Your absolutist statements ("based on nothing but emotion and ideology") do nothing but betray your own ignorance.
As an American living in Switzerland, a "good policy" (whatever that means) here has resulted in: 1) no capital gains tax, nor any capital losses and certainly no carryover loss shenanigans but 2) using a wealth tax in lieu of capital gains tax to collect any sort of tax on those who have presumably been using their capital to beget more capital.
Switzerland does not have any flight of capital, still actively is sought after for parking wealth (which is actually an economy-distorting problem as foreign investors seek to buy stable assets in the Swiss market), and definitely still has an ultra-rich class residing here or moving here.
So, if you thought wealth tax alone was bad policy, how does wealth tax plus removing everything-capital-gains (especially the carryover losses which the current US President likes to excessively utilize) sound as effective policy?
$3k is just the amount you can deduct from income each year. You can carry over the rest of the loss to future years until you die (not inherited by your heirs).
When I, a white young boy, grew up in The South and saw the Klan, my father taught me to never do business with them, never enable their behavior, never let their organization rent rooms from venues I may own, and to decline all of their business even if they were paying extra to be your customer.
For as long as he could remember, and his father before him, the Klan and other fringe organizations would always cry and shed tears about how they were being pushed to the edge and ostracized from the local communities. Most of the town ignored these common pleas. We knew how to deal with them and ignore them, we had our inoculated culture. A few businesses were locally known to be "Klan friendly", but it should surprise no one that they are not rich mega-corps.
It seems that in the internet age, this sort of culture of inoculation has not been passed on to the outside world communities, though the far-right ideologies may have. It is normal to decline the business of people you don't want to do business with. It is normal for it to be the fringe believers -- the ones that by their own choice are pushing themselves to live on that fringe. It is the simple free-market economy of supply and demand telling them that their demand is not necessary.
However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.
It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe". They will shed tears in public and privately rejoice at the welcoming change. It is a grant of liberty they suddenly inherited with tech to have had such a huge audience and defenders of their speech on private platforms all this time. It is only now that the culture of inoculation is catching up.
We should watch it closely & carefully though. We shouldn't be shedding tears for them.
No, he didn’t. He shared the subjective impression which led him to stop the research, but not the results, or even the methodology used to classify content.
Mention sexism in tech and it'll get flagged off the front page almost immediately, because that's one of the issues where the third rail is too close to HN's own posters that substantial debate is impossible.
Also, civility is not the same as not having abhorrent ideas written up in nice language.
different groups of people flags those for different reasons.
- some flag them because they want to keep all politics out of HN
- some just don't like people arguing
- some flag them because of that guy who invariably will bring out JD as an example that sexism goes the other way too (or to say that it mostly goes the other way even)
- some flag them because from their point of view it looks like women have an easier life in IT in men. (This is not generally correct, but to someone who realizes that there are serious KPIs, bonuses and pats on the back to be had for recruiting women in certain companies it might easily look that way. The flip side being they are often treated like decoration instead of like engineers.)
There are some really big issues to tackle in this space but so many people are so busy accusing the other side while simultaneously shutting their ears that I too will soon start flagging them. I'll also admit to having been part of this problem (the shouting part of it before.)
- someone who was always well liked with everyone but is slowly admitting that the other side had some valid points as well.
HN is pretty well known to be a cesspool of terrible far-right ideas. What's more, they're not mocked or booed off but enabled. You don't endear yourself to the general public by doing so.
Everyone with a strong political commitment sees HN as dominated by the opposite politics to their own. This is an illusion. For everyone saying what you're saying, someone else is saying this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632. Both statements are false; it's just a large enough and chaotic enough dataset that you can find examples of anything—and the ones you dislike the most will be the ones you remember the most (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
For sure terrible comments appear. The false part is to say that they're representative of the community—they're not. Commenters with opposite views notice opposite examples, claim those are the representative ones, and are just as wrong. I've mentioned just one counterexample chosen at random, but could as easily link to 50, and another 50 on your side.
"Far right" according to the far-left echo chamber that is Twitter, perhaps. One should never confuse the people who dominate social media with the general public.
> Also, tptacek is fairly far to the left it seems
While in the modern US there is a common (and increasingly strong) correlation on average between political attitudes toward race and gender and the left/right economic axis, there is nothing strongly inherent about that. Racism and sexism on the left are not at all unheard of.
(I don't see any evidence that tptacek is a racist or sexist, I just don't think “hey, he's left-of-American-center, so if he says HN is clear of racism/sexism, it must be the case” is even approximately a reasonable position.)
But, in any case, his own description seems to repeatedly focus on explicit misogynistic or white supremacists content, so even were we to take it as gospel it is perfectly consistent with HN being filled with the kind of urbane circumlocution that is frequently used to provide a thin veneer of not-all-that-plausible-in-aggregate deniability over bigoted attitudes.
I don't agree that the validity of his claim depends in any way on his character, reputation, or personal political views. The validity of a claim is independent of any attribute of the person making the claim. The only way to make any judgment about the claim is to see the data and methodology.
> Based on that last observation I think most of us can agree, can't we?
HN is in a weird place today, very similar to where the Slate Star Codex guy was a few years ago. That is, racist Whites seem to feel safe commenting here (with appropriate dog whistles and what not), but you wonder how long that can last…
In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog [0] when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed. I expect the same to happen with HN.
dang does a good job keeping people on-message politically (and I'm sure tptacek did as well), but being "racist-adjacent"—which HN absolutely is [1]—isn't a long-term viable position.
Someday soon I expect the racist-adjacent user-banning to kick into high gear on HN (like SSC did) but it will be too little, too late. Eventually, HN will inevitably shut down—and it might be sooner than any of us think.
Linking to one flagged comment from a green account doesn't really support your position that the entire community is "racist-adjacent". Neither does linking to a blog post that claims Scott shut SSC down to protect his patients support your position that he did it to evade justice.
It is never the entire community. In situations where this kind of drifts occur, most of the group are usually people with little knowledge about activist dynamics and unwilling to consider that people they know/trust may adhere to or have done things they consider abhorrent. Therefore, they tend do be blindsided about stuff that, in hindsight, was obvious.
This is likely why above poster says "racist-adjacent" and not racist-friendly.
I have no particular opinion on HN, but I have noticed that the tech community in general is usually not the most politics-aware group. This makes us pretty vulnerable to this kind of behaviour.
> In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed.
That isn't why he deleted it. He deleted it because the NYT was threatening to publish his real name in a way that would make it untenable for him to continue to practice psychiatry.
> To reduce criticism of SPLC to "racism" isn't helping the health of discourse here.
"The SPLC is a hate group" is considered healthy, valid criticism to you, coming from an account which then said that "hate speech against white people has been normalized in our society for some time now" and linked to The Bell Curve as proof for the superiority of the white race, but referring to them as "racist-adjacent" is unacceptably reductionist?
The comment "The SPLC is a hate group" is not racist. Even if the person who said it is otherwise racist, it's entirely possible for racists to say things that aren't racist.
Whatever "racist-adjacent" means, clearly it must mean "not actually racist" because if it was racist, I'm sure you would call that.
An outspoken racist falsely attacks one of the great legal defenders of Blacks in America and your argument is, "it's entirely possible for racists to say things that aren't racist."
I'm doubtful you will convince anyone with that argument: perhaps not even yourself.
My argument is that I don't think the user's other comments are relevant to the question of whether the statement is racist.
Now, if you think the statement "the SPLC is a hate group" is false that's fine. I think there is a debate that is worth having here on HN - especially when tech companies are using the SPLC's hate list to justify their deplatforming decisions. In my opinion, the SPLC's use of defamation and fear-mongering for profit make the statement perfectly justified.
Calling it "racist" or "racist-adjacent" is a rhetorical attack that does not serve the purpose of mutual enlightenment. "Racist-adjacent" strikes me as particularly insidious since implicit in that label is the admission that the thing being labeled is not actually racist.
You clearly aren't familiar with the actual history of the splc. Even the name is a bit of a scam, chosen for it's adjacency to Martin Luther Kings civil rights organisation, the SCLC. The founder is a direct marketing hall of famer.
> In the end, the SSC guy banned more and more commenters but it wasn't sufficient to save him and he ended up deleting his blog [0] when the world turned its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed. I expect the same to happen with HN.
That's... not what happened? He's explicitly stated that he deleted his blog due to the fact that the NYT are planning on doxxing him in a story about SSC. He's fine with the story itself, and the attention garnered, but does not want his name attached to it and announced to the world via one of America's most popular newspapers due to his work as a psychiatrist. As far as I'm aware, this is not because SSC contains comments about right wing views or anything, but more due to an intent to maintain his privacy to his patients, which he believes will improve their quality of care.
If you think I'm incorrect in the above interpretation, feel free to disagree.
I do disagree, there was a lot of discussion about this on SSC prior to Scott shutting it down. If you just read what's on the site now, you're missing most of the important background information. In particular, the "reporter" at the NYT was clearly looking to get SSC cancelled, so Scott self-cancelled before that could happen, on his own terms.
I'm ambivalent about his decision, but it was definitely his to make and probably is in the best interest of his patients (and himself)—at least in the short-term. The world, however, has lost a really good blog and community.
I've read SSC for a while now, and check in with the community every so often. Before the takedown, there was talk about the reporter writing an article, with the general consensus being "nervous but optimistic".
I'd love to see clear evidence about the reporter clearly looking to get Scott cancelled. The scare quotes on "reporter" are unnecessary.
I'm sad that the blog is down. "Categories are for man" is an essay/lens that I find very valuable. I hope the situation resolves with the blog being up and the NYT not doxxing Scott.
Here's the NYT protecting the anonymity of female gamers to protect them from harassment (on the same day that Scott took down his blog): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619347
There are other examples, but those strike me as the most related to Scott's circumstances. It's not proof per se, but it severely undermines the credibility of the statement that it would be against NYT policy to grant the same protections to Scott.
Good find. There were also tweets from the reporter, who said in effect "what do you [Scott] have to hide?" about the SSC story.
Scott's attempt to spin it as a positive story in his farewell letter is, I think, an attempt to both influence the NYT in that direction, but also to keep the focus on the doxxing, and not on why SSC might be controversial. He's trying to keep that part out of the public debate entirely, which seems smart.
Also: I'm sorry you're being downvoted so badly, I don't think it's deserved.
> There were also tweets from the reporter, who said in effect "what do you [Scott] have to hide?" about the SSC story.
Woah, really? That's bad.
> Scott's attempt to spin it as a positive story in his farewell letter is, I think, an attempt to both influence the NYT in that direction, but also to keep the focus on the doxxing, and not on why SSC might be controversial. He's trying to keep that part out of the public debate entirely, which seems smart.
That's actually a pretty reasonable interpretation, and probably flips the script in a way that they weren't prepared for. A couple days ago the NYT ran a piece begging people not to cancel their subscriptions. I didn't read the piece to see if it reference SSC, so it could just be a coincidence, but I know there was the #ghostnyt campaign on Twitter in response Scott closing his blog.
The Daily Beast also reported that some of the staff internally at the NYT (mostly the tech folks) were rather irate at learning (from Hacker News, no less) about the planned doxxing of Scott.
> Also: I'm sorry you're being downvoted so badly, I don't think it's deserved.
Thank you. It's really not that bad and my net karma is actually up quite a bit overall from this thread, but kind words and interesting arguments matter more to me than votes. I won't speculate as to the motivation behind the downvotes, and they won't change my opinions, but I do treat them as an opportunity to look at how I could improve the usefulness of my comments here.
I am well aware that the NYT has been inconsistent at best with their anonymity standards. Definitely undermines that policy.
Still don't think that construes sufficient evidence to claim that this current situation is intended to cancel Scott, or that the NYT's policy is to cancel people who post politically. I don't think Scott was against an article being written about SSC, only that it will contain his name. I'm happy if you think that it can be pieced together from his previous statements, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence presented here.
I agree the reporter was trying to get him cancelled (or at least that seems very likely) but I don't think Scott's decision had anything to do with "the world turning its eyes to the kinds of discussions he allowed". Frankly, regardless of the kind of political discussions on his blog, that kind of exposure would likely ruin his ability to practice medicine. Having the "right" politics matters very little when many of your patients don't.
Scott has spoken many times on SSC that his concern is with his employer—i.e. he's afraid of getting fired for the contents of his blog, and perhaps what he himself has written in the past. That's why he uses a pseudonym online—he's not afraid of his patients, at least, not primarily.
Obviously, if Scott is fired from where he works, he can't continue to treat his current patients—so that's where the harm to "his ability to practice and treat his patients" come in.
He didn't lay all of that out explicitly in his farewell post on SSC, but it's fully consistent with what he wrote—if you're aware of the history of his employment concerns and the likely result of the NYT article sending a bunch of low-info culture warriors after him personally as a result.
People can disagree about his motives, of course. For me, the above is most consistent with everything Scott's written previously, as well as the final farewell post.
People reliably will come out to defend white nationalists in every topic it comes up here. And people denouncing white nationalists will be voted down.
Can this be because your group of "white nationalists" is getting very big and possibly includes a good number of innocent people?
Someone wrote something really interesting here somewhere a couple of days ago:
every time a non-racist says something not correct enough or God forbid even wrong (e.g. on twitter), they are ejected into the other camp. Eventually the other camp's grown from a fringe phenomenon to being noticeably large and everyone laments.
No, it's not. It's because people make point-in-time observations about HN and don't see the community working over hours, which is what you have to do, since anyone can make an account and write any comment they want here.
HN routinely votes down to the max all kinds of mainstream and legitimate viewpoints that aren't "white nationalism" but aren't supportive of globalism either. Literally any criticism of the EU will hit -4 within hours regardless of how grounded in facts it is. Given the rhetoric that often accompanies that topic, without a doubt some people consider any criticism of the EU institutions or ideologies to be some sort of racist zealotry, although it's utterly mainstream throughout Europe.
You understand that when you speak of "globalism" this way, you place yourself as a member of a tiny, if vocal, minority.
Hacker News has a lot of sophisticated, intelligent people from all over the world and that's why fringe political beliefs aren't common. I would add that the collegial atmosphere here means people are unsupportive of naked aggression and anger, which also seems to be a common component of fringe political beliefs.
If it's important for you to criticize the EU and have people listen to you, there are plenty of places to go for that.
My personal belief about the EU is that it like all political systems is flawed and could certainly do with constructive criticism, but has managed to deliver a high standard of living, personal rights, some degree of income equality and even happiness to its citizens for decades now and do it better than any other.
This is why I personally left the United States after thirty years to move to Europe.
Given I'm British, that'd make me a part of the majority actually. And in the USA that anti-globalism candidate won the last election, so, I guess I'd be in the majority there too (barely).
Obviously you're entitled to your view on the EU, but your attitude is why EU supporters lost in the UK and would lose in other countries in the unlikely event their political systems would ever give them a true choice on the matter. You cannot handle genuine, well reasoned, intelligent and sophisticated criticism of the EU so simply try to suppress it.
That mistake is how the EU's supporters in the UK got their asses kicked, despite having way more resources and the full support of the entire global establishment on their side. They thought all "intelligent, sophisticated" people agreed with them ... because they'd shouted down or suppressed everyone who disagreed. They were then shocked to discover that their arguments were deemed incredibly weak by the large section of the population that hadn't already made up their minds.
That's what happens when you deplatform those you disagree with. They don't go away. They keep refining their arguments where you can't see it, and then if one day you go head to head with them - you lose.
Fairly sure I could write a comment about how egregiously bad the handling of the financial crisis was in Greece by the EU, or the failings of the Common Agricultural Policy, without getting downvoted to -4.
(I used to consider myself a "cautious/mild euroskeptic" up until the referendum, at which point I've become a hard-remainer)
Try it. Though for some reason Greece seems to be considered legitimate criticism by some EU supporters, perhaps because this "criticism" is in reality a demand for the EU to have done more, rather than less.
This is a thread topic about white nationalists being banned from YouTube. It has 700+ comments, many of them in defense of the banned. Which of the banned people being defended are not actually white supremacists, but innocents caught in a too-broad dragnet?
It's a good question politely asked, so uncomfortable as the subject makes me I'm going to try. Like I said though, this is an awful ball of wax and it feels dirty to approach it. I'm going to try and tackle it via the question of how one identifies a racist. Let me start with a generic, emotionally less charged example and then try to relate that to the specifics of the Molyneux story.
Suppose two people are talking. The first says, "Minority X children score below the national average on IQ tests. I bet it's because minority X children are more likely to be exposed to lead in tapwater. Our country should have an all-hands on deck effort to solve the lead-in-tapwater problem"
The other responds: "I am not interested in any discussion that begins with 'minority X children score below...'. You are a racist for saying this and I don't listen to policy proposals from racists".
Which of these two is the racist? By the modern definition, it's clearly the second, because he's arguing for a status quo that disadvantages minority X. Whether his heart is in the right place or not, he's contributing to systemic oppression by refusing to act in the face of injustice and therefore a racist. By the classic definition, it's just as clearly the first because he is asserting a difference between races. Whether his heart is in the right place or not, he's deepening racial divisions by this rhetoric and therefore a racist.
Hopefully we can agree on those definitions, if not the rest of this comment is pointless. Regardless, and assuming we can, let's bring this to the topic at hand.
African-Americans are Molyneux's 'Minority X' and child corporal punishment is his 'lead-in-tapwater'. Let's see first how he fares by the modern definition of racism. The wrinkle here might be that lead in tapwater is done to a population while corporal punishment is done by a population. This might seem to make it apples and oranges, but I'd disagree. Anyone who wished could make the case that higher rates of corporal punishment are self-evidently fallout from the abuses of colonialism, and done to the African-American population no less than leaded tapwater.
What's the standard under this definition for determining whether a person is a racist? I would propose the following two tests: if their professed beliefs are sincerely held, and if their proposals would lessen inequality assuming their premise is correct, then that person is not a racist. They may be mistaken in their premises, but in that case it is up to other non-racists to educate them, and there is no use for hostility in that process. By that standard, how does Molyneux fare? I think his life provides ample evidence that his beliefs were sincerely held. He became a public intellectual and subjected himself to ongoing, harsh criticism because he believed it was important people hear his ideas. He spoke often about corporal punishment of children and not once did he vary his message. As to the second test, if his premise is correct that higher rates of corporal punishment lead to worse education outcomes for African Americans, then it's fairly obvious that his proposal of no corporal punishment anywhere would help close the gap. Having listened to him speak, I genuinely believe that if his proposal was accepted and the result was that his children faced tougher competition for jobs and scholarships, he would consider it the best possible outcome and validation of his beliefs. So by that standard, I would definitively judge him 'not racist'.
Of course, Molyneux never made any of these arguments because like most people born before 1982, he would use the classical definition of racism and probably refuse to cede the linguistic territory necessary to make any of the foregoing arguments. The way to not be racist by the classical definition is much simpler and requires no arguments about colonial fallout. One must simply start the argument by saying 'inner city children...' instead of 'minority x children...' and one's thoughts on race are one's own affair. The trouble with that approach is, people born after 1982 immediately start shouting about dog whistles and secret racism, and one finds oneself isolated with people who increasingly egg one on to just name the races in question. I believe this is what happened with Molyneux. When I first encountered him, he seemed to be making a good-faith effort to talk about specific demographics instead of the races over represented in them. By the time I lost interest in his content, I must admit, he was no longer making that effort nor did the bulk of his audience want him to.
So on deeper reflection, I think it was a bit disingenuous of me to judge Molyneux only by one set of standards. By what is probably his own definition of racism - and though I'm conversant in both linguistic systems, the definition I use in private thought - he did commit racism. My only excuse is that I cede linguistic territory as instinctively as Molyneux would defend it, and it didn't occur to me much harm could be done thereby. I'll walk my statement back and say that Molyneux weaponized racism for an agenda that, had it succeeded, would have reduced racial inequality.
Stefan Molyneux is not saying that black children have lower IQs because of corporal punishment. He is saying that they have lower IQs because they are black.
It's this benevolent concern for the welfare of black children that underlies his complaint that 'relentless propaganda for "white women with black men" would serve to lower the average IQ of the offspring'?
I don't think I've even seen an explicitly racist post here, despite having dead comments turned on, maybe excepting obvious trolling or spam. Implicitly racist posts are usually downvoted.
I have seen downvoted replies that nonsensically infer racism in a post. I suspect that's how I would describe what you're thinking of.
Because they're not explicitly racist. It's dogwhistling, or talking points, which almost always indicates racism.
Someone saying that black communities should be more policed by dogwhistling that disproportionate crime warrants "assertion of police presence and predictive policing" by willfully misinterpreting statistics is racist, even if it doesn't explicitly say that black people should be harassed by police.
Does it bother you that some of the people most in favor of increased police presence in crime ridden communities are themselves black. Is it more likely that they are racist too, or that their material concerns for their safety are more legitimate than your racism dog whistle detector?
> I don't think I've even seen an explicitly racist post here, despite having dead comments turned on, maybe excepting obvious trolling or spam.
This is self-contradictory. You state that you have never seen explicitly racists posts here, but then you state the exceptions of "obvious trolling or spam". How does a racist post being "obvious trolling" make it not-racist? How does a racist post being spam make it not-racist? Racism abounds in trolling and spam. Spam and trolling are similarly havens for racism.
The spam and trolling is racist, but it's flagged and downvoted to hell immediately. I was responding to someone saying the opposite voting trends exist for racist content.
>People reliably will come out to defend white nationalists in every topic it comes up here.
...and they will be voted down quickly.
> And people denouncing white nationalists will be voted down.
Examples please :-)
The closest thing I can come up with is when I kind of reliably get downvoted every time I say I'd support a ban on nazis but that seems to be die hard free speech people, not nazis.
I'm sorry but this very discussion contains the reverse of what you're saying. In a post suggesting that SM isn't racist, he's only concerned for the welfare of black children, I posted a link clearly highlighting the many instances of SM's racism. My post got downvoted, the parent didn't.
The post you replied to was downvoted and flagkilled until I vouched for it. Every post from me in this thread is or has been graytext. Too many other examples just in this thread to enumerate or counteract.
I did some very small experiments on such a thing a while ago. One was an example of someone being unjustly detained in violation of their rights [1] and another was an actual example of government censorship [2]. The first one was flagged and killed immediately, the second received zero response.
On HN, all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals getting removed from platforms. They receive massive amounts of votes and spur on large flamewars. HackerNews unfortunately is just as prone to falling into certain narrative traps as other websites and one of them that seems to come up more and more frequently is free speech and individual rights but only as it pertains to the far-right.
The discrepancy could be because Hacker News cares more about technology platforms than Alabama public TV. For an example of HN getting upset about government censorship on a technology platform, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
I'm not sure that's the case. Some examples looking back on some of the most popular HN stories tend to align well with either tech platforms or issues dealing with personal rights. Such as [1] or the Snowden and Julian Assange situations [2] [3]. Or for the sake of not cherry-picking, when the Supreme Corut legalized same-sex marriage [4]. Although perhaps somewhat morbidly, the top comment seems to demonstrate one of the problems I find with HN.
With my first story I figured it would fit well with the people that tend to advocate for personal rights because it was an example of an American citizen being wrongfully detained for three weeks, but it ended up flagged because I think people tend to circle the wagon around anything tangentially related to immigration.
The second example was about a direct example of government censorship and the inconsistency of free speech advocates. Google's actions and bending to China for the sake of maintaining profitable behavior is bad, yes, but they also are not the government. The government should be held to even higher standards and yet it seems people are not willing to do so for this administration. An example of that is that people here were praising the administration's threats against Twitter as some sort of pro-freedom move.
all of the 'free speech' stories I see always pertain to the far-right and/or incredibly vitriolic individuals getting removed from platforms
That's because getting people shut down, cancelled, censored, is a left wing tactic, so of course it always seems to be the right getting censored. Free speech is a value the right hold and the left do not, systematically so throughout history.
That is incorrect. Censorship is on the orthogonal spectrum to to the right-left one. It is in liberal-authoritarian spectrum, where authoritarian end usually has state censorship and liberal end usually has freedom to individuals/corps to their own selective "censorship" (by definition censorship is only by state entities, so the term should be different).
Both left and right can be liberal and authoritarian. And in the middle are centrists.
Given the amount of state violence used against left wing protestors over the last month and the number of active political leaders championing that violence... I really don't agree. Leftist speech is silenced with guns. And the free speech supporters sit silent.
Many of the people who raise objections based on “free speech” every time a private entity declines to actively participate in amplifying right wing speech have been actively cheering the events you describe, and arguing they need to be intensified, not sitting silent.
Somehow we have the opposite experience. One day, I'll see people claim HN is a safespace for socialists/communist lefties and another day it's a white nationalist haven.
dang has commented on this a lot lately and he says it is because we see the other side much easier than our own side.
I agree with him to a large degree:
I personally see mostly problematic content from the left[0] but I guess that is partly my bias.
[0]: for example this comment earlier today that I thought[1] was absolutely crazy "I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe" - just try to turn that phrase around to "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe" and see if it wouldn't be flagged to death immediately by everyone including me.)
[1]: someone had to tell me that this is basically an euphemism for nazi, to which I had to reply that I would prefer if we just said nazi then because then I could join in despising it.
> "I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe"
VS
> "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe"
The weight there is different though, in the groups you analyse the violence has historically flown in one direction more than in the other.
I am inclined to think that there have been historically much less concerns of safety for "religious white nationalists" than for "theistic colored globalists"
> The weight there is different though, in the groups you analyse the violence has historically flown in one direction more than in the other.
I think you are wildly underestimating the violence of a number of non-religious groups: recommended reading includes the reign of terror, Stalin and Khmer Rouge.
While it's a euphemism for nazi, I hope you don't just assume that it's appropriate to use "white nationalist" to mean "nazi". Just because other people are being stupid doesn't mean we have to. A white nationalist could be from any political faction and could have different ideas for economic policy. A National Socialist is a very specific kind of person.
Religious white nationalists want me deported or killed. Of course I don't want to be in a space where they are safe.
People say white nationalist instead of Nazi because white nationalists will always deny being Nazis. Someone being nationalist for a race should immediately bring up red flags. There are also small differences. For example some white nationalists are not necessarily antisemitic, which is a characteristic of Nazis, or might even support Israel (though you can be pro-Israel and antisemitic of course), instead focusing their hate on black people, Muslims, etc...
> Religious white nationalists want me deported or killed.
Where do you get that religious thing from? Because for all their faults all major variants of the mainstream religion in US and Europe is pretty clear about not supporting that -to the point that a number of clergy got in real trouble with nazi Germany.
Also yes, while a lot of religious people are very good, the religious people that also happen to be white nationalists tend to be even worse than the garden variety white nationalist.
> Just FTR we are pretty far from accepting the far right here on HN:
I read your linked piece but came to the opposite conclusions you posted here. Reading tptacek's comment indicates to me that he thinks HN's tolerance of white supremacist content is unacceptable ("I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable...")
I also wonder about his criteria for selecting what is white supremacist content and what is not. Most of the content I see on HN that I consider white supremacist or racist content is written in the form of dog whistles and not overt statements. I personally think the prevalence of that content on HN is somewhat higher than tptacek was catching.
> It is a win for the far-right to have y'all here on HN "disagree with them but still believe they should be here and not on the fringe"...
The "far-right" is becoming a broad term in media usage and will end up in the same place as "racist" where it is a category that catches the views of a good 40% of people. It isn't obvious that wins for the far right is a bad thing.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over the Klan being pushed off Youtube, but Molyneux is not a member of the Klan.
Right now, you're right. But look at how definitions are changing.
When I grew up, I was taught that the goal in life was to be colorblind. Race didn't matter, what mattered was what was in one's heart.
Today, I'm considered a racist for these views. The term "racist" has been victim to this definition expansion too. Where it used to be considered "discrimination due to race," it has expanded to mean "discrimination by a majority group against a minority race," a definition that unnervingly doesn't consider hate speech against white people as racist.
At this rate, the definition of "far-right" will expand to the point where anyone not supporting the narrative of the day will be labeled as such. Just like how people were labeled "communist" in the 50's as a way to leverage power over others. It's modern-day McCarthyism, but what is different is that this modern-day McCarthyism is being applied to all the major social media platforms months before an election. The control they're trying to leverage over everyone is stunning.
There are so many examples it’s kind of ridiculous. Jordan Peterson, for example, who isn’t even remotely right.
What I mean to say, is that it’s become common for left-leaning media to describe perfectly moderate right positions as “far-right” and “alt-right,” to the point where those terms mean almost nothing to someone who isn’t politically savvy to distinguish.
Calling someone "far right" or "alt right" are effectively dog whistles at this point, used to notify a member of the Democrat party that their standing in the community and probably their income is at serious risk if they do anything to speak positively about the person.
How Jordan Peterson isn’t even remotely on the right apart from him saying it? Any action leaning on the left for him has some evil Marxist influence for him. Also his theories on “Masculinity“ have nothing to do with classical left and right and are de-facto alt-right.
Any action on the extreme left. Not only that, but also the extreme right.
As a result on one hand he's criticized as a nazi/racist by people on the far left (e.g. you, apparently), and as globalist/socialist by people on the right.
In a small town, everyone knows everyone, so it's easier to exclude them if you want to.
It's a lot harder online when you don't know people, they show up unannounced, they hide their true intent behind plausible deniability and dog whistles, and they just come back with another account when they get sprung.
Inoculation is a good idea. I think this blog post sheds some light on how targeted, intentional, and childish, many of the tactics are and being able to notice them is important. They very much rely on people letting them scatter their pieces all over the web as you say.
Agreed. There is much to reasonably debate about where lines are drawn in regards to which private platforms are de facto public squares, if any, and which are not; and what speech is a reasonable cause for being banned from such a platform, and what speech is not. But the fact that there is such a significant amount of hateful, violence-loving speech, and that it is continuously growing, simply overshadows the topic. I'll happily debate those subtleties all day, once we're not driving cars into groups of each other over identity politics, accusing people who are trying to vote of fraud while intimidating them with guns in person, threatening each other with civil war, gleefully mocking victims of politically motivated violence, and, most of all, once we no longer have a US president who encourages all of that hatred.
This is what I wish was more studied. I feel like social media are intentionally designed to cause people to share violent and toxic speech. I hangout on discord in few big servers and I rarely encounter anything outright racist. Might just be because they are all tech related or maybe a no politics rule change the atmosphere if enforced ruthlessly.
There could also be something about speaking in public vs speaking something in semi-private real time chat app. You have time to clarify what you mean or be more empathetic. On platforms like twitter, when I check engagement metrics for replies to the tweet. I see a decrease of 10x often which is to say a lot of people never see past the first tweet a person makes and since tweets are limited by length, they encourage people to respond from their own biases rather than looking at things optimistically.
I do wonder if there is a reasonable path to punishing a platform that is responsible for encouraging content that causes toxic behavior or higher "engagement".
So long as YouTube issues bans to users that are as egregiously racist as klan members I see no problem.
I don't know any of these people, but if they are undeniably white supremacists, then it's a hard sell to dispute this individual action.
But another argument lies in the policy of bans for certain types of speech, and that's the argument that's more pertinent. If we accept that YouTube can ban users for hate speech, then we also accept that YouTube is the arbiter of what constitutes hate speech.
The question at hand is if we can deem YouTube a fair judge.
If YouTube shows itself as an unfair judge, then let's criticize them for that when it happens. Otherwise, having a judge is much better than having no judge at all.
That's the current situation, and maybe it's worked well so far (I don't create content on YouTube).
What appears necessary or at the very least helpful, is to have a very clear terms of service that outlines exactly what is unacceptable so these situations can be avoided in the first place.
One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect?
Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban?
A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.
These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley).
>One question is, why did it take until now for these bans to come into effect?
I think a lot of social media sites and platforms really believed that it was bad to try to be arbiters, and that an anything-goes system would go well. The fact that this was the easiest option for them probably played a part in this. I think a lot of platforms and their audiences are increasingly seeing that this position as naively optimistic and not backed up by the results.
>Gray areas are always going to emerge. For example, the popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles came under criticism recently for old videos (years ago) that could be construed as hate speech, or at the very least, mildly racist. Does this justify a ban?
I think rules should be and largely are oriented around whether something encourages bigotry, rather than about whether the creator privately has racist opinions in their head. If no one is sure if something is pushing a racist message, then that's evidence it's not doing it. If it's not doing it effectively but maybe trying, then that might be a gray area. I don't think the existence of gray areas is an argument for the extreme no-judges position.
>These issues are going to be decided by the discretion of humans, many of them with a geographically-concentric worldview (i.e., Silicon Valley).
And choosing to allow and promote racists and peddlers of inflammatory pseudoscience is also a decision made by humans of specific worldviews. There's no clean non-political option.
>A few comments say Stefan Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.
He pushes misinformation about races and advocates white ethnonationalism: “I don’t view humanity as a single species...” “The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!” "Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." “You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people." He seems like the textbook example of the sort of person that rules about racism would target. I guess he doesn't literally say the n-word or specifically advocate actively exterminating minorities, just that it might be good if someone did that or at least some segregation.
> What appears necessary or at the very least helpful, is to have a very clear terms of service that outlines exactly what is unacceptable so these situations can be avoided in the first place.
For all of it's concerning parts, the the DOJ recommendations for amending section 230 address that specifically: "Department proposes adding a statutory definition of 'good faith,' which would limit immunity for content moderation decisions to those done in accordance with plain and particular terms of service and accompanied by a reasonable explanation, unless such notice would impede law enforcement or risk imminent harm to others." [1]
I’m sadden a bit to see him banned, but haven’t kept up with him in years. He was big in AnCap circles for a while but was a bit “out there” even in that group. He always struck me as somewhat unstable, so I guess it isn’t really a surprise. I don’t even have the urge to go see what he’s been posting.
> A few comments say Peter Molyneux (again, don't know this guy) is not specifically racist but has white-centric views.
It's Stefan not Peter. But he is very "specifically racist". He believes that arabic people are too dumb for democracy. Among a litany of other terrible statements.
I'm not advocating for any of these people. I'm saying there's going to be scenarios that require nuance to navigate, and that the rules that delineate hate speech should be very explicitly spelled out.
And herein lies the problem: Having pushed the purveyors of "unacceptable ideology" (whatever that may be, decided by whomever) into the black market, we now have made confronting it (by letting our value judgments stand to reason, which they will, if we let them) much more difficult. People behave as though they are completely powerless to stop bad thoughts from following the utterance of particular words in a particular order, which to me is as fundamentally insane as the idea that you can stop murder by simply banning murder, or that you can stop people from using drugs by simply banning drugs.
The central problem is that people are lazy as hell. The answer to this problem and indeed, most problems we face in society, is building and maintaining stronger communities, and encouraging critical thought and an educated and participatory citizenry. But this is incredibly hard, and is incompatible with most forms of grift which people have set up to enrich themselves. In the end, however, this is really a description of all of human history. It will always be the case that building and maintaining a "good" society is incredibly hard work, which most people reflexively don't want to do (in the same way that most people don't want to do the dishes, or take the shopping cart back to the shopping cart corral at the grocery store).
> However, my father also taught me to be careful with this pushing of the fringe. It is a delicate balance of liberty with liberty-destroying ideology. The paradox of tolerance, etc. It should be very closely watched.
Sounds like your father was an honorable man. Honest question: when does pushing the fringe go too far? Is it appropriate for banks to deny their business? Grocery stores?
I wasn't asking a question on the legal theory, but a clarification on the OP's own statement that one should be "careful with this pushing of the fringe", which is presumably a moral or pragmatic one.
I’m pretty sure we are all aware that anti-discrimination laws exist and have in the US for half a century. Political opinions don’t make for protected classes.
Ok, what if this person were a thug and he advocates for a "thug life" (as an arbitrary example, a gangsta rapper)? And let's say he committed a lot of crime and physical harm to other people?
Would you issue the same behavior towards him? Would you be very vocal about it?
On the surface, this seems like a silly example - it doesn't compare in practice. However, if you honestly, in good faith, think that it does, you absolutely should make an effort to form that argument.
I believe that what he is trying to say is that, even though the lyrics are about killing people, selling drugs and so, nobody bans their music and they have the right to express themselves.
Posting the most offensive examples of gangster rap lyrics to Facebook or Twitter could easily get you banned or at least flagged/shadow-banned if the songs were about killing people, contained a lot of misogyny, etc. Uncensored gangster rap would definitely violate TOS for a lot of these platforms and would probably get auto-banned by bots. A lot of this music gets flagged as 21+ only on YouTube. Many businesses ban it on premise, and many record companies won't publish it. That's part of why the really extreme stuff tends to have its own labels, stations, channels, sites, etc.
You're allowed to listen to it in private of course, just like you are allowed to read or listen to any racist material you want in private. There are loads of web sites that cater specifically to these circles, and even entire alternative social networks. Like the most violent and offensive gangster rap, it has its own safe spaces and is available to anyone who wants it.
Well said. I especially appreciate the distinction you're making between balancing liberty with liberty-destroying ideology.
This is the kind of difficult nuance that I rarely see in these discussions. One one side there's the free speech absolutists, whose arguments tend to ignore the fact that unmoderated propaganda, and hate speech tends to be more addictive, and spread ignorance faster then fact-checking can fix it. The consequences of this sort of callous attitude are literally genocide[1].
On the other hand, there's the 'cancel-culture mobs' (for lack of a better term) which are now censoring regular speech that disagrees, or appears to disagrees, or isn't sufficiently subservient to their opinions. Just yesterday I was sadly reading this depressing thread where Yann LeCun was run off twitter[2] for explaining how bias (in the social science sense) can be traced back to various steps in the ML pipeline (in this case, mainly a feature of the dataset itself, but also the choice of errors, bias vs variance, etc).
The inability to admit nuance is the only thing I can think both these groups share, and maybe what needs to be emphasized more.
Supreme Court rulings[0][1]. They consistently rule in favor of free speech and believe something along the lines of "defending the thought that we hate".
They even sided with the Westboro Baptist Church (the people with the offensive signs)[2] so they're pretty committed to "absolute" free speech.
That protection of speech, mind you, doesn’t just extend to the KKK. There are a lot of things people on HN probably like (pornography, violent video games) that have been protected by exactly the same principles.
The important thing to distinguish is that they protect free speech, not free platforms.
People are free to say racist things, produce racist games, setup racist podcasts.
What they aren't entitled to is google showing their racist crap, steam carrying their racist games, hacker news keeping their racist comments uncensored. You are free to burn a flag, you can't force someone to watch you burn it.
If someone feels hurt that youtube censors too much, they are more than free to make their own whitepowertube. The fact that there is a ton of far right media right now shows that they aren't completely without a voice.
I agree with you in general. But would like to add that effective monopolies like youtube should be excluded. Censoring something on youtube essentially means it censored completely for video platforms.
Excluding porn youtube is essentially a monopoly. If you can't go to youtube you immediately land in very small and obscure video streaming sites.
If you compare this to the "real" world it would be the same as not being able to say what you want in public spaces. Youtube is THE public space for video content.
I guess "WhitePowerTube" would have been Stormfront? I never visited the site but I remember hearing about it when Google seized their domain name and wouldn't give it back.
There's a nice fantasy about these parts that the deplatforming left somehow created all these platforms and will stop when people they disagree with go away. No. These platforms were mostly created by people committed to free speech, who came under relentless external and internal attacks for years until they bent the knee, and people who try to create alternative platforms are frequently erased from the internet via whatever levers of power those activists can get their hands on. They definitely don't stop and say, well, you created your own website, good for you and best of luck.
Maybe I have a different viewpoint because my grandfather spent some years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but I just see organizations like Stormfront as completely wrong and to be crushed by any legal means.
The endless association of free speech with white supremacy is tiring.
The First Amendment gives a corporation paying to print hateful lies made up on the spot a massive advantage over an honest and thoughtful individual who has spent considerable time and effort to discover the truth.
What will the final death toll be? How many would have been preventable if Americans hadn't been told a pack of lies?
The First Amendment needs to be completely overhauled to deal with this exploit that is destroying the system. Not to patch this terrible security breach "because the Founders" is like refusing to fix a zero-day exploit in Linux "because Linus".
That wasn't a euphemism, I was referring to the origins of Twitter, Reddit, YouTube etc where they were committed to allowing a whole range of viewpoints. So you misunderstood me pretty badly. That's perhaps an argument for free speech you'd find understandable - if you can censor peopleb at will there's always a risk you'll not correctly understand them and incorrectly, unfairly shut someone down.
Yes, and those acts of violence are crimes at the federal and state level...
The First Amendment protects the content of their speech, however hateful it may be, which means they can generally think whatever they want, and say nearly whatever they want. The dividing line is when speech is action (i.e., yelling "fire" in a theater; the content of the yell is protected but the act of yelling is not).
In the USA, the reason is the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Both in text & traditional interpretation, that gives them the right to speak & assemble – but not do other non-communicative actions that would be criminal no matter the motivations.
The actual terroristic activities are illegal, and Klan members have been prosecuted (and successfully sued) for them. "Hate-mongering" isn't illegal in the US.
If the Klan would’ve been classified as a terrorist organization they would be illegal they haven’t.
The Nation of Islam is also classified as a hate group by the SPLC however they aren’t banned under the same laws that protect the KKK.
NOI members just like the KKK have been prosecuted in the past for many things, however outside of very limited circumstances there isn’t such thing as guilt by association in the US justice system.
I know this. The KKK, or at least a great many chapters, is an organization that helped coordinate crime. By this, I mean that hierarchical members of the KKK organized criminal acts to be perpetrated by other members of the organization in their hierarchical control. The KKK was 100% a criminal organization that could have been prosectured using RICO. It would not even have been the only overtly political group where this would have been done.
There's a lot of reading you can do about why RICO isn't routinely deployed against ideological white supremacist organizations (including those that refer to themselves as "KKK"). RICO is deployed against organized white supremacist criminal gangs, where there's a centralized "enterprise" and a pattern, rather than a scattering, of racketeering-predicate crimes.
I always wonder what people are thinking when they suggest that the US could silence an entire viewpoint through invocation of RICO or FTO designation. If the government could have declared an entire line of thought illegal, don't people think we would have done so numerous times already? We couldn't even ban membership in the actual communist party at the height of the Cold War (not for lack of trying, though).
It's a 100 organizations with 10-30 members who believe they're the true heirs to the KKK. It's be very similar to trying to arrest the head of the Nazi party. There really isn't one.
RICO exists. If the criminal activities were systematically prompted by a group, they can be sued and all their members may be prosecuted for these crimes, especially their leaders.
RICO is a pretty narrow tool, as it should be. It also isn’t based on group membership, it’s based on involvement in the planning / sponsorship of illegal activities.
It wouldn’t matter how many Hackernews members started coordinating bank robberies; RICO wouldn’t magically allow for the rest of the Hackernews user base to be prosecuted.
Sure. But if Hackernews had a hierarchy and a membership system in which lower-ranking members would do criminal acts organized by their ranking superiors, the organization could be sued under civil and criminal RICO, and then dismantled. While not all members would be prosecuted, a very large amount could be, and the subsequent criminal investigation would make it possible to indict a good proportion of the rest. It would also mean that even lower members could have been prosecuted based on their assistance to various criminal acts.
It is indeed a narrow tool, and yet can be applied to organizations such as the KKK.
I think your problem here is not so much that you don't know what RICO is, as that you don't have a tight grip on what the KKK is. It is probably the case that many, or even most, Klan members are also members of white supremacist criminal gangs. That those gangs are subject to RICO prosecution (a major Aryan gang was taken down that way just last year) illustrates the problem with your argument. The enterprise itself has to be focused on the racketeering-predicate crimes.
As far as I know, the Klan doesn't actually exist anymore. In its second most famous incarnation it was a fraternal order like the Freemasons. But that disintegrated in the 40s. Since there's no legal enforcement of the brand anyone can and does use the title for cultural history reasons. Today there are dozens of disparate "KKKs" with no official continuity with the famous KKK that amount to a couple thousand people in a nation of hundreds of millions.
So what would you even be banning other than the word KKK itself?
I suspect that many genuinely kind hearted people think they are doing the right thing by silencing the speech of those whom they find repulsive but have never stopped to ask themselves “Why are the oligarchs on my side?”
Project Dragonfly is alive and well and unfolding before our very eyes.
This is how democracy dies.
I wish I could upvote this more. Many folks here fancy themselves as intellectual people, yet they do backflips in logic to justify silencing voices they find repugnant or inconvenient. The concept of free speech simply cannot have exceptions, conditions, or predications. It’s only a marketplace of ideas if the loud or powerful voices aren’t silencing and banning voices that might not be as popular. Indeed, this is how democracy dies.
There are plenty of mainstream figures that directly or indirectly support the desires of the far right. They pay not be as explicit as the KKK or Nazis, but definitely have real influence.
What free speech? The government isn't preventing these awful people from spewing their hate. Companies refusing to host their content is not a violation of the first amendment.
And yes, free speech, so long as everyone in the room agrees that all of the humans in said room are human. Anything less than that, and they can get the hell out of the room, their ideas aren't worth discussing. If you don't agree with that, you are by definition a white supremacist.
> What free speech? The government isn't preventing these awful people from spewing their hate. Companies refusing to host their content is not a violation of the first amendment.
By your logic, the first amendment has no salutary rationale. We allow Neo nazis to march merely because the first amendment prohibits us from stopping them from marching, and for no other reason. There is no animating principle that we might consider applying to other contexts even where the first amendment isn’t legally required. That view is anathema to how the first amendment has long been understood. (There is a reason the ACLU has repeatedly defended the right of neo nazis to march. And it isn’t because they’re preoccupied with the technicalities of the law. After all, the government does a lot of other unconstitutional stuff that doesn’t merit the ACLU’s involvement.)
If you want to say there is a substantive difference between say Facebook and public streets, that’s fine that warrants differing treatment, that’s fine and I probably agree with you. But saying that the first amendment doesn’t apply to private corporations doesn’t prove anything more than it’s not literally illegal for Facebook and Twitter to do this. It doesn’t say anything about whether it’s an appropriate policy in view of the principles embodied in the first amendment.
If we're going to have a marketplace of ideas, then some ideas will become popular and win, and some ideas will become unpopular and lose. This is how marketplaces are supposed to work.
If we want a forum for speech where every idea is always welcome, and platformed, and no one is allowed to lose no matter how unpopular they are, I don't know what you'd call that. I'd call it a form of hell, personally.
Philosophically, I believe the First Amendment is properly addressed at restraining the power of the government, rather than at propping up unpopular ideas.
I think the idea of marketplace of ideas is that an idea loses by being unpopular, not by another idea persuading large institutions to ban it.
Your interpretation, that persuading a large institution to ban opposition ideas is winning, and being banned is losing, is entirely consistent with getting rid of the 1st amendment.
Obviously the First Amendment is directed to the government. I’m not making a legal argument here. But we don’t abide by the first amendment merely because we throw up our hands and say “this is a terrible idea but we’re stuck with it.” There is an underlying principle there, and that principle isn’t necessarily limited to the government. (As a matter of what is good policy, not what is the minimum legally required protection.)
I don’t agree with your characterization that not shutting down subreddits or Twitter accounts is identical to forcing speech on anyone. There are a lot of Neo-marxists hanging out on Reddit calling for violence whose ideas I find extremely offensive and dangerous. But I choose not to wander into those subreddits. I don’t see why those subreddits need to be wiped out.
It's up to the people who run Reddit. If they want to wipe out some subreddits, who is to say they can't? Any mechanism you can imagine to prevent them from doing so would have the effect of forcing speech upon them.
A website declining to carry some content seems perfectly in line with American values and traditions of free speech, in much the same way that Fox News is free to choose not to carry Rachel Maddow's show.
I have an idea how you feel about the guy refusing to sell (decorate) the gay marriage cake (not trying to be pithy here, just tried to do a bit of footwork before replying). Do you absolve that guy under those "American values and traditions of free speech" as you would a website in this case? For me, second-order consequences are as important as whether or not this particular guy must sell this particular cake, when it comes to issues as critical to a functioning free and democratic society (such as speech). So "fair" abstractions (those which don't hide or ignore contradiction) aren't just important, but obligatory. This is an issue that can be reasoned to completion without introducing "protected classes" of human being, because the reasoning and conclusion are the same regardless (and for the same reason more concise mathematical proofs are preferred over those predicated on "complications" such as Riemann).
The guy selling the cake argued that he was being compelled to express an opinion (decorate a cake in celebration of an idea his religious beliefs dictated were unethical), thus making it compelled speech. So, is Youtube being compelled to express a particular opinion, if they do not ban users from the platform, when those users say things people find abhorrent? I do not think so, because Youtube bills itself as a platform where users create content and then publish the content on the platform for other users. Youtube does not purport to be a merchant of the content itself (obligatory reference to criticality of Section 230 protections). But according to his legal defense, the cake guy is selling the decoration of the cake in addition to the cake itself; his artwork as an expression of himself. In other words, Youtube is selling the medium and not the message. But the cake guy is selling the message (in addition to the medium). He is billing his cake decoration as part of his services, whereas Youtube and every other "platform" specifically denies in legal long-form that the content on their platform(s) reflect the views and opinions of the companies creating them. That is the critical distinction, and why I feel strongly that any platform which displays in its ToS that users agree that the views expressed on its platform are not the views held by the company, is violating the right of free expression to the users they ban from their platforms for the speech those users express on their platforms.
Importantly, a big part of my reasoning here is that, subscribing to stoic thought, I place accountability for any perceived "damage" from words on the shoulders of the person interpreting them. I mention this here because I've found this is so divergent from the dominant worldview that it's rejected often with much of the same forcefulness as if I'd stated a value judgment predicated on the color of a person's skin. And this seems to me to be symptomatic, and I'm not sure how this fits into the broader discussion of how the internet fits into our culture. But it's a core proposition which I hope will be addressed directly instead of indirectly, because the implications are clear (you are ceding control of your mind to others, when you allow their words to dictate your thoughts).
>Importantly, a big part of my reasoning here is that, subscribing to stoic thought, I place accountability for any perceived "damage" from words on the shoulders of the person interpreting them.
Whoa there buddy. You can't just suggest that other people be responsible for their own emotional responses and learn to moderate them and move along. If people started doing that, then what nwxt? You'd start having people independently then! Furthermore, that would completely negate a degree or manner of social control capable of being leaned on.
Apologies for the tongue in cheek, but I have the feeling your words may fall on deaf ears. Even worse, they'll fall on malicious ones who would turn it against you for the gall or privilege you demonstrate by aiming you can just say anything to anyone else, and whether or not they get offended is their problem.
I think I'm starting to understand the mentality a bit better;and it isn't necessarily unhealthy if taken at reasonable degrees. On the one hand, there is some level of required empathy to one's audience in any exchange. On the other hand though, no one is entitled to never getting in a verbal sparring match, and it's not terribly graciously or respectable to just say "That is your problem."
You have to bring your full rhetorical toolkit to the table. You have to meet on levels of logos, pathos, and ethos all. Leave any one out, or conspicuously absent, and you're liable to get binned more often than convincing anyone.
I do appreciate the sarcasm, and to your point, here's a bit of gallows humour in return: Allowing someone else to dictate your reaction to words is literal mind control. We cede control of our minds to those other people when we don't have control of our reactions. It's possible (and perhaps the typical case) that most people are habituated to a certain kind of mind control. And hearing or reading something which fits their worldview and moral relativity and subjective value judgments activates a particular reaction in their minds which becomes the expected reaction. It's only when these people hear or read something which is not in harmony with their habituated mind control that they react poorly, shunting the mind control directly into their emotions, bypassing critical thought. And just as though they'd been hit on the nose on the street unexpectedly, their emotional reaction (the thing which I call the "lizard brain") demands the assignment of "blame" so that it can start planning its revenge. Or otherwise respond in a way specified by the habituated mind control.
But to your point as well, it's in our nature though to react poorly to this notion, because it contains some uncomfortable truths about the universe and our place in it. And the lizard brain, having been hit on the nose with an uncomfortable, worldview-challenging assertion, commands to us that surely some fault lies on some level with the person saying the evil words or whatever. But no: It is literally the case that it is entirely within your control how you react to some person coming up to you on the street and screaming "COCKSUCKER!" in your face. I really try not to qualify my statements too much (because not doing so is one easy and practical way to demonstrate how little courtesy we extend to people who say things we disagree with, and how much we force our own value judgments on the words we interpret), but notice I'm not saying that it's not a lot of work to get to that point. And indeed, I still struggle with this mightily every day. We are human, after all. But we are the sole accountable party for our own thoughts.
To further support my assertion, imagine how your emotional, reactionary lizard brain would interpret the Cocksucker Guy if he was clearly a crazy person who lived on the street. Now imagine your interpretation of the same except that it's your significant other's best friend. Or significant other. Maybe you can see where this is going. Now imagine your interpretation of the exact same two scenarios, except instead of "cocksucker" they are screaming "asshole". You've just demonstrated in this simple thought experiment that your reaction is completely and wholly dependent on factors other than the words themselves. And this is my point (and indeed one of the core tenets of Stoicism), that control is an illusion, that real control does not extend beyond the boundary of your own mind, and thusly that the words themselves which you read and hear are not responsible for your reaction, but all this other shit that goes into your interpretation of those words, including your own personal subjective definition and value judgments and worldview.
You do not owe anyone anything when it comes to controlling their minds, and in fact, you are actually doing another person harm when you habituate the mechanics of external mind control by accepting responsibility for the contents of their mind, their reactions according to their subjective value judgments and moral relativity. Supporting the removal of some Youtube channels with unpopular views is precisely how you make habituating mind control more effective than it already is. Society desperately needs more mechanisms for supporting critical thought and (far) less of anything which streamlines shunting mind control around critical thought and into the emotional lizard brain. If anything, our society needs more bad ideas floating around and not less.
So stop helping the advertising industry, the government, mass media manufacturers, racist shitheads, and anybody else who would wish to co-opt the thought processes of those around you! The content of another person's mind is not your responsibility, and arguably none of your business.
why I feel strongly that any platform which displays in its ToS that users agree that the views expressed on its platform are not the views held by the company, is violating the right of free expression to the users they ban from their platforms for the speech those users express on their platforms.
Users don't have a right to free expression on others' platforms. The right to freedom on of speech only extends to one's own platforms of expression. If someone wants to post videos they can host their own video sharing website.
In Democracy and Distrust, Ely says rules like the First Amendment are important because they secure the channels of democracy; in his framing, it's important that the government not suppress speech because doing so prevents the people from governing. It's not because speech is an intrinsic or natural right, which is an idea he argues against.
That made sense to me when I read it.
The idea of a universal principle of reverence for speech, regardless of its substance, makes no sense to me. In fact, it doesn't make sense to most people. Even on HN, you can find people arguing for decriminalizing child pornography. You have no trouble with that idea being suppressed. Why is white supremacy less loathsome? That's what we say when we suggest white supremacist speech be tolerated.
(Violent neo-Marxism and Shining Path Maoism is trendy among left-edgelords and is equally intolerable).
No. It takes more time to rebut ridiculous ideas than to generate them. At some point along the spectrum of consensus, the burden shifts to the person propagating the idea; otherwise, all we're doing is wasting time feeding the trolls.
Depends what you mean by "we" "obligated" and "tolerate". Users certainly aren't legally or morally obligated to engage with content they find objectionable. HN, reddit, youtube etc. can legally remove whatever content they see fit, but I'd argue, being largely platforms for expression, they're morally obligated to tolerate objectionable speech.
Do you have any arguments that would be persuasive to people who don't believe that HN is morally obligated to host spirited defenses of child pornography? ("No" is a fine answer!)
The reason we need a blanket rule against state prohibition of speech is that human beings cannot be trusted to decide which speech is off limits. It's obvious to you that white supremacy makes the list, but it is just as obvious to religious fundamentalists that heretical speech should make the list (we're talking about your eternal soul, after all).
There is no workable rule that can't be exploited or extended. And it's not enough to invoke the Slippery Slope fallacy in response, because even if we could all decide today on the perfect list of topics to prohibit (we can't, but even if I grant you that absurdity), politics and governance absolutely does operate incrementally and no line would long remain static, especially a line that's so easily moved as one defining acceptable speech.
It's just simply not a workable idea. The only thing you can do is make a rule that prohibits the prohibition of speech and then let people fight it out in public, over and over and over and over, just like you and I are doing here.
And to be clear: YouTube (and other private actors) banning speech they don't like is a totally legitimate part of that conversation.
Your framing of Ely's justification for the 1st Amendment did not make it clear that you wouldn't support banning speech you find particularly egregious. I'm happy to have been wrong.
Ely wouldn't either. The point is that 1A protects the political process, not a natural right we have to express ourselves; thus the distinction between government and social suppression of speech.
That's not the operative distinction most of us are working with, nor do I think there's much demand for an alternative theory of the case. The conventional distinction, which is more or less a distinction between positive and negative rights, is working quite nicely, sufficiently explains the motivation for the rule, and isn't in search of improvement.
I think you more or less wrote, "I don't really like the idea of Free Speech, but I've been told my whole life that it's important, so I'm looking for a way to resolve this dissonance."
The reason I'm not in search of better arguments is that I don't have any dissonance to resolve. (I realize that sounds snarky but I don't actually mean it to be flippant. That's genuinely what it looks like to me. No snark intended!)
We allow Neo nazis to march merely because the first amendment prohibits us from stopping them from marching, and for no other reason.
That is pretty much the exact reason the Courts have given for allowing Neo Nazis to march, so its not anathema to how the first amendment has been understood.
It doesn’t say anything about whether it’s an appropriate policy in view of the principles embodied in the first amendment.
The Bill of Rights is a limitation on government not private entities and attempting to turn it into a club to force private entities to publish speech they find abhorrent is inappropriate policy in view of the principles embodied in the first amendment, which provides that individuals have the right to say something but not to force others to disseminate it (or even pay attention).
>The Bill of Rights is a limitation on government not private entities and attempting to turn it into a club to force private entities to publish speech they find abhorrent is inappropriate policy in view of the principles embodied in the first amendment, which provides that individuals have the right to say something but not to force others to disseminate it (or even pay attention).
Wanted to touch on this because I think you're missing out on some socio-cultural nuance here. Yes, the Constitution is strictly a limitation on Government, but it is also expected that Citizen's of a Government also internalize the enshrined ethos of their highest laws.
To argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights only effects the Government is to strongly demote the force and centrality of said document in Ameri an life. It may only say the Federal/State governments of the United States of America, but the truest message has always been one of the Supremacy of the liberties of the People over the systems that would oppress them. This is why you'll find there is so much resonance and vitriol inspired by the argument that private companies get a pass because they aren't the government. It doesn't matter. The infrastructures there, and it has woven itself tightly into the political fabric and discourse of the United States. I'd make the argument it's a Sixth Estate, of a central and sensitive enough nature that it should be looked at in the same ways we looked at the Press and Fairness Doctrine. Yes, that may have been overturned (and I'm honestly curious as to whether that overturning was truly beneficial), but damn, if you're going to sit by and let private individuals A/B test and gaslight your population in the name of private enterprise, to he'll with the consequences; and elevate whoever ends up in overall control of that edifice in particular... Well... I just don't think that's terribly kosher. Obligation increases to the 4th power of scale and reach. That's just how it seems to be. As an IT person, I internalized that valuelong ago. The bigger and more impactful the system's I end up working on, the more people are counting on me not to abuse my position of power and influence over the system.
I don't think I can buy into any suggestion that it should be any other way...
The first amendment is a limitation on Congress, not YouTube. The first amendment also confirms the freedom of association. On the balance, your radically expansive view of "free speech" trods deeply on the freedom of association and is unlikely to find any satisfaction in court.
GP is not making a legal argument. Nobody is arguing that the First Amendment applies to users of products provided by Facebook. GP is talking about the principle of free speech, which is why we have the First Amendment to begin with.
> GP is talking about the principle of free speech, which is why we have the First Amendment to begin with.
The principle of free speech behind the first amendment is that active choice in what message to spread by private parties produces a desirable marketplace of ideas analogous to a marketplace of goods, where ideas compete on their merits to convince people to devote resources to spreading them, and that this—which not only involves but relies centrally on editorial decisions by the people owning the tools of communications as to which ideas they want to spread—is critical to the progress of good and failure of bad ideas, and is inhibited when the state has their hand on the scales which is why the state must remain neutral so that private actors can act in this area.
The idea of free speech that motivates the first amendment supports free, active, and vigorous decisions as to what content to relay and not by private platform owners. That's the whole point.
There are other competing, incompatible.concepts of free speech besides the one motivating the first amendment, and some of them do have different things to say about private action, but if you want to appeal to the idea of free speech behind the first amendment, it is of no use to your argument here.
No, application of that principle is literally law. If you want that principle to be enforced in these situations, that's a violation of other rights. If you want them to act differently according to your principles, that's just a damn shame isn't it?
Wouldn't it be crazy if mega corporations could be used as tools to circumvent the first amendment? If Visa could tell Stripe who they're allowed to do business with when people in power get a little worried about what's being said?
And when did the first amendment stop protecting (some) dehumanizing speech? It definitely still protects dehumanizing progressive speech. How long before we have a list of types of speech no longer covered by free speech. How long until what I'm saying now is no longer covered?
You didn't read a single thing I said. This has nothing to do with the first amendment. The first amendment does not grant you the right to a platform. It simply doesn't.
If you want to grab a megaphone and spew white-supremacist garbage from your drive way then feel free, the government cannot, and should not, stop you. However, if your neighbors refuse to interact with you, that's your own fault. The megaphone seller also has the right not to sell you the megaphone if they don't want you to spew said garbage using their megaphone. Not once in that scenario does free speech apply.
> The first amendment does not grant you the right to a platform. It simply doesn't.
This feels a little hand-wavy: in the past there have been "designated free speech zones" that are of course critized organizations like the ACLU as a form of censorship and denying free speech. I don't think it's too crazy to say that speech without a platform isn't speech at all. I'm not saying we should force sites to accept content they don't like but we are going to have to address the privatization of speech sooner rather than later.
I agree that we will have to address the privatization of speech at some point. Ultimately I'm not sure where my opinions lie on that spectrum.
However, I find it challenging to have to continuously fight white supremacist ideas on platforms, especially considering the --vast-- amount of violence and brutality inflicted on the oppressed for hundreds of years.
Should we have a debate at some point about whether the privatization of platforms has become a bad thing? Sure. Should we do it -now-, while white supremacists actively use their platforms to incite hate and violence against black and brown people? No. We are losing the forest for the trees. Lives are lost every day because white supremacy continues to be pervasive in America. Allowing white supremacists a platform while not solving that problem is saying that the oppressed's right to live is less important than the white supremacist's right to speech. I simply don't agree with that.
Nobody's preventing anyone from speaking. They're just refusing to allow them to use their private property to broadcast it. There are loads of web sites and even entire alternative social networks where you can find as much of this stuff as you want.
BTW: I get the impression that sites like Reddit and YouTube, rather than being quick to ban, have given these groups and individual personalities a pass for quite some time. Alex Jones had to start harassing the victims of school shootings to get banned. I doubt someone as well known as him would last that long. If anything these platforms keep these people on as long as they can because ad dollars and only ban them when the advertisers revolt.
Having your video hosted by youtube is not an issue of free speech. Free speech does not mean other people are obligated to listen to you, to take what you say seriously, relay your speech or help others discover you.
I'm sure there is a point where it could become an unhealthy slippery slope to kick people off of large platforms, but it is not in the realm of free speech. These people have not been kicked off the internet.
Important to recognise that Stefan Molyneux is not far-right, whether or not the far-right are encouraged by his YT channel deletion. I would classify him as an atheist/libertarian.
I vaguely remember seeing that he’d endorsed Trump in 2016, which surprised me because it hadn’t been long at the time since I recalled him advocating completely abstaining from the political system.
I’ve not kept up with him, but it seemed like he was moving in a direction that was incompatible with the extreme libertarianism that brought him into the circles I frequented at the time.
If you break down political ideas into just left and right, the libertarian belief small government with strong property rights puts them fairly far right. Things are of course more complicated, and there may be other members of the far right who disagree with him on many issues, but he'd still be part of the broader "far right."
Is Stef still claiming to be an atheist? It seemed like he was making up with Christianity in recent years. Just the same, while he used to be an outright anarchist, he went all-in for Trump.
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!”
—Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.”
—YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.”
—Stefan Molyneux describes the Holocaust in YouTube video, Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants, March 20, 2016
If one man produces 1000+ hours of content then there's always going to be dodgy stuff when stuff is taken out of context.
('If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him' -- Cardinal Richelieu)
Black vs white IQ is an empirical rather than an ideological question, and a question best ignored, character and culture being more important than raw intelligence. However I'm not going to hang a man just because he failed to ignore it.
The fact that Molyneux is anti-Nazi ('overreaction') as well as anti-communist is very simply consistent with his libertarian philosophy.
are you actually so far gone you think calling the holocaust an 'overreaction to a Jewish threat' actually makes you an anti-Nazi? Jesus that may be the single dumbest thing I've ever read on this site, congratulations.
And, no it's not normal to casually advocate white supremacy in 1000 hours of recorded conversation. Dude's a full on neo-nazi who calls himself a libertarian, which probably puts him in good company with half of that demographic anyway.
That’s how you personally might classify him, but many would disagree with you. To my eye, for one, it seems quite obvious that Molyneux is a far-right figure.
Well now the videos are gone and I can't verify that any of those quotes were truly said. Many of them such as the one liners are obviously missing context as well.
I sense an implied “/s” in your post. But just in case, there are in-depth critiques that include significant portions of Molyneux’s videos still up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd_nVCWPgiA
Certainly enough to get a sense for Molyneux’s ideology.
I agree with this post for the most part, however the problem is they are not simply banning "the klan", nor it is "paradox of tolerance" as it seems we have moves beyond tolerance to acceptance.
The authoritarian left is promoting segregation, promoting speech codes, and also labeling any disagreement with their socialist / communist economic policies as "racist" or "nazi"
All of that said, before I can progress further I would love to know what you believe the "far right" is, because that is not a defined term anymore, every day conservative values and opinions (things like we should have basic immigration control, or should not have government run health care) are now labeled as "far right" and "racist" so it seems to we need a defining of the terms so I can know what you consider to be a "far right" position
They definitely shouldn't be here or anywhere. This is the right approach. Government power is not the only power and in contemporary times, not even the greatest power in most affairs. Megacorps have huge amounts of power. Often they use it to hurt people. I can't imagine a single american who hasn't been scammed by some megacorp like comcast, wells fargo, verizon, etc. But, sometimes their incentives align with those of the society at large. We should not hold them back by using the slippery slope fallacy. Most of the time, their incentives don't align with society's, so we should be thankful when these unregulated entities actually help society, even though that is never their goal. Yes, ideally this would be handled by government in some way, but our government is too inept to handle anything these days, including reigning in the power of these megacorps.
I think you've simply found the "able-to-have-these-convos conservatives" to have these discussions with and haven't found the "able-to-have-these-convos liberals". Note that I hate using these categories. Anyway, in my personal experience almost all the people I can think of that I have deep political discussions with who may fall into the latter camp almost never discuss politics online, for various reasons.
I just finished Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourses, and I really recommend reading the Discourses as they paint a harrowing picture of how any government -- including democracies -- can become bent to a particular will and therefore lose its Sovereign mandate: it will sound very much like the modern USA. Whether that is true is best left for another time.
I'm currently reading the book's predecessor, John Locke's works Second Treatise and On Toleration.
I think one thing that is very important to these books on liberties that is missed is finding one with a good introduction that can put it in it's historical (read: dated) place. It is too easy to otherwise miss that Locke is not exactly anti-slavery, for example. Or that the "family debate" and role of the patriarchal family, that left the suffrage of women in doubt, was not addressed. Or that the whole struggle for their times was really a question of how to morally justify rule by people versus rule by monarch (and your suggestion of Hobbes' Leviathan is actually arguing for the monarchy, on the other side of the debate). And this debate was otherwise taken within the cultural context of "Wealthy, Man, Head of household", which may be wrong on all 4 counts today (the culture itself is changing, the discussion is no longer limited to the wealthy, men, nor head-of-household family units).
The "monarchy vs people" debate of their time is not an argument we are exactly having in real life. And what I've found by reading the works of this area is: just as fans of this kind of liberty love to out the onus on the "other side" that they need to consider these points, the fans of this kind of liberty really have an onus on them to need to continue the discussion and update it for the modern world: as I move from Plato to Locke to Rousseau their writing really do faithfully build off one another and so it should be possible today in 2020, and modern writers like Haidt (whose works I have also spent time reading) do not meet this bar, I feel.
Without this, simply reading these authors and saying "see, America, read this and be convinced" keeps giving everyone the burden of catching up on the 300-ish years of criticism of these works and discards those intraveneing years' political philosophy debates. A major setback, in my opinion, as I may have the time and willpower to earnestly become a read person of political philosophy, but that is certainly a luxury of a wealthy individual like me (and the founding fathers of the time) and not everyone can afford that (and economic disparity is also a key factor addressed by people such as Rousseau).
Please state your full legal name, date of birth, current address of residence, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses, passwords, your favorite type of pornography, and your mother's maiden name.
It may focus on user's rights, but it still requires technical expertise to exercise half of the 4 freedoms: #1 (inspection & modification) and #3 (distributing your modifications). Merely knowing to ask "can I see the source code" I would put into the "technical user" realm. Overwhelmingly, most people don't know or don't care.
The other two freedoms #0 (freedom to run) and #2 (freedom to share) are readily obvious to non-technical users. "Double click to run" and "drag and drop <on external drive> to copy". Unfortunately, they are also often permitted by non-free/libre software. So non-technical users that can readily see they can do #0 and #2 and generally have no litmus test to further determine whether the software is "free/libre".
This is a case where the ideology's practical concerns hamper its purity. I critique despite generally liking the FLOSS ideal, but it's important to know its flaws.
The users don't have to be technical to benefit from those freedoms though - there's a level of indirection involved. I might not have personally scrutinized every line of the Linux kernel, but knowing that there are tons of people in the world with the ability and motivation to do that inspires confidence.
I am not arguing that one has to be technical in order to benefit from those freedoms. I like FLOSS and agree users in general benefit.
I am saying that your example, for instance, stills falls under the "how does a non-technical user simply verify the software they just downloaded respects their freedoms?" which is an very real educational and cultural problem. For example, see the massive money and numerous gun ranges, gun stores, gun clubs, and other gun-associated organizations in the US that work to educate the "unskilled" general public on "how to be aware, recognize, and exercise their rights and freedoms" under the 2nd Amendment while respecting local laws. Folks generally are 1) aware they have the right and 2) have a low-friction no-special-technical-skilled path to exercising that right. The FLOSS movement is nowhere near that level of educating and making aware non-technical users of their freedoms, their digital rights, and how to then act upon them and exercise them. Folks generally are 1) unaware of libre software and 2) don't have a low-friction no-special-technical-skilled path to exercising that right.
Yeah my apartment neighbor, who is a corporation, broke down crying the other night from all the stress at work and the news. Cried really loudly, could hear through my walls. But at least their ex-wife-divestment lets him see his kids-subsidiaries on the weekends. But he's going to be moving out soon to be closer to his mother, who is a conglomerate and frail, so he can take care of her.
A real tear jerker of a life. But for some reason he never worries about eating healthy -- or eating at all, for that matter. Maybe I should try giving him some body-positive feedback for emotional support.
Bah, you know what, maybe it's my flawed humanism getting in the way, maybe it'll be easier for me to just become a corporation, too.
Woosh. I know the legal definition of Corporate Personhood. This is not the same idea as saying "I believe corporations are human-people", which is what the sarcastic poster was playing with. That distinction is the point of the satire: we all know you meant the former when you agreed with the sarcastic-poster on the latter; hence the satire exposing the absurdity of it.
If you want to play the anecdote game: There's also a local Indian Restaurant whose owner was on the phone with the police while watching it burn on the local news, and he basically said "Let it burn. If that's what it takes to get justice."
Insurance will replace the buildings and stuff. Insurance can't bring George back, nor can it undo a bad system.
Glad to know you think of my intelligence so uncharitably that you have to explain a tautological definition.
I know that insurance only covers the insured. I charitably assumed the reading audience of HN knows that, too. Is there something more insightful you wanted to share? For example: have a conversation on the general risks of taking insurance versus not, or whether in these particular anecdotes the owners in fact did/didn't have insurance and their reasons for it? Or was it really just to try to make me look like a dumbass to the crowd?
I was responding to your assumption that he was insured, which was seemingly a defense of people looting and arsoning the business he worked his whole life to start, before it ever had a chance to open.
If you don't want to feel criticized when people point out basic facts to you, don't use things you don't know as the basis for an argument why people should feel justified in committing crimes against innocent people.
It's not about you, it's about the boneheaded idea that these riot traps are some sort of component of a movement for social justice.
There is zero justice in looting and arsoning this sports bar, stop trying to say that there is, and you won't feel like a fool when presented with the facts.
It's true that insurance can't bring George Floyd back; it can't bring back the dozen or so people killed so far in the riots either.
> If you don't want to feel criticized when people point out basic facts to you
Dude! As I said, you could treat me as a full fledged adult and we could have an actual intelligent conversation. Rather than you try to not-very-wittily say a one-liner "pwned a lib" stand-in for an actual conversation.
> don't use things you don't know as the basis for an argument why people should feel justified in committing crimes against innocent people.
Is the "thing I don't know" about "whether the guys is insured"? How does this tie into your goalpost-shift into moralizing me about the riots? Could you really not have taken a second to construct an argument so we can have a conversation? 'Cause now it seems like you are really hell-bent on merely trying to make me look like an idiot in a "got'em" zinger.
> There is zero justice in looting and arsoning this sports bar, stop trying to say that there is, and you won't feel like a fool when presented with the facts.
Are you trying to censor me? I can say what I damn please, thank you. You may not like it, but my arguments are here to stay.
My original point highlights there's going to be a wide spectrum of anecdotes coming from the riots. Using a sports bar example is stupid because I see a distinction between life and property. I wanted to challenge that anecdote directly with a counter-anecdote. I even said insurance "can't undo a bad system" which I intended to also be a point in favor of the very anecdote I was providing a counter-example for: the system has obviously failed the guy as he's at a total loss of his business. I showed the absurdity of loss of things versus loss of life. You don't see me straw-manning you by imagining you're OK with genociding people to protect "stuff".
On the other hand, you then assumed a lot and constructed a strawman of me, imagining me as, as far as I can tell, some drooling idiot that doesn't know "only insured parties are covered by insurance" and thinks that "the dozen or so people killed so far in the riots is OK" and that "the riots are a part of the movement for social justice". I highly recommend taking a step back and really look at yourself and ask what kind of conversation you're looking to have here. So far, it feels like you just want to insult me.
Let me tell you what I think straight up so we can clear this air and you can see me for what I actually believe. If you want to keep insulting me, that's fine. I, quite frankly, don't care about your opinion. I'm stepping away from your toxic bullshit after this. I'm frustrated that ideological-incest of Reddit and /pol/ is leaking to HN.
I believe these riots are a part of the wider movement to draw attention to police brutality (but not associated with the BLM organizers necessarily) due in part to the way the police over the last 20 years has shifted their training to be less community-focused and become much more military in training and
viewing confrontations in a militaristic rather than civic light. This affects every citizen, not just black people.
Do I want riots in general? No. Do I want these riots in particular? No. Do I applaud the loss of life in the riots? Hell no! Do I think the damage to property is OK? Fuck no. Do I think comparing total loss of a man's business to the loss of George Floyd is OK? No. But as uncomfortable as the riots are, they're here. In reality. I've got to accept that and figure out what the hell to make of it.
But fuck my beliefs, if people are so frustrated that they are rioting and the National Guard can't even restore order, that is a very strong signal that the civic system used to govern the people is broken. That should start a productive dialogue to those of us outside and able to look in. Is it only the police force no longer connecting with the local community and becoming more of a State Police? Is it local elected officials who've been ignoring their constituents? What are all the straws that broke the camels back?
There are additionally conversations about how movements against injustice should be conducted. We could be having similar conversations to the original debates around Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr's differing approaches to changing civil rights.
Finally, a word of warning: it's too easy to paint all the rioters as bad guys, their cause as obviously flawed, and therefore their movement as immoral. Liberties and injustices cuts both ways: when it's your pet protestors rioting, I sincerely hope you don't have to face your anti-clone.
For the record, I'm not feeling like a fool here, despite your operating assumption as such (there were no facts presented in your non-argument).
Main-instance Mastodon (run by the main dev) has made moderation choices that people disagree with. It means conversations here always brings out this same group group of people that disagreed with all these decisions and somehow believe their speech (their bytes) must physically be shipped to everyone else in some network, and must be examined by everyone on the network so that others can decide for themselves whether to listen. I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it.
This group of people have shifted to this position because they no longer have the "de-platform/systemic-censorship" argument that arises when someone is banned from a centralized service, resulting in a total loss of access to the entire platform. Conversely, on the Fediverse they're still there but simply can't talk to some % of users. And that can easily be rectified by being a part of multiple communities and abiding by their rules.
I've tried to write about how ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses) is not a censorship-resistant network and that the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations [0]. Feedback I literally got from here on HN was "I'm disappointed in you", when I think it's an accurate and realistic view. Especially when standing in the shadow of FreeNet.
The same liberty of free-speech and free-association that lets a far-left community thrive, and a far-right community thrive, also lets them block each other (which is a good thing -- it would be ugly otherwise).
the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations
Vehement agreement from a Masto admin who works to keep her instance a nice quiet chill place for people like her, with some connections to other nice quiet chill parts of the Fediverse, if you want to argue then go to Twitter or go to a "free speech" instance - and accept that you will probably be cut off from the chill places unless you make a second account and abide by the chill rules.
> I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it.
I honestly doubt that. Are you sure that you are not straw-manning them? In my experience they usually complain about how admins strip the ability to read their posts from the users registered in said instances.
I am 100% not straw manning them. I couldn't believe the conversation I was having. It's very few people that have this crazy of a hardline stance, but they're out there.
You can't force user's eyeballs to read the bytes you ship to their computers unless you want to go full Clockwork Orange.
Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason.
Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs.
Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.
It isn't contradictory or incompatible to say that people shouldn't be forced to do anything, and also simultaneously believe that censorship, especially the silent or invisible kind, is bad.
Would a web host performing MITM on an HTTP connection to alter or redact your blog posts be bad? After all, it's their hardware...
Instance banning is neither silent nor invisible. Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons, anytime. I would be in agreement with you about silent/invisible censorship, but that's not what's going on here.
This is a categorically different problem than MITM.
> Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons
There are instances which require an account in order to see the bans (cyber.space). There are instances which do not list bans at all. There are instances with made up reasons of banning made up instances (mastodon.art). Even that flagship instance lists incorrect reasons for removing instances (claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content).
You're right, my mistake. In some cases it is not transparent.
However, this is not a systematic censorship problem, unlike centralized services with opaque policy language and a complete boot out the door. People are free to run their own instances or have multiple accounts across different instances.
Whether you think they're correct is irrelevant to the question at hand. Freedom of speech and association means you're free to not federate/talk to those problematic instances, and maybe you'd be much happier for it. On the other hand, not being OK with it and trying to fight for transparency means you're trying to externally force these communities to be run in the way you want, which may be received well, but not always b/c forcing unwanted change is exactly the opposite point of Federation: communities will be built the way their members want to build it. Like the real world, some value transparency and some don't.
It's one thing to argue specific bans about specific instances and disagree on the other party's interpretation; it's a totally different claim to say that the entire system is corrupt with opaque censorship.
I'm sorry! Based on context, I understood your post to refute mine to support sneak. And sneak and I have had heated debates about the Fediverse before, and you've stumbled into the latest one. :)
In the future, it would definitely help me and others understand your motivation better if you could even include one more sentence in your communication like "Just here for a correction: some instances are transparent..."
>claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content
That can be a simple issue of jurisdiction. Mastodon.social is hosted in Germany (IIRC), so they have to adhere to German law. That means, for example, while hatespeech isn't strictly illegal in the US, it certainly is in Germany, it even has a fairly good legal definition. Or take the Japanese instances, which aren't well federated or have media-bans because of differences in media legality. And lastly it can also be simply the case that the instance is not moderating (ie, they write 'no illegal content' but do not care).
Both the statement that an instance shared illegal content and that the same instance was banned for illegal content can be true at the same time.
As an American living in Switzerland, a "good policy" (whatever that means) here has resulted in: 1) no capital gains tax, nor any capital losses and certainly no carryover loss shenanigans but 2) using a wealth tax in lieu of capital gains tax to collect any sort of tax on those who have presumably been using their capital to beget more capital.
Switzerland does not have any flight of capital, still actively is sought after for parking wealth (which is actually an economy-distorting problem as foreign investors seek to buy stable assets in the Swiss market), and definitely still has an ultra-rich class residing here or moving here.
So, if you thought wealth tax alone was bad policy, how does wealth tax plus removing everything-capital-gains (especially the carryover losses which the current US President likes to excessively utilize) sound as effective policy?