IDK that this constitutes the streisand effect. I don't feel like most people are going to be actively seeking this out now that it's being banned. Part of what fuels the streisand effect is that the thing being covered up was relatively unknown prior to the cover-up. People know the details of this event. They know, generally, what's on the video.
The fact that it becomes harder to get isn't going to make Joe-Everyman curious about what the big deal is. He gets that the big deal is that it's a video of actual humans being actually murdered, and he probably has feelings about that.
Probably everywhere necessary. The snuff video has been adjudged obscene, the way the NZ law works it was always obscene, the censor just confirms it. In practice if you access something like this and once you realise what you're seeing you stop watching then the government isn't going to come after you, but if you share it, keep a copy etc etc you have broken the law enough that you're likely in trouble.
Because it's illegal to have a copy or to publish it the ISPs are likely liable for having transient copies in their routers (these laws were written for film), the ISPs chose to do this initially purely as a public service but now I suspect that they are likely legally liable if they don't make a good faith effort to block these sites (remember ISPs can IP block and DNS block, they can't edit an SSL query on the fly, so everything at that IP will be blocked, if you're hosting your web site along with a snuff film archive I don't have a lot of sympathy for you).
A couple of people have already been in court for sharing it, one is an actual nazi, the other alt-right who may also be an accomplice.
Several people have also lost their jobs for sharing it at work or just plain accessing it at work (this is an action by the companies, not the govt).
There's no real reason why anyone needs to watch this snuff video, except maybe the police themselves as evidence.
Don't be naive, it's not being blocked because it's "obscene" or "snuff". There are plenty of sites with _far_ worse than this video on them that aren't blocked.
It's being blocked for political reasons. Just like when the US went to war against Iraq, one argument was "Saddam is a dictator that kills his own people". But there are worse dictators before and after Saddam.
You are using the same manipulative cherry-picked argument to justify censorship. Censorship is a weapon used by dictators, not free leaders.
It's being blocked by private companies, because they think it's the right thing to do in context, and I suspect largely for business reasons, they don't want to be convicted for passing around the snuff video.
Censorship is part of our law, it's right and proper for the NZ censor to declare the snuff video as obscene, that's his job according to law. We're a democracy, if we decide we don't need a censor we'll legislate him away.
In the meantime I'm curious why you are so in favour of this video, are you a supporter of the terrorist and his goals?
Here's the _government_ of NZ arresting people for _not_ censoring the video, with a worse punishment than murder and rape: (fyi, all censoring has to be done via private companies, unless NZ has all government run internet and tv?)
I absolutely loath the video, it's revolting. But as I mentioned ealier, worse stuff has been online and still is.
I think the problem is that many people don't want to really know what was on the video and be appalled by it without truly knowing.
Do you know what was on it? It was sick and terrible. But, since I have seen the whole thing (I made myself) I can compare it with other videos.
The last few years of ISIS videos of drownings, murders, pushing people off of roofs, mass shootings, etc... (only part of a few I saw, and what I saw was so terrible I turned it off)
A _slew_ of videos that are 10 times more graphic, sick and violent have been shown on CNN, Fox News and elsewhere.
So, if you believe this one video is worse than others, I would like to know which part is more horrific than people being burned alive in a cage? Yet, I didn't hear one single peep about censoring those videos, or anyone being arrested or jailed for sharing ISIS terrorist propaganda.
New Zealand has decided, democratically, that we want to have a censor who does this sort of work. What would you consider to be a reasonable criteria for the censor to block a video?
Every culture has it's own definitions. The problem is that the world's cultures are mixing online, and the lowest tolerable level will win out. So, it doesn't matter what I think, it's what every combined culture, religion, government , etc... will choose.
And they will choose anything and everything that threatens their power. The actual contents don't matter.
I’m wondering if the NZ government have a belief that maybe the shooter’s ability to livestream the shooting increased his desire to commit the shooting in the first place.
Alternatively, I feel like seeing the plain video without commentary would take away a lot of the glamor from these events. See the mood change of Black Mirror ep01 after he actually fucks the pig.
(from a USian perspective) Instead, we let the media setup a vibrant tradeoff of emotional tourism versus steering away from direct confrontation. Just enough so that indulging can be written off as mourning rather than the goreporn it is.
I’m sorry that’s just naive and not at all borne out by history. When executions were a public spectacle (as in Tyburn) they were a huge party. People laughed and drank and cheered as people were hanged or drawn and quartered. I think you underestimate just how turned on a lot of people are by watching people suffer and die. We need to think very carefully before we empower people to engage in thst economy again.
I kind of addressed that in my second paragraph (which maybe I hadn't gotten in before delay). I think we're already 80% down the slope of engaging in that economy.
I agree with people's zeal w.r.t public executions, but isn't a key ingredient of the social validation is that it is a "justified" killing?
That was theory, that the state (or monarch) had to show both their power over life and death, and that the public needed to see thst justice was done. We (the British) figured out that didn’t even remotely work back in 1783, and frankly I don’t think that we require a second run at it.
(I think you may have autocorrected from "directly")
Is his narrative actually compelling though? Or does it just come off as misguided/pathetic/wrong/etc? By without commentary, I really mean unmediated by talking heads transmuting it into something to drive their own popularity.
I haven't read much about this actual event, because I think every visit given to news articles just contributes to their incentives of creating a spectacle. I'm not exactly looking to engage in emotional tourism right now, but perhaps I'll have to put my theory to the test on myself.
I’m honestly wondering what will happen when that kind of content starts spreading on less centralized networks, such as scuttlebutt, or on IPFS, via Mastodon instances, or others. Things can become bad for decentralization advocates if 4chan trolls start to use those networks to share and protect such content from being blocked by governments.
Working as designed, I'd imagine? It would be naive to think that wasn't a foreseen use case.
Edit: I'm a so-called decentralization advocate and I'd add on to this to say that the big problem we have right now is that people don't think we need decentralization at all. Something like this might change some minds.
> Working as designed, I'd imagine? It would be naive to think that wasn't a foreseen use case.
Sure, from a technical point of view. But governments and the general public won’t necessarily see a lack of control over the content as something good or even legal. I expect to see some clash and fight over those questions if a significant number of 4chan/8chan users start to migrate to decentralized platforms.
Unfortunately opte.org appears to be down at the moment (the irony) so I had to dig these ones up. To me, this is a visualization of what the current status quo is as far as those in power "addressing" the issue of content.
If you can get 99% of the people using the same websites that are compliant with what the governments think are okay, then the 1% doesn't matter too much. So we saw things quietly shifting toward this paradigm. The way I see it is that the <1% who know how to use the dark web are going to not matter to the governments too much, as long as that number of people stays low. Significant numbers of 4chan and 8chan users and others migrating might raise that number to a point where you'll start to see more proactive measures taken.
But actions like these taken by Australia and NZ (using iron instead of velvet) will only accelerate the number of people interested in alternatives, and would therefore undermine the status quo strategy I outlined above.
That is not as big of a problem. The problem is primarily recruitment, not the content itself. Recruitment happens on centralized platforms where susceptible people can be reached and brainwashed.
If it is spread through (secure) Scuttlebut, how will you even know?
Anyway none of those are going to be as big an issue as when people start to share stuff on freenet, if only because when they are forced to put it there, there is no filter between them and untraceable child porn.
I think 4chan has gone too far on this one. They should ban neonazi propaganda. There is a big difference between allowing non-PC talk and allowing outright neonazi/terrorist propaganda. Besides, it is ruining the experience on all boards for all people.
Isn't their policy basically "anything goes"? Locking things down seems counter to their goals. I know they have "some" moderation in "some" parts of their site, but moderating too much will just drive people away since many are there for "free speech" reasons.
I think they'd be happier with the policy of, "if you don't like it, leave" than trying to appease others.
No, they specifically censor content like child pornography, torrent links (AFAIK), and some other material. There are situations where the expression of certain speech, like the generation and propagation of child pornography, harms others and should not be allowed. Even the original FS philosophers mostly agreed on this type of censorship.
They do not at all censor torrent links. In fact, the /t/ board is dedicated to sharing torrent and magnet links of all kinds of content, almost all of it to copyright-protected content. Child pornography is censored and will earn you an immediate perma-ban as soon as your post is found by a mod.
Generation of CP harms others yes, but propagation does not. Always did regard the criminalization of possession and propagation of CP as a censorious overreach.
The argument is that propagation (and consumption) encourages those who generate such things to keep on going since they see there is a market for them. I guess kind of similar to banning sales of ivory to kill the market, and in turn, reduce or wipeout the incentive for the hunters.
I'd argue spreading it harms others as the people in it didn't consent to it being created or shared and is associated with trauma for them. Knowing that it was perfectly legal for people to share footage of them getting raped as children probably wouldn't be good for their mental health
m00t had taken action when it was necessary in the past. m00t had already banned the offending parties once. Then he reinstated them and gave them a containment board. In retrospect this did not work so well. The containment board became an ever radicalized echo chamber and worst, it did not contain anything. Since Hiro took over it seems like he has ignored the issue.
This was pre-neonazi days. /news/ and /pol/ were not so bad back then. None of those users back then would have overtly supported nazism.
There was never a /news/ "back then", it was created in 2015 and is a text board. There was only /new/ and /new/ and /pol/ never co-existed. /pol/ was created after /new/ was removed because moot was sick of /new/ going constantly off-topic with racism and bigotry. The decision was made to more or less cease moderation of /new/, rename it to /pol/, and use it as a containment board.
Also people need to realize chan culture. Each board may as well be its own website. 4chan hosts /pol/, it also hosts /lgbt/. 4chan's moderation (rather, lack of) is being seen as an issue because of how heavily moderated the internet has become in the past 20 years.
Reddit, the "bastion of free speech", bans every subreddit that gets in the way of advertisement money, giving Voat more popularity. 4chan, "a bastion of free speech", banned #Gamergate discussion which gave 8chan its rise to popularity.
I'd rather have extremists on Reddit and 4chan where they can be debated and talked down to by moderates than on Voat and 8chan where they can form echo chambers. Echo chambers are a lot better at recruitment. Pushing "bad people" away where they are out of sight and out of mind hasn't been solving the problem, it has only been making it worse year over year.
There is no debate on 4chan /pol/, its an echo chamber that keeps fueling the flames of hate (Remember Dylann Roof?). Why dont you try and make a thread there and argue that muslims shouldn't be shot and report back here with results?
the worst of the worst are already banned and made 8chan (no doxing/raiding allowed on 4chan, etc ). the fundamental problem is pretending to be a white supremacist as a comedic device, and actually being one, are not easily distinguished on an anonymous message board. especially when the most popular form of humor on that board, is trying to be edgy and/or imitating someone you think is stupid.
if you are old enough to remember /b/ raiding Hal Turner, i'm pretty sure that same thing would have happened to Alex Jones had raiding not been banned.
You're either for free speech or you're not, and as much as I would like to have some absolute reference of good and bad, it's all culturally defined.
I mean, I think it's horrible, but I can envision lots of functional and useful societies that are horrible based on my principles (how would you like to to be part of a hize mind?), but that doesn't make them bad in an absolute sense.
Scaled down, freedom of speech is to protect us from changing cultural and mob rule running roughshod over what we consider good and bad to the detriment of all. The law would basically just lag internet outrage by a few months or years.
Edit: This is meant to be interpreted in context, where a platform has taken a stance that it doesn't censor, and a government blocking that platform. I'm also not making a stance that anything goes, as speech inciting direct action against the law (or meant to cause a situation which is immediately and obviously unsafe) is problematic, and under what I take free speech to embody, which is freedom of thought and to express those thoughts. As absolutist as the first words sound, it's not really meant to be interpreted that way, but more as a call to acknowledge that good and bad are relative to the farthest degree, which is about as far from absolutist as you can get.
Edit 2: From closer reading, it wasn't actually a government request. The article notes that the government often issues these through the courts, but the ISPs acted on their own in this case.
This brings up the hypocrisy of those that want to shut down speech based on their personal views.
More people died in 9/11, but those videos are all over the place, even on youtube. Those planes hitting those specific builder _were_ the message of the terrorists.
It feels good to say stuff like that, and it's the kind of reality I want to live in, but my whole point is:
- Define innocent
- Define political
- Define evil
In way that is independent of the culture in which it takes place. It might even be possible to do so, or come close, when limited to current cultures and Humans. That's a far cry from proved as universal though. It's been quite a while since I read it, but I believe this short story[1] covers some of the ground I'm trying to express. Note: If you key off humans/aliens, I think you're missing the point.
> It feels good to say stuff like that, and it's the kind of reality I want to live in, but my whole point is:
I think the opposite is true. It is gratifying to the logical mind to process this event through the lens of pedantic philosophical analysis, but in real life most things aren't so ambiguous and they definitely aren't ambiguous in this case.
> Define innocent
In this context I define innocent as "undeserving of abrupt and violent execution".
> Define political
In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
> Define evil
In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
Seems pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to read the story you linked (though it does seem interesting even though I am generally not a fan of yudkowsky's writings), but if you want to summarize it I don't mind addressing that summary.
> In this context I define innocent as "undeserving of abrupt and violent execution".
Okay, you've traded innocent for undeserving. That doesn't feel any more definitive to me. Who's undeserving?
> In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
Governments are made up of the people. If they aren't enslaved, then they have some responsibility for the action of said government. It's one group of people doing something to another group. Whether it's from some government or not is irrelevant. For example, is not a non-government group advocating for the eradication of a subgroup of people evil in your reasoning? That's not political in any way.
> In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
You've already stated morality is relative in your first comment. You're relying on a relative assessment to claim something as universal.
You can be for free speech while also unwilling to host certain speech on a platform you own & operate. I can support your right to protest, while also not permitting you to do it in my living room.
I think their point was that free speech is more nuanced than the "You're either for free speech or you're not" dichotomy, and that was just one example. Even the philosophers behind free speech said that speech should be curtailed when the expression itself causes harm, and they were certainly proponents for free speech.
Yeah, free speech doesnt mean "anything goes". We as a society have made the determination that there are categories of speech that are harmful, and as such are illegal. You cant libel, you cant slander, you cant shout "Fire" in a crowded theater. Speech that advocates for the supression or termination of other people based on their race is "Hate speech" and also illegal. There is neither value nor need for complete and total 'free speech'.
Free speech is about government interference, and the first 3 categories have unanimous agreement.
It's the "hate speech" label that gets complicated based on who defines it. Many who claim things are hate speech today also use hate speech themselves (following your definition of suppression based on race) to shout down and ban others.
It shows just how complex this situation is and why "hate speech" is precisely the type of speech that needs defense in the first place because it's mostly rooted in defiance and disagreement, not outright hate.
That's not what the post I was replying to is talking about. Free speech as an idea is pretty simple, it's the complexities of implementation that are up for debate.
I agree with the content of your message but shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is actually free speech (or at least, only not free speech under an outdated legal standard). It was used as a hypothetical to represent speech creating “clear or present danger” in the Schenk vs. US case and was later overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio. After that case, speech must be directly inciting certain unlawful or violent action to not be free speech (under the model of creating harm, this isn’t the only model and free speech is essentially case specific, e.g. free speech is different for a government employee vs. a student at a state college vs. an urban professional at a private company). Free speech is honestly pretty sweeping and I always find conversations about free speech on tech platforms really disingenuous because most people usually have no idea what the legal standard is and don’t really separate government and corporate moderation of speech.
Yes, it does. It has to, otherwise free speech is defined as any arbitrary level of censorship a government allows, and one could say North Korea has just as much "free speech" as the US.
Now, I'm not making an argument that free speech as such is preferable or even feasible in a civil society, or that censorship per se is wrong, and I'm definitely not making the typical slippery slope argument that any form of censorship will inevitably lead to tyranny.
However, free speech has to be defined as a constant to mean anything objective.
Depending on how you interpret those terms (that is, if you choose a very specific definition of each), possibly. What I means is that free speech is meant to protect everyone from other people's differing opinions on what is and isn't acceptable in a cultural sense.
If you're "for free speech as long as it's accepted within my culture" then you're not for free speech. I did clarify a bit in my original comment what I was going for though.
Because it shouldn’t. Why let a terrorist organization not only get away with a shooting, but also get away with taking down any service (which removes content like this swiftly) too?
How do you define "swiftly?" I haven't been able to follow this as closely as I like, but what I read early on was that it was streaming on Facebook for 17 minutes, and then available as reposts for days afterward. If this is incorrect, help me out by providing the actual numbers.
Gonna need a source on that. It’s impressive how fast they handled it when probably tens of thousands of people are reposting the content with the express intent to get around spam filters and avoid manual review.
Should Aus block sms, WhatsApp, and iMessage because the content gets re-shared there too? Should they block Google because you can find links to the content there?
In the case of 4chan, probably not easy to block everyone. They are on CloudFlare, so ISP's will mostly be limited to overriding DNS. The DNS servers on your ISP belong to them, so unless your ISP are doing something outright malicious, it is really up to them what sites they wish to block and they probably know you can't vote with your wallet unless you have plenty of ISP choices. I could be incorrect, so certainly read through your agreement with the ISP.
A decent method of side-stepping ISP DNS is to run Unbound DNS on your home router or a server in your home, if you can.
An example snippet from the configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this:
forward-zone:
name: "."
forward-addr: 1.1.1.1 # CloudFlare
forward-addr: 1.0.0.1 # CloudFlare
forward-addr: 8.8.8.8 # Google
forward-addr: 8.8.4.4 # Google
forward-addr: 208.67.222.222 # OpenDNS
forward-first: no
And you can view it's status with unbound-control:
unbound-control dump_infra | grep 1\.1\.1
1.1.1.1 . ttl 1745 ping 0 var 71 rtt 284 rto 284 tA 0 tAAAA 0 tother 0 ednsknown 1 edns 0 delay 0 lame dnssec 0 rec 0 A 0 other 0
This method of caching can also slightly improve the privacy of the people using your network. You get the bonus of a local low latency cache, and requests are distributed among multiple destinations, slightly reducing the marketing benefits of running those public DNS servers.
You can also enable TCP and TLS for recursive servers that support DoT (DNS over TLS). I prefer this over DoH, as everything in your home can benefit from it, not just your browser. Some of the servers mentioned above listen on TCP 853 for TLS. Just google "Unbound DNS TLS" There are some examples on Calomel as well. [1]
Here is an example snippet using TLS: (not the full config)
Someone at Facebook is going to have to train an "is streamer committing a mass murder" neural net now, kind of like the "is dude whipping out his genitals" ones that are already around.
The instance reminds me of the horrible ISIS beheading videos they used to publish.
I don't remember what social platforms and governments did about those because I made it a point to avoid them so there was no chance of seeing the horror.
Honestly, who needs the shit popping back in their head during any random moment?
The "first" beheading video (American contractor in orange jumpsuit in Iraq) was played on the monitors in the halls and public spaces at the local college for everyone on the campus to see.
It seems that if the message is supported (attack a foreign country) the populace will put up with a lot. And it doesn't take anything (just words) to be censored if they disagree with you.
Just a thought experiment: so it's after 9/11. Nobody will show a video of the planes flying into the towers. The only place you can watch the video is ISISchan.org, and there are news articles about how many countries banning ISISchan.org & how problematic ISISchan.org is (don't go to ISISchan.org, kids!). Now instead of watching a clip on CNN you've got people absorbing all the extremist propaganda on ISISchan.
I think this is really a different situation. The NZ video was made by the perpetrator as a vehicle to disseminate his views. 9/11 videos were made by bystanders as they watched their city being attacked.
A better comparison would be videos produced by terrorist organizations which use 9/11 footage to promote their own views: that would be something I could see being argued for a ban.
I'd argue that the shooting video is much worse - psychologically, graphically, and in terms of inspiring others, since the act was so much easier than the extravagant plane attacks. For God's sake, it was a first person video of the murder of individual people, one by one, played for jokes by the murderer ("remove kebab").
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to ban host sites under certain conditions - I just think the analogy is just way too disparate to be viable.
The New Zealand video is orders of magnitude more viscerally graphic than the famous videos of the planes flying into the towers. This is not to say one is more tragic than the other, just that the video for the NZ shooting may be one of the worst videos on the Internet. It would never be on CNN, so this comparison doesn't hold very strongly.
I'm very biased against video. I don't watch TV news or reshared political videos. I'm quite happy that Hacker News doesn't host video; you can link if needed. So, I have questions:
There are specialized uses, but for most of us, I'm skeptical that it's important to have video of news events as they happen. If nobody caught 9/11 on video, what would be different?
For many years, no cameras were allowed in courtrooms or in Congress. It seems like that was fine?
Different people's brains process information in different ways. Others are better at absorbing information through text, and yet others need hands-on experience to learn something. There's a reason for the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words".
Alternatively, look how bad the conspiracy theories are about 9/11 despite video of the planes hitting WTC and Pentagon.
Now imagine that the same unfounded rumors start and sites are barred from displaying the videos so people can "make up their own mind".
There will always be conspiracy theories but hiding the footage, IMHO, will increase it dramatically.
To be clear, it's terrible footage and I think it's good FB, Youtube, and other private sites are choosing to bar it from their platforms.
But I worry that in the long run, if you start doing things like banning any domain that hosts it, you'll feed into some of the worst elements of the internet.
I watched this "illegal" video. And not only do I think it should not be illegal, I think watching it should be almost mandatory!
Package it with a safety curriculum, and people should watch it to know what to do. In particular: For the most part, those people in the video who ran, lived, those who tried to drop low, or froze up, died. (There were a couple of exceptions.)
Additionally, one guy tried to attack the shooter and was killed. But it was just one guy, everyone else was too scared. If instead they had all attacked, some would have died, but not as many.
(It sounds like I'm blaming them, I'm not.)
There are a lot of safety lessons in that video, and people should watch it.
You could have a point; as a reference, airline passengers reputedly put up a lot more fight against hijackers post-9/11. I don't want to watch the video- but perhaps a similar sort of shift in mindset could be brought about for these kinds of attacks, whether that be more running or more teaming up to fight back.
The need to see a video is proven wrong by your very example: Passengers on 9/11 already started putting up a flight before they’d seen the video, after they heard on their cell phones from loved ones what had happened to the other flights the passengers knew they had to fight back leading to the Pennsylvania crash.
Prior to this established hijacking procedure and expectation was cooperate, you’ll be flowen to some foreign country. There’ll be a demand for such and such prisoners to be released. A negotiation. Eventually the passengers will be released. As soon as people knew the planes were being used as weapons and this wasn’t the hijackings of past the fought back.
The chances of being in such a situation are so incredibly small, that training to deal with it is a wasted effort compared to a host of other stuff — e.g., learning CPR, taking a course in safely driving in wintery conditions, employing elementary fire safety precautions in the house, etc. Even stimulating people to learn to swim if they haven't already saves way more lives!
If you normalize an attack like this to the point that you start training the general populace for its (statistically unlikely) occurrence, you have effectively made terrorism in this form that much more effective.
I think the fact these attacks are happening regularly all over the world normalizes this already. The odds of you being the victim of a terror attack are low but honestly you don’t need a 15 minute course on tips. Make news distributors run a 2 minute clip on how to effectively maximize your odds of survival during every broadcast coverage of a mass shooting. I think it also changes the narrative in a would be perpetrators mind: if this is about power over others, to some extent others are now prepared to either flee or effectively attack a terrorist en masse.
> I think the fact these attacks are happening regularly all over the world normalizes this already.
I think you overestimate how common this style of mass shooting are outside of war zones. Even in places where gun violence is high mass shootings are incredibly rare[2].
Between 1966 and 2012 there were 18 mass shootings in the country with the second most count[1].
Some advanced CPR classes actually do cover active-shooter scenario training. I get refreshers every 3 months and full training every year. Ask your CPR training company if they have this available. Not all of them do it.
Marine friend said if there's a shooter, charge them. Most people aren't trained to handle it. Throw something at them and run at them. If even 5 people had attacked this guy at once, he would have been taken down and many people saved.
This guy maybe was trained... but who knows, 10 people fighting for their lives of their families and kids would be scary to face.
> If even 5 people had attacked this guy at once, he would have been taken down and many people saved.
But those 5 people would have to take the increased risk of getting killed, which is difficult to convince than just run. Also the standard safety norms, says to do not indulge with the attacker.
I understand and fully agree. That is why real training, even the most basic, is a good idea. Running and hiding didn't help any of these people. (unless they actually got out of the building)
Those men let women and children die around them without even trying to save them.
For those down voting my comment above, I think you have no idea what happened in that mosque. It was really sad, only one person tried to help anyone. Everyone else just laid down. Literally (I mean _literally_) just laid down and waited to be shot.
Imagine if you are trapped in a room with your family, women and children and a gunman is coming. Would you tell your family to just lay down and wait to die? And you wouldn't try to do anything at all?
You're probably being downvoted because of the judgmental position you're taking. None of us knows how we would react in such a situation, and to talk down about it on a message board is in poor taste at best (even though you probably didn't mean it that way).
Also, I think you may be looking at this through the wrong frame. It's well known in the physiology of trauma that the body shuts down in overwhelming situations. That's the freeze part of fight, flight or freeze.
I think the problem is that most people in 1st world countries have never feared for their lives or for others. The past 100 years has made the world really safe for modern society, where we no longer rely on our own ability to keep us safe or our families, but rely solely on police.
I think you would have commented how I did if you have had your life threatened before, and now see how docile/weak our modern society has made us. It's a really dangerous place to be in.
I foresee us being pushed around by anyone with any sort of authority at all in the future, and the idea of protesting will come to end and some form/version of government will be the last one of it's kind and we will all just accept it, like it seems we are being trained for.
Edit: I had just recently watched this retched video before commenting here, as I see way to often people making a clear stance with limited or no information to base it on. It was disturbing and I feel my comments are justified. If anyone else knows the entirety of the contents of the video and are not disturbed emotionally, something is wrong with them.
That's certainly true! But your GP comment wasn't substantive, and you've posted a bunch of other ones that have this same problem. We eventually ban accounts that keep doing that, so this would be good to fix. Fortunately you've also posted a bunch of fine comments, so it shouldn't be a problem.
As I mentioned further up the thread, it was illegal for about 50 years in the US as a hypothetical but it’s no longer a legitimate legal standard. Shouting fire in a crowded theater isn’t illegal (at least, it isn’t not free speech). See Brandenburg v. Ohio and how it overruled the prior Schenk standard.
Today's illegal speech must incite "imminent lawless action." It could be argued that sharing the video fails that standard. Probably wouldn't fly in the US, but we're not talking about the US.
It makes me sad how 4chan has largely been reduced to a place where racists and bigots and sexists hang out. When I was a teenager, it felt like the racists in /b/ were doing it ironically (maybe I was wrong?), but now it seems like a place to spout off white-nationalist nonsense, and whenever its called out the people fall back on "it's just a joke bro!"
You're right, it used to be very non-political, irreverent, and highly offensive, as in offensive humor. Now there's a whole lot of very sincere religious/political/racial hatred.
I also visited 4chan regularly in my teenage years, and this is the thing that jumps out at me. In the past, 4chan was a place where nothing was sacred and people who sincerely believed in anything were ruthlessly mocked. There were always the white nationalist types, but there were enough people making fun of them that it balanced out.
That former group has disappeared, and 4chan has become the biggest echo chamber on the Internet. There are stretches of hours and thousands of posts where there isn't a single dissenting political opinion.
The irreverence of 4chan was always the appeal. It has morphed into a lockstep belief system in a hero figure. What's the point of a website with anonymous posts and no rules if everyone is carefully agreeing with each other?
In hindsight you are right, but I'll give you the mentality that 14-year-old-me had:
Basically, the idea of being racist is so absurd, that by being ironically racist I'm poking fun at the racists, not the races.
It's not a completely ridiculous notion (though it's abused heavily); satire is a common tactic for comedy. Clearly people go too far, and I don't think it's a good excuse to say "it's just satire".
I mean, I do think it's way too easy for someone to say something horrible, and then get off with no consequences because they claim it's just a joke (or locker room talk... cough).
I'm not exactly sure where we draw the line socially. I don't really have a problem with something like The Colbert Report, but I also really hate the "shitlord" movement that seems to be happening.
If you look inside a persons mind, an ironic racist says racist things simply to make fun of people who get too easily offended by racism. Someone who is actually racist says those things and also believes them.
Ten years ago, in white suburbia, saying “nigger” was worse than murdering someone. It was clear that a social feedback system had developed where the least racist person was considered most virtuous, leading to people doing all kinds of rediculous things in order to be least racist, the denial of common sense and logic and true statistics became like a thorn in the mind of anyone who was not swayed by herd mentality.
It was in this atmosphere of deadly seriousness about racism that it became outrageously funny to say racist things. Just like every other anti-racism effort by white affluent people, it only made everything worse and made racism funny. I guarantee that without this atmosphere of hyper-anti-racism, people would not have been saying “nigger” on early 4chan.
As 4chan got more popular the average iq went down and the proportion of people that really meant it increased.
On the Internet, even if you're "ironically" being something, it doesn't matter - in text, where it's difficult to interpret intent, if you're being something ironically, you're still being that thing. And for those that find it hard to interpret the irony, all they see is you being that thing.
Yeah, I agree that Poe's law is a thing. I'm not going to argue that 14-year-old me had terribly good judgement, and while I didn't really post any racist nonsense on 4chan, I did laugh at it, and I look back at that and cringe.
despicable websites such as rotten.com and liveleak should also be banned -- they really mess up human brain. Some reddit subreddits are extremely graphic and twisted too.
there is a difference -- platforms which show case human misery, violence, gore and carnage for sake of entertainment and/or profit making should be banned.
Overall, even web search engines and ISPs need to be vigilant during indexing/hosting of websites and come up with some method of periodic review of websites being visited/hosted and tag them as appropriate or non appropriate.
Somebody profiting from somebody's death or misery or injury is not cool and goes against the very grain of civility.
What happens when a video of "something" bad happens, a person is put in jail immediately for that "something", but the video is "banned"? And "something" is not even reported on...
This is a great tool for stifling opposing politics of _any_ kind. And seems like the easiest way to start an oppressive tyranny than a method of stopping terrorist propaganda.
Psychos don't need videos like this. Just watch movies, there are many that are far worse than the New Zealand shooting videos... (and plenty have propaganda in them as well)
You’re making the same mistake everyone is making by assuming that the censor in this case is answerable to the Govt and can censor anything he/she likes or is told too. I understand because in the US system that is probably how it would work, it would be a federal agency, and the censor would be appointed by each new president and take his marching orders from the president.
Your argument requires beforehand authoritarian capture of all branches of the NZ government to make sense. At which point the whole suggestion is moot.
No, I am viewing this as a general world-wide trend, censoring for _any_ reason you can get people to agree with first. Then, when people agree to censorship in general, they won't fight it when it get's really bad, mainly because they won't know it's happening. (consider China)
The actual "really bad" results of this is years away still. But this is how freedom of speech is stripped away. Under the guise of safety, one tiny piece at a time.
Would George Washington have fought the British if the British had succeeded is censoring every pamphlet? Would India have succeeded in escaping the power of Britain if Ghandi couldn't speak openly?
If the cost of censorship is tyranny world wide, it's not worth it.
We _need_ freedom of speech, even if it allows kooks the same platform, that is cost we should be willing to pay.
Youre responding to a thread about the New Zealand mosque attacks and the Office of Film and Literatures classification of this video as objectionable and expressing concern that this can be used for political purposes to quell dissenting political opinions, which I have explained why that can’t be used that way in NZ and you’re mistaken in your understanding of how censorship works in NZ. Now you say you’re concerned about censorship as a concept generally in far away historical and authoritarian regimes. These things do not follow and your concern has no relation to this thread. It’s borderline bait.
> This is a great tool for stifling opposing politics of _any_ kind. And seems like the easiest way to start an oppressive tyranny than a method of stopping terrorist propaganda.
You’re talking about a tool in New Zealand you clearly knew nothing about but presumed was some kind of censorship you’d find in a dictatorship. You’ve been corrected on that. Then your concern was far away authoritarian regimes. Now your concern is the US and yet you bring up nothing related to how New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature’s classification applies to potential US pathways into tyranny.
The "great tool" is censorship. New Zealand is just the current lightening rod to push more of it on everyone.
Both NZ and the US and all other countries are becoming more oppressive every year. Censorship (the tool of tyranny and dictators) is constantly be pushed to "protect" someone.
If you think NZ won't change because of these events you are deceiving yourself.
Scary how an ISP can just up and decide to block a website for hosting what they think is offensive. I guess it's the norm for China and Russia. What's scarier are the people cheering this as if it's a win.
I guess it's the norm in Australia and New Zealand now as well. And let's not forget that Sci-Hub has been blocked in a bunch of countries (including the US) and their domains have been taken away [1].
It looks to me that Australia, in particular, is the testing ground for FIVE EYES censorship efforts. Australia recently passed a draconian anti-encryption law [2] which will impact a number of multi-national companies. Other members of FIVE EYES are gauging the fallout from this and are probably waiting for some tragedy to strike before they can enact similar laws.
> It looks to me that Australia, in particular, is the testing ground for FIVE EYES censorship efforts. Australia recently passed a draconian anti-encryption law [2] which will impact a number of multi-national companies. Other members of FIVE EYES are gauging the fallout from this and are probably waiting for some tragedy to strike before they can enact similar laws.
Australia doesn't have free speech in so far as the US does with the first amendment. Australia doesn't have a citizen Bill of Rights either. This combined with Australian's penchant for not taking risks does bode well for using it as a Five Eyes testing ground to remove what some would consider basic rights.
This is not a a daily instance of "he says", "she says" offensiveness. This is an act of terror, and these platform served as a propaganda media which ought to stopped.
So who determines that I can't see this video? Who determines what ISIS videos I should watch from live leak, twitter, etc? Should I be able to see the atrocities that are happening in Brazil? Who watches the watchmen?
Is the manifesto also considered propaganda media? What about analysis of that manifesto, or discussions about how to prevent attacks like this based on the contents of the manifesto, especially if they contain excerpts?
Should we ban security companies from using the video for training purposes or to design better security or anti-terror measures?
Should we ban people from sharing the attacker's name?
Should we ban news agencies from even reporting on attacks like this? Keep in mind that news-coverage especially has been shown to incite copy-cat attacks.
I hate 4chan so much, its a diseased cesspool of morons. However, I hate the idea blocking them. Its such a slippery slope from censorship of bad websites to moving to censorship of good websites that the government does not like.
Edit: Also, facebook pro-actively took down the video as soon as they became aware.
>Its such a slippery slope from censorship of bad websites to moving to censorship of good websites that the government does not like.
Is it really, though, or do people just like the slippery slope fallacy a bit too much?
Does everyone really think that if a government bans 4chan, no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else because there's precedent now and nothing can be done? That's not how societies or governments tend to work.
You must not work for government, because once they have a foothold into socially and even legally dubious methods/ideas, they'll continue to encroach on rights and abilities like the zerg creep.
Don't allow it to happen in the first place and it won't happen. History is rife with examples.
If Trump had the power to censor bad websites, think about how much effort he would currently be putting into censoring any website that talked about him badly.
Needs to be noted, because a lot of people are very confused about this as you seem to be:
The government cannot direct the rating and censoring of material in NZ. It’s an independent commission operating under the strict legislation that establishes it and checked by the judicial system. If NZ had a Trump he could not order anything to be censored. That’s not how it works.
Like a lot of parliamentary systems, NZ agencies and commissions operate independently under the laws that establish them. In the US it’s very different, each new President comes in an appoints a huge number of positions that direct these agencies and those positions have tremendous political influence of them. Hence you can have a new EPA director appointed by someone like Trump who comes in expressly to cut down the EPA and who answers to Trump for his marching orders. This may be where some of this confusion comes from.
> Does everyone really think that if a government bans 4chan, no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else because there's precedent now and nothing can be done?
Is it really, though, or do people just like the strawman fallacy a bit too much?
No... I know you thought you were being clever, you just didn't hit the mark. E for effort, though.
I didn't invoke any strawman. A slippery slope argument is, by definition, precisely as I described - that a particular degenerative state (be it social, or political) will inevitably be reached starting from some innocent and minor consequence, and that this trend cannot be reversed or corrected for.
You know, like falling down a slope that's slippery.
Except in the degenerative state that you talked about. No reasonable person has said that the censoring of this one case would lead to censorship of everything, but that's exactly what you decided on for the degenerative state.
> no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else
The "it's a slippery slope fallacy to assume that censorship of bad things will lead to censoring good things" would be a more compelling argument if we didn't have thousands of years of human history proving that it happens again and again.
"Oh - don't worry, this time in human history it won't be a slippery slope!" is not a very compelling argument when we have historical precedent of the opposite being true time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again.
>when we have historical precedent of the opposite being true time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again.
Do we? Because we appear to be in one of several threads about how the ease with which certain content spreads around the internet makes attempts at censorship futile, and I can legally buy a copy of Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries and read the Unabomber's manifesto and all kinds of stuff generally agreed upon to be "bad things," and I don't see the vast amount of "good things" being censored everywhere as a result of the slippery slope of censorship.
Censorship is applied in different degrees in different places, yes, China is not the US is not Europe, but that doesn't signal the universal certainty that "time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again" seems to imply.
Maybe the slippery slope is just, like, a tiny slope? Maybe it's a slope but it's not as slippery as you think? Maybe there's more than one slope?
Or is it just a matter of time until the boot crushes all of our heads, or something?
>I don't see the vast amount of "good things" being censored everywhere as a result of the slippery slope of censorship.
I would like to ask that you take a moment to reflect on this statement ... ... ... Okay now moving on.
Who's to say they need to censor "good things"? They only need to censor things that you don't agree with censoring. I won't pretend to know your political standings but I can guarantee you that your opinion and the governments opinion on what should be censored will eventually reach a disagreement.
People tend to give governments powers during a time of need or when they are frightened often in exchange for "increased safety". A perceived increase of safety that may - or may not - result in more safety but with 100% certainty results in giving up certain rights or freedoms.
For the easiest example of exchanging things for a perceived increase in safety. What do you think of the TSA? Is the intrusiveness and racism in the 'random selections' actually resulting in increased safety and security? Or is it mostly security theater? It tramples over peoples' privacy and sometimes violates their rights for a perceived increase of safety but the failure rate is so high that it is meaningless. The government isn't going to get rid of that power (the TSA) so easily. After all, we gave it to them and they'll gladly keep up the security theater in exchange.
The U.S signed away large portions of our privacy and removed many checks & balances placed on the government after the 9/11 attacks. The USA-PATRIOT Act was forced through in a time of need where people were frightened in exchange for safety and security.
By the time you realize you've given the government too much power it's far too late to take any of it back. History is full of examples and history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Isn't that a bit of survivor bias? You only see the times in history where it wasn't effective because those are the instances that somehow survived to become notable. No ship ever sinks if you only ever look at the floating ones.
>Does everyone really think that if a government bans 4chan, no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else because there's precedent now and nothing can be done? That's not how societies or governments tend to work.
I dont think the people here saying nazist ideology should be confronted in the public have actually used 4chan/8chan (anyone thats ever been there knows /pol/ isnt limited to /pol/). Its not a place of discourse but of propagation and fuels hate and dehumanization. Id encourage you to go there try out your debate theory.
The boards have a code that is created per message that when used in conjunction with the thread id, can give the IP. HTTPS only prevents your ISP from seeing what you are seeing, but there are very few truly "anon" sites. To be semi-anon, one would have to sit near an open WiFi and use a unique MAC address and a browser that has never logged into Google. Most people won't make this effort.
Maybe there is another reason this video is being banned.
I saw this video, I made myself watch it. (judge me)
Then I went back to my tv show. There were scenes of soldiers attacking the "heroes" in a bowling alley, and it made me horrified and sick. And I realized Hollywood is glorifying this shit. Hollywood is promoting shootings like this.
An hour before, and this tv show was entertainment to me. Now I feel like a twisted sicko for enjoying violent entertainment just like what is in the New Zealand video.
This video changed me, it made me see violence in a new light. It's sick to be entertained by re-enactments of this in the same way as the original.
Even more disturbing is playing counter strike or another FPS after watching it. You're brain can look at the NZ shooting and a first person Counter Strike stream and it wouldn't interpret them any differently.
It's good that the ISP's decided to act on their own in this case, and they weren't ordered by the courts. But can't say I am a fan of this. Why participate in censorship? Once something is on the Internet, it's not gonna go away. It's trivial to get the shooting footage for those who want to see it. Censoring is a band aid at best. These tragedies happen because of an underlying problem. Address gun laws, address xenophobia. Those are the real problems. Censoring the footage is just going to create more curiosity. It is giving exclusivity to a killer. The act of censoring the footage is giving credence to the killer.
Besides, I think there are legitimate uses of this footage. We live in a world where mass shootings are increasing. But there is no public awareness in countering these situations. I think at this point we should train students from a young age, and adults, on what to do if in an active shooter situation. The fact that this isn't done is incredibly scary to me. I personally saw the footage, so that I can potentially pick up things from it and potentially save my life if god forbid I end up in a situation like that.
I am so incredibly saddened and frustrated by the lack of training for these situations in our society. With a proper response I think so many lives could have been saved. In this instance, killer went into the mosque and all the people formed 2 giant clumps/clusters around the 2 door exists on either side of the central entrance the killer entered from. Killer just unloaded on the right hand side cluster, then left hand side cluster. He faced practically zero opposition. One brave man successfully tackled him to the ground but by that time it was already too late.
I understand that in a panic situation like that it's fight or flight and most people understandably lose their heads and try to flee, and it is very hard to coordinate a counter attack to something like this. But this is why I say we need to bring this type of training in schools and in our day to day lives. I know it's a morbid reality where such a thing is necessary but alas such is the reality right now. If everyone had rushed the killer instead of forming 2 giant convenient clusters for the killer to unload into, I think so many lives would have been saved.
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[ 20.3 ms ] story [ 3663 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#Efficacy_of_the_U...
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I think the grandparent was referencing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The fact that it becomes harder to get isn't going to make Joe-Everyman curious about what the big deal is. He gets that the big deal is that it's a video of actual humans being actually murdered, and he probably has feelings about that.
Because it's illegal to have a copy or to publish it the ISPs are likely liable for having transient copies in their routers (these laws were written for film), the ISPs chose to do this initially purely as a public service but now I suspect that they are likely legally liable if they don't make a good faith effort to block these sites (remember ISPs can IP block and DNS block, they can't edit an SSL query on the fly, so everything at that IP will be blocked, if you're hosting your web site along with a snuff film archive I don't have a lot of sympathy for you).
A couple of people have already been in court for sharing it, one is an actual nazi, the other alt-right who may also be an accomplice.
Several people have also lost their jobs for sharing it at work or just plain accessing it at work (this is an action by the companies, not the govt).
There's no real reason why anyone needs to watch this snuff video, except maybe the police themselves as evidence.
You are using the same manipulative cherry-picked argument to justify censorship. Censorship is a weapon used by dictators, not free leaders.
Censorship is part of our law, it's right and proper for the NZ censor to declare the snuff video as obscene, that's his job according to law. We're a democracy, if we decide we don't need a censor we'll legislate him away.
In the meantime I'm curious why you are so in favour of this video, are you a supporter of the terrorist and his goals?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/new-zealand-men-...
I absolutely loath the video, it's revolting. But as I mentioned ealier, worse stuff has been online and still is.
I think the problem is that many people don't want to really know what was on the video and be appalled by it without truly knowing.
Do you know what was on it? It was sick and terrible. But, since I have seen the whole thing (I made myself) I can compare it with other videos.
The last few years of ISIS videos of drownings, murders, pushing people off of roofs, mass shootings, etc... (only part of a few I saw, and what I saw was so terrible I turned it off)
A _slew_ of videos that are 10 times more graphic, sick and violent have been shown on CNN, Fox News and elsewhere.
So, if you believe this one video is worse than others, I would like to know which part is more horrific than people being burned alive in a cage? Yet, I didn't hear one single peep about censoring those videos, or anyone being arrested or jailed for sharing ISIS terrorist propaganda.
I'm sorry for you that you watched it all the way through, that sounds like a sick compulsion, please get help
The ISIS videos of people being executed were magnitudes more gruesome than this, and they were on CNN/FOX news.
Do you think everyone who watches the evening news has a sick compulsion as well?
And they will choose anything and everything that threatens their power. The actual contents don't matter.
(from a USian perspective) Instead, we let the media setup a vibrant tradeoff of emotional tourism versus steering away from direct confrontation. Just enough so that indulging can be written off as mourning rather than the goreporn it is.
I agree with people's zeal w.r.t public executions, but isn't a key ingredient of the social validation is that it is a "justified" killing?
Is his narrative actually compelling though? Or does it just come off as misguided/pathetic/wrong/etc? By without commentary, I really mean unmediated by talking heads transmuting it into something to drive their own popularity.
I haven't read much about this actual event, because I think every visit given to news articles just contributes to their incentives of creating a spectacle. I'm not exactly looking to engage in emotional tourism right now, but perhaps I'll have to put my theory to the test on myself.
Edit: I'm a so-called decentralization advocate and I'd add on to this to say that the big problem we have right now is that people don't think we need decentralization at all. Something like this might change some minds.
Sure, from a technical point of view. But governments and the general public won’t necessarily see a lack of control over the content as something good or even legal. I expect to see some clash and fight over those questions if a significant number of 4chan/8chan users start to migrate to decentralized platforms.
Disclaimer: Take the below images with a grain of salt, I wasn't able to verify how they were generated.
Internet Connectivity in 2003 vs 2010 via The Opte Project:
2003: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110263#
2010: https://equipping4eministry.com/2015/03/05/a-visual-look-at-...
Unfortunately opte.org appears to be down at the moment (the irony) so I had to dig these ones up. To me, this is a visualization of what the current status quo is as far as those in power "addressing" the issue of content.
If you can get 99% of the people using the same websites that are compliant with what the governments think are okay, then the 1% doesn't matter too much. So we saw things quietly shifting toward this paradigm. The way I see it is that the <1% who know how to use the dark web are going to not matter to the governments too much, as long as that number of people stays low. Significant numbers of 4chan and 8chan users and others migrating might raise that number to a point where you'll start to see more proactive measures taken.
But actions like these taken by Australia and NZ (using iron instead of velvet) will only accelerate the number of people interested in alternatives, and would therefore undermine the status quo strategy I outlined above.
Anyway none of those are going to be as big an issue as when people start to share stuff on freenet, if only because when they are forced to put it there, there is no filter between them and untraceable child porn.
I think they'd be happier with the policy of, "if you don't like it, leave" than trying to appease others.
Also people need to realize chan culture. Each board may as well be its own website. 4chan hosts /pol/, it also hosts /lgbt/. 4chan's moderation (rather, lack of) is being seen as an issue because of how heavily moderated the internet has become in the past 20 years.
Reddit, the "bastion of free speech", bans every subreddit that gets in the way of advertisement money, giving Voat more popularity. 4chan, "a bastion of free speech", banned #Gamergate discussion which gave 8chan its rise to popularity.
I'd rather have extremists on Reddit and 4chan where they can be debated and talked down to by moderates than on Voat and 8chan where they can form echo chambers. Echo chambers are a lot better at recruitment. Pushing "bad people" away where they are out of sight and out of mind hasn't been solving the problem, it has only been making it worse year over year.
if you are old enough to remember /b/ raiding Hal Turner, i'm pretty sure that same thing would have happened to Alex Jones had raiding not been banned.
I mean, I think it's horrible, but I can envision lots of functional and useful societies that are horrible based on my principles (how would you like to to be part of a hize mind?), but that doesn't make them bad in an absolute sense.
Scaled down, freedom of speech is to protect us from changing cultural and mob rule running roughshod over what we consider good and bad to the detriment of all. The law would basically just lag internet outrage by a few months or years.
Edit: This is meant to be interpreted in context, where a platform has taken a stance that it doesn't censor, and a government blocking that platform. I'm also not making a stance that anything goes, as speech inciting direct action against the law (or meant to cause a situation which is immediately and obviously unsafe) is problematic, and under what I take free speech to embody, which is freedom of thought and to express those thoughts. As absolutist as the first words sound, it's not really meant to be interpreted that way, but more as a call to acknowledge that good and bad are relative to the farthest degree, which is about as far from absolutist as you can get.
Edit 2: From closer reading, it wasn't actually a government request. The article notes that the government often issues these through the courts, but the ISPs acted on their own in this case.
Absolutism is poison.
More people died in 9/11, but those videos are all over the place, even on youtube. Those planes hitting those specific builder _were_ the message of the terrorists.
- Define innocent
- Define political
- Define evil
In way that is independent of the culture in which it takes place. It might even be possible to do so, or come close, when limited to current cultures and Humans. That's a far cry from proved as universal though. It's been quite a while since I read it, but I believe this short story[1] covers some of the ground I'm trying to express. Note: If you key off humans/aliens, I think you're missing the point.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
I think the opposite is true. It is gratifying to the logical mind to process this event through the lens of pedantic philosophical analysis, but in real life most things aren't so ambiguous and they definitely aren't ambiguous in this case.
> Define innocent
In this context I define innocent as "undeserving of abrupt and violent execution".
> Define political
In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
> Define evil
In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
Seems pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to read the story you linked (though it does seem interesting even though I am generally not a fan of yudkowsky's writings), but if you want to summarize it I don't mind addressing that summary.
Okay, you've traded innocent for undeserving. That doesn't feel any more definitive to me. Who's undeserving?
> In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
Governments are made up of the people. If they aren't enslaved, then they have some responsibility for the action of said government. It's one group of people doing something to another group. Whether it's from some government or not is irrelevant. For example, is not a non-government group advocating for the eradication of a subgroup of people evil in your reasoning? That's not political in any way.
> In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
You've already stated morality is relative in your first comment. You're relying on a relative assessment to claim something as universal.
> Seems pretty straightforward.
It seems fairly shaky to me.
I think 4chan has gone too far on this one. They should ban neonazi propaganda. -- the grandparent
In that case, you're for free speech in principle, but not in practice.
Which is fair, given that free speech in practice means being willing to commit felonies.
I'm not sure I follow. What "free speech" do you think is currently a felony in the US?
It's the "hate speech" label that gets complicated based on who defines it. Many who claim things are hate speech today also use hate speech themselves (following your definition of suppression based on race) to shout down and ban others.
It shows just how complex this situation is and why "hate speech" is precisely the type of speech that needs defense in the first place because it's mostly rooted in defiance and disagreement, not outright hate.
No. The 1st amendment of the US constitution is about government interference - the idea of free speech is broader than that.
Yes, it does. It has to, otherwise free speech is defined as any arbitrary level of censorship a government allows, and one could say North Korea has just as much "free speech" as the US.
Now, I'm not making an argument that free speech as such is preferable or even feasible in a civil society, or that censorship per se is wrong, and I'm definitely not making the typical slippery slope argument that any form of censorship will inevitably lead to tyranny.
However, free speech has to be defined as a constant to mean anything objective.
and
> it's all culturally defined.
contradict each other completely, right?
Everyone is for free speech, it just everyone has a different idea of what that means (as you say)
If you're "for free speech as long as it's accepted within my culture" then you're not for free speech. I did clarify a bit in my original comment what I was going for though.
I don't believe 4chan will ever share this sentiment with you.
When they block Facebook for streaming it live, then I'll be impressed.
Should Aus block sms, WhatsApp, and iMessage because the content gets re-shared there too? Should they block Google because you can find links to the content there?
A decent method of side-stepping ISP DNS is to run Unbound DNS on your home router or a server in your home, if you can.
An example snippet from the configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this:
And you can view it's status with unbound-control: This method of caching can also slightly improve the privacy of the people using your network. You get the bonus of a local low latency cache, and requests are distributed among multiple destinations, slightly reducing the marketing benefits of running those public DNS servers.You can also enable TCP and TLS for recursive servers that support DoT (DNS over TLS). I prefer this over DoH, as everything in your home can benefit from it, not just your browser. Some of the servers mentioned above listen on TCP 853 for TLS. Just google "Unbound DNS TLS" There are some examples on Calomel as well. [1]
Here is an example snippet using TLS: (not the full config)
And here [2] are a small list of public servers that support DoT[1] - https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_recursive_name_server
>countries block 4chan
makes total sense
I don't remember what social platforms and governments did about those because I made it a point to avoid them so there was no chance of seeing the horror.
Honestly, who needs the shit popping back in their head during any random moment?
It seems that if the message is supported (attack a foreign country) the populace will put up with a lot. And it doesn't take anything (just words) to be censored if they disagree with you.
No need for that, 4chan is a free for all. It's where I saw most ISIS execution videos.
A better comparison would be videos produced by terrorist organizations which use 9/11 footage to promote their own views: that would be something I could see being argued for a ban.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to ban host sites under certain conditions - I just think the analogy is just way too disparate to be viable.
There are specialized uses, but for most of us, I'm skeptical that it's important to have video of news events as they happen. If nobody caught 9/11 on video, what would be different?
For many years, no cameras were allowed in courtrooms or in Congress. It seems like that was fine?
Now imagine that the same unfounded rumors start and sites are barred from displaying the videos so people can "make up their own mind".
There will always be conspiracy theories but hiding the footage, IMHO, will increase it dramatically.
To be clear, it's terrible footage and I think it's good FB, Youtube, and other private sites are choosing to bar it from their platforms.
But I worry that in the long run, if you start doing things like banning any domain that hosts it, you'll feed into some of the worst elements of the internet.
Package it with a safety curriculum, and people should watch it to know what to do. In particular: For the most part, those people in the video who ran, lived, those who tried to drop low, or froze up, died. (There were a couple of exceptions.)
Additionally, one guy tried to attack the shooter and was killed. But it was just one guy, everyone else was too scared. If instead they had all attacked, some would have died, but not as many.
(It sounds like I'm blaming them, I'm not.)
There are a lot of safety lessons in that video, and people should watch it.
Prior to this established hijacking procedure and expectation was cooperate, you’ll be flowen to some foreign country. There’ll be a demand for such and such prisoners to be released. A negotiation. Eventually the passengers will be released. As soon as people knew the planes were being used as weapons and this wasn’t the hijackings of past the fought back.
It didn’t require video.
If you normalize an attack like this to the point that you start training the general populace for its (statistically unlikely) occurrence, you have effectively made terrorism in this form that much more effective.
I think you overestimate how common this style of mass shooting are outside of war zones. Even in places where gun violence is high mass shootings are incredibly rare[2].
Between 1966 and 2012 there were 18 mass shootings in the country with the second most count[1].
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...
[2]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/theres-a-new-global-rank...
This guy maybe was trained... but who knows, 10 people fighting for their lives of their families and kids would be scary to face.
But those 5 people would have to take the increased risk of getting killed, which is difficult to convince than just run. Also the standard safety norms, says to do not indulge with the attacker.
Those men let women and children die around them without even trying to save them.
Imagine if you are trapped in a room with your family, women and children and a gunman is coming. Would you tell your family to just lay down and wait to die? And you wouldn't try to do anything at all?
Also, I think you may be looking at this through the wrong frame. It's well known in the physiology of trauma that the body shuts down in overwhelming situations. That's the freeze part of fight, flight or freeze.
I think you would have commented how I did if you have had your life threatened before, and now see how docile/weak our modern society has made us. It's a really dangerous place to be in.
I foresee us being pushed around by anyone with any sort of authority at all in the future, and the idea of protesting will come to end and some form/version of government will be the last one of it's kind and we will all just accept it, like it seems we are being trained for.
Edit: I had just recently watched this retched video before commenting here, as I see way to often people making a clear stance with limited or no information to base it on. It was disturbing and I feel my comments are justified. If anyone else knows the entirety of the contents of the video and are not disturbed emotionally, something is wrong with them.
I tried to watch it. I had to stop the video as he entered the mosque before he fired a shot.
My heart started racing and i felt sick. it was such a pedestrian build up.
They'll take away freedom in an instant won't they? Censor it! Take the guns!
This is fucked
Shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theatre has always been illegal.
That former group has disappeared, and 4chan has become the biggest echo chamber on the Internet. There are stretches of hours and thousands of posts where there isn't a single dissenting political opinion.
The irreverence of 4chan was always the appeal. It has morphed into a lockstep belief system in a hero figure. What's the point of a website with anonymous posts and no rules if everyone is carefully agreeing with each other?
Basically, the idea of being racist is so absurd, that by being ironically racist I'm poking fun at the racists, not the races.
It's not a completely ridiculous notion (though it's abused heavily); satire is a common tactic for comedy. Clearly people go too far, and I don't think it's a good excuse to say "it's just satire".
I'm not exactly sure where we draw the line socially. I don't really have a problem with something like The Colbert Report, but I also really hate the "shitlord" movement that seems to be happening.
Ten years ago, in white suburbia, saying “nigger” was worse than murdering someone. It was clear that a social feedback system had developed where the least racist person was considered most virtuous, leading to people doing all kinds of rediculous things in order to be least racist, the denial of common sense and logic and true statistics became like a thorn in the mind of anyone who was not swayed by herd mentality.
It was in this atmosphere of deadly seriousness about racism that it became outrageously funny to say racist things. Just like every other anti-racism effort by white affluent people, it only made everything worse and made racism funny. I guarantee that without this atmosphere of hyper-anti-racism, people would not have been saying “nigger” on early 4chan.
As 4chan got more popular the average iq went down and the proportion of people that really meant it increased.
Overall, even web search engines and ISPs need to be vigilant during indexing/hosting of websites and come up with some method of periodic review of websites being visited/hosted and tag them as appropriate or non appropriate.
Somebody profiting from somebody's death or misery or injury is not cool and goes against the very grain of civility.
This is a great tool for stifling opposing politics of _any_ kind. And seems like the easiest way to start an oppressive tyranny than a method of stopping terrorist propaganda.
Psychos don't need videos like this. Just watch movies, there are many that are far worse than the New Zealand shooting videos... (and plenty have propaganda in them as well)
Your argument requires beforehand authoritarian capture of all branches of the NZ government to make sense. At which point the whole suggestion is moot.
The actual "really bad" results of this is years away still. But this is how freedom of speech is stripped away. Under the guise of safety, one tiny piece at a time.
Would George Washington have fought the British if the British had succeeded is censoring every pamphlet? Would India have succeeded in escaping the power of Britain if Ghandi couldn't speak openly?
If the cost of censorship is tyranny world wide, it's not worth it.
We _need_ freedom of speech, even if it allows kooks the same platform, that is cost we should be willing to pay.
Viewing this as a NZ only issue is thinking small. There's discussions about free speech in the US and all over the world about this issue.
> This is a great tool for stifling opposing politics of _any_ kind. And seems like the easiest way to start an oppressive tyranny than a method of stopping terrorist propaganda.
You’re talking about a tool in New Zealand you clearly knew nothing about but presumed was some kind of censorship you’d find in a dictatorship. You’ve been corrected on that. Then your concern was far away authoritarian regimes. Now your concern is the US and yet you bring up nothing related to how New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature’s classification applies to potential US pathways into tyranny.
Both NZ and the US and all other countries are becoming more oppressive every year. Censorship (the tool of tyranny and dictators) is constantly be pushed to "protect" someone.
If you think NZ won't change because of these events you are deceiving yourself.
I guess it's the norm in Australia and New Zealand now as well. And let's not forget that Sci-Hub has been blocked in a bunch of countries (including the US) and their domains have been taken away [1].
It looks to me that Australia, in particular, is the testing ground for FIVE EYES censorship efforts. Australia recently passed a draconian anti-encryption law [2] which will impact a number of multi-national companies. Other members of FIVE EYES are gauging the fallout from this and are probably waiting for some tragedy to strike before they can enact similar laws.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Legal_situation
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18130391/encryption-law-a...
Australia doesn't have free speech in so far as the US does with the first amendment. Australia doesn't have a citizen Bill of Rights either. This combined with Australian's penchant for not taking risks does bode well for using it as a Five Eyes testing ground to remove what some would consider basic rights.
This is not a a daily instance of "he says", "she says" offensiveness. This is an act of terror, and these platform served as a propaganda media which ought to stopped.
Should we ban security companies from using the video for training purposes or to design better security or anti-terror measures?
Should we ban people from sharing the attacker's name?
Should we ban news agencies from even reporting on attacks like this? Keep in mind that news-coverage especially has been shown to incite copy-cat attacks.
Edit: Also, facebook pro-actively took down the video as soon as they became aware.
Is it really, though, or do people just like the slippery slope fallacy a bit too much?
Does everyone really think that if a government bans 4chan, no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else because there's precedent now and nothing can be done? That's not how societies or governments tend to work.
Don't allow it to happen in the first place and it won't happen. History is rife with examples.
We should be glad he has no such power.
The government cannot direct the rating and censoring of material in NZ. It’s an independent commission operating under the strict legislation that establishes it and checked by the judicial system. If NZ had a Trump he could not order anything to be censored. That’s not how it works.
Like a lot of parliamentary systems, NZ agencies and commissions operate independently under the laws that establish them. In the US it’s very different, each new President comes in an appoints a huge number of positions that direct these agencies and those positions have tremendous political influence of them. Hence you can have a new EPA director appointed by someone like Trump who comes in expressly to cut down the EPA and who answers to Trump for his marching orders. This may be where some of this confusion comes from.
Is it really, though, or do people just like the strawman fallacy a bit too much?
Well, strawmen are often involved in the invocation of slippery slope arguments, so yes, probably.
I didn't invoke any strawman. A slippery slope argument is, by definition, precisely as I described - that a particular degenerative state (be it social, or political) will inevitably be reached starting from some innocent and minor consequence, and that this trend cannot be reversed or corrected for.
You know, like falling down a slope that's slippery.
Except in the degenerative state that you talked about. No reasonable person has said that the censoring of this one case would lead to censorship of everything, but that's exactly what you decided on for the degenerative state.
> no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else
Try to backpedal harder.
"Oh - don't worry, this time in human history it won't be a slippery slope!" is not a very compelling argument when we have historical precedent of the opposite being true time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again.
Do we? Because we appear to be in one of several threads about how the ease with which certain content spreads around the internet makes attempts at censorship futile, and I can legally buy a copy of Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries and read the Unabomber's manifesto and all kinds of stuff generally agreed upon to be "bad things," and I don't see the vast amount of "good things" being censored everywhere as a result of the slippery slope of censorship.
Censorship is applied in different degrees in different places, yes, China is not the US is not Europe, but that doesn't signal the universal certainty that "time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again" seems to imply.
Maybe the slippery slope is just, like, a tiny slope? Maybe it's a slope but it's not as slippery as you think? Maybe there's more than one slope?
Or is it just a matter of time until the boot crushes all of our heads, or something?
I would like to ask that you take a moment to reflect on this statement ... ... ... Okay now moving on.
Who's to say they need to censor "good things"? They only need to censor things that you don't agree with censoring. I won't pretend to know your political standings but I can guarantee you that your opinion and the governments opinion on what should be censored will eventually reach a disagreement.
People tend to give governments powers during a time of need or when they are frightened often in exchange for "increased safety". A perceived increase of safety that may - or may not - result in more safety but with 100% certainty results in giving up certain rights or freedoms.
For the easiest example of exchanging things for a perceived increase in safety. What do you think of the TSA? Is the intrusiveness and racism in the 'random selections' actually resulting in increased safety and security? Or is it mostly security theater? It tramples over peoples' privacy and sometimes violates their rights for a perceived increase of safety but the failure rate is so high that it is meaningless. The government isn't going to get rid of that power (the TSA) so easily. After all, we gave it to them and they'll gladly keep up the security theater in exchange.
The U.S signed away large portions of our privacy and removed many checks & balances placed on the government after the 9/11 attacks. The USA-PATRIOT Act was forced through in a time of need where people were frightened in exchange for safety and security.
By the time you realize you've given the government too much power it's far too late to take any of it back. History is full of examples and history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Russian here. It's exactly how ours works.
But, I didn't want to pose an allegation like that with so few facts.
I saw this video, I made myself watch it. (judge me)
Then I went back to my tv show. There were scenes of soldiers attacking the "heroes" in a bowling alley, and it made me horrified and sick. And I realized Hollywood is glorifying this shit. Hollywood is promoting shootings like this.
An hour before, and this tv show was entertainment to me. Now I feel like a twisted sicko for enjoying violent entertainment just like what is in the New Zealand video.
This video changed me, it made me see violence in a new light. It's sick to be entertained by re-enactments of this in the same way as the original.
Besides, I think there are legitimate uses of this footage. We live in a world where mass shootings are increasing. But there is no public awareness in countering these situations. I think at this point we should train students from a young age, and adults, on what to do if in an active shooter situation. The fact that this isn't done is incredibly scary to me. I personally saw the footage, so that I can potentially pick up things from it and potentially save my life if god forbid I end up in a situation like that.
I am so incredibly saddened and frustrated by the lack of training for these situations in our society. With a proper response I think so many lives could have been saved. In this instance, killer went into the mosque and all the people formed 2 giant clumps/clusters around the 2 door exists on either side of the central entrance the killer entered from. Killer just unloaded on the right hand side cluster, then left hand side cluster. He faced practically zero opposition. One brave man successfully tackled him to the ground but by that time it was already too late.
I understand that in a panic situation like that it's fight or flight and most people understandably lose their heads and try to flee, and it is very hard to coordinate a counter attack to something like this. But this is why I say we need to bring this type of training in schools and in our day to day lives. I know it's a morbid reality where such a thing is necessary but alas such is the reality right now. If everyone had rushed the killer instead of forming 2 giant convenient clusters for the killer to unload into, I think so many lives would have been saved.
What? How is this good, this is obviously extremely bad. Which you also state?