https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-world-should-not-ne...
The first link is from Destiny, a well-known (albeit controversial) online figure. It seems to be a factual timeline of events with citations for every claim made, which is far from an opinion piece.
Completely dismissing the content because you believe it must be biased is somewhat ironic.
Would you at least then concede that the Wikipedia article is also unreliable and biased?
> One is bordering on an attack piece.
Which one? If you're referring to the piece published by Destiny, what constitutes an "attack piece" if all the claims made are rigorously cited? Would being an attack piece invalidate the claims even if they're demonstrably true?
[1]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...
Moreover, if it's about the situation mentioned earlier this year on HN, it's problematic because of its complexity and gravity. Even with just facts and only facts, the change of the narrative (ie. the order you present the facts in) is enough for the same reasonable person to come to opposite conclusions. And that's before accounting for rhetorical devices that aim to manipulate the reader while still not crossing the line and sticking to facts - happily employed by both sides of the discussion in staggering quantities. (Then, of course, there's the other 90% of sources full of lies and fabrications, but let's leave those alone on HN at least...)
In short - it's not worth the hassle unless you're invested in the matter enough to care a lot, and once you are, odds are you won't post an unbiased source anyway. You'll need to do your own research, wade through a metric crapton of some of the worst humanity has to offer, and form your own opinion based on that. I don't think there's a shortcut here.
Come on, that is the literal fucking purpose of infrastructure. Water/sewage doesn't get to refuse to flush my toilet because the content of my stool doesn't meet their nutritional expectations.
> I'd never believed that sending someone a pizza would qualify as an act of violence
It doesn't unless you interpret every instance of adversity as an attempt on your life.
Nobody trying to kill anybody sends a pizza, unless the intent is to induce poisoning or choking.
> [Wikipedia] Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her
"Leaked" sounds so much worse than the truth of the photos being found on a 2257-compliant commercial porn site, which Keffals willingly worked as a onetime model for under a 4-letter pseudonym. To say they were "leaked" is being intentionally dishonest. They were available for sale, by the studio that took them. Users shared the preview images that were publicly posted, because nobody involved felt they were worth paying for.
Don't take my word for it; anyone can see for themselves-- they're helpfully posted in her KF thread, if the site is even up anymore.
Just on this specific point: this is not a particularly weird scenario at all. There are very strong rules about what you can and cannot send in the mail, and these rules are enforced. The most obvious example is the Comstock laws, which regulate "obscene and immoral materials" sent through the mail (including things like information about birth control). They're from the 1800s, but several are still on the books. It's not a strange concept at all in American law to regulate what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
It's amazing to me that some people are so determined to defend KF when it appears that the best defense they have is: "no suicides have been definitively linked to KF." I know their public reason is all about censorship etc, but I'd like to know what their private reason really is.
KF is ultimately an archive site. It "keeps receipts" in their words. If storing someone's posts is bad, is archive.org bad for performing the same function?
If KF supports harassment campaigns then make that case, but they seem not to. I've seen more harassment and threats on Twitter (literally!) than on KF threads.
If suicide is your metric, are you also against storing the words of people you find objectionable in case they commit suicide when discovered? What if a neo-nazi was recorded being a nazi and killed himself, is that bad?
I personally support storing the speech (because it's censorship not to allow it) and I support legal charges for people who go beyond - let the courts sort of the fine lines.
You know what would counter disinformation? Links to analysis of kiwifarms with methodology and citations. E.g. what proportion of threads (from, say, a random sample of 20) contain doxxing on the first page?
> Edit: I've now done this. Looks like about 25%. Damn, that's high.
There's probably a fallacy or term for this, but this is one of those situations where if you catch someone doing one thing, it gives you just enough credibility to exaggerate other features without proof-- and people will believe the whole thing.
Doxxing is the easiest claim to verify, and though unwelcome, it's not a crime. "Harassment" in this context is conflated with "accountability," which is relevant when you consider who exactly their "victims" are and what KF accuses each of them of in turn. None of them are random nobodies minding their own business-- most if not all of Kiwi Farms' "victims" are public e-celebrities or influencers they accuse of being complicit in some form of fraud, abuse, child solicitation or other shenanigans, so it seems clear to me why such "victims" would want evidence of their own criminal behavior erased from the internet.
I've said it elsewhere, but nobody ever accuses KF of being liars. If they're posting defamatory content, there are established legal channels available to address that-- the site and its owner are reside in the most litigious country on earth. Yet there are no channels to suppress publication of truthful information (or opinion)...which I would argue is the real reason for the histrionics of the opposition.
They're still trying to present Chris-chan as some sort of sob story because Kiwi Farms was mean to him or something; the guy raped his own mother. Keffals is no better, crying to the fucking media about being SWATed by Kiwi Farms when their own account sounded more like a search warrant being executed. byuu was caught faking his own death before, but he's totally dead this time and it's totally Kiwi Farms' fault for making him commit suicide again. Attention whores, all of them. Cry me a fucking river.
I imagine the moderators giving the same "No, please, don't do this" with the exact same level of authority as Willy Wonka telling people "no don't":
It's a bullshit, paper-thin "policy" that exists only for KF to cover their own asses.
Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for publishing someone's home address, place of employment, phone number, etc. (aka, "doxxing") is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
If KF truly discouraged harassment, they'd do what every other sane site does and immediately delete the post and ban the user that posted it.
Chris Chan has been a notorious and divisive figure online long before the existence of the Kiwi Farms. They are arguably one of the most well-known Internet personalities.
Merely referring to them as "a trans woman" throws away a massive amount of context why Kiwi Farms (and many other sites) seems so obsessed.
Also, what does labeling the person as trans (or anything else) have to do with harassment?
These threads exist. They're easy to find. I've seen them before and they're absolutely abhorrent.
Another commenter said they checked themselves
> Edit: I have now accessed the site and confirm a culture of doxxing, with 3 of the 10 opening posts proudly having "doxx" sections.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327204
> Edit: I went through the hassle of figuring out how to get on that website. I can confirm 2 or the five pages I checked had doxx info on them and agree that kiwifarms does not seem to have a policy against doxxing and in fact has a culture that promotes it. This is bad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327642
Anyone who claims that KiwiFarms is not a site for harassing and doxxing people has done zero research and is trusting some lying "news" source that tells them something else. I really wish I could understand the mentality of thinking otherwise. Are you really so hung up on "thinking for yourself" that you automatically assume anything said by the mainstream media is a lie? Skepticism is great and I highly encourage it, but automatic knee-jerk rejection is not skepticism, it's basically setting you up for falling for reverse psychology. Just because the mainstream media says one thing while fringe reporters say something else does not automatically mean the mainstream is lying.
Two notes:
1. Kiwifarms, by volume, based on the sampling of posts I've read today, is first and foremost a site for talking about, insulting and mocking people. The harassing and doxxing do not seem to have focus and it would require a relatively minor change (banning and removing doxxing) in order for it to claim innocence of harassment and doxxing.
2. "Does more than zero research" is a very high bar that few meet. The number of people I've found on the internet who cite primary sources, government stats/papers and scientific papers is less than 0% to the nearest tenth of a percent. While its true that sometimes research can take half an hour or more, so often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
Ideally everyone would do research and cite real sources, in practice less than one in a thousand do.
There's a difference between an honest archive of potentially reprehensible things that might motivate someone to harass someone and a site which actively promotes harassment. Example, _Something Awful_ (at least back in the day).
Would KF be better, in your mind, if the threads contained links to archive sites whose archives contained the doxxing information, but they didn't repost it on KF? Separate the comments from the data?
> often it takes five minutes (like checking out stats on the uk gov website regarding criminal convictions of British Pakistanis for having sex with under 16 year olds to settle the myth of Pakistani child rape).
The claim is that the police/courts/government are actively ignoring sex-trafficking and child sex when they perceive there to be a racial group of perpetrators, so one would expect the stats on prosecutions to be misleading. It's not about which race is more likely to commit a crime in Britain, but which races are potentially being "allowed" to and thus which victims are unlikely to be helped. The claim is not that Muslims or Pakistanis are more rapey than other people, just that they're less likely to be prosecuted in Britain's current legal climate.
There is a comment by a police officer "The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found a chief inspector told a missing child’s father that Rotherham “would erupt” if it knew that multiple Asian gangs were sexually abusing children" which indicates a blindness towards certain groups, and because the issue is police perception of their ability to prosecute without being called racist, that chief inspector's view is relevant to likelihood of investigation and arrest and therefore prosecution.
A UK parliament study on the issue deliberately clouds the issue by saying "The vast majority of convicted child-sex offenders in the UK are single White men", which shouldn't surprising in a country where the majority is white. This misses the claim of unequal police attention though, which is the real issue.
I don't think you researched the actual claims of the people who brought that up and thus haven't disproven it.
That's only your opinion. What OP says about KF is still correct.
No, it really isn't.
> Let's make one thing clear, the only purpose for [doxxing] is to condone harassment of that individual. Any claims otherwise are completely bad faith and bullshit. Nobody believes you. Stop claiming "Oh, but this information is publicly available!"
Yes, I acknowledge it's all public, but that doesn't explain why you would want to aggregate that information and post it in a public forum and make it easier to acquire. What purpose does it achieve?
I do not recall seeing those in the threads I looked at (which all have an opening post collecting information about the individual).
Can you confirm what proportion, if any, of main posts had that info? Can you also confirm that KF does not have a policy of removing that info?
I can't access kiwifarms at the moment to check, but I strongly suspect that information is in obscure posts by individuals and their "community" as a whole does not condone it and it is removed where obvious.
Primary sources analysed either a good methodology are by far the best way to learn about a subject.
> Just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one
Problem: a forum full of misanthropes dedicated to saying the worst things allowed under the first amendment.
Bad solution: erode 1A at the case law level
Bad solution: censor the internet at the backbone level
Freedom isn't free. We're lucky to live in country with robust speech protections. The tradeoff is that there will always be some people who get a kick out of going right to edge of what they can get away. My view is that our civil liberties are worth it.
Not exactly. While there are certainly people who espouse anti-free speech views in the big tech, I'm pretty sure the companies themselves are pressured/threatened with increased regulatory scrutiny, anti-thrust action and anything else that is at congress/government's disposal. These congress/senate hearings about misinformation are exactly that.
I 100% disagree with this, the engineering level of silicon valley left the old "libertarian" hacker ethos behind a long time ago, at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
In fact recent activism coming from the engineer levels at Big Tech (google, Amazon, FB, etc) has me believe that that administrative layer is not really in control, and the policy changes are a reflection coming from the activism in the engineering layer
We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
For shame. But, things go in cycles. What was once great becomes a ruin, and then rises again. We are now in the heading steadily towards the ruin phase.
Implementation is the guys holding the shovels, not the guys saying where to dig.
And thank fuck for that.
> at the engineering layer there is idea about using technology to build a "better society" where "better society" is ensuring people with "wrong opinions" isolated so they can not "harm" others with their "violence" and violence is now words on the internet.
People are so glib about this and it's such a catastrophic failure to engage in empathy and respect for other human beings that it simply blows my mind that people can say things like this and think they're in the moral correct. "Being bullied to death by the Internet" isn't even that uncommon anymore. Especially for people who will have a hard time finding community in the real spaces in which they live, Internet communities of like-people become a literal lifeline. Entire relationships both communal and intimate are carried out through the lens of online communication. "Words on the internet" indeed.
And if said words can be a lifeline of communication and community to like-minded people and alleviate suffering, you can be damn well assured that works the other way too. Having personally known and helped people through being the subject of online alt-right hate mobs, I assure you, "words on the internet" can absolutely kill people. I have watched in happen in real time and pulled people back from the precipice.
> We also see this through out Open Source with the raise of the CoC to implement systemic changes with in open source to ensure only those with "correct opinions" are allowed to contribute moving from just caring about code, to then caring about code and conduct with in a project and project related events, to now even more expansive monitoring of developers entire lives, and activities completely removed and unrelated to any development activities.
Yeah I don't particularly want to use software, especially pay to use software, made by people who want to exterminate people I call friends and family. If a developer comes out on their social media and broadcasts about how my friends are some combination of insane/dangerous for being who they are, no, I'm not using their product ever again and I will spread word about it to people I know who feel similarly. This is just how social networks (in the sociology sense, not the technological sense) work and always have.
I guess what I'm saying is if you want maximum capture on your product, tell your team to park their opinions on which groups of people deserve to die on personal, anonymous accounts. I don't think this is a massive ask, personally, but I also don't want anyone dead so I can't really comment on it.
Which one is it? Does your speech have a real world impact? If yes, then you have to acknowledge that it can cause real damage and that private companies have no obligation to accommodate that. If its just meaningless words, then why does it matter that companies ban anyone for any speech?
This is the oddly standard wording used in defense of these newly-fashionable 'everything you've ever done ever can be used against you' contributor codes of conduct and I have to find it very disingenuous.
By and large nobody wants to exterminate anybody. People have legitimate differences of opinion and when they attempt to express them they're being told that even _thinking_ that opinion is tantamount to violence.
If you can't see it as anything other than a transparent attempt to restrict discourse I don't know what to tell you. It isn't like this is the first time this strategy has been used.
Please provide me an example of a code of conduct you find objectionable on these grounds. I have yet to see one that fits the language used both in this and the parent comment I originally replied to of being "orwellian."
Is that hyperbole or do you really believe it?
The concepts of pluralism, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence with people whom we disagree is replaced with forced acceptance, mono-culturalism, speech controls and a rank intolerance of opposing views often supplanted with a rather obtuse perversion of the "paradox of tolerance" where by intolerant people of both political sides justify their actions actions as morally and ethically correct, as being on the "correct side of history" or other such platitudes
Ergo: if you treat everyone around you with the respect and recognition of their personhood, you in turn are 100% entitled to that same respect and recognition. If however you make statements or act in such a way as to diminish the personhood of others, you are no longer entitled to that respect.
I think it's a nice little system and resolves the paradox quite nicely. To promote a tolerant society means being intolerant of intolerance.
The right is most seen on this in the modern era Womens Rights, Schools, Gay Marriage, etc
The left is most seen on this with Speech Codes around "Hate Speech" and Pronouns, in Employment Regulations, in Equity Regulation (enforced by law not market) ,etc
You seem to believe that because 2 cultures exist it is "multicultural" but that is not the reality, "multicultural" would be accepting the other culture as equally as valid as your own, tolerating their existence in a legal and market framework (i.e willing to do business with them, and not use government power to make their culture illegal)
What we have today is 2 cultures attempt each attempting to banish the other both using markets, and using governments.
This notion that "well what's objectionable is subjective and therefore having any standard is having an agenda" is frankly, bullhockety. Yes, it does vary from person to person. Different people will have different tolerances to different things, and part of community building is all of those people coming together and, through trial and error, through difficult conversations, through awkward moments, etc. slowly constructing a line in the sand where upon one side is beyond tolerance, and the other side is not, and that line in itself being subject to change based upon new cultural events, new people joining the community, other people being removed from the community for infraction, etc. etc.
We have been doing this since roughly the taming of fire. The only thing that's changed is the mode of enforcement. Now instead of chucking people out of our tribes and telling them to piss off, we block them on social media and revoke their access rights. Same exact thing. If you want to participate in a community, that participation has always, always been conditional upon agreeing to a mutually agreed upon set of rules, that yes, change over time and that can mean you by virtue of being an imperfect human can stumble over them without meaning harm. The differentiator from that point is how you handle that situation and if your reflex is to post on your own social media about how everyone involved in the community you have transgressed against is censoring you and you have a right to say XYZ, then that community in all likelihood is going to reject you in a more permanent fashion. If your individual liberty to say XYZ is more important to you than membership in that community, then that's the choice you make. I don't judge you inherently for that. I have joined and left many communities over the years as my and those communities' values shifted around. This is just how social organizations work and have always worked.
And you in turn are free to demand access to whatever space but that entitlement needs to be articulated, and I am inherently suspicious of this almost reflexive "well I guess I just had the WRONG OPINIONS" response, which almost universally is presented without the opinions attached. (Including in this comment.) What were the opinions? Why were they "wrong?"
And I will grant: in the digital age, the enforcement of being rejected is much easier with a much lower emotional energy gate than it was previously. Now you don't need to confront people, to have conversations, if you don't want to and that makes a certain kind of person perhaps itchier on the trigger finger than is ideal. And that's unfortunate. But on the flip side of that, sometimes the transgression involved is too extreme. Sometimes the transgression makes the people who would confront an individual feel unsafe to do so. Sometimes there is no path to resolution and there's nothing to do but block and move on.
Regardless, it's not an argument. Your emotion has no direct weight on the correctness of an outcome you're arguing for, and trying to appeal to other's emotions in an attempt to sway them is attempting to bypass their critical analysis.
Argue the facts and let emotions happen. They "are you" but should not drive you.
> "Everyone agrees with me but they're too afraid to say it" is a convenient excuse to hold reprehensible beliefs that you don't want to take responsibility for. If everyone is afraid to say something, maybe that's because it's disgusting?
No, likely outcomes and consequences for discussing something are rarely aligned. You're discussing hounding people out of work/home/politics because of your emotional take on what they're saying, without any actual analysis of it or how actionable it is.
In my mind, that's incredibly dangerous (and thus, if I chose to use emotional language - disgusting) but I'm not advocating taking away your right to say it.
> Again though, while there I am certain are some examples of people being bullied to that point, I have a hard time seeing it.
James Damore is a great example. He didn't broadcast his views - he responded privately to questions in a hiring review panel at Google, discussing how the company could improve its hiring of women by understanding the roles it was offering in the light of modern psychological analysis using the "Big Five" traits model.
Specifically, he did not say that women were worse engineers in any way, either holistically or in individual skills, OR less suited to engineering than males. He argued that Google's roles were less suitable for "traditionally female" interests. Again, this was privately, in the context of a panel trying to evaluate why Google wasn't great at hiring women engineers.
His communications were leaked, with the context stripped, in an edited form without any references to gawker-style media who were prompted with the lead 'white guy says - "Don't hire women"' to prompt them into the "right" emotional headspace to write an attack piece.
To tie this back to emotion, obviously someone read his words and let their emotion at those words (I myself don't like psychobabble) override their analysis of what was said. Their emotions are "valid lived experience" but the attacks they called for, and lies used to do so, are not helpful or justified.
That is a failure of mental health and the direction of psychology in general where by they are teaching people that everyone, everywhere must affirm you, must support you, and everything you do is perfect.
No longer are we teaching people "sticks and stones can break my bones but words should never hurt me" and then also providing people with the mental tools, and fortitude to deal with those words. No instead society and the field of psychology as embraced the "affirm" narrative and supports this idea that people should seek external validation instead of securing their internal framework.
I grew up being physically bullied, in spaces I could not escape from. There was no monitor turn off, browser to close, or computer to pull power from. I dont even want to curb that speech, let alone online speech. Why because I understand the extreme problems that come with embracing censorship at any level.
>>being the subject of online alt-right hate mobs,
So your are partisan, and operate under the belief that only the "right" bullies people, because I can show several cases of far left violence, and bulling, I have a feeling you would not call that bullying thought. I bet you are all in on the "accountability culture" as well.
No bad tactics, only bad targets right. If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
Let me ask, do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying" and that in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves, or banned from society?
>>I'm not using their product ever again and I will spread word about it to people I know who feel similarly.
that is perfectly acceptable, and not at all what I am talking about. Boycotts are fine. There is a big difference between boycotts and cancelations.
Boycotts are you choosing not to engage with a product, group company, and attempting to get like minded people to do so as well.
Cancellation is a form of harassment that involves deep diving to any associations even loosely and attempting to interfere or cancel all relationships the target has with everyone. So for example, Let say Walmart has a bad policy, say Anti-union, and your pro union so you refuse to shop there and tell all of your pro union friends to to either. Perfectly fine.
Now lets say an Employee at Walmart happens to go the Republican National Convention and wears a MAGA hat, you see a photo of this online, then proceed to find their friends, employers, family, and attempt to get them evicted from their apartment, fired from walmart, and when they get a new job at Target attempt to get them fired from that as well, attempt get their mother fired, and attempt get their roommate fired as well just for good measure. (true story form left wing cancellation BTW)
That is no longer OK. But that is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian left which you seem to support
>>made by people who want to exterminate people I call friends and family.
this such hyperbolic virtue signalling non-sense on the level of "words are violence", where by "exterminate" is in reality no "affirming, and accepting everything about my life as wonderful, virtuous, and pure". Certain segments of the population seem to be so fragile that if someone says to them "Your lifestyle is a sin" that means they are being exterminated...
I used to work with this very devote christian, she would pray for me everyday because I was a godless soul doomed to hell or some such thing. She was harmless, and I could care less. Today some people would report her to HR, get her fired, etc... simply because she believed something crazy and different. Of course you are free to be crazy as long as you use the "correct" political dogma in your crazy...
No, it's really not. It's what happens when you live within a society where far too many people in positions of authority either deny that people like you exist entirely, or fully accept you do and want to limit your access to healthcare, to resources, to gather in public, to your rights, what have you.
You cannot therapy or mental health your way out of the fact that a significant portion of society wants you to cease being the person you are.
> No longer are we teaching people "sticks and stones can break my bones but words should never hurt me"
Yeah you know how much I heard this tripe as a kid who was bullied basically continuously from the 4th grade to graduation? I heard it from every manner of school counselor to (vice) principal to teachers, and all of them, every single one, absolutely believed it and wanted to help me, and it doesn't change the fact that being subjected to daily psychological torture for roughly 8 years of my developmental life has taken yet another 8 years of intense therapy to work through the myriad of issues I have developed as a result of it, and even now, I am not free of it and never will be in all likelihood. I will go to my grave with issues around my self worth, my self image, my less-than-stellar social skills, on and on.
I cannot imagine dealing with that all through school, and THEN graduating into a larger society that not only doesn't rebuke that, but actively encourages it. Where your given bully is no longer the high school football captain, but a septuagenarian who has never worked a proper job in his life who is determined to mine support for his public policies on the back of making people who hate you feel good about hating you and encouraging them to continue doing so for literally no reason.
> So your are partisan
Everyone is.
> and operate under the belief that only the "right" bullies people,
I didn't make that claim and I'm not going to litigate it.
> No bad tactics, only bad targets right. If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
"Political dogma" here being that all human beings have an equal right to exist without threats of violence? I mean yeah, I guess if that's the thing people don't agree with I am largely okay with them being bullied.
> Let me ask, do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying" and that in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves, or banned from society?
Personally I don't like neo-pronouns. Like if someone wants to be called that, that's their business, I will probably avoid speaking to them when possible. I think the set of he/she/they covers everyone perfectly effectively and anything beyond that should strictly be an opt-in. However, I also wouldn't purposely go out of my way to not use someone's pronouns in front of them to make some idiotic point. I would just respect it to the degree that anyone is deserving of respect, and probably avoid them in the future.
> that is perfectly acceptable, and not at all what I am talking about. Boycotts are fine. There is a big difference between boycotts and cancelations....That is no longer OK. But that is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian left which you seem to support
I mean, what's the line here? I can tell people I know not to associate with someone or something, and then they tell their friends, that's still okay? At what point does it become not okay? What if down the line of 4 friends happens to be a vendor that supplies that company, and they decide to cancel their contract? Is that cancel culture now because a company is involved? What if enough of my friends are upset enough and publicly talk about it, and of their own volition, a company decides to cancel that contract based on not wanting the bad PR? At one point have I crossed from Boycott to Cancelling? Or is the it determined post-hoc based on the fallout? Because like... in my mind at least, they're the same thing. One is just more associated with a certain type of community.
> this such hyperbolic virtue signalling non-sense on the level of "words are violence", where by "exterminate" is in reality no "affirming, and accepting everything about my life as wonderful, virtuous, and pure". Certain segments of the population seem to be so fragile that if someone says to them "Your lifestyle is a sin" that means they are being exterminated...
Moving past that words absolutely have psychological consequences especially when applied en masse and over time as outlined above: it also matters when the "certain segments of the population" wield much larger institutional power than the others. You say all of this is just "words words harmless words from people who call me a sinner" like we didn't just deal with, here in the US, a massive court decision that granted abortion rights being overturned by judges appointed by theologically minded people to achieve that specific goal. This isn't even theoretical anymore, this is happening. Right now. There are now laws in place that directly contribute to making women's healthcare more dangerous because of the perception of it being "sinful" to receive otherwise, so don't tell me I shouldn't worry and that it's just words, when those same words not even forty years ago were used to condemn victims of the AIDS epidemic to death because it was "God's will" or whatever garbage.
no in fact we did not deal with this, nor was that the decision.
First and foremost Roe did not grant abortion rights, it granted privacy rights in a weird hamfisted way that only applied to abortion... It was a terrible precinct that even many left legal scholars (include Ruth Bader Ginsburg) rejected.
The reversal of Roe also did not remove any abortion or any other rights from anyone, it returned the issue to the proper place, State governments. Of which the vast majority had/have a more expansive view of abortion that the limits under Roe.
Thirdly the left had 30+ years to take the issue out of the hands of the hamfisted Roe by passing an actual law to address it, but chose not do because the democratic party wanted that boogeyman for elections (and still does) so they did not want to resolve the conflict at all, they want the issue not the resolution. They wrongly believe the court "would never" reverse itself... the screwed around, and found out.
The level if wrong information out there around the subject of Roe is crazy to me.
>>There are now laws in place that directly contribute to making women's healthcare more dangerous because of the perception of it being "sinful" to receive otherwise
100% wrong... You are clearly indoctrinated into a political ideology completely removed from reality
>>Everyone is.
I despise political parties. All of them. Political parties are for rich men north of Richmond, who all just wanna have total control of what you think, and what you do...
Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, Constitution, you name the party and I reject it.
"political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." -- George Washington.
An utterly disingenuous and politically motivated misstelling
Your ideas on needing an internal framework for emotional stability is on the spot, but this idea that "they" are teaching people whatever is in itself a partisan cop-out. The onus of failure for not providing adequate mental health tools is on parents who had no idea how to handle the sudden rise of technology & a general failure of leadership figures to step in. There isn't some big leftist boogeyman teaching people that others "must" do anything.
> do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying"
There are a lot of qualifying questions that need answered before this one could be considered. Like what constitutes bullying - your definition is different than everyone else's. Do we frame this under your perception of bullying, or mine? If something is a large part of your internally perceived identity & someone else actively denies that part of your identity, is that okay? Do you have an experiential framework with which to tackle that identity scenario in the first place, to understand in any fashion how they feel about that? Are you willing to employ empathy?
I'm trying to find a moral justification for not simply calling someone what they ask to be called, or walking away from the situation - if you're dredging up old dated phrases, whatever happened to "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all?" If someone wants to be called Xir or whatever, my question is "how the fuck do I say that" not "why should I."
> in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves
No, but they should be made aware that they're being assholes. Outside of this hypothetical vacuum scenario, we know statistically that it's more likely for the person refusing to use pronouns to engage in actual violence than someone requesting to be referred using those pronouns, so things become much muddier after the point of "you're being an asshole" - but in this scenario, that's where it should end.
It shouldn't be surprising or incomprehensible to anyone that folks on one side of this field are suddenly stepping up to the same field that the other side is. It doesn't justify it, but it should be well-understood that attacks from the left are not predicated on nothing.
> or banned from society
No. Rather I'd like to see our mental health systems improve enough that we don't have millions of people that erroneously believe that other humans don't have just as much right to exist as they do. That's why people get "banned from society" or whatever inane scenario you're trying to claim happens.
> If they don't agree with your political dogma then bullying is perfectly fine right, they deserve it...
The hilarious part of this statement, at least in this specific context, is that it goes both ways. Our monkeys are flinging shit at their monkeys, and for some reason their monkeys are throwing shit back! How dare they.
I agree that 'cancelling' people - in the view that you've provided - is wrong. That said...
> Now lets say an Employee at Walmart happens to go the Republican National Convention and wears a MAGA hat, you see a photo of this online, then proceed to find their friends, employers, family, and attempt to get them evicted from their apartment, fired from walmart, and when they get a new job at Target attempt to get them fired from that as well, attempt get their mother fired, and attempt get their roommate fired as well just for good measure. (true story form left wing cancellation BTW)
You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation? Being bound by chains and dragged behind a truck. Gunning down an entire building full of gay people. Being burned alive in their own home. These events, steeped in alt-right online cultures of stoking fear and hatred towards leftists. Is this not the ultimate form of cancellation, the end-of-the-line of this whole scenario? As you put it, this is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian right. This is the extermination the other person is referring to. Murdering people based on shit they heard online, without actually bothering to interact with those people or build any kind of basis of empathy, to understand the challenges they face in a world where they feel the need to lash out like you've seen.
This is not justification of leftist actions, but you should also keep in mind the cauldron that they've been stewing in for decades upon decades - and the atrocities that the group you're defending have also committed. They are not innocent of wrongdoing, but you seem to casually miss that part.
> I used to work with this very devote christian, she would pray for me everyday [...] Today some people would report her to HR, get her fired, etc...
If they asked her to stop, and she didn't stop, she's in the wrong. Yes, absolutely report her to HR. What was the point of this story?
I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you. I believe, based on the ideas you've expressed here, that you lack the empathy necessary to engage with a very emotional & "human" topic. Have a good one.
You believe there is no violence on the left? Shall I pull video of people being beaten and pulled from their cars during BLM "peaceful" protests? Or of the police captian that was burned alive in a store? Or of the Nashville mass school shotting for which the FBI is still withholding the manifesto that has it been a right wing person would have been on ever news outlet the next day?
>This is not justification of leftist actions,
if not outright justification it is attempt to "but but but look over there they are worse"
>>group you're defending
Not defending anyone, I am pointing it out is not left / Right. it is Authoritarian vs Libertarians.
Authoritarians are violent, that is how they weld authority. Right, left does not matter, In this community (technologists) people tend to want to believe only Right Authoritarians exist, and only Right are violent. That there is a nazi on every corner, and that nazi is a republican...
>>I will also save you the time by stating I don't intend on discussing this topic with you.
then I welcome your non-reply... If you did not intend on discussing this then you should have refrained from reply at all.
ironically I am a very empathetic person. I empathize with people suffering real hardship, like the people that are going to lose everything in the hurricane, not because someone on twitter did not use Xe or Xir correctly....
It also irks me to no end, when people refer to leftists as "liberal" when they are no such thing at this point. I can deal with liberals, and as a libertarian share most of the values. More like Progressive past the point of usefulness to society.
The difference, I feel, is that I know many people whose identity is "leftist" or "progressive" and I don't personally know anyone who identifies as a "rightist". The right is a centuries-old boogeyman of the left, and it encompasses everyone who disagrees with the critical-analysis class-based views of the left.
The worst term the left has is "far-right" which just means very-heretical. The worst thing you can do is let your opinions diverge from the groupthink.
> If they asked her to stop, and she didn't stop, she's in the wrong. Yes, absolutely report her to HR. What was the point of this story?
"I pray for everyone, saints and sinners, to have a better life." - "Fire the witch, she's using hateful spells against me!"
You took something you had no context or scale for, you don't know if she loudly and rudely prayed at her desk, or casually commented that she prays daily for many people of whom the OP is one, and yet you immediately agree that she should be examined for ability and worthiness to have a job for her actions.
> > do you believe someone refusing to use neo-pronouns is "bullying"
> If something is a large part of your internally perceived identity & someone else actively denies that part of your identity, is that okay?
You've jumped a few steps. Where did not participating in your identity become "actively denying" it? I don't believe you can literally be a furry-kin but I don't follow furs to their place of work to make the case that their belief renders them less useful as engineers.
> Do you have an experiential framework with which to tackle that identity scenario in the first place, to understand in any fashion how they feel about that?
Yes, throughout history people have believed things I do not think are literal truth. Catholics believe that their cracker has a certain god-nature as they eat it, I do not but this doesn't constitute religious oppression - even if I refuse to promote it.
> Are you willing to employ empathy?
Are you? If I agree with your claim that you like movies it costs me nothing, but if you want me to agree with your claim that you have changed sexes and want me to support changing laws to accommodate you, this does. Are you considering the feelings of everyone impacted by the required changes for that worldview to be accepted, or only the person making the claim?
> > in return anyone that refuses to use neo-pronouns should be bullied themselves
> No, but they should be made aware that they're being assholes.
Are they though? Is Riley Gaines an asshole for protesting men entering women's sports? At what point do you feel it's reasonable to label and other someone for their disbelief and lack of support for someone else's religious beliefs?
Refusing to use misleading terms or labels, to call a man a woman for instance, is required in stating the premise that women's sports, and safe spaces, are being invaded by males - invalidating the point of women's spaces. If you're forced to call a man a woman, or he a she, you aren't allowed to actually speak.
> It doesn't justify it, but it should be well-understood that attacks from the left are not predicated on nothing.
Saying that attacks are based on something is an attempt to justify them.
> The hilarious part of this statement, at least in this specific context, is that it goes both ways. Our monkeys are flinging shit at their monkeys, and for some reason their monkeys are throwing shit back!
> You wanna know a true story from right-wing cancellation?
You've drawn a simple map, with good people in a group called "the left" and everyone else, including Hitler of course, in a group called "the right".
I'm descended from people who escaped communism, and have some relatives who did not, so I'm very anti communism/socialism/marxism, you could say "anti-left", but "anti-communist" would be more accurate. I'm not "right", let alone "alt" or "far", because those aren't ideologies you can subscribe to, they're merely labels for people who disagree with the academic left.
For instance, my views on sex and gender and thus neo-pronouns don't come from my position on some political compass, they come from being a father and seeing the impact of sex and sex-based actions on my children and then on females in general.
> As you put it, this is a common tactic for those on the authoritarian right.
You were right, up until that last word. Othering and violence is a common tactic of authoritarians. Left/right is not relevant to believing people should be beaten for their words.
> This is the extermination the other person is referring to. Murdering people based on shit they heard online, without actually bothering to interact with those people or build any kind of basis of empathy, to understand the challenges they face in a world where they feel the need to lash out like you've seen.
Riley Gaines was merely speaking about the actual disparate impact to "female women" on her and her teammates. She was screamed at and bullied out of finishing her talk, chased and hit, and unlawfully confined be people who refused to even listen to her, let alone try to empathize with her, before literally calling for her death, her extermination.
Female is a real group you can point to, "males who want to be called women" is not. If you can't empathize with women, how do you expect them to empathize with their attackers?
At what point do you ask "Am I one of the baddies?"
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Preference falsification from engineers, especially after James Damore had his character publicly assassinated. Yelling "shame shame" at him before chopping off his head was a warning to everyone else to keep quiet or echo the correct opinions.
There's a lot of tribal signaling and "don't hurt me I'm one of you".
Then there's a new generation of engineer who are true believers (as well as some old gen who converted) and for who programming is just a lucrative way to participate in late stage capitalism as a wage slave. They are aggressive bullies and codify their beliefs into CoCs. Their passion is the new religion, not programming.
You might not like it, but that’s kind of the point, either let the market decide or take the market out of it.
Only, that's not how it works in our (and pretty much any) society. We, as a society, choose what we think is acceptable. And then we make laws to enforce that people behave in a way consistent with that. A company is not free to deny service to someone that is gay, or black, or married; just because that is their chosen business model.
I’m quite discouraged by this thread not being taken down despite the very obvious brigade of alt-right Nazi sympathizers pretending that being gay is the same as yelling for the genocide of gay people.
I don’t think your problem is with Democrats, or social media companies, really, it’s with objective reality.
And I didn’t say they were traitors, you did.
Maybe don’t have racist genocidal stances then?
Trump wasn’t banned for being a republican. He was banned, ultimately, for Jan 6.
In reality, Trump broke all those platforms rules on several occasions and was given a free pass till he tried to steal an election. He’s actually the poster boy for the fact that republicans get MORE leeway on social platforms, not less.
Sounds like you want special treatment for Republicans, yet are paranoid that others might do the same thing.
Infrastructure providers should not be able to refuse customers engaging in lawful activity. Your phone company can't shut you off because you say, "I wish $POLITICIAN were dead." You don't have to like or agree with everything everyone says, but it's a very dangerous slippery slope.
Personal liberty should be maximalized so as not to infringe on the rights of others. You do not have the right to live a life without risk of being offended.
Such a laughable statement given that Silicon Valley was from the beginning a military project, with social control as an explicit aim. Milquetoast lamentations about a lost libertarian dream are no different than old cries about the closing of the Western frontier or Jeffersonian myths about a pastoralist capitalism corrupted by industry.
Like, no. Certificate Authorities exist because the web fucking sucks. Not because they want to be gate keepers.
Let's Encrypt has a post about phishing websites: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html
We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age.
But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!
I really wonder how I became the radical conservative here......
https://www.aclu.org/report/1978-aclu-pamphlet-why-american-...
We already have many laws that effect companies.
For example, power companies cannot just turn off your electricity because they don't like what you say.
These are called common carrier laws and they are completely uncontroversial.
We live in a society, and it is perfectly OK for us to put limits on what major monopoly type companies can do.
I am not sure if you were aware, but this article is about ISPs and we currently have laws that already regulate them and make the behavior described in the article as illegal.
So yes we do regulate them. And these laws are called common carrier laws. And those have have existed for decades and uncontroversial, and yes they work.
> Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with
Both sides are indeed already happy with our existing common carrier laws that apply to ISPs, yes. Common carrier laws are not controversial.
What's not so clear to me is whether (A) the allegations against the ISP have any merit (the article itself states it has no confirmation), or (B) even if they were true that they would run afoul of the common carrier laws. As far as I understand, these regulations do not prohibit the carriers from selectively promoting (and, ipso facto, selectively suppressing) the content they carry.
Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The capacity of the carrier is always going to be finite, therefore, tough choices are always going to have to be made as to who gets priority access.
Civil rights legislation can happily co-exist with a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" sign on the shop door.
That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.
Running a whites-only business overlaps but is different from being racist.
In this scenario, it would be weird to force your business to associate with whites-only businesses. But those are illegal, so you're not forced to do that. You're only forced to work with racists that don't run whites-only businesses.
My overall point here is that it does not make much sense to object to the freedom of association arguments being made in this thread on the grounds that similar arguments were used to support discrimination against Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act recognized racism as a unique evil that required special legal remedy; it did not recognize racists as requiring special legal protection. So, yes, freedom of association permits you to avoid associating with racists but does not (in all cases) permit you to avoid associating with people of a particular ethnicity.
chuckle I certainly have been lost in wonder that now I'm the one defending corporate power :-)
But, what would a solution to the problem look like, on your view? Would we really be better off having, say, Elon must having to get his decision to remove blocking approved by some media czar in the Ministry of Truth? Would that really stop people from thinking that their views are not being systematically suppressed?
Progressives (like Americans generally) are skeptical of all power, pubic and private, and (like Americans generally) don't want government interference in society unless it might have some hope of actually solving the problem.
But I haven't seen any concrete proposals at all, let alone anything which I would have any confidence that would actually solve the problem. Quite the contrary; no matter what regulations are imposed, surely there will always be those who feel they are being systematically suppressed--and come to think of it, they would be correct in thinking that way.
The contrast with regulating the media companies couldn't be greater. What, exactly, should these regulations be? I haven't heard anything but the most vague notions--which are so undercooked that they do not rise to the level of any kind of concrete proposal.
In point of fact, no matter what regulations are adopted, there will be media winners and media losers, and the losers will always feel the system is against them. Our media will become even more hyper-politicized than it is now, because its fate would be determined by politicians who can't even agree that it's probably a good idea to pay our debt.
E.g. You are sitting on a bus, and a venerable person comes aboard and launches into paean to Bolshevism, urging the present company to rise up and seize the means of production. Certainly protected speech. You might find it entertaining. You might even feel a pang of nostalgia for a lost world and its simpler problems.
But after a few hours of this, would you really feel like a free speech abuse had happened if the bus driver asks our comrade to give it a rest; or, if he feels honor-bound to continue, would he please go do on somebody else's bus?
But you asked how I thought they were different, and I do think they are very different, because human attention is limited in a different way than the number of busses, or ISPs are. If you can't fit one more person on a bus without kicking another one off, you can just buy more busses.
Human attention is not like that. No matter how many clones of twitter there are, I can't doom scroll for more than 24 hours a day. If some content is promoted on my feed, the means other content is inevitably excluded from my feed. And isn't this really what people are unhappy about? Not just that their views are not stored in some database somewhere. No, they want people to pay attention to what they are saying.
Can that problem be solved by additional regulations? I really don't think so. No matter what regulations we put on carriers, there will be media winners and media losers. And the losers will always feel like the system is systematically excluding them. And no wonder they feel that way--they are right. Moreover, they would be able to point to specific line items in specific regulations which were having the effect of suppressing their speech, perhaps even unconstitutionally suppressing their speech. But the conundrum is that this would be true for any set of regulations. The regulations can change who gets attention and who gets ignored. But I have a hard time seeing how it can actually solve the problem.
Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass.
> The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!
That's correct but as soon as you're "open to the public" the rules, necessarily, change.
E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective.
Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?
I don't know what the regulations should be but that doesn't mean regulations shouldn't exist. Businesses are under perhaps thousands of regulations and I can only name a few. How many can you name? What problems do those regulations solve? Do you think they shouldn't exist as well?
But suppose we actually did have a concrete proposal, something we could legislate. No matter what the legislation was, there would still be media winners and media losers. And the media losers would still feel they are being systematically excluded.
Here's the kicker--they would be absolutely right!! Moreover, they wouldn't have to appeal to vague dissatisfactions about "corporate abuses"--they could point to specific line items of regulations which had the effect of suppressing their speech. There would be endless, highly politicized fights about what the regulations should be, but no matter what they were, the regulations would inevitably have the effect of promoting some points of view and suppressing others.
I.E. I really don't how regulations could provide any sort of solution to this problem.
Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs.
Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well.
Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make.
Freedom is a tricky thing to balance.
Having employment contracts with people gives you that right.
Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc.
So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways.
Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.
This is one of the positives of capitalism. The only color that matters is green. More competition please.
It's hard when it's your line people are using to put their brand of ugliness "online".
Cloudflare comes up so regularly because so many legally problematic websites use their free service to evade even judicial blocks that ISPs are ordered to implement at national level. CF are used as a free proxy that's very hard to block unless Cloudflare takes a stand.
When they don't take a stand, when they try to stay impartial, they're attacked for enabling terrorism, child abuse, human trafficking, etc, etc, etc. So they do something, and they're attacked for being moral arbiters.
They're here to do business, not please everyone. Perhaps letting them pick isn't so bad. You can decide whether or not you want to do business with them then based on their actions and everybody can not use them if they're that much of a moral problem for them. I think many people would benefit from knowing they don't always get their way.
"Oh but I have no choice of ISPs" is absolutely a problem, but it's not this problem. Your ISP having a monopoly can be fixed separately.
Imo the problem lies here. On the idea that servicing someone implies support for their actions or ideology. For all the talk about acceptance and tolerance it would seem a good deal of society is ok with the idea that those doing reprehensible stuff ought to be completely ostracized from society, laws be damned.
If you let authoritarians kafka trap you or you peers into thought terminating cliches left and right, and you don’t call the BS, this is the society you end up in.
What you're seeing is how government is born. Corporatoctacy is just another form of authoritarianism and the more government pulls up stakes, they get replaced.
The global strain of far right ethno isolationist politics is creating the public void these corporations are filling.
For example, banks don't typically want to service car dealerships simply because they are a prime target for money laundering. Same for legal cannabis firms due to being unbanked previously or because the whole industry isn't traceable.
Frankly, while I understand the historical reasons for having a "big brother" watch financial transactions, it's way to convoluted to satisfy and represents a big cost in the economy.
My understanding is that banks are federally chartered and thus cannot provide services to weed firms as it remains illegal federally.
HE is within their rights to say no, we will not host or route to KF, to stop us would violate our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They would then point to a litany of issues surrounding KF, how it would impact their business, and then win their case with ease.
I'm kind of shocked EFF went to bat for KF If I'm being honest. When your speech is unaliving people, or responsible for wide scale harassment of minors, guess what, I'm not interested in doing business with you, and that's perfectly fine. The fact that they use such a weak argument like utilities, and mail service as a comparison to commercial internet service is wild.
Plenty of rights are conferred by merely being within the borders of a country, regardless of citizenship status. You can be a tourist or even an illegal immigrant in the US and have the right to habeas corpus or the right of non-self-incrimination, for example.
Talking about elevating corporations to be on par with citizens is a fascist idea, which is absolutely adjacent to corporatism.
A key tenet of fascism is protecting corporate interest and power... but okay.
I have nothing whatsoever to do with the US, my Google account is based in a jurisdiction where I'm well past the legal age for adults and where hearing such words (and "worse") is quite normal at 14.
And yet I can't get this multinational behemoth to stop nannying me.
It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone/some group at an ISP doesn't like them or think they should be accessible.