That's the general consensus in their own community. The takeover post says something about "defending the Jewish people", which is a particularly unusual way for Anonymous to describe their actions, and is more in line with alt-right vocabulary.
Honestly, it's not surprising. /r/the_donald, 4chan's /pol/ etc all had far worse responses to this situation.
The article from the daily stormer, as horrible as it is, is ithe least offensive right-wing response to this that I've read yet. Everything else went even further.
Now the big question is, why does reddit, a SV company, still support these groups on their site, and why did these groups form in first place.
Well, they're not really new groups - militia and the klan have been around for decades. They just like giving themselves new names because, like all angry idiots, they start infighting and splintering from each other.
Although, yes, the GOP have been enabling and emboldening them for the last (at least 5 but really many more) years - now they have a whole bunch of people who support them in the WH that are dismantling anti-WS task forces etc.
Most of the ones that participated in the march in Charlottesville were genuine new groups: Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, Traditionalist Worker Party etc.
And most of their membership is not a split from KKK etc. It's new people, often with very different backgrounds age- and education-wise. And one distinguishing thing about them is that they put a lot more emphasis on politics and outreach compared to KKK, and they openly reference fascist and Nazi ideas - which is to say, they don't just talk about white supremacy, but they talk about fascist ideals for governance etc.
Make no mistake, this is a new wave of political right-wing authoritarianism in US, not the same old.
Freedom means freedom for anyone, including nazi, antifa, 4chan, voat.co and 8chan. We have to educated ourself to engage in discussion, i think when you look in internet bubbles/hugboxes. You don't talk to those people, you ignore or ban them like google did with 8chan or you can ridicule them calling them nazi or virgins/neckbeards. People won't allow any discussion and that will fuel rage, i mean real rage and can get real serious, because they felt like other people (normies) are enemy, that they can't even talk and they are censored by blant corporations using "hate speech"
sure, they can select, that's part of freedom.
But if you are saying like google, duckduckgo, wikipedia, other "freedom sites" that you promote freedoom and free speech and then you just ban unpopular or sometimes wrong or nazi views, cutting the discussion and sometimes the chance to explain to other site your views/convince then you don't promote freedoom or free speech.
The entire internet infrastructure is controlled by private companies. Many of which are incorporated in the US.
If you hold to the belief that internet infrastructure companies should be free to censor anything and everything they want to, there is no such thing as free speech on the internet.
That future is not one I personally subscribe to; I believe in the basic human right to express one self, and as ubiquitous as the internet is as a means of communication, that means people must be free to express themselves on the internet.
that means people must be free to express themselves on the internet
If that expression of freedom happens to be not wanting to let certain others express their freedom via your infrastructure then there's a problem. Because there's 2 parties, each having the freedom to express themselves. By your saying A should let B express themselves, but that takes away freedom from A. Likewise I'm advocating that A should have the freedom to not let B express themselves even though, yes, that takes away freedom from B. So this is a tough one, because none of both solutions lets each party have full freedom. In such cases you need to look further. What I see here, is that B spreads hatred and as such, in my opinion, does way more damage to certain groups and humankind in general if you will than the damage done by A. So, since there must be a choice, I'd rather have some freedom taken away from B here.
Fuck white nationalists and those that harbor them. They love violence[1], they love terrorists[2]. They think they are at literal war with those dissenting against their hate.
This is the crowd that has spent the last few years cheering chemical weapons use against children, while simultaneously denying their use calling the children dolls. Then further justifying the attacks against hospitals that treated the victims while denying the hospitals were attacked.
That car ramming murderer was one of those Assad/Trump/Putin cultist assholes. Fuck him and fuck them.
Fuck their love for terrorism, fuck anyone that wants to give them a podium to speak from. Companies are wise to keep distance from this type of stuff because it is incredibly inflammatory and distracts from being a for-profit concern.
edit:
Want to see how far down the rabbit hole this Assad/white nationalist fanboy hole goes? Look no further than congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi's trip to Syria was organized by SSNP[3] a political & militant party with a long anti-Semitic history.
Their emblem is based off the swastika.
Assad putting SSNP in legal status some years ago helped to place him, an Arab, in favor with white nationalists/right wingers[4]. During the civil war there has been a steady stream of international Nazi figures visiting Syria[5]. Tulsi somehow ended up making pilgrimage with this lot just before another regime chemical weapons attack that again slaughtered civilians.
I wounder if this is the start of a significantly less free internet. In the past if one site started censoring ideas, one could open up a new site to express those ideas. Now that a hosting site is removing a site for hateful ideas, I wounder what would come next. Maybe in the not so distant future, sites that publish mainstream Republican news will be removed from GoDaddy, or maybe sites that disagree with SOPA [1] or that shooting wild elephants is wrong[1].
While I think that posting an article titled "Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut" shows that you are a terrible person, there has to be a media for them to express their ideas. If the government wont "sell" domains directly to people then there should be a rule similar to net neutrality that will require private companies to treat all sites equal no matter how much they disagree with the idea. The alternative to that is to make sure that you don't post anything on your own website that will anger the domain name registras.
Who knows if in the future your idea will become an idea that many others disagree with.
[1] GoDaddy supported SOPA and their CEO hunted a wild elephant.
> there has to be a media for them to express their ideas.
No, there doesn't. Nazism had its chance. We fought a world war over it. I think popular opinion came down on the side of "hang Nazis and prevent this ever happening again."
> there should be a rule similar to net neutrality
Unfortunately, Trump and his cabinet are against net neutrality.
> No, there doesn't. Nazism had its chance. We fought a world war over it.
As did Communism, and we fought a Cold War over that.
A "white nationalist" (apparently) ran someone over with his car, while a communist is currently threatening to nuke the United States. Nuking a country has to be worse than running over a single person, right? If not, why not?
Maybe next we can shut down all communist web sites.
After the communists, then we can move on to socialists of any kind. Then people who don't salute the flag. Then atheists. Then people who don't go to church on Sunday. Then...
This doesn't end up where you imagine that it ends up.
> "False equivalence" how? Communists have murdered way more people than the Nazis ever did.
Has there been a world war against the communists? Not that I am aware - your comparison of WW2 and the Cold War is false although I appreciate that you're only doing it to try and force an argument to the extremes.
(You also might want to reflect on why you're this eager to minimise the crimes of Nazism.)
> Can you give me an example of a Communist country that isn't a dictatorship?
I don't need to - it's for you to show that Kim Jong-Un is a Communist and a handful of collective farms doesn't really get you there.
If you're going to categorize him, wouldn't he fall into the "People who've controlled countries and called themselves Communist, but who I don't think should represent Communists even though every person who's controlled a country and called themselves Communist was roughly like him?"
> Has there been a world war against the communists?
Yes. It ran for 70 years, with a truce during WWII. It was called the Cold War. It was fought in Korea, Vietnam, and many other countries.
> why you're this eager to minimise the crimes of Nazism.
I'm not eager to "minimise" anything. Nazis were horrible, but Communists killed more people, and that is just a fact. Why are you so eager to defend Communism?
> it's for you to show that Kim Jong-Un is a Communist
Umm... no, it isn't up to me to prove something that's been common knowledge since the 1950s, namely that North Korea is a Communist regime.
> no, it isn't up to me to prove something that's been common knowledge since the 1950s, namely that North Korea is a Communist regime.
The DPRK was notionally Communist in the Leninist mold originally, but it was progressively recast into what its own propaganda describes as an alternative Socialism/Communism, but which expressly rejects Marxist materialism and the central role of economic relations with a central role of the individual and the single great leader. In many ways, it's more Fascist than Communist in substance (the highly centralized ideology of Juche bearing an analogous relation to the heirarchical Fuhrerprinzip as absolute monarchy does to feudalism.)
> I think popular opinion came down on the side
> of "hang Nazis and prevent this ever happening again."
I doubt you really believe in the "wisdom of crowds", or that the march of progress is an irreversible cosmic force, or that God will suddenly start intervening before fascism can take hold.
I don't understand what you're basing your confidence on, aside from optimism.
Popular opinion had the same attitude towards witches. Times change.
We had the same attitude towards communists and communist sympathizers, yet its making a comeback in 'popular culture'.
America came down on the side of 'I don't agree with what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it.'
That being said, this whole debacle is a slippery slope and that should be the key takeaway here, regardless of which way your political spectrum leans.
> America came down on the side of 'I don't agree with what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it.'
That's a nice aphorism but isn't even slightly true given the number of wars they've been involved in (even just this century!) and regimes they've plotted to overthrow and organisations the government has infiltrated and ... etc.
For a recent example, compare and contrast the police responses to white supremacist marches vs BLM marches. If your hokey aphorism was true, both would be treated equally.
We're talking about Americans. Not other nations that cry about American imperialism out one side of their face, then demand protection, food and money out the other. If America ceased all humanitarian services and closed all military bases in other nations you would see unprecedented loss of life as we would be labeled an uncaring nation that let women and children starve.
You're right about the different police responses, though, as BLM was allowed to burn an entire city while the white people were kicked out of a park. Labeling all gatherings of white people as 'white supremacists' is disingenuous and racist in and of itself.
For there to be a media to express their ideas, you need to force some people - private actors, not government - to provide them with such a media. For most people, this is highly unacceptable, because it makes them complicit in spreading this kind of speech. It's one thing to accept that the speech itself should be legal and not prosecuted, and quite another to assist (even if involuntarily) in spreading it.
So, what's more important: the right of Nazis to free speech, or the right of everyone else to freedom of association?
Two things are swirling in my head:
1) Libraries and librarians are rabidly anti-censorship
2) The Supreme Court's ruling about pornography "I know it when I see it"
Libraries aren't cesspools of things titled "...a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old-Slut" and yet subversive books have always been available.
Libraries/librarians seem to have figured out how to toe the line between freedom of speech and the kinds of hate-speech that caused GoDaddy to dump the Daily Stormer.
These are raw thoughts, but I'm wondering what we might be able to learn from the librarian ethos.
They are, actually. There's plenty of hate filled speech in my local library. It carries Mein Kampf, for example, as well as plenty of other objectionable material.
The difference is probably that you don't fixate on these things when you visit the library. You don't consider the entire library to be a cesspool simply because it contains some objectionable material.
Libraries have a strong, approachable position which supports disseminating all speech, including vile speech. It's an academic position, independent of good PR. Folks are strongly discouraged from engaging in book-burning campaigns against libraries. This culture is largely lacking on the internet, which is primarily run by profit seeking companies who worry about their public image.
So maybe the internet isn't a cesspool either? Perhaps the issue is that the curators of the internet are happy to censor, in exchange for better public relations?
Did this TOS magically appear overnight? GoDaddy has been hosting this website a very long time. This wasn't an ideological decision by them, it was a business decision. If it was a TOS violation that would've happened a long time ago.
44 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 92.5 ms ] threadThe article from the daily stormer, as horrible as it is, is ithe least offensive right-wing response to this that I've read yet. Everything else went even further.
Now the big question is, why does reddit, a SV company, still support these groups on their site, and why did these groups form in first place.
I'm assuming you want a more nuanced answer than "because SV is libertarian white dude central"?
> why did these groups form in first place.
Oh, that's easy - because the US has been a racist country for decades and no-one has had the balls to stamp it out.
That explains why they exist, but not why new groups form today still.
Although, yes, the GOP have been enabling and emboldening them for the last (at least 5 but really many more) years - now they have a whole bunch of people who support them in the WH that are dismantling anti-WS task forces etc.
And most of their membership is not a split from KKK etc. It's new people, often with very different backgrounds age- and education-wise. And one distinguishing thing about them is that they put a lot more emphasis on politics and outreach compared to KKK, and they openly reference fascist and Nazi ideas - which is to say, they don't just talk about white supremacy, but they talk about fascist ideals for governance etc.
Make no mistake, this is a new wave of political right-wing authoritarianism in US, not the same old.
I know another newly created account commenting.
well sure, but doesn't freedom also mean you're allowed to select whether or not you want to host their websites?
If you hold to the belief that internet infrastructure companies should be free to censor anything and everything they want to, there is no such thing as free speech on the internet.
That future is not one I personally subscribe to; I believe in the basic human right to express one self, and as ubiquitous as the internet is as a means of communication, that means people must be free to express themselves on the internet.
If that expression of freedom happens to be not wanting to let certain others express their freedom via your infrastructure then there's a problem. Because there's 2 parties, each having the freedom to express themselves. By your saying A should let B express themselves, but that takes away freedom from A. Likewise I'm advocating that A should have the freedom to not let B express themselves even though, yes, that takes away freedom from B. So this is a tough one, because none of both solutions lets each party have full freedom. In such cases you need to look further. What I see here, is that B spreads hatred and as such, in my opinion, does way more damage to certain groups and humankind in general if you will than the damage done by A. So, since there must be a choice, I'd rather have some freedom taken away from B here.
This is the crowd that has spent the last few years cheering chemical weapons use against children, while simultaneously denying their use calling the children dolls. Then further justifying the attacks against hospitals that treated the victims while denying the hospitals were attacked.
That car ramming murderer was one of those Assad/Trump/Putin cultist assholes. Fuck him and fuck them.
Fuck their love for terrorism, fuck anyone that wants to give them a podium to speak from. Companies are wise to keep distance from this type of stuff because it is incredibly inflammatory and distracts from being a for-profit concern.
edit:
Want to see how far down the rabbit hole this Assad/white nationalist fanboy hole goes? Look no further than congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi's trip to Syria was organized by SSNP[3] a political & militant party with a long anti-Semitic history.
Their emblem is based off the swastika.
Assad putting SSNP in legal status some years ago helped to place him, an Arab, in favor with white nationalists/right wingers[4]. During the civil war there has been a steady stream of international Nazi figures visiting Syria[5]. Tulsi somehow ended up making pilgrimage with this lot just before another regime chemical weapons attack that again slaughtered civilians.
[1] http://archive.is/ZBOOa
[2] http://archive.is/Xb0fk
[3] http://www.thedailybeast.com/tulsi-gabbards-fascist-escorts-...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/13...
[5] http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/German-neo-Nazi-party-builds-a...
While I think that posting an article titled "Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut" shows that you are a terrible person, there has to be a media for them to express their ideas. If the government wont "sell" domains directly to people then there should be a rule similar to net neutrality that will require private companies to treat all sites equal no matter how much they disagree with the idea. The alternative to that is to make sure that you don't post anything on your own website that will anger the domain name registras.
Who knows if in the future your idea will become an idea that many others disagree with.
[1] GoDaddy supported SOPA and their CEO hunted a wild elephant.
No, there doesn't. Nazism had its chance. We fought a world war over it. I think popular opinion came down on the side of "hang Nazis and prevent this ever happening again."
> there should be a rule similar to net neutrality
Unfortunately, Trump and his cabinet are against net neutrality.
As did Communism, and we fought a Cold War over that.
A "white nationalist" (apparently) ran someone over with his car, while a communist is currently threatening to nuke the United States. Nuking a country has to be worse than running over a single person, right? If not, why not?
Maybe next we can shut down all communist web sites.
After the communists, then we can move on to socialists of any kind. Then people who don't salute the flag. Then atheists. Then people who don't go to church on Sunday. Then...
This doesn't end up where you imagine that it ends up.
For example:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/08/14/co...
(note that I do not necessarily agree with this article)
You know this is a false equivalence - they're not even remotely comparable.
> a communist is currently threatening to nuke the United States [...] has to be worse than running over a single person
Again with the false equivalences.
Also I don't think Kim Jong-Un is a Communist - they have collective farms, sure, but the country is much more a dictatorship than anything.
"False equivalence" how? Communists have murdered way more people than the Nazis ever did.
> Also I don't think Kim Jong-Un is a Communist - they have collective farms, sure, but the country is much more a dictatorship than anything.
Can you give me an example of a Communist country that isn't a dictatorship?
The "But that wasn't real communism!" argument doesn't fly any more.
China has certainly made some significant steps away from dictatorship, though it's still damned authoritarian.
It's also made significant steps away from communism (I mean, it has billionaires and everything).
That's not a coincidence.
It's not a dictatorship characterized of a single leader ruling by force, with no stable transitions of power.
As an aside, North Korea is a stable hereditary monarchy, and not a dictatorship. Neither him nor his father took power via force.
Now that doesn't make them "good people". Mary Queen of Scots, and King John of England, were legitimate monarchs and terrible leaders.
Has there been a world war against the communists? Not that I am aware - your comparison of WW2 and the Cold War is false although I appreciate that you're only doing it to try and force an argument to the extremes.
(You also might want to reflect on why you're this eager to minimise the crimes of Nazism.)
> Can you give me an example of a Communist country that isn't a dictatorship?
I don't need to - it's for you to show that Kim Jong-Un is a Communist and a handful of collective farms doesn't really get you there.
Yes. It ran for 70 years, with a truce during WWII. It was called the Cold War. It was fought in Korea, Vietnam, and many other countries.
> why you're this eager to minimise the crimes of Nazism.
I'm not eager to "minimise" anything. Nazis were horrible, but Communists killed more people, and that is just a fact. Why are you so eager to defend Communism?
> it's for you to show that Kim Jong-Un is a Communist
Umm... no, it isn't up to me to prove something that's been common knowledge since the 1950s, namely that North Korea is a Communist regime.
The DPRK was notionally Communist in the Leninist mold originally, but it was progressively recast into what its own propaganda describes as an alternative Socialism/Communism, but which expressly rejects Marxist materialism and the central role of economic relations with a central role of the individual and the single great leader. In many ways, it's more Fascist than Communist in substance (the highly centralized ideology of Juche bearing an analogous relation to the heirarchical Fuhrerprinzip as absolute monarchy does to feudalism.)
I don't understand what you're basing your confidence on, aside from optimism.
We had the same attitude towards communists and communist sympathizers, yet its making a comeback in 'popular culture'.
America came down on the side of 'I don't agree with what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it.'
That being said, this whole debacle is a slippery slope and that should be the key takeaway here, regardless of which way your political spectrum leans.
That's a nice aphorism but isn't even slightly true given the number of wars they've been involved in (even just this century!) and regimes they've plotted to overthrow and organisations the government has infiltrated and ... etc.
For a recent example, compare and contrast the police responses to white supremacist marches vs BLM marches. If your hokey aphorism was true, both would be treated equally.
You're right about the different police responses, though, as BLM was allowed to burn an entire city while the white people were kicked out of a park. Labeling all gatherings of white people as 'white supremacists' is disingenuous and racist in and of itself.
So, what's more important: the right of Nazis to free speech, or the right of everyone else to freedom of association?
Libraries aren't cesspools of things titled "...a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old-Slut" and yet subversive books have always been available.
Libraries/librarians seem to have figured out how to toe the line between freedom of speech and the kinds of hate-speech that caused GoDaddy to dump the Daily Stormer.
These are raw thoughts, but I'm wondering what we might be able to learn from the librarian ethos.
They are, actually. There's plenty of hate filled speech in my local library. It carries Mein Kampf, for example, as well as plenty of other objectionable material.
The difference is probably that you don't fixate on these things when you visit the library. You don't consider the entire library to be a cesspool simply because it contains some objectionable material.
Libraries have a strong, approachable position which supports disseminating all speech, including vile speech. It's an academic position, independent of good PR. Folks are strongly discouraged from engaging in book-burning campaigns against libraries. This culture is largely lacking on the internet, which is primarily run by profit seeking companies who worry about their public image.
So maybe the internet isn't a cesspool either? Perhaps the issue is that the curators of the internet are happy to censor, in exchange for better public relations?
And I'd much rather have my social opprobrium doled out in the marketplace. Ideologies should absolutely have costs.