Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view.
Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
If there is some notion that we have no choice but to enable other's views then our own views become secondary to them. We no longer have absolute control over expressing the views we agree or disagree with.
Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
“Free speech” in the moral sense is exactly that people who operate civil infrastructure shouldn’t use their privilege for censorship.
So... people who believe in “free speech” as a moral value will disagree with your first paragraph — and hence, your entire post.
You assume your conclusion, so your argument fails to be persuasive.
“I disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” is a maxim of free speech — and a bold declaration of the exact opposite of your message: if we want a free society, we have a moral duty to aid the freedom of others — not suppress it.
I guess you have a problem with news editorial decisions then? For example, Fox News have a strong bias running through their programming. Isn't that a kind of implicit censorship of ideas?
Opinions are biased and specific people and programs are biased on Fox News and many other channels, but to be a journalist you literally have to correct false statements you make. This makes Fox News as reliable as all other stations. People often post memes about Fox News or CNN saying something wildly stupid but don’t realize they are posting a literal opinion from an opinion show not news from a news show.
> but to be a journalist you literally have to correct false statements you make
What? No, you absolutely do not have to correct false statements you make to be a journalist. Reputable publications post retractions and clarifications because that is how they maintain their reputation, but it is in no way a requirement.
You actually do or you can lose your license to broadcast.
The FCC is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press. It is, however, illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news, and the FCC may act on complaints if there is documented evidence of such behavior from persons with direct personal knowledge.
This is also besides slander and libel, lying about an individual or organization.
> It is, however, illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news, and the FCC may act on complaints if there is documented evidence of such behavior from persons with direct personal knowledge.
What particular laws are you referring to?
> This is also besides slander and libel, lying about an individual or organization.
Sure, you can get sued for that. But getting sued for libel or defamation doesn't mean you can't be a journalist anymore. A journalist who loses a libel lawsuit can keep writing even if they've been sued into oblivion.
Note how “to defend your right to say it” actually makes sense in its normal context of positive and negative rights. One can in theory fight to defend every person’s right to say what they want to say, because saying something generally does not preclude anyone else from also saying something.
However, these modifications doesn’t work the same way: “to defend your right to be trending on Twitter” or “to defend your right to be on CNN tonight.” These things are still forms of speech, of course, and yet their exercise does in fact preclude others from likewise exercising. It doesn’t make sense do defend every person’s right to be trending on Twitter.
The response is that Twitter is more like a neighborhood bar than CNN — and yeah, it would be pretty weird to exclude people from the bar’s karaoke or comedy night based on their political beliefs. Being able to speak your mind at the bar (or other neighborhood center) is exactly what free speech is about.
Actually, it would be illegal to ban people based on politics (as Twitter does) where I live (Seattle), as doing so violates rules for public accommodations which require the owner (a private company) not to discriminate based on political ideology. Rules for private establishments to enforce public access and equality are normal.
Whether or not you think it makes sense to defend the right to be trending on Twitter depends on whether you view it like the bar (mic night open to all) or like CNN (editorial control).
Of course, if Twitter is like CNN and not the bar, they should lose copyright protections — those aren’t meant for edited anthologies (like CNN).
Disclaimer: I don't really use Twitter, so my understanding of its mechanics might be wrong.
Isn't "trending on Twitter" a popularity contest? As in something's "trending" because more people (users, as opposed to Twitter the company or their moderators) have chosen to interact with that tweet instead of some other?
I think that "to defend your right to say it", in this context, does mean "to defend your right to be trending on Twitter". What I understand by that is that anyone has a right to not be artificially prevented from trending, such as hiding the tweet from other users (censorship) or "not counting the votes" correctly which won't have a tweet "trend" even though it's the most retweeted / replied to.
As I've said on another comment on this thread, my tweet is my speech, it's not Twitter's. And if the "trending" is the effect of the users' actions, having a tweet become trending is the collective speech of the users, not twitter's.
It's pretty much the same thing with CNN. Having someone on "cnn tonight" is CNN's speech. They choose to have person A instead of person B.
Twitter removing a tweet or otherwise preventing it from trending is like some external entity – e.g. the cable company – preventing CNN from having person C on the show because they don't agree with person C's speech.
In my opinion, in this scenario, CNN is like the Twitter user, not like Twitter the company. Just because they have some third party on the show doesn't make CNN any less of a publisher of speech. Just as if a Twitter user chooses to quote someone instead of someone else (as opposed to twitting an "original thought" or "own opinion").
I think you’re making a common mistake, which is to assume there’s some “natural” algorithm that determines which tweets trend, and that human intervention is “unnatural” and unfair.
But on the contrary, Twitter’s trending feature (and indeed all distribution on all public social media networks I’m aware of) is active promotion of speech. Humans at Twitter are deciding which tweets trend, regardless of whether they’re doing so manually or using algorithms (which they designed) to automate the process.
Even a very simple change to a very simple ranking algorithm, like changing the relative value of likes/comments/etc. or the time decay of whatever values are being counted, can significantly change which content gets promoted. These are choices that humans make at Twitter.
> I think you’re making a common mistake, which is to assume there’s some “natural” algorithm that determines which tweets trend, and that human intervention is “unnatural” and unfair.
That's partly true. I think it's "unfair", or rather disingenuous, only when the company claims there's no manual intervention. I wouldn't really have an issue with a company saying "we're looking to promote this or that speech". I think no one really takes issue that Democrat or Republican conventions don't have speakers from the opposing parties. They are clearly labeled "Democrat", so people expect this going in.
I think the crux of the matter is these platforms pretend being an unbiased space for people to communicate, when they clearly aren't. Or rather, they aren't as open anymore. Once people flocked to them, and they became a common place of exchange, the rules drastically changed.
Why did the rules change? Twitter, and any other private company, has never been under any legal obligation in it's business to provide a public space and it's not clear how you'd even define them as providing one (seeing as how the servers are in Twitter's datacenters, using Twitter's network, paid for by Twitter's revenue).
Literally everything on Twitter is Twitter's property other then where governed by intellectual property law agreements and even then it's still someone's private property they have a right to control!
A country club being very popular doesn't suddenly make it a public space.
I'm not a Twitter user so don't know exactly, but from what I see being discussed, it seems to me that there used to be more tolerance towards certain groups (apparently right wing, but probably others, too). But maybe that's just it, the rules themselves haven't changed, they're just more strictly enforced now (I actually don't know).
I'd say that what they're doing is obviously not illegal, or else we probably wouldn't be having this conversation because it would be much more clear-cut.
However, it's more of a "moral" issue, for lack of a better term. They advertised the platform as a medium for everybody to exchange. Now that a lot of people have gone there because of this advertisement, it has become more or less a public utility.
Now, again, I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal, they are not legally a utility, there are other avenues for people to communicate, etc.
> A country club being very popular doesn't suddenly make it a public space.
While I think you're right in the general case, I can't help but think there's a question of measure involved.
The country club will advertise exclusivity. Even if it's just for pose, and it's actually easy to gain membership, it will actively not pretend it's open to any and everybody. Also, it will require people be somewhat close geographically and will have a fairly limited reach. If the club said "we're open to everybody, we want to encourage public conversation" [0], then I'd consider it the same way I do Twitter.
Contrast this with Twitter, which explicitly advertises its openness.[0] And when you can subscribe to Twitter just by having a random browser and an internet connection, wherever you are in the world, and when pretty much anyone and their grandmother are using it to communicate, and when there's an assumption (be it misguided!) that Twitter is a public space, I think it's at least worth it to consider the question.
The answer may well be a firm "no", but it may also be "woops, this is actually something new, which we hadn't considered in our (quite old) laws. Maybe we should do something about it".
To sum it all up, I think Twitter, FB, etc are all a fairly new kind of "thing". They are private entities in that they are funded, operated, etc by a private company and with that private company's goal in mind. But their operations are clearly designed to attract the most people who then communicate on their platform.
Just as we regulated what can and can't be done by a telephone company or an electrical company (all private entities!) when those came about, I wouldn't be shocked for there to be some kind of specific regulation for those platforms, more than "just don't break any laws". It seems pretty obvious to me that trying to apply pre-existing models to them doesn't work all that well.
---
[0] From about.twitter.com, emphasis mine:
> We serve the * public* conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.
> We believe real change starts with conversation. Here, your voice matters. Come as you are and together we’ll do what’s right (not what’s easy) to serve the public conversation.
It is extremely odd to find so many on Hacker News arguing for laws to say "that server you own and run in your house that hosts a small web forum...that's a public space now, you'll not be deleting things from it anymore". Because there's no way somehow Twitter is a public space but any random phpBB isn't - they both ask for an email address to sign up and can reject me at that point if they don't like my provider.
There are no laws governing how a corporation defines it's "values" as an entity and it certainly has no need to follow that - freedom of speech is my freedom to lie through my teeth publicly about everything I believe, for example.
So again: Twitter has always been able to talk about how it's for things, but at the end of the day it's Twitter's garden and we all play in it.
> It is extremely odd to find so many on Hacker News arguing for laws to say "that server you own and run in your house that hosts a small web forum...that's a public space now,
I mean if for you the scale simply doesn't come into equation, then yeah, I guess Twitter, serving millions and millions of users and being used for communication by many public figures is exactly the same thing as a random server in someone's basement serving 100 people talking about some niche subject.
Of course there has to be a line drawn to distinguish the two, and I don't know where it should be drawn. I think it's a tough call.
But then, in the case of FB and Twitter, maybe this has "run out of hand"? Maybe those platforms became public forum in spite of the companies' wishes? Let's assume that's the case. Does that mean we shouldn't do anything about it?
> There are no laws governing how a corporation defines it's "values" as an entity and it certainly has no need to follow that - freedom of speech is my freedom to lie through my teeth publicly about everything I believe, for example.
It is, but your doing that exposes you to my freedom of calling you a liar. Hence, the "moral" component I talked about in my previous post.
I think where the government should come in is when you're trying to get everyone inside your private space, to use it as a general communications medium (as opposed to niche, interest-based), and then you cut off those you don't like for whatever reason. Would you be OK with a utility, say the electric company, denying you service because they don't agree with your – non-illegal! – use of their electricity? If not, why's Twitter different?
You've avoided answering the question: if Twitter and other private platforms are suddenly "public spaces" due to scale...what does that mean? Practically? These are businesses with costs, expenses, legal liabilities (i.e. copyright and defamation law), advertisers to keep happy for revenue.
You're demanding the government step in and nationalize a business which in no way has a monopoly on a concept which has never been protected - the right to a broadcast platform.
It probably means changing laws to allow users to hold internet platforms liable for harms caused. All parties can then have their day(s) in court. That seems fair to me.
I'm not talking about nationalizing anything, just defining what they are. In the particular case of Twitter and FB, I'd be on the side of declaring them utilities. They wouldn't be liable for what people say there as long as it's otherwise legal. In return, they wouldn't be allowed to cut people off without due process (in an actual court, not by some contractor following an order because the CEO doesn't like someone).
> Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
This succinctly expresses a feeling of mine I hadn't been able to put into words so beautifully. Thank you!
The article made the distinction between empirical "can" you censor and normative "should". His point is that censorship or cancelling isn't effective.
Choosing not to be part of an audience (and encouraging others not to be) is not the same as denying others from being part of one they wish to be part of.
I think you have a point in that no one has a right to force me to listen to their speech.
However, I think that in the case of the monopolies being discussed here, it's different. The issue is that they "enable" speech in a generic way. They don't enable this or that speech in particular. They also don't force A to listen to B's speech. If anything, they do the complete opposite, what with the whole "echo chamber" situation. I think this is the whole meat of the "platform vs publisher" debate.
A newspaper or other media have to actively "enable" something. When they publish speech A, they choose to not publish speech B. It's often an "either / or", at least for questions of space. They produce whatever speech they print / show. It's theirs, it's their point of view.
However, Facebook, Twitter and other similar companies only put out a tool. This tool is then used by this or that person to speak this or that argument. FB doesn't actively and directly help speaker A anymore that they help speaker B. Also, as an FB user, no one forces you to listen to B's speech if you don't care for it. Your right not to listen to speech you disagree with is not infringed. If I publish a story on FB, it's my story, my speech, not Facebook's. Just as if I shout in the town square it's my speech that I shout. It doesn't become the mayor's speech because it's in his town or the square's architect because he built it in such a way that my voice can physically be heard.
If you consider that FB has some right to prevent people from speaking "wrong" views, then why stop at FB? We should come up with ways to help other companies to prevent their product from being used for speech and other actions they don't agree with. Like the power company. Maybe they don't like their electricity being used to spread some "wrong" ideas. I'm pretty sure the local bakery isn't all that happy either to support some X-ist fanatic.
The argument is we draw the line at public versus private. Elected governments are not allowed to restrict speech, but private companies are. I don’t subscribe to this view, but it’s what the libertarian paternalists think.
> However, Facebook, Twitter and other similar companies only put out a tool. This tool is then used by this or that person to speak this or that argument. FB doesn't actively and directly help speaker A anymore that they help speaker B.
Facebook actually deliberately manipulates people's feeds in order to promote content that will increase engagement. Twitter does the same by default.
> Just as if I shout in the town square it's my speech that I shout. It doesn't become the mayor's speech because it's in his town or the square's architect because he built it in such a way that my voice can physically be heard.
The town square is public property. If you instead decide to step inside a private business and shout they can have you removed from the premises.
> Like the power company. Maybe they don't like their electricity being used to spread some "wrong" ideas.
Electricity is regulated as a utility and as such wouldn't be allowed to cut service for that reason. A bakery could refuse to bake cakes with swatiskas on them if they so chose for example. Where the private business's choices on refusing service runs into trouble is when they refuse service based on a customer's race/ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.
I feel like the choice on how to respond is less than it ever was, at least for myself.
It is 100% infeasible for me to contract any of the canon taught in my office: diversity is a top priority, women are oppressed, etc. I don’t even disagree with all of it, but I do know that I don’t have the option of doing anything but earnestly nodding my head at the diversity events.
> Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
This doesn't work if every platform - whether they have market power or not - are compelled to censor by mobs. Most recently, Glenn Greenwald wrote about journalists trying to get Substack to censor its authors [1]. Well before, Signal employees tried to make their company have an anti-extremism policy [2].
The fact of the matter is, most people don't know enough about censorship to fight against it, and so small groups of dedicated people can create enough of an uproar in their circles about something to make it untenable for any major platform to speak about it, simply because those platforms now have to contend with a vocal minority pushing a narrative. This has been a very common tactic in India, where I'm from: interest groups will object to a movie or a book loudly enough to de-facto, and even sometimes, de-jure censor it. Most recently, a Netflix series lead to a controversy as it dared to show teenagers doing drugs. This lead to Netflix being notified buy the Indian equivalent of the CPS, and was directly caused by people complaining about the show on Twitter. [3]
There is a pardadox of tolerance with respect to free speech. We cannot expect to maintain freedom of expression if we treat everyone who actually expresses themselves as a sinner.
>There is a pardadox of tolerance with respect to free speech. We cannot expect to maintain freedom of expression if we treat everyone who actually expresses themselves as a sinner.
In every thread about free speech, the people against it cite the 'paradox of tolerance'. Or half of it anyway. They invariably leave off the back half, which is pointedly anti-censorship:
>Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — *In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.* But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
There are multiple issues with free speech no matter what, and some of them are the result of closed platforms that have too much power over communication channels, but ultimately need to moderate to avoid turning their platform into 8chan. I agree with you that many complaints about free speech on the internet have weird caveats like... You should have the right to say whatever you want without criticism or you should have the right to engage in rational debate or play devil's advocate on any topic even if another party doesn't want to. Like you said this might make the free speech proponent happier, but ends up limiting the speech of the person that doesn't want to engage in that way.
So, if AT&T cut out phone service from union sympathizers, that would be OK, because they are just expressing their right to free speech?
I think there is such a thing as critical communication infrastructure, and even if it run by private companies, it should be protected from censorship. Whether all of FB or just private messaging fall under this is more debatable, but there have to be clear limits on what a company that facilitates communication between 1 billion people can do.
So if there were 50 companies, and all of them censored you for saying something really unpopular, would things be any better?
Critical infrastructure must be legally protected from censorship and (private, mandate-less) eavesdropping. Whether it is run by a monopoly or many small companies is immaterial.
>Critical infrastructure must be legally protected from censorship and (private, mandate-less) eavesdropping. Whether it is run by a monopoly or many small companies is immaterial.
Well said.
What we have today is an oligopoly on speech by a small handful of ideologically identical technotyrants who have managed to circumvent the first amendment without ever having had to so much as introduce a bill to Congress.
Critical infrastructure has never been regarded as a public platform.
No one has been prevented from buying their own internet connection or DNS names and running their own site over the "common carrier" status internet backbone infrastructure.
It's just a lot less useful when your goal is radicalization and you need to hit the widest possible audience to get conversions.
Is that guaranteed? Parler has found that the machines their code ran on could be taken away for having bad opinions. I'm not a defender of fascists, if anything I lean towards being happy when their megaphone is taken away, even when they receive the occasional punch, but the precedent this has set with the power of these companies is frightening for anyone.
What if Amazon will refuse to do with business with people who support unions next? It no longer seems impossible to ke.
Amazon contracts haven't changed, they always have had the right to drop you for any reason.
Amazon is not a common carrier: the cloud, other people's data centers, have no legal requirement to be neutral about what runs on them (and it's not even clear how this would work given the difference between compute and communications).
First of all, there is a difference between current law (which means that what AWS did with Parler is indeed perfectly legal) and a theoretical "perfectly fair" law, which is essentially what people mean when they say such and such should/should not be legal.
Secondly, there are limits even in current law on what grounds a business can refuse to do business. For example, Amazon could not refuse to do business with someone because of their skin color, or because of their religion. Extending this in more of a free speech direction (where companies could be prevented from refusing to do business with organizations whose message they do not condone) is not unthinkable (though there are pros and cons).
AT&T is regulated as a common carrier and there are federal laws that prevent them from discriminating against their customers. I don't think classifying Twitter and Facebook as common carriers would work out very well for those companies, and I'd imagine they don't want that either.
Maybe there is a different set of regulations that could be applied to those platforms beyond something like Section 230. But the side effects of that could cause serious damage to those companies, depending on how the regulation was crafted.
There's no legal right, unless you are a government employee (who btw routinely censor anyway, e.g. any state university with a content-based speech policy is violating the law). But there's very much a moral right and moral obligation - if you are in a position of power, as people leading the high-tech industry and prominent politicians are, you are responsible for maintaining the society that promoted you to that power in good health.
And good health of the society requires free exchange of ideas and freedom to debate this ideas without fear of being persecuted and punished. Yes, even if you're end up being wrong - in fact, freedom to be wrong (excluding, of course, recognition that you're wrong) is vital to any proper debate, since if being wrong implies one's destruction and punishment, no serious and honest debate is possible, and no serious and honest truth-seeking through free exchange of ideas is possible either. You'd either fear to express your ideas, if you're powerless, or use your power to suppress other's ideas and punish them, if you're powerful - and that would have no relation with whose ideas are better.
Only when the exchange of ideas are free, and only when ideas can participate in this competition without prior approval by powerful incumbents, any healthy democratic society is possible.
And yes, whoever in power in such society, which now includes the big tech leadership, have moral if not legal responsibility for it - a responsibility that they are not only neglecting but blatantly violating right now. Censorship by powerful monopolies is as wrong as censorship by the government, and we need to stop hiding behind this stupid idea "but it's not government, so we can ignore it".
So in the case that participants on a social platform engage in trolling, harassment, and abuse (sometimes with bots), that company should not do anything? If some people who are attempting to exchange ideas and debate in good faith, are shouted down by people hurling epithets and death threats, the platform owners should shrug their shoulders?
When people openly promote and even plan violent attacks against others big tech should just leave things be?
I think we have more than ample proof of Big Tech companies blocking people not for abuse/bots but for expressing viewpoints that the platform management deems politically unacceptable. So let's not pretend that fighting bot abuse, spam, violent threats, etc. is the same as political censorship - the platforms can do one without the other, and actually have been doing it successfully up to about 2019, when they started increasingly censor by political views. And now political bans are pretty much commonplace. Once can pretend that it's all "fighting disinformation" and "preventing violence" but nobody is buying it anymore. It's political censorship, sometimes openly partisan censorship, and nothing more.
And you don't have the freedom to measure the presumed audience reach of someone's speech.
Furthermore, your calculation of someone's reach isn't entitled to be the standard of how reduction of reach is to be applied.
In fact, you don't even own the audience or the platform that you claim you have the right to deny others from using.
You have absolutely no say, sway, or stake in anything you are discussing. You're just hiding behind a Google lobbyist's buzzphrase and pretending you are targeting people you don't like.
By that argument, the US "monopoly or near monopoly" phone company AT&T during the Vietnam War could have decided that anyone who spoke on the phone about their opposition to the Vietnam War was unpatriotic and canceled their telephone service, and leftists who so often now make the argument you're making would have supported their right to do so. "The private phone companies should be allowed to enforce their terms of service prohibiting anything they consider 'hate speech' against America," explains Noam Chomsky, adding that "I don't share their opinions about the war, but it's not as if the govt-run postal service is doing it, so I don't see the problem."
The two major credit card companies that dominated could have canceled anti-war "haters'" credit cards in the name of patriotic support of the just cause, banks closed their checking accounts, the major airlines refused to fly them, and so on, and those on the left with your principled commitment to the right of "monopolies and near monopolies" to enforce their political preferences would have had no major objections--as long as it really is a general principle and not just a pretense.
Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others
And yet I suspect that this support for the "freedom" of the most powerful to silence, control, and enforce their will is not really the general, politically neutral commitment to everyone's freedom of choice that it pretends to be.
They literally could have if the technology and motivation was there, that's why they were considered a monopoly and broken up by act of the state: because the lack of a viable competitor service means that sort of consumer hostile action was possible.
Of course, in reality phone company's exchange the right to monitor what you say for common carrier status which makes them legally immune to the fact you are saying it, and credit card companies do in fact ditch whoever they want because they have no such burden.
The solution in one case is obvious (protect net neutrality) and the solution in the other case would line up with the calls for US Post to be extended to offering basic banking services to ensure an appropriate floor on the transaction market, and as a government entity would have to allow everyone to transact.
It's not clear to me what you seem to think Google, Twitter or Facebook should get in response for becoming a "public plaza" style arrangement which would be detrimental to their business model and wouldn't destroy the rest of the internet in the process? After all is a DDOS attack also free speech? A botnet? What are we going to obligate them to carry and on what basis?
> Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
The urge to preempt what an audience hears is suspect.
>Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view.
I don't disagree with this as stated. But the reality is different. When the tech-oligopoly has a mono-ideology and they all censor the same people, and then pull the rug (hosting) out from under competing platforms, and then rip up the signs (dns) pointing to alternatives, and then siege the opposing cities (payment processors ban them) it becomes a much worse problem. That moves from the theoretical to the practical.
> Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
Yes, because it's not just websites. It's infrastructure and finance colluding with the presentation layer. At what point do we all agree that it's a problem, and admit that the powerful aren't always right?
> Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view.
Free expression is a moral right.
And what is a platform anyway? A wordpress site? A twitter account? An IP address? A bank account? A megaphone? A street corner? A sign? How far are you willing to go to shut other people up because you disagree with them?
> Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
How did we turn so quickly to this view? When I was growing up, everyone would have blanched at the suggestion that attempting to "silence others" is a-okay. It wasn't that it was illegal. It was that it was a strategy that would only occur to weak, ineffectual people who were afraid to argue on the merits.
> Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
By what principle is it wrong for the government to censor? Once you've answered that, please explain how that principle magically stops at the government.
> And what is a platform anyway? A wordpress site? A twitter account? An IP address? A bank account? A megaphone? A street corner? A sign? How far are you willing to go to shut other people up because you disagree with them?
Well, I'm curious, what do you think it is?
If I run a forum or a blog, should I have to allow any comment, to be morally in the right? Let's say I run a forum dedicated to discussing Christianity, and some person keeps posting arguments that God isn't real, or posts pictures of aborted fetuses, in every thread on my forum. If free expression is a moral right, is it immoral for me to remove such content from any thread? Even threads about daily worship or about lost loved ones?
>> Like most of these rants against "censorship" they skip over people's rights to restrict speech as a form of speech itself: there is no moral (or legal) right to give people you disagree with a forum or audience to express their view.
> Free expression is a moral right.
> And what is a platform anyway? A wordpress site? A twitter account? An IP address? A bank account? A megaphone? A street corner? A sign? How far are you willing to go to shut other people up because you disagree with them? ...
> By what principle is it wrong for the government to censor? Once you've answered that, please explain how that principle magically stops at the government.
Yeah, it's a moral right, but its implementation is more complicated than a lot of people want to acknowledge.
Is it censorship for you to refuse to wear a shirt that I give you with some slogan I agree with? No. Is it censorship for you to take down a yard sign with that slogan that I placed in your front yard? No. What if you allowed someone else to put up a yard sign that you agree with? Still no.
If literally one guy owns all the land in the world, is it censorship for him to control what signs get put up? Almost certainly.
No one's going to be able to give you a pithy principle that fits in an internet comment that tells you where the censorship/not censorship line is, given the huge grey areas between those extremes. This is an area where lots of interests need to be balanced, and where reasonable people can disagree.
I never understood the point of Strafgesetzbuch section 86a. It does not make any sense to outlaw using Nazi symbols. It's like outlawing symptoms instead of caring for the illness. People will just take it underground and you will have a harder time tracking it down.
Maybe I shouldn't have mixed up two different aspects of this question. "Taking it underground" relates more to the expression of ideas as the discussed in the article. I don't see much of this in the use of the classical Nazi symbols.
On the other hand the law has been used to a ridiculuous extent in banning Nazi symbols from all sorts of cultural artifacts such as games or movies. Doesn't make any sense to me.
Its purpose was somewhat historic in that it kills any attempt to invoke their symbolism or terrible power for "legitimacy".
While nearly everyone rightfully recognizes it as terrible some see that as fear and a source of power.
Fascism is a death cult which conflates its ability to commit travesties with strength and vicarious empowerment to its supporters to make crimes against humanity heroic. Stopping the death cults from drawing upon resources for their twisted in-group is a purpose.
The constitution embedded ban means any resurrectionists can be hammered down without any credible slippery slope worries.
It is true that a new set could emerge eventually. However having to neuter their own symbols undermines their twisted claim to strength and makes them look pathetic in the same way the battle of Cable Street undermined their claims of strength - even with their warped doublethink trying to be both mighty victor against overwhelming odds and crying victim after they lost is too much.
Gangs get impressionable recruits by dealing violence to demonstrate power not being seen getting laid out after they try to attack somebody and get decked in the face.
Chess set sales were up a huge percentage when the Queen's Gambit became popular. Daenerys became a somewhat popular baby girl's name after Game of Thrones became popular. These are super simple, super obvious examples, but you can find more.
> Look: the most powerful governments, militaries, and intelligence services in the world have in recent decades tried to prevent the communications of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, using the most sophisticated digital means possible and with the full backing of various publishing and social media platforms. And yet those organizations effortlessly shared their propaganda and their rhetoric and coordinated across distance all the same.
This isn't entirely true [1]:
> As of January 2015, ISIS had reconstituted its regional accounts with strong privacy settings, allowing only a small group of known ISIS supporters to follow the accounts and read their tweets. The content of the tweets—primarily news releases, videos and photos from ISIS’s various provinces—are then disseminated by a number of other smaller accounts using hashtags. After the initial dissemination, the content is more widely distributed, but at significantly reduced levels from early 2014.
> Despite this, the number of new accounts created dropped significantly after the first round of suspensions in September (section 2.5.4), and while we do not have complete data to make a positive assessment, it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions.
Another study about the impacts of Twitter's more aggressive stance against ISIS found, "These findings support the notion that Twitter’s policy deteriorates IS followers’ ability to gain traction on the platform, likely hindering their reach to potential recruits. " [2].
A third study also concluded, "Our data showed that the costs for most pro-IS users of engaging on Twitter (in terms of deflated morale, diffused messages and persistent effort needed to maintain a public presence) now largely outweigh the benefits." [3].
Deplatforming seems to work to reduce the spread of extremist ideas, which then reduces the spread of extremist actions, based on the years of research we've apparently been doing on the topic prior to today. We can reasonably disagree on the philosophy (and this appears to largely be a think piece), but there are practical realities that cannot be ignored.
These are very good examples, but we just witnessed an even better one: Trump has been, for all practical purposes, entirely silenced, simply because Twitter deplatformed him.
edit: should have done my own research better, the profile reads:
>Reserved for the 45th President of the United States of America🇺🇸 This account is an uncensored Twitter archive and shares email statements sent by The Office of Donald J. Trump.
>As of January 2015, ISIS had reconstituted its regional accounts with strong privacy settings, allowing only a small group of known ISIS supporters to follow the accounts and read their tweets. The content of the tweets—primarily news releases, videos and photos from ISIS’s various provinces—are then disseminated by a number of other smaller accounts using hashtags. After the initial dissemination, the content is more widely distributed, but at significantly reduced levels from early 2014.
I'm sure detonating high explosives on their heads and putting bullets through most of them had nothing to do with it!
> Despite this, the number of new accounts created dropped significantly after the first round of suspensions in September (section 2.5.4), and while we do not have complete data to make a positive assessment, it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions.
Lack of something doesn't prove it's gone. So they realized they couldn't use twitter. Did that change their views? Did it change their minds? Citing a lack of participation in a hostile platform proves nothing except that twitter controls twitter.
They're not "terrorist groups", they're just following the Koran. What do you think the first 2 letters in ISIS mean?
Also, Muslims who promote traditional Islamic violence have dozens of Youtube channels today. The reason is that Youtube delegates complaints to ... Muslim moderators, who are also "just following the Koran."
If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality.
It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.
We are steeped in a culture of Hollywood telling us what the lessons of history are about. One of the off repeated "hopeful" messages we are fed is that you can't kill an idea but my reading of history has led me to the other conclusion entirely. That controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.
> suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
Because then these bad ideas fester in dark places and emerge as an entrenched ideology that is more difficult or impossible to respond to before they have resulted in adverse outcomes.
> I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality.
It seems you’ve answered your own question then. Censorship is bad because it sustains systems of inequality.
> It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.
You are attributing effects to censorship when material circumstances and ideology contributed in large amounts. Its much easier to destroy ideas by burning books when all the books are manufactured by skilled craftsman using their hands.
> We are steeped in a culture of Hollywood telling us what the lessons of history are about. One of the off repeated "hopeful" messages we are fed is that you can't kill an idea but my reading of history has led me to the other conclusion entirely. That controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.
You can’t kill an idea but you can delay it or make people too terrified to spread it openly.
Of course you can do it in theory. The question is, whether you can do it today and whether those attempts will turn out more dangerous than helpful. IT achievements allows for extremely easy exchange of the information throughout the world. You can easily circumvent many kinds of blocking. You have E2E conversations available to masses, so you can't effectively censor anything centrally.
Whether that's good or bad is for history to decide. Recently I saw some guy watching video about terrorists executing some prisoner. He got it via whatsapp. That video was pro-terrorist, they obviously are trying to recruit more people by spreading their propaganda. Of course I would prefer such kinds of conversations to be silenced. The thing is, it can't be silenced. Russia tried to block Telegram, they poured lots of IT resources, they used DPI and other methods but they did not succeed and did lots of collateral damage in the process by blocking innocent websites.
I think that genie is out of the bottle already and we have to learn how to live with it. IMO governments right now are trying another method: they put lots of disinformation, hoping that average folk won't find out which one is true. Not blocking specific information, but making it hard to find and distinguish truth from false. That works for me, I already stopped to trust most of the information on the web.
> Of course you can do it in theory. The question is, whether you can do it today and whether those attempts will turn out more dangerous than helpful.
Allow me to restate my position more precisely. I believe the supresion of information has worked in the past. And based on this I will need very compelling evidence to convince me that we live in a special time when it is impossible and no longer is effective.
I'm happy to be wrong but am skeptical when people begin claiming their circumstances are special in history.
And further, while you maybe can make an argument that it wasn't possible ten years ago, we're headed in a very centralized direction at this point. There are basically three places where broad populations can engage in discourse/recruit/radicalize and there may be fewer in another ten years.
The article itself makes the arguments for this. One, hate speech just rebrands. Two, the assumption that what you want censored is what will get censored is false, especially if you feel you are the marginalized group already. So what censorship is effective? Pushing existing already popular ideas that are widely held already. This makes censorship basically useless, and more so creates problems for anyone who doesn’t strictly believe I the most popular ideas. Flat earth is a perfect example of an idea that doesn’t get censored and doesn’t need to be because culture already accepts it is wrong. The truth is almost all ideas don’t need censorship for the same reason flat earth doesn’t. We already make violence and calls to violence illegal which is the generally accepted tipping point of interfering with someone’s life. Censoring views that some may lead to violence is starting to get into a gray area, and censoring views that are just “hate” goes well beyond gray to pure opinion of the person interpreting and we don’t want to give tech companies the ability to deem their interpretation of what we say as “hate” when it has no basis.
> The article itself makes the arguments for this. One, hate speech just rebrands. Two, the assumption that what you want censored is what will get censored is false,
I don't believe either point is true. For example, the concerted efforts to silence, defame and de-platform socialists in 1950s America were highly effect.
It worked practically in practice in history. It works also practically in countries like Saudi Arabia. Once in a while censorship does not manage to stop all opposition, which is why once in a while revolutions and such succeed.
But practically speaking, censorship works. That does not makes it right thing to do or something, which would be different claim.
Just because people manage to say censored things here and there just means it cant stop completely all such claims and materials. But it does minimize who will run into them, how many of them will be available and so on.
> If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
They may think censorship doesn't work but can still do damage, such as by lowering the standing and integrity of the left, damaging the liberal commons, or paradoxically making censored ideas more appealing.
>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
Because the unintended consequences are harmful to bystanders. Probably more harmful than to the intended targets, since they're already socially ostracized for their openly bigoted views. Take, for example, the recent upswing in deplatforming. Most of the statistical data seems to suggest that the masses have become more afraid to speak openly, but it doesn't seem to have actually stopped extreme racists from saying racist things.
>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
Because instead of treating the disease (terrible dehumanizing ideologies) it treats the symptom (them talking about it).
Instead of a fire, it creates a bomb.
>It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.
It worked before the Internet.
>controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.
In the short term. Determining the status quo isn't up to censors. It's up to society. And while censors have some power, they're not omniscient, so they always get circumvented eventually.
> In the short term. Determining the status quo isn't up to censors.
I don't agree. Before WWII, America had a very small standing army. It was practically an American value that the country demilitarized after each war. But from 1900 through WWI and especially through WWII there was a deliberate effort by the government and elites to change that. In just 40 years America went from barely militarized to having a large and expensive standing force that was viewed as a bedrock of American virtues.
Similar things happened throughout history regarding sanitation, citizenship, traffic laws and more. I believe the information ecosystem has a tremendous impact on people's beliefs and values.
Have you considered the possibility that the experience of WWI and WWII changed their model of the world? Maybe the public felt that another war could break out and therefore deemed necessary to have a strong military to protect themselves
>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
I've read a screenshot of some anonymous post that goes like:
"There's a general phenomenon I've noticed on the internet. Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right wing. Leftist ideas cannot exist without censorship and moderation."
Which I think misreads the situation slightly. When sites censor people, it pushes those censored to other sites. Concentrates them. When all sites censoring have a left bias, both the censored and uncensored areas become echo chambers. Censorship then is segregation, but instead of having water fountains for blacks and whites, you have websites for lefts and rights. The only reason sites like gab and parler exist is because twitter censors.
If you really believe in equal rights and desegregation, you would not censor people based on their diversity of opinions. If you really believe diversity is our strength, then you tolerate diverse opinions, even if you find some of the opinions repugnant.
As the article points out, it's not a question of "should" you censor. It's a question of "can" you censor. Clearly censorship fails in the worst possible way. It further radicalizes both sides. If you read both /r/politics and patriots.win, it's like both groups live in two entirely separate worlds. When you isolate populations their evolutions take separate paths.
And that's how it is ultimately dangerous. Censorship leaves you with two groups of radicals with no common ground. At some point, those two groups meet and that's when bad things happen.
>"There's a general phenomenon I've noticed on the internet. Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right wing. Leftist ideas cannot exist without censorship and moderation."
I've noticed similar and I'm not entirely sure it's right wing but more of extremism of ideas in general. Essentially, the "loudest" people (or ideas) win the conversation without moderation.
I'd say this has more to do with group think and populism. If there is any moderation it's going to steer the ground in a specific direction of populism. The more aggressively shared an idea is, the more successful it tends to be. It's not a linear relationship, but ideas tend to pick up steam (the flat Earth phenomenon blows my mind to this day). Extremists seem to be the ones most willing to verbalize and share these ideas that make them "loud." There's probably some overlap here on how effective propoganda is through repetition. Just look at how ads tend to focus on spreading an idea through repetition and seem to work.
Sometimes modern "right wing" ideas are difficult to discern from other extremists because the spectrum has slid and much of the modern right wing is extremist. To be fair, we have a lot of left wing extremists verging on being bananas as well. I know plenty of conservatives who feel fairly disenfranchised by the current right wing we've been seeing. I don't agree with many of their ideas but they make good points and have civil discussions about their different opinions and perspectives.
> "There's a general phenomenon I've noticed on the internet. Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right wing. Leftist ideas cannot exist without censorship and moderation."
I suspect that "right wing" here is euphemism for more of sexism and racism. Because I can tell you that moderate conservative, economic conservative and for that matter libertarian forums all have moderation too. They cant exist without moderation and censorship either.
What happens however is that without moderation people will use harassment, trolling, both including massive sexist and racist statements to push away people who disagree with them. And people who dont want to be subjects of those leave. So you end up with people who are fine with trolling, racism and sexism and the end result is biased toward right wing. You know who will be harassed the most? Anyone perceived as feminist or sjw.
The actual extreme left, which I guess would be defined more as a marxism or communists, is relatively small in numbers. They are also pretty often sexists and racists too, so I dunno how it crosses with that.
>They cant exist without moderation and censorship either.
Back when email arrived with a "You've got mail!" AOL chats were not moderated. I assure you they existed. All you needed was the ignore button. People are perfectly capable of deciding who to talk to on their own. Current UX seems designed to make you think you need moderators, but that is not a requirement.
>If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work then why in exactly these kinds of articles do people bemoan it as dangerous?
Because the process itself involves heaping lots of social costs on people in the attempt to hurt their narratives, and that normally we would consider this bad? I mean, if we concede that literally throwing people in prison is ineffective then shouldn't the argument for not throwing people in prison be obvious?
> Because the process itself involves heaping lots of social costs on people
I'm open to that argument. But I think this writer is really trying to have it both ways. They literally say, censorship doesn't work and we shouldn't do it because we are the ones who will be censored. It just seems like a kitchen sink argument. Either it is dangerous to society because it works or it is dangerous to a few because it is unjustly punitive.
I am not fully in agreement with what is happening right now because I believe it is fundamentally immoral to force someone into a society where they must provide for themselves and then to take away their means of provision.
But I also see our society as deeply censoros before this and a lot of people who are very upset now were fully willing to ignore that as long as it didn't broach opinions they value. Two wrongs don't make a right but it does leave me a little suspicious of how genuine they are and how magnanimous they will be when the pendulum of discourse swings back in their favor.
> "If you cannot censor away opinions, if suppression of ideas doesn't work..."
> "I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work."
that's at least falling for an availability bias. we have a extraordinarily tiny, highly-fragmented, and highly-idealized view into history. the more reasonable null hypothesis would be to assume folks had a range of opinions on any given topic, but their behaviors were modulated through social norms and coercion.
That's exactly my point. I don't think censorship changes people's minds immediately. But over time, the absence of an idea creates a status quo bias. People born into a society where certain ideas are circulated less are less likely to encounter and adopt them.
People change their behavior based on what is acceptable not just based upon what they believe. If using a racial slur will get a person written up at work, they have an incentive to hold back when the instinct arises to use it. The absence of racial slurs at work will make new workers less likely to use them as people often copy the environment they inhabit for the sake of cohesion.
Deplatforming solves a problem. And only temporarily in the abundance of VPN & encrypted technologies. IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas.
If it made things "worse" they why are they not already doing those things?
These groups want to be on public platforms because their goal is to radicalize people. Or do you think that it was a mistake to kick ISIS and other radical Islam groups off Twitter too?
> If it made things "worse" they why are they not already doing those things?
What do you mean by your statement "not doing those things"?
I hope you know talking about doing something,,, actually doing something,,, and getting caught in the act of doing the "something" are ALL different situations in themselves.
How on earth is equating ISIS members to Gab or even Parler users even remotely the same? It either means you are not aware of the real issue at hand or you seem to have a personal biasness against different political views to yourself.
My point is, Twitter accounts or not, normal (please double bold this word as you read this) people who hold different unpopular views should have the space and freedom to speak their minds.
Unfortunately freedom of speech is a black and white affair. If twitter as a platform doesn't allow their users to legally exercise this right, they might as well come out and freely state they are partisan and include this in their policy. Rather than pretend to be something they are not.
Note: Terrorism is criminalized and well-defined within most state laws. My argument is not in defence of this.
> IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas.
That result makes it more difficult for law enforcement to follow their movements, but it also has the effect of making it more difficult to recruit new members and spread their ideas.
The whole reason social media has been so powerful in spreading ideas, good and bad, is because it reduces communication friction and effort while promoting discoverability. If extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable, and requires more effort on the part of their members. Over time that makes it less likely they'll be able to grow or maintain their numbers.
> That result makes it more difficult for law enforcement to follow their movements
The easiest enemy to go after is an exposed one. The 2nd is a weak one.
> extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable
Extremist groups do not need to be discoverable. They just need
to plant enough conviction into the minds of susceptible and willing hosts. I assure you, not so much energy is required to convert in this case. Certainly not more than religious ones.
Though I need to clarify. When extremism crosses the border of advocating for mass violence. It gains a new universally unambiguous term: terrorism.
> IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas.
The whole point of deplatforming is to prevent those stupid ideas from having a general audience. Sunlight is not always the best disinfectant.
The minute your platform becomes malevolent, and begins to "work" against your values, will you not regret granting it the power of moderating the social discourse?
They don't rise to power if the political system is sane. In many countries without First Past the Post systems, an extremist rises in popularity. Then when the final vote comes, it is revealed that most people are moderate and the crazy does not get into power.
You know exactly what I mean, cut the bullshit. Point being, deplatforming may be okay for the group who exercises it, but not for the group that is being deplatformed. Who the fuck decides? The government? Some out of touch Big Tech CEOs? Fuck that.
Now, if I'd be willing to argue that this is a antitrust issue (FB, TW, Google / Amazon AWS, CloudFlare / PayPal, Stripe / Visa, MasterCard) having too much power to the point that they decide whether you live or not, and that there should be way more alternatives.
It is entirely and issue of the means of communication being concentrated into the hands of a few powerful organizations, like its been since the radio was captured by capitalist regulation.
> Who the fuck decides?
Everyone decides norms in the small bubble around them. When people organize their influence grows too. Some people have too much power. Some people should never have power, like nazis.
A lot of the arguments in this thread you will notice are about whether deplatforming makes nazis less nazis. Well, that's not the point. The point is to make sure they aren't accepted, that they can't use the public square to recruit and gain power.
Some would argue that this is ineffective, but they are now stuck in the bind of thinking that access to places of public discourse is both an important right and also practically unimportant.
Maybe they're too young to remember the holocaust deniers on use usenet or how ineffectual stormfront was before 4chan and before mass social media. People who are hungry for power will try to gain it in the easiest ways possible.
If you think them having power would suck, then you want to make it harder for them.
I simultaneously think facebook and twitter and CBS and fox news etc. have too much control over public discourse and also don't want white supremacists to be able to freely use that power to bring back hell on earth. That includes the new york times giving the likes of Richard Spencer space on their page, Tucker Carlson crying about how much white people are under attack and facebook letting white supremacists run recruiting groups thousands in size.
> Some people should never have power, like nazis.
That's exactly what I'm arguing against. That's just your opinion and you treat it like some universal axiom. Same way you treat 'Holocaust deniers' as some kind of monstrous apparitions. You may not agree, that's all.
It's people like you that inspire me to counteract this trend with full force.
It's not an axiom. It's a fundamental disagreement about how society should be and an understanding of what the world would be like if nazis have the power to change it to suit their vision.
> It's people like you that inspire me to counteract this trend with full force.
What does that look like? What actual effects on the world do you try to make or support others making because I am opposed to fascism?
> fundamental disagreement about how society should be
We may not agree, but we can't say it's a "fundamental disagreement" if there's so much people rooting for it.
> What does that look like?
1) Disagreeing with people online
2) Opening niche internet forums that are lax on moderation (except for illegal content such as child pornography and direct threats)
3) Investing in hosting/domain registrars/payment processors that don't deplatform because of political stance (e.g., Epik, SkySilk)
I've been doing 1) and 2) for some time now, but I want to do 3) as well. I think it will become very profitable during this decade.
Sure, as long as it's not legislated (see 'Volksverhetzung').
I mean, my subjective judgement could tell me that you're a fucking faggot and that I should beat the living shit out of you. It would be right for me to have that subjective judgement, but it can't be for monopolies, nor governments.
> So, deplatforming (silencing) a group is okay, but doing the same for other group is not okay based on some arbitrary criteria.
This is such a lazy argument, because it's trivially defeated. Yes. Exactly this. In the same way that e.g. jailing one group (the guilty) is okay, but doing the same for another group (the innocent) is not okay.
Great. Let them do that. The important thing is that they're not getting their message in front of whoever happens to be scrolling the Reddit front page. That's enormously more harmful.
My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults.
Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting your conscience, go ahead, that's choice.. you have different goals.. but remember that instinct that wants you to scream at this-this-this type of person is a confrontational approach that deep down falls in the pattern of, eliminating the other tribe.. if you choose to do something about it and what you do is your responsibility and problem.
I just think the solution should lie in :
1) dialog 2) laws
I think beyond those 2 lie some really wrong answers..
I think the extremes, both left and right, have realized that their greatest enemy is not the other extreme, but the masses in between.
A group that has the numbers, with mild views that can dilute your message with reasonable doubt, challenge certain aspects of your extreme yet be broadly acceptable to a much wider audience including those tending towards your side – that's poision for an extremist.
Therefore, their solution to that is tribalism, polarization, and shaming for any hint of non-compliance with the extreme's dogma.
End result is that the vast majority of moderate people do not participate in debates on sensitive topics, leaving the field open for polarizing demagoguery. All that's left is to make more topics sensitive to get an advantage there too, and that's progressing very well too.
this might be false equivalence. People far on the left (except from some nas-bols; which I’ve never encountered in the wild) call them selfs anti-facists. It is clear who their greatest enemy is. In fact far left groups (like food not bombs, etc.) often engage in social programs called mutual aid where the goal is to spread propaganda through helping the masses.
I know a certain Jesus Christ who would disagree with you. In seriousness though, visiting poor rural American during Trump is a really numbing experience. You see the people there flagging Trump signs everywhere while living in dirt poor conditions. It is hard not to emphasize with them even though they are calling for everything you are fighting against.
After all, the establishment has failed those people. The democratic party has severely failed them. Democracy it self has failed them. I know that really capitalism has failed them and they would find better answers under socialism then under Trump (after all Trump has failed them as well). But you must still understand where this is coming from. That is you must empathize with them, even though their views are wrong.
It's entirely your choice who you empathize with. If you don't act over your indifference, it doesn't harm anybody. It's impossible to empathize with everybody.
The criticism people are raising is about a kind of hypocrisy, even when lying is entirely to oneself.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Power is simply the capacity to influence the behavior of others, and in a democracy, it is leveraged to get anything done.
In the US today, you're a real dumb dumb if you try to attain power via a left platform. A handful of people did it (AOC, Omar, Taleib) but by far if you want a successful career you take a mainstream R or D position and just try to outdo everyone else in culture war takes. I'll point out that "the squad" is social democratic in nature, they aren't as far left as you can go by far.
A left position calls for redistribution of wealth and transfer of control of the means of production, which gets you attacked from nearly all establishment sides.
Obama turned out to be an establishment President (with bailouts, not prosecutions, for the architects of the housing bubble and crash) but he ran as an anti-establishment candidate.
Then, despite obviously being part of the establishment, Hillary tried to do the same, arguing that she as a woman she clearly wasn't part of the establishment ("Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment.")
She lost to Trump, who - despite being a billionaire white male - constantly attacked and was attacked by the establishment, in particular as a "populist", someone chosen by the people, not the establishment.
And until the DNC united behind Biden, Bernie was giving him a serious challenge, and Biden was relying on his anti-establishment rep with his "black firewall".
Meanwhile, Bloomberg was painted as the clueless establishment candidate and laughed out of the race.
A young politician (left or right) studying recent events would be smart to run away from the establishment, just as so many elder politicians have (while perhaps seeking establishment support in secret, and hoping not to be caught).
But facing enormous pressure from a younger generation that seems to be far to the left of Biden and was not happy with either Biden or Harris, but voted against Trump rather than for Biden.
And even with all Trump's failings as a person, it was a close election between the unpopular populist and the likeable establishment compromise. Is that evidence of establishment strength?
There is no consistent conception of the masses to the left. Traditionally, there is the labor class and the capital class. In the modern left, oppressors and oppressed are typically determined by identity group, but the game is the same. To win the game of leftism, you better pray that you're in the "masses."
True. A Marxist will have a different conception of the masses from an anarchist (even though the intersection is usually pretty large). But I fail to see what that has to do with anything. There is no game of leftism. The goal is to free people from the tyranny of capitalism and fascism (marxists might emphasize the former while anarchists the latter).
Leftists generally accept rich folks sympathetic to the cause, even though they technically don’t belong to the masses. For example Marxists and anarchists alike generally accept Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy as leftists (even though the latter was born into great wealth), and leftists generally accept Dan Price (#DanPriceSeattle on twitter) even though he is a boss (i.e. not off the masses).
There is no game of leftism? The game is for the oppressed class to take power from the oppressor class. Who fits into which of those classes is a contentious issue, though as I said, more frequently predicated on identity than anything else.
Also, to be free of the "tyranny of capitalism and fascism," I hope that those are two different categories. Capitalism and fascism are near polar opposites.
It's also important to understand that leftism necessarily ushers in tyranny. It is impossible, not just in practice, but in theory, for leftism to be implemented without an authoritarian state. If you attempt to get around this constraint, it will only be by you failing to describe a state whose outcomes will fall within the objectives of leftism, or by describing an authoritarian state by any other name (syndicates, guilds, unions).
It is not to free people, it is to free the abstract idea of people. This is how leftists are as tyrannical as everyone. They have a romantic idea of the poor which is not tied to their actual existence or wants, and act on it. Too often, it is just a way to morally justify their own wants or desires. Any evil can be justified if it helps a faceless mass of people.
It is actually quite fun to read Dostoevsky’s Idiot with that in mind that Dostoevsky might have written Prince Myshkin (the Idiot) with Leo Tolstoy in mind. Dostoevsky was very much not a man of means, whereas Tolstoy literally came from a line of nobility. To Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s talk of the impoverished must have sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about.
That being said, I do think that romanticism of the poor is a really old school mentality, maybe some boomers sometimes still engage in it, but I doubt that you’ll find contemporary leftists engaging in it. Today’s left is much more AOC and Greta Thunberg complaining about how shitty life is for the poor (with a substantial retweet history each backing up poor people calling for it).
Calling yourself anti-fascist does not make you immune to totalitarianism, tribalism and othering any more than, to borrow an analogy, writing "cool" on a box makes it a freezer.
Im sure the foot soldiers of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot had that exact same purity of thought, the exact same infallible self-belief and the exact same absolute certainty they were on the right side of history.
Maoists and National Bolsheviks are a really small minority inside leftist circles, you will have to look for a long time before you encounter one in the wild. And when you do, and if you are a leftist, you will most likely shun them. Racism is usually not tolerated by the left.
Varg is pretty much a textbook NazBol. Thing is people won't stop tripping over each other to label him far-right/Nazi before hearing anything he says. Pretty likely this is happening to most other of their ilk as well.
In the five years or so I spent hanging out with Socialist Party USA folks, I met loads of Maoists, including a former party chairman. There were a lot who were Trotskyists out in the open and Maoists if you got them drunk enough to talk freely.
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” - Dr. King, 1963
When you elevate yourself above a group of people there is no option for dialog, because engaging in dialog would mean that you view those people as equals.
> I just think the solution should lie in : 1) dialog 2) laws
If they're not willing to be reasonable (like, you don't get to "dialog" about whether or not genocide is appropriate), then the best and most moral course of action could very well be to stop them from recruiting your friends.
In the context of tech, this is the essence of deplatforming. Twitter and Facebook cannot censor, since they are not governments. However, as private entities, they can decide not to let you use their service. That's their private property rights in action.
Wow, so many downvotes for saying that debating genocide is never okay. There's truly nothing to debate -- it's always wrong, and we would do well to kick out users who would say otherwise, lest they start organizing.
One of my all-time favorite metaphors on the internet:
"I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years."
Reminds me of some test I read in a book (can't remember which one).
A teacher asks some student to stand up and raise his hands before him. The teacher stands in front of him and does the same, touching the students hands. Then the teacher starts pushing, and the student uses force to stay in place. Then the teacher uses more force, and so does the student.
Finally the teacher asks: "Whay are you pushing me?". "Because you were pushing me!"
This is exactly what is happening here. You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.
This is exactly what is happening here. You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.
There was an episode of STTNG that had a profound effect on me as a kid as a metaphor for confrontation, where the crew of a destroyed ship kept saying "more power to the shields" when the "shields" were actually causing the problem.
So in that case, the party with authority and power asked the other to do something. Then the powerful party started pushing and then complained about counter pressure. Sounds familiar.
> ... You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.
On the contrary, Chinese martial arts (as well as physical exercise more generally, as with Tai chi chu'an) use the pushing hands exercise to teach how to skillfully yield and redirect the other party's power. It's viewed as foundational to the entire discipline.
Martial arts is not politics, and the western mindset is to respond with equal or greater force. In fact the military doctrine is to respond with disproportional force. Yielding may be the smarter thing to do, but that's would be seen as weak in most of the world (including, I suspect, China).
There's a common idea I see sometimes in discussions about weapons of war - would it be good if everyone only made defensive technologies? Say no to fighters and bombers, but yes to surface-to-air missiles? Say no to guns, but yes to anti-ballistic protection?
But to this, the answer is: every defensive technology can be used as an offensive weapon. I can pack my SAM turrent on a truck and drive all the way to your city, and start shooting down your airliners, and you won't be able to do anything about it, because whatever guns you scavenge from a museum mean nothing to my anti-ballistic vest.
This is what I think of when I see people who purposefully inject themselves into communities, feign offense and call society for help. Using means of protection as weapons.
I don't think anyone really expects to convince racists, sexists, homophobic, rapey, violent, narcissist to change their ways. Ignoring them is obviously bad so there's nothing left to do but to try and make sure their, technically legal, but clearly nefarious, behavior doesn't go unnoticed at every opportunity.
The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off; the left is currently the majority, and the right is, on average, old.
In this regard, it's absolutely a "viable approach": By making it low-status to be right-wing, or even by not carrying right-wing views on popular private platforms, it makes the right-wing destined to lose out somewhere along the line simply due to the youth not wanting to associate with them.
It's a waiting game above anything, and on a long enough scale it looks like the winner is clear here, for better or worse.
What does "winning" even mean for the left? The people who choose leftism will win against everyone else for the reasons you say, but like all political victories, winning is (comparatively) the easy part. Keeping your values intact and governing a successful society is the hard part.
The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism. What remains?
Socialism, liberalism, and progressivism are all different ideas.
Leftism tries to combine these ideas into a coherent political ideology. Liberalism (the part about individual rights) is a check on the abuses of socialism, and progressivism is supposed to make it all work (experts in control making good decisions).
I'm not a Leftist, but I can acknowledge that it's a coherent ideology.
When you take Leftism and take away liberalism and progressivism, you are left with rebels that have no solution to anything. Like BLM and antifa which are always recruiting to attack a mysterious "system" rather than making serious proposals. (It's always easier to get people to agree on a problem than a solution.) If they were to win, it would look more like Venezuela or Cuba than Denmark or Sweden.
I know that liberalism and progressiveness are different things. Liberalism isn't tied to progressiveness, but progressiveness is inherently tied to economic justice. Socialism is certainly a progressive stance.
Liberalism can be dropped with no real loss.
What's wrong with Cuba? It seems like it's doing pretty well; it has more or less the longest-lasting government in South America, largely because it dropped liberalism.
> The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism.
This is a direct quote from the post I am replying to. I know liberalism and progressiveness aren't the same thing. I am stating that they're getting more progressive, and I don't see why liberalism declining is a bad thing.
> "The winning approach is obviously in waiting for the other side to die off..."
Seems doubtful. Rural and poor areas remain strongholds for conservatism and that seems unlikely to change. The urban left may increasingly outnumber rural conservatives but that doesn't necessarily give them more power thanks to the way that the electoral system and government in the United States is structured.
You cannot tolerate intolerance. And of the two sides, only one is actively trying to restrict the freedom of people based on skin, religion and sex. Only one side is arguing for violence against weaker people, like fugitives and migrants. And it is this side that hides behind free speech.
The author is getting a couple of things completely wrong about both France and Germany. The FN managed to get into the second round of Frances presidential election only to clearly loose that round. In the following parliamentary elections, FN lost as well. Whether or not the FN will end being a major factor will be shown by the next elections. If anything, the more aggressive approach seems to have softened the FN and make it more mainstream acceptable.
In Germany, we went without a major right wing party from 1945 to the rise of the AfD. And the AfD is, until now, more of a nuisance than a threat. That could change with the next elections, so. The reason we managed to go without a party like that for decades are the laws we have.
These laws were created based on lessons of WW2 and the Nazis rise to power. That they work less well in the 21st century, with social media, shoulder really surprise anyobe.
I'd also add, that the Covid restrictions, and the seemingly incompetent governments, are the main driver behind the right rise in popularity. And not some failure to fight hate speech.
> And of the two sides, only one is actively trying to restrict the freedom of people based on skin, religion and sex. Only one side is arguing for violence against weaker people, like fugitives and migrants.
I sincerely don't think either of the two sides is advocating for those things (ignoring a very few extremists - on both sides - with malicious intent, who don't represent the majority).
I do see those issues mentioned a lot in the public debate, but mostly in the context of straw man arguments repeated as a sort of battle cry, and to denigrate "the other side".
It was a whole lot easier to push McCarthyism than it ever was to convincingly prove you weren't a communist.
The AfD called to shoot migrants at the EU border. They retreated to the "only one person's personal opinion" after a harsh backlash.
QAnon representatives are calling for the murder of Democrats. The same group advocates for brutal treatment of migrants, restrictions of freedom of choice for women, direct violence against muslims.
I don't see any of this on the left side of the political spectrum. Also, when someone in a group voices radical opinions and calls for violence it represents the groups view when said group is not distancing itself from these views. Because if the group doesn't, the one person is just the group trying to find out how far they can go.
I appreciate you proving my point about extremist outliers, the ones who don't represent the majority of either side, yet receive all the media attention (and association with whichever side is currently being vilified).
> when someone in a group voices radical opinions and calls for violence it represents the groups view when said group is not distancing itself from these views
When "the other side" has an interest in associating you with extremists and refuses to listen to you repeatedly denounce the actions of those extremists, there's nothing you can do to convince them otherwise. Again, the demagoguery and parallels to the McCarthy era are troubling.
On case of the AfD it is rather Mccarthy's old outfit deciding to treat his new one as a threat. The Verfassungsschutz, the German federal interior secret service, decided to watch the whole party as threat for democracy. The Verfassungsschutz was headed by a certain Mr. Maaßen who is now touting right wing conspiracies i social media. The minister responsible for the agency once prouded himself of deporting 69 Afghans on his 69s birthday. Ajd they are treating the AfD as a right wing extremist group now. Should tell you something. Or not.
You seem to get down-voted but I agree with your view and I think is is funny that the free-speech-absolutists downvote / to take your speech away.
To be intolerant against intolerance is at the heart of any stable, decent, livable society. I don’t understand the view of the free-speech-absolutists because it is so obvious that it doesn’t work.
In Europe - or least in The Netherlands - saying discriminatory thing can get you fined or in jail and that is how it should be if you care about your society.
> To be intolerant against intolerance is at the heart of any stable, decent, livable society.
I agree; in the name of preserving social order, SJWs should all be thrown in jails.
Just kidding... but that's what the article is talking about. You can make strict laws (or social norms) against "intolerance", and someone else will be happy you handed them a powerful weapon they can use against you.
Do your political opponents seem intolerant to you? Let me tell you a secret: the feeling is probably mutual. You prefer to focus on those parts where they are less tolerant than you, and ignore the ones where it is the other way round. They do the same.
If almost 80 years of havinthese laws in basically every European democracy doesn't proof that these laws aren't miss used, I don't know what can.
And no, denying people service, jobs and social security based on color, religion sex or whatnot is not the same as fighting for people to have these rights. Because the former takes away rights, while the latter grants rights without anybody else loosing anything.
Of course, if all your side ever does is "fighting for people to have these rights, without anybody else loosing anything", then you are the good guys.
Do you honestly believe this is a truthful description of reality?
Do you believe your opponents would also agree with this description (that is, if they only could abstain from lying for a moment, e.g. if you would give them a truth serum)?
The funny thing is that free speech doesn't exist. Nowhere do you get free speech. There are always limits. Even in the USA.
Let me tell you also a secret. It is not about political opponents disagreeing over their views. That is not the intolerance I refer to. You make it a sad word game.
It's the intolerance of discrimination, of hatred of (groups) of people. We in The Netherlands have laws against discriminatory speech and hate speech.
Last time I checked, SJW mostly are against stuff like discrimination. They are no threat. This is not a 'both sides' situation.
Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming. People are only sensitive to the shaming they won't accept, which always seems to come from the people they disagree with, and they are completely blind to the shaming that goes on in their in-group.
Interesting thought, it would seem to follow that those less effected by social shaming might find themselves at a evolutionary advantage over those that are greatly effected. For example those who ignore prohibitions on premarital sex may have more children overall.
Except that society has a mechanism for for enforcing social norms: laws. Premarital sex might seem like an evolutionary advantage, unless you live in a society that murders you for such activities.
You are right though, which is why high-status in a society are "allowed" to break social norms with no consequence.
Brutal enforcement is quite distinct from legislation so much so that the legislation becomes unnecessary since such practices often take the form of extrajudicial conviction and punishment at the hands of police or the military.
Yea, a recent example of environmental shaming that worked was the reduction of littering from cars. Roadside cleanup helped, but tossing stuff out of car windows used to be significantly more common.
What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.
I believe the "Don't mess with Texas" advertising campaign was actually significantly more helpful than the ticket cost. If you think about it, people usually only know about the cost if they get fined but people know that it is frowned upon to litter through an advertising campaign.
After all, the people in and around your car can judge and shame you while you can only get a ticket if there's a cop around.
>Every society exerts social pressure in the form of norms and shaming.
HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.
Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.
Here's a deplatforming example that is very much in line with societal consensus: when Daech was recruiting teenagers and young adults from Europe, there was a constant struggle, by both platforms and law enforcement, to systematically de-platform the accounts pushing their propaganda.
It is likely that had this propaganda been allowed to run unchecked, there would have been even more people recruited by Daech to go fight in Syria (or get married off), and to attack random civilians in the name of this ideology. Most attacks, if not all, were perpetrated by people who had in large part radicalized online, away from extremist mosques where they might have been more easily detected.
That being said, I don't believe censorship or de-platforming should ever be used outside of preventing the spread of propaganda that results in actual attacks on people. Anything short of this is just talk.
Not only would they disagree with you, but their strategy actually works. Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective.
In terms of "adults", they are few and far between. There will always be biological adults, but so many adults are emotionally stunted that it's difficult for me to give them the title. Just as domestically raised cats are more child-like than cats that have spent their lives on the streets, the average life of an adult in the west is replete with comfort and novelty so as to keep them from building maturity and character. This makes them incredibly easy to be shamed into doing whatever is considered acceptable by the society they're in.
I hesitate to respond to this because I've been scolded by dang whenever I make political comments about specific groups, so I'll have to speak very generically. I will say that political movements can be either ambivalent towards or in support of destabilization of the current regime, even if that means doing things that superficially appear to be counter to their goals, so long as their politics are normalized and even chosen by the information brokers.
Their strategies may “work” in the short-term but I think short-term thinking is really damaging the long-term progress for the US political sphere. The reason the founders decided to emphatically form the “United States” is because we are stronger working together than as factions or tribes.
> Not only would they disagree with you, but their strategy actually works. Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective.
Is the goal of social justice movements just to be hot topics? Your statement makes it seem like success is measured by the amount of retweets or something. Clearly that can't be true, but if global fascism and ethnic nationalism is on the rise, what actual victories can this strategy claim to have won?
In general I think there has been progress, but it's all come from other corners: economics, regulatory reforms, art, and so on. Other than getting attention, are there any specific things you're thinking of when you say this strategy has been effective?
I think the current primary strategy is to destabilize Western liberalism. Every tenet of liberalism is actively under attack, and successfully so.
Individualism? Long gone, the name of the game is collectivism and your identity groups are everything.
Color blindness? It's officially considered to be an outdated, laughable mode of thinking. If your identity collective is paramount, how can you be blind to the parameter by which we should first be characterizing you by?
Freedom of speech? Muh freeze peach. This is now a dog whistle value for hate speech. Freedom of speech just means freedom for the identity groups in oppressive positions.
Rule of law? The application of the law should, of course, not be universal. It should be applied with context, with the context being...you guessed it...your identity group.
Objectivity? Facts? Reason? Tools of the colonialists in order to snuff out alternative modes of thinking. Any claim at truth is simply done within the context of the identity group.
If you don't think the left has succeeded in this objective, I don't know what planet you're living on. As a liberal, I can hardly communicate with any of my peers within the framework that has been foundational to Western civilization.
Western liberal democracy is collapsing because the right wing reactionaries were right about diversity destroying society, but their mistake was attempting to focus on things like racial and religious diversity. Diversity of ideas is not sustainable.
Now we can see multiple “factions” each with different ideas about the direction to take society with many of these ideas being excluding of or outright hostile to a different faction. So the solution? You have to kill them before they kill you (not in a literal sense, or at least not yet). Some of these factions will band with others (see right-libertarians typically siding with reactionaries and the progressive adoption of various leftist ideas) though it will be interesting to see what happens there when whichever group comes out on top.
"Individualism" was never really implemented as "western" value; it was only ever a catch-phrase to defend the status quo by insisting those at the top "earned the right" to be there.
"Color blindness" likewise has mostly been used to argue that those on the bottom of society deserve to be there; (again) preserving the status quo. I.E. shutting down discussion by labeling racism a "solved problem".
"Freedom of speech" complaints most often come from those claiming to be "censored" because they are no longer being given a megaphone.
"Rule of law" is used to prevent analysis of those laws by, among other things, demonizing any discussion of those laws' motivations, or the cultural context in which they are enforced.
"Objectivity, Facts, and Reason" are used as buzzwords, often by those who know they aren't actually on their side, because
1) everyone knows they are good, and so claiming to already possess them is convincing rhetoric,
2) painting your opponents as "rejecting" them is also persuasive rhetoric, especially to your uninformed audience.
Claiming that people are actually demonizing them is a mischaracterization.
None of these were actually faithfully followed, and they were indeed used as excuses. But they used to be viewed as ideals to work toward. Now there are circles where they are _only_ seen as excuses, and they really have been demonized.
You could make that case, but I do think that they ceased to be "ideals to work toward" before people started recognizing them as such. I.E. it was only after "colorblindness" advocates started using the term to shut down discussions of issues facing minorities that people started calling out "colorblind" rhetoric as disingenuous.
One more observation. The choice of words in "diversity equity inclusion" is telling. DEI is god in Latin. In good old times, the ruling class had the Church with its inquisition and heresy to control the crowd, when the neutral laws didn't work. Today you can shout "I'm a heretic and I don't believe in god" and nobody would budge, so the ruling class had to invent something else. Not long ago it was the abstract communism and terrorism, but even these two words don't instill fear in masses today. So the ruling class has come up with this DEI - the new awkward god for the masses, and racism being the new heresy. But given how convoluted and laughable this ideology is, I bet it won't stick for even ten years. I'm really curious what will be next.
Someone here has posted a link to the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model. A quote from it: "So I think when we talked about the "fifth filter" we should have brought in all this stuff -- the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority."
> Is the goal of social justice movements just to be hot topics?
I'm not sure I understand precisely what you're getting at but, for the record, anyone reading this should understand that I am not suggesting that hot topics are the goal of social justice.
In fact, I wasn't even making a value judgement of left wing causes in general, but people seem to always take the word "leftists" as a pejorative. All I'm saying is that leftist political strategies have been successful in that, on any given day, I can tune in to any given medium and count on trans rights, BLM, UBI, social equity, anti-racism, and so forth being a topic of conversation. This wasn't nearly as true before the current wave of leftism gained steam.
> I am not suggesting that hot topics are the goal of social justice.
"their strategy actually works." implies that their strategy accompishes their goals.
"Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective." impies that hot topics are what their strategy accompished.
The transitive property between "goals" == "what strategy accompished" == "hot topics" is at least pretty clearly implied there.
Do you know the history of jaywalking? Shaming works.
But telling people they shouldn’t insult and denigrate people for immutable physical characteristics is not shaming them, but if it is that’s a weird aspect of the interaction to focus on.
It absolutely does work. A little bit, at first, when you have broad consensus backing you - but it does work. People will begrudgingly change their behavior for relatively minor things, and the change in the use rate of racial epithets in public reflects that.
The problem is that A) this process is more useful for advancing within the ideological block than for advancing the ideology's goals, and B) there's a "Laffer Curve" of sorts for paying "moral taxes" in following behavioral norms. The internal dynamics of a movement is going to set the level by true-believer dynamics where outrageously high demands are acceded to, while the general public is going to respond to that level of demand of "well, if you think I'm a bad person for saying 'Latino" instead of 'Latinx', that's your problem".
> It absolutely does work. A little bit, at first, when you have broad consensus backing you - but it does work. People will begrudgingly change their behavior for relatively minor things, and the change in the use rate of racial epithets in public reflects that.
The only change is that you now have a bunch of people who are afraid to use a handful of naughty words in public because they might lose their job over it. You haven't changed any minds or hearts, you've just moved the conversations into private rooms. You can't end racism by just shaming people for using the n-word. It's arguably just as bad now as it was during the Civil Rights era, but you can't easily see it anymore because it's mostly kept within "friendly" company.
> The only change is that you now have a bunch of people who are afraid to use a handful of naughty words in public because they might lose their job over it.
That's not the "only change". If were, that's still a feature, not a bug. It means that real consequences are possible, and that those possible consequences are widely understood.
One is never going to change the mind and heart of a deeply racist person, but one can help bend the overall curve of intolerance over time.
Because you can measure by harm caused, not just by thoughts thought.
For example, I posit (without proof) that, because we have effectively banned hateful racist speech in most standard professional workplaces, the people who work in those environments and used to suffer harm (through being forced to work in an openly hostile environment to them, through being denied advancement or equitable compensation, through the mental stress of being the target of hate speech, etc.), that those people suffer less harm today then they used to.
- Is it perfect now? No.
- Can people still be secretly denied promotions because of racism? Absolutely.
- Does it happen less frequently in the aggregate than it used to 40-50 years ago? Almost certainly, though I base this claim on common sense for now (don't have scientific sources handy but I'm sure I can find some).
They're mortal, but that's cold comfort when they're oppressing you now.
And they cling to power. The party that opposed gay marriage now controls 67% of the voting power on the court that legalized it. If that case came up again today, it would almost certainly go the other way. And they may, in fact, find ways to re-litigate it.
Even when the majority of that party switched to be in favor if it, they continue to vote for leadership who opposed it. Laws against trans rights are being enshrined in law literally as we speak, and it will take a very long time to scrub them off the books.
They're mortal, but I take no joy in that. They have disproportionate power, and as it dims, they use it harder and harder.
> "My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well)..."
> "Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good."
a good first start is to follow the latter maxim when discussing the former issue, particularly when it comes to issues of power and influence. you're already lost when you speak in terms of left and right. those are distractions from the real coercions impinging on our freedoms daily, from the desire to stagnate and wield (more) power. you need to pierce that construct, disregard it entirely, to understand and orient your resistance and dissatisfaction toward the rightful source.
two people chosen randomly are going to be vastly more similar than different, no matter where on the artificially-constructed political spectrum they are. this is how we know it's constructed and not real.
the left-right dichotomy, like all dichotomies, collapses our thinking into detrimental zero-sum tribalism pointing us against each other rather toward the real source of conflict, power-wielders, creating an artificial, seemingly-insurmountable gulf, that fractures the populace and shields power further from the will of the people (that's us).
a power structure can do awesome things, and sometimes we need it to do those awesome (positive) things temporarily, but stagnated, amassed power can do a lot of awesome, negatively-externalizing, and self-serving things not in the interest of the many (especially the future many).
the way to think about power is as flows, not stores, and especially not as individuals, which is where our primitive brains betray us constantly. to harness power, we must allow it to temporarily coalesce when and where it will do good, and dissapate steadily so as not to stagnate, and corrupt, in any one set of hands.
I make the distinction between anti-racism and anti-racist. If you're anti-racism, you want to reduce racism and that involves talking to people who are racist to fix the problem. If you're anti-racist, you just want to beat someone up and use racism as an excuse.
While shaming and scolding might be overused, it's a legitimate tool in some cases. The problem is that a lot of sjw are punching down while telling themselves they are punching up because the person is white.
How often did I end up in a room full of urban, university educated people looking down on the white rural common folks.
The common people are not always common by choice. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't follow wonkish academic stories about the history of race to understand modern issues. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't see all the shades of gray of advanced morality and sort out complex issues about gender and race. These are the type of people that need to see a moral guide every week just to follow a simple morality where they can't process much beyond stereotypes.
The best AIs out there are not able to simulate advanced empathy. It is highly complex and involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-...). Given the level of complexity, I don't expect everyone to be able to intuitively get it.
A lot of people are intellectually underprivileged and too often, sjw like to scorn and mock them for their handicap.
The way I see it, Trumpism is made of an evil right wing elite that has managed to capture a large swath of simple minded folks party because these simple folks were pushed away from more reasonable political affiliation.
Populism doesn't have to be negative. The US constitution starts with We the People, not We the Scholars. Yes populism means unsophisticated views but these could be aligned with reasonable policy as much as right wing policy if the left didn't show so much contempt for the intellectually and morally disadvantaged. Democracy means you need unsophisticated people to vote with you to win elections.
How politically correct does the left need to be? Especially after the "deplorables" gaffe, the left has bent over backwards to avoid appearing to be condescending towards rank and file right-wingers.
And it's ultimately hopeless. No matter how hard we try, someone on the left will scold. Oops.
My reading from the outside is, the left needs to realize (I'm sure it applies to the right equally as well) that scolding people into guilt is not a viable approach to affect action or to change perceptions when you're dealing with adults.
This seems manifestly false. A lot of adult behavior can be changed by scolding, a lot of society runs on scolding.
I'm a pretty rational and strongly opinionated person. You won't change my opinions with scolding. But if someone says "don't talk so loud, you'll wake the baby", well, you can certainly change my behavior. But even more, a lot of people do not operate at anywhere near this the level of rationality and a wider area of their behavior can be changed by scolding. Which is to say the population of fully adult humans is a lot less than the population of humans above the age of majority.
And sure, you can't control everything with scolding, you can't replace the police and the army with scolding but scolding, peer (and non-peer) pressure, etc is a tool in the hands of all the different incarnation of "society".
I agree, but I would suggest you use the same logic about labelling anyone in any part of the political spectrum then. Using terms such as "the left" might seem less antagonistic than calling someone a "fascist" yet come across just as harshly when read / heard by someone who hears "the left" preached in the 2 minutes hate of their preferred news source.
Yeah but nobody here said "you can't talk with leftists, they're all extremists and closed-minded."
edit: At least nobody I've seen yet. People are probably gonna say it (this goes for any "it" as conversation length grows), but I'd expect it to be downvoted.
Indeed the assertion can be construed as part of the label itself. What I'm saying is that just because a person uses a label without additional assertions, there are many blanks filled in by the reader / listener based on their own daily inputs.
So regardless of the HN crowd's restraint when using labels, the labels themselves can carry unintended implications.
People have been real happy to say "extreme left and extreme right" and yet mysteriously seem to have no idea who the extreme left actually is.
Fascist is not just "extreme right" it's a specific political ideology or goal. The extreme left is therefore ???
Because while the US certainly has a small following of communists like how every country has a small following of everything, they're certainly not the group which attempted to seize the Capitol building on January 6.
You can dialog with fascists, monarchists, communists, anarcho-sydicalists, theocrats, trans-human techno utopianists, and those who welcome our insect overlords.
2) How do you determine that a specific person you're dealing with can be specifically categorized into that bucket?
3) Are you calling them that name because it accurately defines that person's identity and behavior or is it because this tag is a really easy tag to slap onto people so you can deal with them very easily without having to think too much..
Like if I call someone a simp, beyond me insulting him and conveying I don't like him, it doesn't really mean anything..
not like he's going to become one (whatever that would mean) because I called him that..
Science. Science is an excellent framework. This is where what you call “fascists” try to lead you all the time. We revert to science because leftist don’t recognize our lived experiences don’t seem to matter to you (e.g. a daughter raped by people who should have been already in prison, was liberated out of ideology, and said he had no good intention in our country), so we come back to statistics to try to sort the emotions out of rational thinking. It is as if leftists didn’t recognize our emotion towards the rape victim, so we come back to factual things.
Science is an excellent framework, leftists are very good at it when it’s about criticizing the opponent, and we are very good at it when we want to criticize the PC of the moment. Now we need to converge.
Please don’t despair. Please don’t give up discussing and trying to sort out truth from pollution.
Railing against the word "fascist" by attacking "leftists" is not a very effective approach, especially if you truly seek unity. (which HN guidelines force me to have to assume here)
Corporatism isnt argued for by leftists. Far left especially generally strongly opposes class collaboration. So much so that Stalin declared Social democrats "social fascists" (see wiki article, its quite funny how retarded it is).
Not sure what you mean by "fascists form of government"? Something like Italy in 1924-1945? I don't think there's any political power that advocates anything like that, and I am sure that at least 99.999% of daily use of terms "fascist" and similar ones are not directed at people who advocate appointing Il Duce and advocating government after Mussolini's example.
Well there was just an attempt by the ex president to overturn the results of an election and install himself as the president contrary to the expressed will of the people.
Maybe that’s what they meant by “fascist form of government”?
Technically, that would be a coup (more specifically and auto-coup). That's bad enough. The fear is that it would lead to a dictatorship, which is worse. Whether it's fascism or not would depend on the specific policies of that illegitimately-installed government.
So, if "that's what they mean", they're mis-using the term.
> Well there was just an attempt by the ex president to overturn the results of an election and install himself
Just as there was an attempt by a presidential candidate to overturn the results of an election and install himself in 2000. And many times before. Challenging election results is not something unusual, it happens all the time. And will undoubtedly happen again. There's nothing "fascist" in using free speech and court system to try and prove there were election fraud (or miscount, or whatever the next candidate could think of). That's why we have the court system, so they have their chance to prove their case.
> Maybe that’s what they meant by “fascist form of government”?
Except nobody tried to change the form of government. So either we already have the fascist form of government right now, or trying to prove, using existing form of government, that you were - by existing laws - the rightfully elected candidate - can not be seen as advocating "fascist form of government".
We should unironically taboo the words fascist (unless referring to 30's Italy), nazi (unless referring to third reich), communist (unless they propose a People's Republic) and socialist (not really referring to anything, but the word has become an ad hom at this point) to have any kind of healthy political debate. It is cowardly to hide behind those words and not say what you actually mean
It's an irony that the kind of free speech you appear to support (and please correct me if I'm wrong) existed in fascist states like Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, because, as Chomsky points out here[1] "Goebbels was in favour of freedom of speech for views he liked".
I'd suggest you might try the other path, as Chomsky also suggests:
> “If you're in favour of freedom of speech that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise you're not in favour of freedom of speech.
> There's two positions you can have on freedom of speech, and you can decide which position you want.”
This is the story of Daryl Davis, a black man who convinced 200 KKK members (yes, real violent racists, not just people who disagreed with you on tax rates) to change their ways. If a black man can do it by talking to KKK members, maybe it's after all possible for you to dialogue with your neighbor about tax rates?
200 people isn't very much. Twitter has 192 million users. Assuming (extremely generously given that twitter is on the Internet and has a userbase that skews younger) that twitter matches America's partisan divide, it probably has around 90 million users.
It seems unlikely that at least a thousand people out of 90 million aren't gullible enough to be swayed by hellbanning.
Hellbanning has a history of working well for deradicalization of online communities that were a lot worse than twitter is; Jeff Atwood has a good post giving a brief look at the history of it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/suspension-ban-or-hellban/
That's not proof that any one actual person was deradicalized, which was the metric.
Mr. Davis has 200 examples. I'm only asking for one. His method works. The deplatformers' citation of their own platforms only proves that they control their own platforms, not that any extremist view was changed.
And Jack Churchill captured Nazi outposts with a longbow and a broadsword, but if allies armed every soldier with longbows and broadswords, something tells me that we'd be under Nazi occupation to this day.
Some great things are done by great people, but they don't necessarily scale well.
This misses the point (that the author of OPs post nailed). It doesn't matter that it doesn't scale. It works, and censorship doesn't.
Do you want a (difficult) method that works (personal involvement and direct conversation), or a simple, easy, lazy one (deplatforming/cancel/censorship) that doesn't?
Jean-Paul Sartre has a good quote on this - he framed it around anti-semitism but it covers othes as well, it might as well been written about QAnon or COVID deniers:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I am not sure what you opinion is. The poem you quoted is aimed at true, real, historically existing Nazis. So it is less applicable at people with somewhat similar views complaining about being called out. Calling them out and confronting them is exactly what the poem advocates for.
The same goes for your post about tolerance towards intolerance. And then you complain about anti-white racism, which is not a thing.
I partly agree with you. You cannot convince a person with an extreme view (see flat earthers for example).
But I do believe you need to give reasonable responses to extreme views, to prevent others from becoming extreme. Calling someone "fascist" is in that sense never constructive.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
It's fascinating when someone who is in a position of power and never suffers from hate speech develops his mind. People who suffer from hate speech know and understand cristal clear what they want to ban from our society. But others, which are not feeling it at the skin level, are just "hate," a natural part of the human being.
Please do not automatically jump to assumptions that people who you disagree with are in position of power or never encounter hate. This kind of sweeping generalization is what fuels racism, sexism and other kinds of "identitarianism", it stifles thought and prevents nuanced discussion.
According to the authors logic, we should stop censoring fraud, false advertisement, child grooming, defamation, doxxing, false testimony, etc. because "it doesn't work" and "erodes free speech". This is clearly nonsense. It works, and it should be done, the only question as with all laws is were the line should be.
We restrict freedom in general when it hurts other people (slavery, rape, killing, trespassing,etc) and we don't go around crying about slippery slopes and lack of freedom for it.
Clear examples of good censoring of free speech are the courts decision in the Alex Jones - Sandy Hook case and the Washington Post paying reparations to Nathan Phillips (the child mocking the native American). In both cases their "free speech" caused damage to people and the court decided that they didn't were protect under the free speech laws.
>Federal prosecutors and the Ministry of the Interior regularly move against organizations deemed far-right or hate groups.
On the contrary, the Verfassungschutz and other federal organisations built to work against enemies of the state support the enemies of the state! And that is where the 'vast and varied far-right network' comes from, it's supported by tax money.
The Verfassungsschutz is a special intelligence agency observing enemies of democray, which includes neonazis and the like. This agency uses 'V-Maenner', which is a network of paid informers within these structures.
Early 2000 Germany tried to outlaw the NPD, the then-biggest far-right political party. The outlaw process failed because the Verfassungschutz had too many of its members in the party's rank, so the judges could not say which party activities were anti-democratic, or what was the government's own doing ('fehlende Staatsferne' - not enough distance from the state).
Because the state taxes itself a measly 10% on these payments we have a rough idea on how much they pay - Tino Brandt, one of the NPD's party functionaries in Thuringia, received 200,000 DM over 6 years until 2001. In the same state alone (remember, Germany has 16 states) in the same time the government paid out 1.5 million DM.
The last head of the agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, is now retired after it became apparent that he was ignoring evidence. He has since opened a Twitter account where he's spouting Fox News-level far right nonsense. This was the head of the agency 2012 to 2018.
The OP's whole argument falls down if you consider that the German state is saying they're fighting Nazis but then they go and fund them very well with tax-money. It would be much easier to fight Nazis if they wouldn't get millions in funding.
> The OP's whole argument falls down if you consider that the German state is saying they're fighting Nazis but then they go and fund them very well with tax-money. It would be much easier to fight Nazis if they wouldn't get millions in funding.
How does this do anything but support the OP's argument? OP argues that hate speech laws are futile because those in power get to decide what is hate speech and how it is enforced and it is always possible for the wrong people to be in power. Has-Geog Maassen and the overall failure you highlighted seems like a perfect example of this seeming inevitability in practice.
According to the authors logic, we should stop censoring child grooming, fraud, false advertisement, defamation, doxxing, false testimony, etc. because "it doesn't work" and "erodes free speech". This is clearly nonsense. It works, and it should be done, the only question as with all laws is were the line should be.
We restrict freedom in general when it hurts other people (slavery, rape, killing, trespassing,etc) and we don't go around crying about slippery slopes and lack of freedom for it.
Clear examples of good censoring of free speech are the courts decision in the Alex Jones - Sandy Hook case and the Washington Post paying reparations to Nathan Phillips (the child mocking the native American). In both cases their "free speech" caused damage to people and the court decided that they weren't protect under the free speech laws.
But Alex Jones - Sandy Hook case wasn't censorship (he was free to say what he said), he was sued for defamation. We already have laws on that and all the other stuff you mention child grooming, fraud, false advertisement, doxxing, false testimony, etc.
The point is - we have laws for speech that enters the criminal realm.
You are completely missing the point. Because those laws exist, the argument for "free speech" and against censorship is ignorant. We don't have free speech and never had and never will, no country on earth has, because it's ridiculous to the point of been childish. Speech is not free, it has limits, like everything else.
And about Alex Jones, the case proves beyond reasonable doubt that he should had been censored to prevent the damage and that is my point. His speech has real life serious consequences that hurt people even if he didn't do it personally and he didn't intended to happen.
No, you're looking at it in too black and white a way. It's not a decision between "no limits to speech at all" and "any limit is fine because free speech doesn't exist".
The line, at least in the US, is that all speech is free unless it "incites imminent criminal behavior". And no, the criminal behavior doesn't include criminal speech (that's just circular logic).
Yes, the line the US draws favors free speech far more than almost any other country. And that's a part of the ethos of our country. Other countries are free to do whatever they want.
And no, Alex Jones shouldn't have been censored (by the government). We don't allow the government to arbitrarily deny citizens rights unless they have been given a fair trial. In his case, a judge decided his speech fell into the realm of defamation and thus his victim was due restitution.
And that's how it should work. We don't need "speech police" and we don't need to create new laws to further remove people's rights. If someone oversteps the bounds of free speech then a judge can decide what to do, not Facebook.
What the left also needs is a realization that some of its beliefs are akin to extremism. And some of the left inspired policies have really really hurt and isolated a significant population. The left needs to soften it's stand on such issues.
What the right also needs is a realization that some of its beliefs are akin to extremism. And some of the right inspired policies have really really hurt and isolated a significant population. The right needs to soften it's stand on such issues.
It's such a generic statement that it's meaningless and could apply to any group of opinions.
Doesn't mean it's wrong... The racists on the right know they're racists. They admit it. The racists I've encountered on the left are the racism-of-low-expectations kind with a dash of openly-racist-against-white-people, and then they go and act morally superior to people who aren't racist against any race. The sanctimony is grating.
Exactly. Racists will generally justify themselves as "not racist" by giving claiming something to the tune of "I'm not prejudiced, I just agree with the numbers!", while appealing to some out-of-context statistic to try and act like those disagreeing with them are "denying science" by acknowledging that there's more nuance to the issue.
I'm not even sure if you're talking about the racist left or the racist right and that is mildly amusing.
I don't know a lot (any?) racist right folks, but I know a shitload of racist left and they ALL publicly, verbally, in writing, rail against racism in one breath, and then shit on white people in the next.
I acknowledge that this is anecdotal, but still...
There is no racism against white people in the, what, northern hemisphere. And never was. In that part of the world, racism comes from the white population and is aimed at others.
Calling white racists out definitely isn't racism.
Racism is literally defined as discrimination against any singular group based on race or ethnic group. Discrimination, irrespective of its origin on the left or right wing of the spectrum, should be treated identically. Implicit and explicit racial discrimination is omnipresent on both sides of the spectrum. This is evidenced by literally pulling up any of the popular social justice warrior channels on YouTube; you then immediately come in contact with it. It is farcical for anyone to push through a narrative that doesn't acknowledge this fact.
"White male" has become a demeaning putdown by many enthusiastic liberals, which is evidence enough.
"White male"? So we are now rolling in sexism and racism to defend the, historically, most powerful group of people on the planet and their hurt feelings about having to give some of their privileges, whether or not they really have? Ok, I guess.
Also, please note I said in the northern hemisphere. Assuming most of us here are living there. Could be different in, say, Africa or Asia. But even there it is not even close to the "white farmer genocide" shit that is still being spread.
My race and ethnicity has nothing to do with whether or not I am actively oppressing others. Whether these are correlated right now is irrelevant to how we should be behaving in a modern day, postmodern civil society.
Not sure the rest of your post makes any sense. I don't consider myself a racist or a sexist and I find it appalling that I am unable to comment on ongoing social issues without being called a "white male" or being told that my opinions are invalid because my lack of melanin seems to imply I am part of an elite group of oppressors. This is insulting and lacks any intellectual merit.
I didn't call you racist or sexist. And you brought up "white male" in your post I replied to.
Historically speaking, there was bo group more privileged than white, European males. Being one myself, I don't see anything wrong with simply acknowledging that simple fact.
Maybe because white men went out and did things? Your idea of privilege didn't just fall in our lap, it came after thousands of years of studying nature, warfare, conquering, etc. It also wasn't guaranteed, what would have happened if Persia conquered Greece?
You tell me, you suggested first it might be different in Asia(northern hemisphere) or Africa(majority in northern hemisphere) compared to northern hemisphere. I don't claim to be geography or racism expert like someone, but I know that for instance anti anything non-Japanese racism isn't uncommon in Japan (I wanted to link the well known "whitu piggu go home" video, but sadly youtube deleted it because of hatespeech).
It's institutions and power structures which creates that.
For example, speculative home values in whiter neighborhoods lead to higher home prices and thus higher property taxes and thus better funded schools and so the racist-system continues.
Nobody is explicitly being racist there. Speculating in the white neighborhood is genuinely a better investment yield. Just like with investing in Javanese over Sudanese neighborhoods in Indonesia or Croat over Serb towns in Croatia.
Realizing it's mostly cultural just like it is with say the Hmong and Lao people, where you can just change the clothes, grooming and mannerisms and our minds recategorize, that's the radical leap for people. There's physical differences but they're more imagined than real and can often be short-circuited. Our collective minds have an invisible override switch.
When people are being racist, they have an epistemology that the different outcomes is a natural result of racial hierarchies. They use these human created systems as their empirical evidence and not realize this logic is a self-reinforcing system.
It's like when police departments disproportionally patrol and focus on one group, find more things in that group and use it as evidence that their suspicions were well-founded. At different times the supposed more criminal groups have been everything from the roma, suffragists, gays, 7th day adventists, rock and roll fans, jewish people, Chinese immigrants, jehovah's witnesses, Catholics, italians... It's all arbitrary. The closed logic loop it perpetuates, that's racism.
I think literally actively searching for something mostly hidden is very different from it being public. A few fringe social media posts are what you are linking to with few likes and shares, versus large media or tech companies with a reach in not only millions but hundreds of millions of views openly publishing articles blaming whites for everything under the sun.
> The racists on the right know they're racists. They admit it.
Not necessarily.
Even Richard Spencer, proud Hitler-saluting Neo-Nazi, essentially the founder of the "alt-right", denies being racist.
People know that racism is bad, but a lot of racists will deny being racist while very explicitly saying they don't want to live next to a black person or will call the police just because they saw a black man walking through the neighborhood.
I don't remember where I saw it, and I'm struggling to find it now, but there was some interview where he explicitly claims to not be racist and claims to not hate black people, and even claims to not be a white supremacist, but that he merely believes that the races shouldn't mix and that America should be a white ethno-state.
He knows that racism is not socially acceptable, so he makes bad faith claims of not being racist while expressing obviously racist views. And the problem is, it works. It doesn't take much searching to find racists that don't think they're racist. The fact that people don't think Donald Trump is racist, despite a long list of racist remarks and actions [0], is proof of that.
And of course, later, Milo Yiannopoulos later released an audio recording of an explicitly racist rant. [1]
Maybe you should sample some of the other content to get a feel of who this guy is before promoting his work based solely on the fact that you agree with an opinion you have.
Because if someone has mostly bad opinions, you have to wonder if he managed to have just one good one or if this is a bad opinion too.
My assumption when I write comments on HN is that readers can make opinions for themselves. Perhaps that's a bad assumption? I don't have to agree with an article to post it on HN, why should I have to agree with everything a youtube channel produces to post one of their videos? I doubt I would be able to post almost anything as I have opinions about a variety of subjects, it's very unlikely I will align with anyone on all of them.
How about you watch the video and let me know what's objectionable about it specifically?
After 5 seconds, it does the exact thing which I expected it to after only looking at the titles of his other videos. Grossly misrepresenting positions to make them look similar enough to "both sides" the issue so he can present himself as an "enlightened centrist" but really is looking to quiet people who would call him out on his problematic opinions.
It's a lot like your "assumption". You're trying to present your position as a "gee golly jeez, I'm just asking questions" being sort of overly, even comically naive about content you wish others to consume.
You're also asking people to be able to refute the entire video or not voice their objections. To ignore the context of the channel. Blah blah blah. The entire "foot in the door" approach to radicalization.
I personally don't believe your claim that you don't watch the channel. Otherwise, why even post a disclaimer? The only reason to post a disclaimer is because you kind of know what to expect from his channel. Either because the video itself is telling (it is) or you know what the rest of the content of the video would show (not great).
So please, stop with the disingenuous positions. A good number of people here are savvy enough to see through it.
I've watched a lot of his stuff and even seen him perform stand up. He has made a career in calling out the hypocrisies of the left, usually in an absurd way. Behind the ridiculous presentations are usually fairly well thought out points.
Occasionally he takes on the far right as well. The problem being that it's just too easy and boring to do that.
Thats true, which is why most of the left has adopted intersectionality, which says an individual is the sum total of their experiences, rather than this or that identity
Doubling down on the idea that both racists and wokists center everything around race and are unable to think about people as individuals outside of shallow racial generalizations.
So, making sure people can live their lives, without being discriminated and abused, is extremism? What you are saying is that people with more liberal and left leaning views should just forget about it and roll with the right, unless the right feels hurt.
It would help, if you would the issues the left should soften up on.
Examples? I'm not really sure what you're aiming at here. I don't know of any documented cases where too much environmentalism or healthcare really hurt significant populations.
The right supports environmentalism and healthcare. They disagree with specific leftist plans.
The official right wing position towards the left is "your outcome would be lovely, but it isn't worth the excessive cost to getting there".
There isn't a sizeable lobby who is "against environmentalism", for example. There is a huge lobby who just doesn't see how a comfortable living standard can be achieved without fossil fuels.
> The right supports environmentalism and healthcare. They disagree with specific leftist plans.
Can you give me one right-leaning healthcare or environmental "plan" that anybody in congress is pushing that will cover every American 100% for healthcare, drugs, mental health, dental, etc?
Single-payer is the best plan I've seen because it negotiates rates for drugs in bulk - one price for all of America and the government can choose different companies if they won't play ball but it's a huge ass market so they'll play ball.
Likewise for the environment - the right tends to deny climate change is even happening, so how do they support environmentalism?
Why do the right also think it's okay to spend 700 billion per year on the military (that's more than the next ten countries combined, China for example only spends 200 billion), and the DOD is the only government agency never to pass a fiscal audit. If they're worried about "costs" then maybe they should start with the defense budget.
> There isn't a sizeable lobby who is "against environmentalism", for example. There is a huge lobby who just doesn't see how a comfortable living standard can be achieved without fossil fuels.
How comfortable a standard of living will we have when we have wars over water, and species of animals becoming extinct at ever faster rates (including the very species we eat and rely on for food)?
> Likewise for the environment - the right tends to deny climate change is even happening, so how do they support environmentalism?
That answers itself - if someone doesn't believe in a threat, it doesn't make sense to invest in stopping it.
> Can you give me one right-leaning healthcare or environmental "plan" that anybody in congress is pushing that will cover every American 100% for healthcare, drugs, mental health, dental, etc?
If there were exactly 2 choices, maybe there'd be a point there. But there is a spectrum of choices and no possible future where everyone has enough healthcare. None of the plans on the left or the right are pushing for the extreme scenario of 100% of the economy is devoted to healthcare.
The right wing would prefer the arbitrary standard trades off a little less against the economy, the left a little more. Both those positions are pro-healthcare, and both are arbitrary. You're welcome to your opinion on where the line should be drawn, but someone drawing the line differently isn't anti-healthcare.
> Why do the right also think it's okay to spend 700 billion per year on the military...
US's high military spending basically only goes up. If the left wanted to reign that in, they've had their chances and not taken them. It is a tragedy.
> That answers itself - if someone doesn't believe in a threat, it doesn't make sense to invest in stopping it.
But you're the one claiming they're not anti-environmentalism! This is literally what anti-environmentalism is [1]. You might claim that they're not anti-environment though: I doubt anyone would actually choose to destroy the environment if it had no other effect. (Other than the small minority that's in it just to own-the-libs.)
Fair enough, but if you want to argue that then I can go back to the point I joined the thread and provide examples of even small amounts of environmentalism causing hurt to specific populations.
All the resistance to the actual policies is people observing that they will have markedly lower quality of life and that the overall strategy of environmentalism is explicitly to dismantle big chunks of the west's way of life. That is why there is substantial organised resistance to the environmental policies the left wants, and why the resistance is more sustained. It is very damaging policy. That is why it is so unpopular. The people it is damaging aren't going to bear any consequences otherwise.
There is no policy that is better for the environment than stopping deficit spending and balancing budgets - its just not branded as an environmental policy.
Yes im sure the insurance companies and fossil fuel companies who have spent millions of think tanks and studies and election were just concerned about living standards.
The direct answer is too complex to argue in a HN thread. "More healthcare" is a trade off. At some point real resources have to be taken from somewhere and put into healthcare. There is no limit to how many resources can be put into healthcare, so more healthcare means less of something else.
The premise of the question is that more=better, without acknowledging more=less of something else. The argument over what gets given up is exactly the political process, and that isn't going to be fun to rehash. People throw out "what if we trade off [thing I don't like]" and the whole argument becomes divorced from what will actually happen in the actual policy implementation.
The more productive response is to lay out the viewpoint, without delving in to the theoretical justifications. The view is pithy and might help a few people understand what the thinking is.
They aren't. Eg, Germany has an energy policy shaped by an acceptance of global warming and their electricity grid is a hot mess compared to France that has better outcomes on pretty much every axis including emissions if you care about that. The French policy was shaped by military concerns about energy security.
And air/water/etc quality in the major US cities were off the charts good compared to the major Chinese cities, for a long period if not currently, and it has nothing to do with climate change.
Plus, the obvious way for the US to get knocked down to the #3 emissions producer from #2 is for India to industrialise, lifting the living standards of a billion people. I'd bet the actual environmental outcomes in India would improve if they burned fossil fuels like the US and China, then they'd tighten up environmental standards like the west has. In that instance that is a direct conflict between believing in climate change and actual observed environmental outcomes. There isn't really a question in hindsight that India should have done the same things as China in the 80s/90s and built up their coal fired power plants. That would have left them in a better position to tackle environmental issues today.
I (very much) appreciate the thoughtful response, but I have to push back because I don't think you appreciate what climate change trajectory means. At the current rate, much of the planet may become unlivable _within our lives_. While the other kinds of environmental impacts matter, they don't matter as much as (the degree to which) the climate will be impacted. Its a bit like caring about the quality of your car's interior comfort features as you head 80mph into a brick wall.
> Eg, Germany has an energy policy shaped by an acceptance of global warming and their electricity grid is a hot mess compared
They don't, because they don't build nuclear power plants. Simply put, if you don't build nuclear power plants, you don't (fully) understand climate change. Unless you have a plan for your country to use dramatically less energy (which I don't believe is tenable), its the only feasible option in the time frames we need as far as I know.
> I'd bet the actual environmental outcomes in India would improve if they burned fossil fuels like the US and China, then they'd tighten up environmental standards like the west has.
I believe there is not enough time for that process to happen.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. The thread is crappy already, and it gets noticeably worse after swerving in directions like this.
I think we should negotiate with Hitler too. He's not such a bad guy, eh? I don't like parts of his philosophy, but i'm sure if we DIALOG with him, he'll come around to our side, right? Or maybe concede a bit of ground with a compromise, right?
I know the article spends its time describing how anti hate speech laws in Western Europe are not working. But frankly they’re not enforced. I think this is why they don’t work.
I see censorship has putting dirt under the carpet. People will try again. There’s no accountability. Social media censorship would ban flashing boobs with the same enthusiasm as Nazi propaganda. The latter is not a breach of terms and condition, it’s literally illegal over here, in the same way punching someone in the street would be.
Why not put these people in court? I understand it won’t entirely eliminate right wing ideology, but at least it sends a clear message that racist, homophobic, and threat to use violence are illegal.
If you look at right wing parties in France and Germany, their speech is a lot more nuanced. They can’t go about and say things like “all Mexicans are rapists” (a Trump quote) because it would lend them in jail or worse to be stripped of the right to run for elections. So it works!
The only problem is that it is not enforced for anyone else. People can go about and write things like that on social media and face no consequences whatsoever. At worst, their accounts will be disabled.
By enforcement, I assume you mean arrest and jail people for speech. It will probably work for a while, as it does it more dictatorial countries. At least until the cities start burning down.
>They can’t go about and say things like “all Mexicans are rapists” (a Trump quote) because it would lend them in jail
First of all. I intensely dislike Donald Trump and I'm glad he's gone. I hope its for good. That being said that's not a quote from him. Its an unnecessary and dishonest embellishment of what he actually said. Unnecessary because what he said is bad enough to make the same point.
Finally, if a person simply said the exact quote you listed, and the result is that they were imprisoned, the most offensive thing in this story would be the government that thinks someone saying something nasty and untrue alone is enough to warrant time in jail.
I feel like the author should consider the /actual/ alternative.. Jobbik, etc with real governing power in places that do not "censor" instead of citing 13% support for fascism in France.
It is a complex issue, but censorship does "do" something, lots of research out there about how making things like QAnon just a little harder to access trims off support at the edges. If you want to make this argument you have to reckon with those facts.
Much of the assumptions of the article are the opposite of the titles conclusion.
Racism and hate did not go away. People were much less capable of organizing it and normalizing it's behavior before the internet. You actually had to go vast distances to get people together before. Now, it's a facebook group or 'conservative social media' platform away.
With the dawn of anonymity began the demonstration of human nature when it does not receive local social pressures. A completely new and unique prototype of communications that bypass our evolutionary social ques.
Without identity, pressure from peers, and authority, humans are left with the freedom to choose any way they want to conduct themselves.
Sadly, humans chose to conduct themselves poorly. A result a 2nd grader could also predict. Instead of caring about the truth they care about superiority. Instead of honesty they care about being on a team.
We can censor people. Governments can absolutely create a great firewall where only approved businesses are licensed and given access by ISP's to receive incoming socket connection requests. ISP's prevent this all the time due to multi layer NAT. ISP's can lock down ports and prevent two subscribers from communicating without a server that is explicitly allowed on their IP range to do so.
Certainly, we could. But anonymity has benefits. People can discuss important matters without that social threat. People cannot seek a recourse when they are offended, cannot censor information, etc.
Ghost in the Shell had a very interesting scenario in which people would VR dive into a group chat to discuss controversial events - and it all went mostly professional and fact seeking. This prediction is so far away from what we actually have now - actual fabrication of facts and cults that surround them. People entirely uninterested in reasoning or being reasoned with. Just a room full of people reinforcing each other without any basis in fact.
Also the author disagreeing "hate crimes" being a thing: the reason for hate crimes is that individuals would organize to intimidate the lives of others that belong to specific ethnic groups. People have a right to be free from that, and it's absolutely the purpose of government to uphold that right. Organized crime has always received special laws targeting it to deter it.
Banning hate speech (even if it's whack-a-mole) also protects the victims.
1. It says that society (with the power to make laws) has your back.
2. It does what it can to prevent the environment from being toxic (obviously with limitations raised in the article).
I would also consider these people who have these extremist ideas victims.
Society has never had your back. In so many other areas including this one. What we have is interest groups as people within society. And these groups will always have different and sometimes directly opposing ideas.
Thinking that society or even the law has your back is an error in logic.
Again, about toxic social spaces. There is much reason to place Twitter & Facebook as toxic just as much as Parler was. Platforms aren't necessarily toxic, people are. And to be frank, this is a media consumption choice. If you unintentionally visit Gab today and feel the majority of the content does not align with your values and beliefs. Close the tab and visit another platform. Freedom of speech needs to encouraged in any modern society and should be protected as a human right. Anyone who tries to influence your thinking by diluting this, is seeking to control and weaken your mind for their own gain.
Look, we need to factor in that humans are social creatures. And that our ideas secure themselves through the help of validity from others. Hate speech that occurred on Reddit in a community was validated and encouraged that eventually lead to a man carrying out a terrorist attack in Toronto.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwdk3/man-accused-of-toront...
It's embarrassing to admit, but with my ban today from /r/science, I'm now banned from three major subreddits, with the other two being /r/politics and /r/worldnews.
While I'm highly opinionated, I've always followed these subreddits' rules because I do believe rules are important for functional forums. These subreddits are also not some niche forum catering to a select group; they're major forums around topics of very general interest, so they really should have very high tolerance for unorthodox viewpoints.
All the bans I received were entirely politically/ideologically motivated.
In /r/politics I was permanently banned for saying something like 'I don't think little girls should be forced to share change rooms with little boys who identify as girls'.
For that I was accused of transphobia and permanently banned. The mod who imposed the ban wouldn't even quote the offending statement or try to explain what was transphobic about it. In private messages, they just stuck to their guns and stonewalled me on my requests for elaboration.
The /r/science ban was due to a comment I posted which contained a harsh criticism of the authors of a posted article. These authors were not forum members, so there was no subreddit rule violation, as far as I'm aware. I strongly suspect the real motivation for the ban was that in the comment, I also criticized the study's premise, that observing "racial blind ideology", was by definition, "anti-Black".
I really think there is a significant amount of extremism coming from the establishment nowadays, and the attempts to silence opposing viewpoints is a symptom of that.
I'm surprised to see people agreeing with this hypothesis ... while commenting on HN. I'm a huge fan of the site rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the way they are applied by the moderation team. But that said, HN has the most heavy handed censorship of any site I frequent. Read all the rules from start to finish and ask yourself if you'd be ok following these rules in every Internet forum.
"Strong moderation" and "heavy censorship" are the same thing, just dependent on whether you agree with the moderation or not. If you disagree, please show me a site without moderation that still has high quality discussion.
I like well-moderated sites like Hacker News, but this isn’t going to do anything to prevent extremists from communicating using other forums.
What are you going to do, shut down all group chats that doesn’t conform to your standards? It’s a much harder problem than creating a site that has good moderation.
I genuinely don't understand how a forum of people who would almost certainly self-identify as internet-natives don't understand the concept of mainstreaming. We invented all this language do talk about and describe how ideas work and spread in the information age but decided to just pretend it doesn't exist anymore. When did programmers become so... binary?
Like it's so frustrating to talk about issues like this on HN because huge swaths of the US part of crowd see themselves as very distant from the "gods & guns" crowd but then fall into the same patterns of thinking that hate and extremism are just part of this world and that the free market (of ideas) will solve everything with proper education and personal responsibility. That any solution that isn't perfect or has a downside for them personally is worthless because they're so insulated from the actual harm being done.
That's all fine and good in a world where everyone is acting in good faith, truthfully, and that propaganda, and emotional manipulation don't exist. But the internet isn't some some big Socratic circle.
The people in the comments here haven't had their online life improved by a huge subreddit ban, forumn takedown, or twitterspehere implosion after having exactly zero power to do anything other than endure the abuse and hope to not catch their eye and it shows.
I mean, sure, it’s nice if it isn’t in your face all the time. I’m glad Google’s SafeSearch exists. But keeping people who are actually curious from finding things is much harder than that, and there are a lot of curious teenagers.
Agreed. But at the same time, a key part of normalization is constant exposure; people who are exposed to extreme views incessantly are less likely to recognize them as "extreme" than those who only see them once in a blue moon, and see them get moderated when they do.
This isn't even specific to extremist views or even politics in general; in all parts of life, from the foods people eat, to the religion they practice, to the music they enjoy: people will consider "normal" that which they constantly perceive.
HN doesn't have very strong moderation. The things people got kicked off twitter and Facebook for saying would be allowed here, at least if they were on topic and phrased politely.
FWIW, I agree. But the people who are shadow banned for trivial offences would probably be writing replies to your comment about this ... if they knew they were shadow banned that is. And we wouldn't be able to read it either way, so it's a moot point. Just one data point, but one of my friends has been shadow banned from HN for years and he never even knew that he was. Say what you will about twitter and Facebook, but at least they're up front about bans.
The lack of transparency is really unfortunate. It makes this whole thread sorta ironic: there's a lot of hate in this thread (deserved or not) directed at larger social media sites, but at least those ones aren't both removing peoples' content and deliberately wasting their time by pretending to accept their posts.
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[ 1037 ms ] story [ 643 ms ] threadCalling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
If there is some notion that we have no choice but to enable other's views then our own views become secondary to them. We no longer have absolute control over expressing the views we agree or disagree with.
Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
So... people who believe in “free speech” as a moral value will disagree with your first paragraph — and hence, your entire post.
You assume your conclusion, so your argument fails to be persuasive.
“I disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to defend your right to say it” is a maxim of free speech — and a bold declaration of the exact opposite of your message: if we want a free society, we have a moral duty to aid the freedom of others — not suppress it.
What? No, you absolutely do not have to correct false statements you make to be a journalist. Reputable publications post retractions and clarifications because that is how they maintain their reputation, but it is in no way a requirement.
The FCC is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press. It is, however, illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news, and the FCC may act on complaints if there is documented evidence of such behavior from persons with direct personal knowledge.
This is also besides slander and libel, lying about an individual or organization.
What particular laws are you referring to?
> This is also besides slander and libel, lying about an individual or organization.
Sure, you can get sued for that. But getting sued for libel or defamation doesn't mean you can't be a journalist anymore. A journalist who loses a libel lawsuit can keep writing even if they've been sued into oblivion.
However, these modifications doesn’t work the same way: “to defend your right to be trending on Twitter” or “to defend your right to be on CNN tonight.” These things are still forms of speech, of course, and yet their exercise does in fact preclude others from likewise exercising. It doesn’t make sense do defend every person’s right to be trending on Twitter.
Actually, it would be illegal to ban people based on politics (as Twitter does) where I live (Seattle), as doing so violates rules for public accommodations which require the owner (a private company) not to discriminate based on political ideology. Rules for private establishments to enforce public access and equality are normal.
Whether or not you think it makes sense to defend the right to be trending on Twitter depends on whether you view it like the bar (mic night open to all) or like CNN (editorial control).
Of course, if Twitter is like CNN and not the bar, they should lose copyright protections — those aren’t meant for edited anthologies (like CNN).
Isn't "trending on Twitter" a popularity contest? As in something's "trending" because more people (users, as opposed to Twitter the company or their moderators) have chosen to interact with that tweet instead of some other?
I think that "to defend your right to say it", in this context, does mean "to defend your right to be trending on Twitter". What I understand by that is that anyone has a right to not be artificially prevented from trending, such as hiding the tweet from other users (censorship) or "not counting the votes" correctly which won't have a tweet "trend" even though it's the most retweeted / replied to.
As I've said on another comment on this thread, my tweet is my speech, it's not Twitter's. And if the "trending" is the effect of the users' actions, having a tweet become trending is the collective speech of the users, not twitter's.
It's pretty much the same thing with CNN. Having someone on "cnn tonight" is CNN's speech. They choose to have person A instead of person B.
Twitter removing a tweet or otherwise preventing it from trending is like some external entity – e.g. the cable company – preventing CNN from having person C on the show because they don't agree with person C's speech.
In my opinion, in this scenario, CNN is like the Twitter user, not like Twitter the company. Just because they have some third party on the show doesn't make CNN any less of a publisher of speech. Just as if a Twitter user chooses to quote someone instead of someone else (as opposed to twitting an "original thought" or "own opinion").
But on the contrary, Twitter’s trending feature (and indeed all distribution on all public social media networks I’m aware of) is active promotion of speech. Humans at Twitter are deciding which tweets trend, regardless of whether they’re doing so manually or using algorithms (which they designed) to automate the process.
Even a very simple change to a very simple ranking algorithm, like changing the relative value of likes/comments/etc. or the time decay of whatever values are being counted, can significantly change which content gets promoted. These are choices that humans make at Twitter.
That's partly true. I think it's "unfair", or rather disingenuous, only when the company claims there's no manual intervention. I wouldn't really have an issue with a company saying "we're looking to promote this or that speech". I think no one really takes issue that Democrat or Republican conventions don't have speakers from the opposing parties. They are clearly labeled "Democrat", so people expect this going in.
I think the crux of the matter is these platforms pretend being an unbiased space for people to communicate, when they clearly aren't. Or rather, they aren't as open anymore. Once people flocked to them, and they became a common place of exchange, the rules drastically changed.
Literally everything on Twitter is Twitter's property other then where governed by intellectual property law agreements and even then it's still someone's private property they have a right to control!
A country club being very popular doesn't suddenly make it a public space.
I'm not a Twitter user so don't know exactly, but from what I see being discussed, it seems to me that there used to be more tolerance towards certain groups (apparently right wing, but probably others, too). But maybe that's just it, the rules themselves haven't changed, they're just more strictly enforced now (I actually don't know).
I'd say that what they're doing is obviously not illegal, or else we probably wouldn't be having this conversation because it would be much more clear-cut.
However, it's more of a "moral" issue, for lack of a better term. They advertised the platform as a medium for everybody to exchange. Now that a lot of people have gone there because of this advertisement, it has become more or less a public utility.
Now, again, I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal, they are not legally a utility, there are other avenues for people to communicate, etc.
> A country club being very popular doesn't suddenly make it a public space.
While I think you're right in the general case, I can't help but think there's a question of measure involved.
The country club will advertise exclusivity. Even if it's just for pose, and it's actually easy to gain membership, it will actively not pretend it's open to any and everybody. Also, it will require people be somewhat close geographically and will have a fairly limited reach. If the club said "we're open to everybody, we want to encourage public conversation" [0], then I'd consider it the same way I do Twitter.
Contrast this with Twitter, which explicitly advertises its openness.[0] And when you can subscribe to Twitter just by having a random browser and an internet connection, wherever you are in the world, and when pretty much anyone and their grandmother are using it to communicate, and when there's an assumption (be it misguided!) that Twitter is a public space, I think it's at least worth it to consider the question.
The answer may well be a firm "no", but it may also be "woops, this is actually something new, which we hadn't considered in our (quite old) laws. Maybe we should do something about it".
To sum it all up, I think Twitter, FB, etc are all a fairly new kind of "thing". They are private entities in that they are funded, operated, etc by a private company and with that private company's goal in mind. But their operations are clearly designed to attract the most people who then communicate on their platform.
Just as we regulated what can and can't be done by a telephone company or an electrical company (all private entities!) when those came about, I wouldn't be shocked for there to be some kind of specific regulation for those platforms, more than "just don't break any laws". It seems pretty obvious to me that trying to apply pre-existing models to them doesn't work all that well.
---
[0] From about.twitter.com, emphasis mine:
> We serve the * public* conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.
> We believe real change starts with conversation. Here, your voice matters. Come as you are and together we’ll do what’s right (not what’s easy) to serve the public conversation.
There are no laws governing how a corporation defines it's "values" as an entity and it certainly has no need to follow that - freedom of speech is my freedom to lie through my teeth publicly about everything I believe, for example.
So again: Twitter has always been able to talk about how it's for things, but at the end of the day it's Twitter's garden and we all play in it.
I mean if for you the scale simply doesn't come into equation, then yeah, I guess Twitter, serving millions and millions of users and being used for communication by many public figures is exactly the same thing as a random server in someone's basement serving 100 people talking about some niche subject.
Of course there has to be a line drawn to distinguish the two, and I don't know where it should be drawn. I think it's a tough call.
But then, in the case of FB and Twitter, maybe this has "run out of hand"? Maybe those platforms became public forum in spite of the companies' wishes? Let's assume that's the case. Does that mean we shouldn't do anything about it?
> There are no laws governing how a corporation defines it's "values" as an entity and it certainly has no need to follow that - freedom of speech is my freedom to lie through my teeth publicly about everything I believe, for example.
It is, but your doing that exposes you to my freedom of calling you a liar. Hence, the "moral" component I talked about in my previous post.
I think where the government should come in is when you're trying to get everyone inside your private space, to use it as a general communications medium (as opposed to niche, interest-based), and then you cut off those you don't like for whatever reason. Would you be OK with a utility, say the electric company, denying you service because they don't agree with your – non-illegal! – use of their electricity? If not, why's Twitter different?
You're demanding the government step in and nationalize a business which in no way has a monopoly on a concept which has never been protected - the right to a broadcast platform.
Right up until it runs into their 'trending blacklist'. An admin tool that the existence of was leaked a while back.
The Nazis are perfectly capable of building their own platform.
Disney filmed Mulan next to a concentration camp where people are butchered for organs and thanked the CCP for their generous support.
These are actual acts supporting a genocidal regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.
The “Nazis” of modern America are solidly on the left — and generally the people calling for censorship.
Twitter’s support of pro-genocide propaganda from the CCP shows they’re definitely unqualified to act as a censor.
The point you are making is just not relevant. Not even tenuously.
This succinctly expresses a feeling of mine I hadn't been able to put into words so beautifully. Thank you!
But a warning to those who downvote: It's a trap! By doing so you're agreeing with me.
However, I think that in the case of the monopolies being discussed here, it's different. The issue is that they "enable" speech in a generic way. They don't enable this or that speech in particular. They also don't force A to listen to B's speech. If anything, they do the complete opposite, what with the whole "echo chamber" situation. I think this is the whole meat of the "platform vs publisher" debate.
A newspaper or other media have to actively "enable" something. When they publish speech A, they choose to not publish speech B. It's often an "either / or", at least for questions of space. They produce whatever speech they print / show. It's theirs, it's their point of view.
However, Facebook, Twitter and other similar companies only put out a tool. This tool is then used by this or that person to speak this or that argument. FB doesn't actively and directly help speaker A anymore that they help speaker B. Also, as an FB user, no one forces you to listen to B's speech if you don't care for it. Your right not to listen to speech you disagree with is not infringed. If I publish a story on FB, it's my story, my speech, not Facebook's. Just as if I shout in the town square it's my speech that I shout. It doesn't become the mayor's speech because it's in his town or the square's architect because he built it in such a way that my voice can physically be heard.
If you consider that FB has some right to prevent people from speaking "wrong" views, then why stop at FB? We should come up with ways to help other companies to prevent their product from being used for speech and other actions they don't agree with. Like the power company. Maybe they don't like their electricity being used to spread some "wrong" ideas. I'm pretty sure the local bakery isn't all that happy either to support some X-ist fanatic.
Where do we draw the line?
Facebook actually deliberately manipulates people's feeds in order to promote content that will increase engagement. Twitter does the same by default.
> Just as if I shout in the town square it's my speech that I shout. It doesn't become the mayor's speech because it's in his town or the square's architect because he built it in such a way that my voice can physically be heard.
The town square is public property. If you instead decide to step inside a private business and shout they can have you removed from the premises.
> Like the power company. Maybe they don't like their electricity being used to spread some "wrong" ideas.
Electricity is regulated as a utility and as such wouldn't be allowed to cut service for that reason. A bakery could refuse to bake cakes with swatiskas on them if they so chose for example. Where the private business's choices on refusing service runs into trouble is when they refuse service based on a customer's race/ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.
It is 100% infeasible for me to contract any of the canon taught in my office: diversity is a top priority, women are oppressed, etc. I don’t even disagree with all of it, but I do know that I don’t have the option of doing anything but earnestly nodding my head at the diversity events.
This doesn't work if every platform - whether they have market power or not - are compelled to censor by mobs. Most recently, Glenn Greenwald wrote about journalists trying to get Substack to censor its authors [1]. Well before, Signal employees tried to make their company have an anti-extremism policy [2].
The fact of the matter is, most people don't know enough about censorship to fight against it, and so small groups of dedicated people can create enough of an uproar in their circles about something to make it untenable for any major platform to speak about it, simply because those platforms now have to contend with a vocal minority pushing a narrative. This has been a very common tactic in India, where I'm from: interest groups will object to a movie or a book loudly enough to de-facto, and even sometimes, de-jure censor it. Most recently, a Netflix series lead to a controversy as it dared to show teenagers doing drugs. This lead to Netflix being notified buy the Indian equivalent of the CPS, and was directly caused by people complaining about the show on Twitter. [3]
There is a pardadox of tolerance with respect to free speech. We cannot expect to maintain freedom of expression if we treat everyone who actually expresses themselves as a sinner.
1: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-start-demanding...
2: https://www.theverge.com/22249391/signal-app-abuse-messaging...
3: https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2021/mar/11/netflix-...
In every thread about free speech, the people against it cite the 'paradox of tolerance'. Or half of it anyway. They invariably leave off the back half, which is pointedly anti-censorship:
>Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — *In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.* But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
-Karl Popper
I think there is such a thing as critical communication infrastructure, and even if it run by private companies, it should be protected from censorship. Whether all of FB or just private messaging fall under this is more debatable, but there have to be clear limits on what a company that facilitates communication between 1 billion people can do.
Critical infrastructure must be legally protected from censorship and (private, mandate-less) eavesdropping. Whether it is run by a monopoly or many small companies is immaterial.
Well said.
What we have today is an oligopoly on speech by a small handful of ideologically identical technotyrants who have managed to circumvent the first amendment without ever having had to so much as introduce a bill to Congress.
If this keeps going it isn't going to end well.
No one has been prevented from buying their own internet connection or DNS names and running their own site over the "common carrier" status internet backbone infrastructure.
It's just a lot less useful when your goal is radicalization and you need to hit the widest possible audience to get conversions.
What if Amazon will refuse to do with business with people who support unions next? It no longer seems impossible to ke.
Amazon is not a common carrier: the cloud, other people's data centers, have no legal requirement to be neutral about what runs on them (and it's not even clear how this would work given the difference between compute and communications).
Secondly, there are limits even in current law on what grounds a business can refuse to do business. For example, Amazon could not refuse to do business with someone because of their skin color, or because of their religion. Extending this in more of a free speech direction (where companies could be prevented from refusing to do business with organizations whose message they do not condone) is not unthinkable (though there are pros and cons).
Maybe there is a different set of regulations that could be applied to those platforms beyond something like Section 230. But the side effects of that could cause serious damage to those companies, depending on how the regulation was crafted.
I think there actually is such a moral obligation.
And good health of the society requires free exchange of ideas and freedom to debate this ideas without fear of being persecuted and punished. Yes, even if you're end up being wrong - in fact, freedom to be wrong (excluding, of course, recognition that you're wrong) is vital to any proper debate, since if being wrong implies one's destruction and punishment, no serious and honest debate is possible, and no serious and honest truth-seeking through free exchange of ideas is possible either. You'd either fear to express your ideas, if you're powerless, or use your power to suppress other's ideas and punish them, if you're powerful - and that would have no relation with whose ideas are better.
Only when the exchange of ideas are free, and only when ideas can participate in this competition without prior approval by powerful incumbents, any healthy democratic society is possible.
And yes, whoever in power in such society, which now includes the big tech leadership, have moral if not legal responsibility for it - a responsibility that they are not only neglecting but blatantly violating right now. Censorship by powerful monopolies is as wrong as censorship by the government, and we need to stop hiding behind this stupid idea "but it's not government, so we can ignore it".
When people openly promote and even plan violent attacks against others big tech should just leave things be?
Furthermore, your calculation of someone's reach isn't entitled to be the standard of how reduction of reach is to be applied.
In fact, you don't even own the audience or the platform that you claim you have the right to deny others from using.
You have absolutely no say, sway, or stake in anything you are discussing. You're just hiding behind a Google lobbyist's buzzphrase and pretending you are targeting people you don't like.
The two major credit card companies that dominated could have canceled anti-war "haters'" credit cards in the name of patriotic support of the just cause, banks closed their checking accounts, the major airlines refused to fly them, and so on, and those on the left with your principled commitment to the right of "monopolies and near monopolies" to enforce their political preferences would have had no major objections--as long as it really is a general principle and not just a pretense.
Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others
And yet I suspect that this support for the "freedom" of the most powerful to silence, control, and enforce their will is not really the general, politically neutral commitment to everyone's freedom of choice that it pretends to be.
Of course, in reality phone company's exchange the right to monitor what you say for common carrier status which makes them legally immune to the fact you are saying it, and credit card companies do in fact ditch whoever they want because they have no such burden.
The solution in one case is obvious (protect net neutrality) and the solution in the other case would line up with the calls for US Post to be extended to offering basic banking services to ensure an appropriate floor on the transaction market, and as a government entity would have to allow everyone to transact.
It's not clear to me what you seem to think Google, Twitter or Facebook should get in response for becoming a "public plaza" style arrangement which would be detrimental to their business model and wouldn't destroy the rest of the internet in the process? After all is a DDOS attack also free speech? A botnet? What are we going to obligate them to carry and on what basis?
The urge to preempt what an audience hears is suspect.
I don't disagree with this as stated. But the reality is different. When the tech-oligopoly has a mono-ideology and they all censor the same people, and then pull the rug (hosting) out from under competing platforms, and then rip up the signs (dns) pointing to alternatives, and then siege the opposing cities (payment processors ban them) it becomes a much worse problem. That moves from the theoretical to the practical.
> Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
Yes, because it's not just websites. It's infrastructure and finance colluding with the presentation layer. At what point do we all agree that it's a problem, and admit that the powerful aren't always right?
Free expression is a moral right.
And what is a platform anyway? A wordpress site? A twitter account? An IP address? A bank account? A megaphone? A street corner? A sign? How far are you willing to go to shut other people up because you disagree with them?
> Calling to silence others (that is, encouraging them to take your view of not giving them an audience) is fine as long as people have a choice on how to respond.
How did we turn so quickly to this view? When I was growing up, everyone would have blanched at the suggestion that attempting to "silence others" is a-okay. It wasn't that it was illegal. It was that it was a strategy that would only occur to weak, ineffectual people who were afraid to argue on the merits.
> Is the government or some other absolute authority censoring wrong? Yes. Are powerful monopolies (or near monopolies) wrong to censor? No, because they have the same speech rights as others, the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.
By what principle is it wrong for the government to censor? Once you've answered that, please explain how that principle magically stops at the government.
Well, I'm curious, what do you think it is?
If I run a forum or a blog, should I have to allow any comment, to be morally in the right? Let's say I run a forum dedicated to discussing Christianity, and some person keeps posting arguments that God isn't real, or posts pictures of aborted fetuses, in every thread on my forum. If free expression is a moral right, is it immoral for me to remove such content from any thread? Even threads about daily worship or about lost loved ones?
> Free expression is a moral right.
> And what is a platform anyway? A wordpress site? A twitter account? An IP address? A bank account? A megaphone? A street corner? A sign? How far are you willing to go to shut other people up because you disagree with them? ...
> By what principle is it wrong for the government to censor? Once you've answered that, please explain how that principle magically stops at the government.
Yeah, it's a moral right, but its implementation is more complicated than a lot of people want to acknowledge.
Is it censorship for you to refuse to wear a shirt that I give you with some slogan I agree with? No. Is it censorship for you to take down a yard sign with that slogan that I placed in your front yard? No. What if you allowed someone else to put up a yard sign that you agree with? Still no.
If literally one guy owns all the land in the world, is it censorship for him to control what signs get put up? Almost certainly.
No one's going to be able to give you a pithy principle that fits in an internet comment that tells you where the censorship/not censorship line is, given the huge grey areas between those extremes. This is an area where lots of interests need to be balanced, and where reasonable people can disagree.
On the other hand the law has been used to a ridiculuous extent in banning Nazi symbols from all sorts of cultural artifacts such as games or movies. Doesn't make any sense to me.
While nearly everyone rightfully recognizes it as terrible some see that as fear and a source of power. Fascism is a death cult which conflates its ability to commit travesties with strength and vicarious empowerment to its supporters to make crimes against humanity heroic. Stopping the death cults from drawing upon resources for their twisted in-group is a purpose.
The constitution embedded ban means any resurrectionists can be hammered down without any credible slippery slope worries.
It is true that a new set could emerge eventually. However having to neuter their own symbols undermines their twisted claim to strength and makes them look pathetic in the same way the battle of Cable Street undermined their claims of strength - even with their warped doublethink trying to be both mighty victor against overwhelming odds and crying victim after they lost is too much.
Gangs get impressionable recruits by dealing violence to demonstrate power not being seen getting laid out after they try to attack somebody and get decked in the face.
If not, then propaganda and advertising are both myths that don't really work.
Chess set sales were up a huge percentage when the Queen's Gambit became popular. Daenerys became a somewhat popular baby girl's name after Game of Thrones became popular. These are super simple, super obvious examples, but you can find more.
They're not guaranteed to work, but they do work.
This isn't entirely true [1]:
> As of January 2015, ISIS had reconstituted its regional accounts with strong privacy settings, allowing only a small group of known ISIS supporters to follow the accounts and read their tweets. The content of the tweets—primarily news releases, videos and photos from ISIS’s various provinces—are then disseminated by a number of other smaller accounts using hashtags. After the initial dissemination, the content is more widely distributed, but at significantly reduced levels from early 2014.
> Despite this, the number of new accounts created dropped significantly after the first round of suspensions in September (section 2.5.4), and while we do not have complete data to make a positive assessment, it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions.
Another study about the impacts of Twitter's more aggressive stance against ISIS found, "These findings support the notion that Twitter’s policy deteriorates IS followers’ ability to gain traction on the platform, likely hindering their reach to potential recruits. " [2].
A third study also concluded, "Our data showed that the costs for most pro-IS users of engaging on Twitter (in terms of deflated morale, diffused messages and persistent effort needed to maintain a public presence) now largely outweigh the benefits." [3].
Deplatforming seems to work to reduce the spread of extremist ideas, which then reduces the spread of extremist actions, based on the years of research we've apparently been doing on the topic prior to today. We can reasonably disagree on the philosophy (and this appears to largely be a think piece), but there are practical realities that cannot be ignored.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/isis_tw...
[2] https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Digital...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319395856_DISRUPTIN...
[4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1348147867739975681.html <- where I found this info (there's more here I didn't add to this comment, all credit to @AmarAmarasingam for compiling this data)
Just because you only pay attention to mainstream (D) media doesn't mean he's not on others.
edit: should have done my own research better, the profile reads:
>Reserved for the 45th President of the United States of America🇺🇸 This account is an uncensored Twitter archive and shares email statements sent by The Office of Donald J. Trump.
AFAIK Trump isn't on gab.
I'm sure detonating high explosives on their heads and putting bullets through most of them had nothing to do with it!
> Despite this, the number of new accounts created dropped significantly after the first round of suspensions in September (section 2.5.4), and while we do not have complete data to make a positive assessment, it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions.
Lack of something doesn't prove it's gone. So they realized they couldn't use twitter. Did that change their views? Did it change their minds? Citing a lack of participation in a hostile platform proves nothing except that twitter controls twitter.
They're not "terrorist groups", they're just following the Koran. What do you think the first 2 letters in ISIS mean?
Also, Muslims who promote traditional Islamic violence have dozens of Youtube channels today. The reason is that Youtube delegates complaints to ... Muslim moderators, who are also "just following the Koran."
I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality.
It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.
We are steeped in a culture of Hollywood telling us what the lessons of history are about. One of the off repeated "hopeful" messages we are fed is that you can't kill an idea but my reading of history has led me to the other conclusion entirely. That controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.
Because then these bad ideas fester in dark places and emerge as an entrenched ideology that is more difficult or impossible to respond to before they have resulted in adverse outcomes.
> I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work. It worked for centuries to help maintain systems of inequality.
It seems you’ve answered your own question then. Censorship is bad because it sustains systems of inequality.
> It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.
You are attributing effects to censorship when material circumstances and ideology contributed in large amounts. Its much easier to destroy ideas by burning books when all the books are manufactured by skilled craftsman using their hands.
> We are steeped in a culture of Hollywood telling us what the lessons of history are about. One of the off repeated "hopeful" messages we are fed is that you can't kill an idea but my reading of history has led me to the other conclusion entirely. That controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.
You can’t kill an idea but you can delay it or make people too terrified to spread it openly.
Whether that's good or bad is for history to decide. Recently I saw some guy watching video about terrorists executing some prisoner. He got it via whatsapp. That video was pro-terrorist, they obviously are trying to recruit more people by spreading their propaganda. Of course I would prefer such kinds of conversations to be silenced. The thing is, it can't be silenced. Russia tried to block Telegram, they poured lots of IT resources, they used DPI and other methods but they did not succeed and did lots of collateral damage in the process by blocking innocent websites.
I think that genie is out of the bottle already and we have to learn how to live with it. IMO governments right now are trying another method: they put lots of disinformation, hoping that average folk won't find out which one is true. Not blocking specific information, but making it hard to find and distinguish truth from false. That works for me, I already stopped to trust most of the information on the web.
Allow me to restate my position more precisely. I believe the supresion of information has worked in the past. And based on this I will need very compelling evidence to convince me that we live in a special time when it is impossible and no longer is effective.
I'm happy to be wrong but am skeptical when people begin claiming their circumstances are special in history.
I don't believe either point is true. For example, the concerted efforts to silence, defame and de-platform socialists in 1950s America were highly effect.
It worked practically in practice in history. It works also practically in countries like Saudi Arabia. Once in a while censorship does not manage to stop all opposition, which is why once in a while revolutions and such succeed.
But practically speaking, censorship works. That does not makes it right thing to do or something, which would be different claim.
Just because people manage to say censored things here and there just means it cant stop completely all such claims and materials. But it does minimize who will run into them, how many of them will be available and so on.
They may think censorship doesn't work but can still do damage, such as by lowering the standing and integrity of the left, damaging the liberal commons, or paradoxically making censored ideas more appealing.
Because the unintended consequences are harmful to bystanders. Probably more harmful than to the intended targets, since they're already socially ostracized for their openly bigoted views. Take, for example, the recent upswing in deplatforming. Most of the statistical data seems to suggest that the masses have become more afraid to speak openly, but it doesn't seem to have actually stopped extreme racists from saying racist things.
Because instead of treating the disease (terrible dehumanizing ideologies) it treats the symptom (them talking about it).
Instead of a fire, it creates a bomb.
>It worked for centuries to maintain familial control and enforce sexual monoculture in many countries. Information control works so well, it prevents people from even understanding themselves or what they really want in the face of ideologically imposed values.
It worked before the Internet.
>controlling the conversation, its constraints and determining the status quo are profoundly powerful tools.
In the short term. Determining the status quo isn't up to censors. It's up to society. And while censors have some power, they're not omniscient, so they always get circumvented eventually.
I don't agree. Before WWII, America had a very small standing army. It was practically an American value that the country demilitarized after each war. But from 1900 through WWI and especially through WWII there was a deliberate effort by the government and elites to change that. In just 40 years America went from barely militarized to having a large and expensive standing force that was viewed as a bedrock of American virtues.
Similar things happened throughout history regarding sanitation, citizenship, traffic laws and more. I believe the information ecosystem has a tremendous impact on people's beliefs and values.
I've read a screenshot of some anonymous post that goes like:
"There's a general phenomenon I've noticed on the internet. Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right wing. Leftist ideas cannot exist without censorship and moderation."
Which I think misreads the situation slightly. When sites censor people, it pushes those censored to other sites. Concentrates them. When all sites censoring have a left bias, both the censored and uncensored areas become echo chambers. Censorship then is segregation, but instead of having water fountains for blacks and whites, you have websites for lefts and rights. The only reason sites like gab and parler exist is because twitter censors.
If you really believe in equal rights and desegregation, you would not censor people based on their diversity of opinions. If you really believe diversity is our strength, then you tolerate diverse opinions, even if you find some of the opinions repugnant.
As the article points out, it's not a question of "should" you censor. It's a question of "can" you censor. Clearly censorship fails in the worst possible way. It further radicalizes both sides. If you read both /r/politics and patriots.win, it's like both groups live in two entirely separate worlds. When you isolate populations their evolutions take separate paths.
And that's how it is ultimately dangerous. Censorship leaves you with two groups of radicals with no common ground. At some point, those two groups meet and that's when bad things happen.
I've noticed similar and I'm not entirely sure it's right wing but more of extremism of ideas in general. Essentially, the "loudest" people (or ideas) win the conversation without moderation.
I'd say this has more to do with group think and populism. If there is any moderation it's going to steer the ground in a specific direction of populism. The more aggressively shared an idea is, the more successful it tends to be. It's not a linear relationship, but ideas tend to pick up steam (the flat Earth phenomenon blows my mind to this day). Extremists seem to be the ones most willing to verbalize and share these ideas that make them "loud." There's probably some overlap here on how effective propoganda is through repetition. Just look at how ads tend to focus on spreading an idea through repetition and seem to work.
Sometimes modern "right wing" ideas are difficult to discern from other extremists because the spectrum has slid and much of the modern right wing is extremist. To be fair, we have a lot of left wing extremists verging on being bananas as well. I know plenty of conservatives who feel fairly disenfranchised by the current right wing we've been seeing. I don't agree with many of their ideas but they make good points and have civil discussions about their different opinions and perspectives.
I suspect that "right wing" here is euphemism for more of sexism and racism. Because I can tell you that moderate conservative, economic conservative and for that matter libertarian forums all have moderation too. They cant exist without moderation and censorship either.
What happens however is that without moderation people will use harassment, trolling, both including massive sexist and racist statements to push away people who disagree with them. And people who dont want to be subjects of those leave. So you end up with people who are fine with trolling, racism and sexism and the end result is biased toward right wing. You know who will be harassed the most? Anyone perceived as feminist or sjw.
The actual extreme left, which I guess would be defined more as a marxism or communists, is relatively small in numbers. They are also pretty often sexists and racists too, so I dunno how it crosses with that.
Back when email arrived with a "You've got mail!" AOL chats were not moderated. I assure you they existed. All you needed was the ignore button. People are perfectly capable of deciding who to talk to on their own. Current UX seems designed to make you think you need moderators, but that is not a requirement.
Because the process itself involves heaping lots of social costs on people in the attempt to hurt their narratives, and that normally we would consider this bad? I mean, if we concede that literally throwing people in prison is ineffective then shouldn't the argument for not throwing people in prison be obvious?
I'm open to that argument. But I think this writer is really trying to have it both ways. They literally say, censorship doesn't work and we shouldn't do it because we are the ones who will be censored. It just seems like a kitchen sink argument. Either it is dangerous to society because it works or it is dangerous to a few because it is unjustly punitive.
I am not fully in agreement with what is happening right now because I believe it is fundamentally immoral to force someone into a society where they must provide for themselves and then to take away their means of provision.
But I also see our society as deeply censoros before this and a lot of people who are very upset now were fully willing to ignore that as long as it didn't broach opinions they value. Two wrongs don't make a right but it does leave me a little suspicious of how genuine they are and how magnanimous they will be when the pendulum of discourse swings back in their favor.
> "I may agree that most censorship is wrong but it does work."
that's at least falling for an availability bias. we have a extraordinarily tiny, highly-fragmented, and highly-idealized view into history. the more reasonable null hypothesis would be to assume folks had a range of opinions on any given topic, but their behaviors were modulated through social norms and coercion.
People change their behavior based on what is acceptable not just based upon what they believe. If using a racial slur will get a person written up at work, they have an incentive to hold back when the instinct arises to use it. The absence of racial slurs at work will make new workers less likely to use them as people often copy the environment they inhabit for the sake of cohesion.
Reduce to the point of practical irrelevance? Yep.
Deplatforming works.
These groups want to be on public platforms because their goal is to radicalize people. Or do you think that it was a mistake to kick ISIS and other radical Islam groups off Twitter too?
What do you mean by your statement "not doing those things"?
I hope you know talking about doing something,,, actually doing something,,, and getting caught in the act of doing the "something" are ALL different situations in themselves.
How on earth is equating ISIS members to Gab or even Parler users even remotely the same? It either means you are not aware of the real issue at hand or you seem to have a personal biasness against different political views to yourself.
My point is, Twitter accounts or not, normal (please double bold this word as you read this) people who hold different unpopular views should have the space and freedom to speak their minds.
Unfortunately freedom of speech is a black and white affair. If twitter as a platform doesn't allow their users to legally exercise this right, they might as well come out and freely state they are partisan and include this in their policy. Rather than pretend to be something they are not.
Note: Terrorism is criminalized and well-defined within most state laws. My argument is not in defence of this.
That result makes it more difficult for law enforcement to follow their movements, but it also has the effect of making it more difficult to recruit new members and spread their ideas.
The whole reason social media has been so powerful in spreading ideas, good and bad, is because it reduces communication friction and effort while promoting discoverability. If extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable, and requires more effort on the part of their members. Over time that makes it less likely they'll be able to grow or maintain their numbers.
The easiest enemy to go after is an exposed one. The 2nd is a weak one.
> extremists have to move to Signal and Telegram, it makes them less discoverable
Extremist groups do not need to be discoverable. They just need to plant enough conviction into the minds of susceptible and willing hosts. I assure you, not so much energy is required to convert in this case. Certainly not more than religious ones.
Though I need to clarify. When extremism crosses the border of advocating for mass violence. It gains a new universally unambiguous term: terrorism.
Yep!
> IMO it makes things even worse since these groups will congregate in secret much further away from the public eye where they can perpetuate unbalanced and unhealthy ideas.
The whole point of deplatforming is to prevent those stupid ideas from having a general audience. Sunlight is not always the best disinfectant.
And then suddenly, for no reason at all, someone incredibly well aligned with everyone you deplatformed rises to power.
FPTP is dogshit, agreed. But does even ranked choice voting result in a sane system? I'm not implying it can't. I honestly just don't know.
European ones are decent.
"Arbitrary criteria" describes all norms.
You know exactly what I mean, cut the bullshit. Point being, deplatforming may be okay for the group who exercises it, but not for the group that is being deplatformed. Who the fuck decides? The government? Some out of touch Big Tech CEOs? Fuck that.
Just take a look at Venezuela's current "Law against Hatred" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_against_Hatred)to get an idea of how dumb this whole approach is.
Now, if I'd be willing to argue that this is a antitrust issue (FB, TW, Google / Amazon AWS, CloudFlare / PayPal, Stripe / Visa, MasterCard) having too much power to the point that they decide whether you live or not, and that there should be way more alternatives.
> Who the fuck decides? Everyone decides norms in the small bubble around them. When people organize their influence grows too. Some people have too much power. Some people should never have power, like nazis.
A lot of the arguments in this thread you will notice are about whether deplatforming makes nazis less nazis. Well, that's not the point. The point is to make sure they aren't accepted, that they can't use the public square to recruit and gain power.
Some would argue that this is ineffective, but they are now stuck in the bind of thinking that access to places of public discourse is both an important right and also practically unimportant.
Maybe they're too young to remember the holocaust deniers on use usenet or how ineffectual stormfront was before 4chan and before mass social media. People who are hungry for power will try to gain it in the easiest ways possible.
If you think them having power would suck, then you want to make it harder for them.
I simultaneously think facebook and twitter and CBS and fox news etc. have too much control over public discourse and also don't want white supremacists to be able to freely use that power to bring back hell on earth. That includes the new york times giving the likes of Richard Spencer space on their page, Tucker Carlson crying about how much white people are under attack and facebook letting white supremacists run recruiting groups thousands in size.
That's exactly what I'm arguing against. That's just your opinion and you treat it like some universal axiom. Same way you treat 'Holocaust deniers' as some kind of monstrous apparitions. You may not agree, that's all.
It's people like you that inspire me to counteract this trend with full force.
> It's people like you that inspire me to counteract this trend with full force.
What does that look like? What actual effects on the world do you try to make or support others making because I am opposed to fascism?
We may not agree, but we can't say it's a "fundamental disagreement" if there's so much people rooting for it.
> What does that look like?
1) Disagreeing with people online 2) Opening niche internet forums that are lax on moderation (except for illegal content such as child pornography and direct threats) 3) Investing in hosting/domain registrars/payment processors that don't deplatform because of political stance (e.g., Epik, SkySilk)
I've been doing 1) and 2) for some time now, but I want to do 3) as well. I think it will become very profitable during this decade.
It's OK that some things involve subjective judgment.
I mean, my subjective judgement could tell me that you're a fucking faggot and that I should beat the living shit out of you. It would be right for me to have that subjective judgement, but it can't be for monopolies, nor governments.
This is such a lazy argument, because it's trivially defeated. Yes. Exactly this. In the same way that e.g. jailing one group (the guilty) is okay, but doing the same for another group (the innocent) is not okay.
Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good. Like if all you want to do is dehumanize those guys so you can happily insult / hurt them without hurting your conscience, go ahead, that's choice.. you have different goals.. but remember that instinct that wants you to scream at this-this-this type of person is a confrontational approach that deep down falls in the pattern of, eliminating the other tribe.. if you choose to do something about it and what you do is your responsibility and problem.
I just think the solution should lie in : 1) dialog 2) laws
I think beyond those 2 lie some really wrong answers..
A group that has the numbers, with mild views that can dilute your message with reasonable doubt, challenge certain aspects of your extreme yet be broadly acceptable to a much wider audience including those tending towards your side – that's poision for an extremist.
Therefore, their solution to that is tribalism, polarization, and shaming for any hint of non-compliance with the extreme's dogma.
End result is that the vast majority of moderate people do not participate in debates on sensitive topics, leaving the field open for polarizing demagoguery. All that's left is to make more topics sensitive to get an advantage there too, and that's progressing very well too.
A leftist that doesn’t empathize with the masses, is not a true leftist.
Do they really have the right to commit suicide by policy, taking us with them via climate change?
It is realy hard to empathize with those.
If you are looking for a clearler symptom that you don't empathize with them, there isn't any.
What is not a moral failing, by the way. But check your "Left" label, because it's probably wrong.
After all, the establishment has failed those people. The democratic party has severely failed them. Democracy it self has failed them. I know that really capitalism has failed them and they would find better answers under socialism then under Trump (after all Trump has failed them as well). But you must still understand where this is coming from. That is you must empathize with them, even though their views are wrong.
The criticism people are raising is about a kind of hypocrisy, even when lying is entirely to oneself.
A left position calls for redistribution of wealth and transfer of control of the means of production, which gets you attacked from nearly all establishment sides.
Obama turned out to be an establishment President (with bailouts, not prosecutions, for the architects of the housing bubble and crash) but he ran as an anti-establishment candidate.
Then, despite obviously being part of the establishment, Hillary tried to do the same, arguing that she as a woman she clearly wasn't part of the establishment ("Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment.")
She lost to Trump, who - despite being a billionaire white male - constantly attacked and was attacked by the establishment, in particular as a "populist", someone chosen by the people, not the establishment.
And until the DNC united behind Biden, Bernie was giving him a serious challenge, and Biden was relying on his anti-establishment rep with his "black firewall".
Meanwhile, Bloomberg was painted as the clueless establishment candidate and laughed out of the race.
A young politician (left or right) studying recent events would be smart to run away from the establishment, just as so many elder politicians have (while perhaps seeking establishment support in secret, and hoping not to be caught).
And even with all Trump's failings as a person, it was a close election between the unpopular populist and the likeable establishment compromise. Is that evidence of establishment strength?
Leftists generally accept rich folks sympathetic to the cause, even though they technically don’t belong to the masses. For example Marxists and anarchists alike generally accept Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy as leftists (even though the latter was born into great wealth), and leftists generally accept Dan Price (#DanPriceSeattle on twitter) even though he is a boss (i.e. not off the masses).
Also, to be free of the "tyranny of capitalism and fascism," I hope that those are two different categories. Capitalism and fascism are near polar opposites.
It's also important to understand that leftism necessarily ushers in tyranny. It is impossible, not just in practice, but in theory, for leftism to be implemented without an authoritarian state. If you attempt to get around this constraint, it will only be by you failing to describe a state whose outcomes will fall within the objectives of leftism, or by describing an authoritarian state by any other name (syndicates, guilds, unions).
It is actually quite fun to read Dostoevsky’s Idiot with that in mind that Dostoevsky might have written Prince Myshkin (the Idiot) with Leo Tolstoy in mind. Dostoevsky was very much not a man of means, whereas Tolstoy literally came from a line of nobility. To Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s talk of the impoverished must have sounded like he had no idea what he was talking about.
That being said, I do think that romanticism of the poor is a really old school mentality, maybe some boomers sometimes still engage in it, but I doubt that you’ll find contemporary leftists engaging in it. Today’s left is much more AOC and Greta Thunberg complaining about how shitty life is for the poor (with a substantial retweet history each backing up poor people calling for it).
edit: Oy! The downvote is not for disagreeing!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
What's not ok is going on about downvotes. It never does any good, and it makes for boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel like that works better for factual, technical claims than political ones though. As another website says, "No technology is discussed."
In the five years or so I spent hanging out with Socialist Party USA folks, I met loads of Maoists, including a former party chairman. There were a lot who were Trotskyists out in the open and Maoists if you got them drunk enough to talk freely.
1%'er motorcycle clubs, mafia organizations and radical religious cults are notorious for doing this as well.
If they're not willing to be reasonable (like, you don't get to "dialog" about whether or not genocide is appropriate), then the best and most moral course of action could very well be to stop them from recruiting your friends.
In the context of tech, this is the essence of deplatforming. Twitter and Facebook cannot censor, since they are not governments. However, as private entities, they can decide not to let you use their service. That's their private property rights in action.
Seriously, wtf is wrong with you?
"I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years."
A teacher asks some student to stand up and raise his hands before him. The teacher stands in front of him and does the same, touching the students hands. Then the teacher starts pushing, and the student uses force to stay in place. Then the teacher uses more force, and so does the student.
Finally the teacher asks: "Whay are you pushing me?". "Because you were pushing me!"
This is exactly what is happening here. You cannot expect people to give in once you start pushing.
There was an episode of STTNG that had a profound effect on me as a kid as a metaphor for confrontation, where the crew of a destroyed ship kept saying "more power to the shields" when the "shields" were actually causing the problem.
On the contrary, Chinese martial arts (as well as physical exercise more generally, as with Tai chi chu'an) use the pushing hands exercise to teach how to skillfully yield and redirect the other party's power. It's viewed as foundational to the entire discipline.
But to this, the answer is: every defensive technology can be used as an offensive weapon. I can pack my SAM turrent on a truck and drive all the way to your city, and start shooting down your airliners, and you won't be able to do anything about it, because whatever guns you scavenge from a museum mean nothing to my anti-ballistic vest.
This is what I think of when I see people who purposefully inject themselves into communities, feign offense and call society for help. Using means of protection as weapons.
The second is what you are doing in your post.
In this regard, it's absolutely a "viable approach": By making it low-status to be right-wing, or even by not carrying right-wing views on popular private platforms, it makes the right-wing destined to lose out somewhere along the line simply due to the youth not wanting to associate with them.
It's a waiting game above anything, and on a long enough scale it looks like the winner is clear here, for better or worse.
The Left seems to have given up on liberalism in persuit of victory. They are in the process of giving up on progressivism. What remains?
They seem more progressive than ever; an open socialist nearly won their primary last year.
Leftism tries to combine these ideas into a coherent political ideology. Liberalism (the part about individual rights) is a check on the abuses of socialism, and progressivism is supposed to make it all work (experts in control making good decisions).
I'm not a Leftist, but I can acknowledge that it's a coherent ideology.
When you take Leftism and take away liberalism and progressivism, you are left with rebels that have no solution to anything. Like BLM and antifa which are always recruiting to attack a mysterious "system" rather than making serious proposals. (It's always easier to get people to agree on a problem than a solution.) If they were to win, it would look more like Venezuela or Cuba than Denmark or Sweden.
Liberalism can be dropped with no real loss.
What's wrong with Cuba? It seems like it's doing pretty well; it has more or less the longest-lasting government in South America, largely because it dropped liberalism.
This is a direct quote from the post I am replying to. I know liberalism and progressiveness aren't the same thing. I am stating that they're getting more progressive, and I don't see why liberalism declining is a bad thing.
The generation that comprised the hippies are now in their 80s. Mitch McConnell would have been in that generation.
So while the current crop of conservatives are dying off, they are being replaced by new members.
Seems doubtful. Rural and poor areas remain strongholds for conservatism and that seems unlikely to change. The urban left may increasingly outnumber rural conservatives but that doesn't necessarily give them more power thanks to the way that the electoral system and government in the United States is structured.
The author is getting a couple of things completely wrong about both France and Germany. The FN managed to get into the second round of Frances presidential election only to clearly loose that round. In the following parliamentary elections, FN lost as well. Whether or not the FN will end being a major factor will be shown by the next elections. If anything, the more aggressive approach seems to have softened the FN and make it more mainstream acceptable.
In Germany, we went without a major right wing party from 1945 to the rise of the AfD. And the AfD is, until now, more of a nuisance than a threat. That could change with the next elections, so. The reason we managed to go without a party like that for decades are the laws we have.
These laws were created based on lessons of WW2 and the Nazis rise to power. That they work less well in the 21st century, with social media, shoulder really surprise anyobe.
I'd also add, that the Covid restrictions, and the seemingly incompetent governments, are the main driver behind the right rise in popularity. And not some failure to fight hate speech.
I sincerely don't think either of the two sides is advocating for those things (ignoring a very few extremists - on both sides - with malicious intent, who don't represent the majority).
I do see those issues mentioned a lot in the public debate, but mostly in the context of straw man arguments repeated as a sort of battle cry, and to denigrate "the other side".
It was a whole lot easier to push McCarthyism than it ever was to convincingly prove you weren't a communist.
QAnon representatives are calling for the murder of Democrats. The same group advocates for brutal treatment of migrants, restrictions of freedom of choice for women, direct violence against muslims.
I don't see any of this on the left side of the political spectrum. Also, when someone in a group voices radical opinions and calls for violence it represents the groups view when said group is not distancing itself from these views. Because if the group doesn't, the one person is just the group trying to find out how far they can go.
How are people declaring themselves an independent 'commune' _not communist?
How many people died in and around of those zones?
Maybe my comment was inflammatory, but there is evidence for the underlying point I'm making.
> when someone in a group voices radical opinions and calls for violence it represents the groups view when said group is not distancing itself from these views
When "the other side" has an interest in associating you with extremists and refuses to listen to you repeatedly denounce the actions of those extremists, there's nothing you can do to convince them otherwise. Again, the demagoguery and parallels to the McCarthy era are troubling.
So, like, when someone tweets "kill all men", no one on the left says: relax, it was obviously just a joke!
Also, Valerie Solanas and Donna Hylton never existed, or at least were never considered heroes by the left.
To be intolerant against intolerance is at the heart of any stable, decent, livable society. I don’t understand the view of the free-speech-absolutists because it is so obvious that it doesn’t work.
In Europe - or least in The Netherlands - saying discriminatory thing can get you fined or in jail and that is how it should be if you care about your society.
I agree; in the name of preserving social order, SJWs should all be thrown in jails.
Just kidding... but that's what the article is talking about. You can make strict laws (or social norms) against "intolerance", and someone else will be happy you handed them a powerful weapon they can use against you.
Do your political opponents seem intolerant to you? Let me tell you a secret: the feeling is probably mutual. You prefer to focus on those parts where they are less tolerant than you, and ignore the ones where it is the other way round. They do the same.
And no, denying people service, jobs and social security based on color, religion sex or whatnot is not the same as fighting for people to have these rights. Because the former takes away rights, while the latter grants rights without anybody else loosing anything.
Do you honestly believe this is a truthful description of reality?
Do you believe your opponents would also agree with this description (that is, if they only could abstain from lying for a moment, e.g. if you would give them a truth serum)?
Let me tell you also a secret. It is not about political opponents disagreeing over their views. That is not the intolerance I refer to. You make it a sad word game.
It's the intolerance of discrimination, of hatred of (groups) of people. We in The Netherlands have laws against discriminatory speech and hate speech.
Last time I checked, SJW mostly are against stuff like discrimination. They are no threat. This is not a 'both sides' situation.
You are right though, which is why high-status in a society are "allowed" to break social norms with no consequence.
The general consensus in such countries is that the laws are terrible and oppressive, the the brutal enforcement largely ensures compliance.
What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.
So sure in some states the fines are huge, but New Mexico’s $50 fine is a minimal risk.
After all, the people in and around your car can judge and shame you while you can only get a ticket if there's a cop around.
HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.
Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.
It is likely that had this propaganda been allowed to run unchecked, there would have been even more people recruited by Daech to go fight in Syria (or get married off), and to attack random civilians in the name of this ideology. Most attacks, if not all, were perpetrated by people who had in large part radicalized online, away from extremist mosques where they might have been more easily detected.
That being said, I don't believe censorship or de-platforming should ever be used outside of preventing the spread of propaganda that results in actual attacks on people. Anything short of this is just talk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In terms of "adults", they are few and far between. There will always be biological adults, but so many adults are emotionally stunted that it's difficult for me to give them the title. Just as domestically raised cats are more child-like than cats that have spent their lives on the streets, the average life of an adult in the west is replete with comfort and novelty so as to keep them from building maturity and character. This makes them incredibly easy to be shamed into doing whatever is considered acceptable by the society they're in.
There was a raid on the capitol. Racial tension is at its highest point in decades. Domestic terrorism is on the rise.
"We are stronger working together" is what a tribe is.
Is the goal of social justice movements just to be hot topics? Your statement makes it seem like success is measured by the amount of retweets or something. Clearly that can't be true, but if global fascism and ethnic nationalism is on the rise, what actual victories can this strategy claim to have won?
In general I think there has been progress, but it's all come from other corners: economics, regulatory reforms, art, and so on. Other than getting attention, are there any specific things you're thinking of when you say this strategy has been effective?
Individualism? Long gone, the name of the game is collectivism and your identity groups are everything.
Color blindness? It's officially considered to be an outdated, laughable mode of thinking. If your identity collective is paramount, how can you be blind to the parameter by which we should first be characterizing you by?
Freedom of speech? Muh freeze peach. This is now a dog whistle value for hate speech. Freedom of speech just means freedom for the identity groups in oppressive positions.
Rule of law? The application of the law should, of course, not be universal. It should be applied with context, with the context being...you guessed it...your identity group.
Objectivity? Facts? Reason? Tools of the colonialists in order to snuff out alternative modes of thinking. Any claim at truth is simply done within the context of the identity group.
If you don't think the left has succeeded in this objective, I don't know what planet you're living on. As a liberal, I can hardly communicate with any of my peers within the framework that has been foundational to Western civilization.
Now we can see multiple “factions” each with different ideas about the direction to take society with many of these ideas being excluding of or outright hostile to a different faction. So the solution? You have to kill them before they kill you (not in a literal sense, or at least not yet). Some of these factions will band with others (see right-libertarians typically siding with reactionaries and the progressive adoption of various leftist ideas) though it will be interesting to see what happens there when whichever group comes out on top.
"Color blindness" likewise has mostly been used to argue that those on the bottom of society deserve to be there; (again) preserving the status quo. I.E. shutting down discussion by labeling racism a "solved problem".
"Freedom of speech" complaints most often come from those claiming to be "censored" because they are no longer being given a megaphone.
"Rule of law" is used to prevent analysis of those laws by, among other things, demonizing any discussion of those laws' motivations, or the cultural context in which they are enforced.
"Objectivity, Facts, and Reason" are used as buzzwords, often by those who know they aren't actually on their side, because
1) everyone knows they are good, and so claiming to already possess them is convincing rhetoric,
2) painting your opponents as "rejecting" them is also persuasive rhetoric, especially to your uninformed audience.
Claiming that people are actually demonizing them is a mischaracterization.
Someone here has posted a link to the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model. A quote from it: "So I think when we talked about the "fifth filter" we should have brought in all this stuff -- the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority."
I'm not sure I understand precisely what you're getting at but, for the record, anyone reading this should understand that I am not suggesting that hot topics are the goal of social justice.
In fact, I wasn't even making a value judgement of left wing causes in general, but people seem to always take the word "leftists" as a pejorative. All I'm saying is that leftist political strategies have been successful in that, on any given day, I can tune in to any given medium and count on trans rights, BLM, UBI, social equity, anti-racism, and so forth being a topic of conversation. This wasn't nearly as true before the current wave of leftism gained steam.
"their strategy actually works." implies that their strategy accompishes their goals.
"Leftists, "wokeness", and social justice wouldn't be the hot topics they've been if the strategy of leftists weren't effective." impies that hot topics are what their strategy accompished.
The transitive property between "goals" == "what strategy accompished" == "hot topics" is at least pretty clearly implied there.
But telling people they shouldn’t insult and denigrate people for immutable physical characteristics is not shaming them, but if it is that’s a weird aspect of the interaction to focus on.
The problem is that A) this process is more useful for advancing within the ideological block than for advancing the ideology's goals, and B) there's a "Laffer Curve" of sorts for paying "moral taxes" in following behavioral norms. The internal dynamics of a movement is going to set the level by true-believer dynamics where outrageously high demands are acceded to, while the general public is going to respond to that level of demand of "well, if you think I'm a bad person for saying 'Latino" instead of 'Latinx', that's your problem".
The only change is that you now have a bunch of people who are afraid to use a handful of naughty words in public because they might lose their job over it. You haven't changed any minds or hearts, you've just moved the conversations into private rooms. You can't end racism by just shaming people for using the n-word. It's arguably just as bad now as it was during the Civil Rights era, but you can't easily see it anymore because it's mostly kept within "friendly" company.
That's not the "only change". If were, that's still a feature, not a bug. It means that real consequences are possible, and that those possible consequences are widely understood.
One is never going to change the mind and heart of a deeply racist person, but one can help bend the overall curve of intolerance over time.
For example, I posit (without proof) that, because we have effectively banned hateful racist speech in most standard professional workplaces, the people who work in those environments and used to suffer harm (through being forced to work in an openly hostile environment to them, through being denied advancement or equitable compensation, through the mental stress of being the target of hate speech, etc.), that those people suffer less harm today then they used to.
- Is it perfect now? No.
- Can people still be secretly denied promotions because of racism? Absolutely.
- Does it happen less frequently in the aggregate than it used to 40-50 years ago? Almost certainly, though I base this claim on common sense for now (don't have scientific sources handy but I'm sure I can find some).
My grandparents used the N word freely.
My parents used the C word on occasion when they were younger and grew out of it.
I don't use either, and neither do my kids.
Generations don't exist in bubbles. They are shaped and influenced by popular society just as much as their local communities.
30 years ago, the AIDS epidemic was a punchline.
17 years ago, you couldn't be openly gay in the military and the majority of people in the US supported it.
Now, most people are in favor of gay marriage and a sizeable percentage are fine with trans rights.
The best part about bigots is that they are mortal.
And they cling to power. The party that opposed gay marriage now controls 67% of the voting power on the court that legalized it. If that case came up again today, it would almost certainly go the other way. And they may, in fact, find ways to re-litigate it.
Even when the majority of that party switched to be in favor if it, they continue to vote for leadership who opposed it. Laws against trans rights are being enshrined in law literally as we speak, and it will take a very long time to scrub them off the books.
They're mortal, but I take no joy in that. They have disproportionate power, and as it dims, they use it harder and harder.
> "Neither does boxing people into this, that and that category do any good."
a good first start is to follow the latter maxim when discussing the former issue, particularly when it comes to issues of power and influence. you're already lost when you speak in terms of left and right. those are distractions from the real coercions impinging on our freedoms daily, from the desire to stagnate and wield (more) power. you need to pierce that construct, disregard it entirely, to understand and orient your resistance and dissatisfaction toward the rightful source.
two people chosen randomly are going to be vastly more similar than different, no matter where on the artificially-constructed political spectrum they are. this is how we know it's constructed and not real.
the left-right dichotomy, like all dichotomies, collapses our thinking into detrimental zero-sum tribalism pointing us against each other rather toward the real source of conflict, power-wielders, creating an artificial, seemingly-insurmountable gulf, that fractures the populace and shields power further from the will of the people (that's us).
a power structure can do awesome things, and sometimes we need it to do those awesome (positive) things temporarily, but stagnated, amassed power can do a lot of awesome, negatively-externalizing, and self-serving things not in the interest of the many (especially the future many).
the way to think about power is as flows, not stores, and especially not as individuals, which is where our primitive brains betray us constantly. to harness power, we must allow it to temporarily coalesce when and where it will do good, and dissapate steadily so as not to stagnate, and corrupt, in any one set of hands.
How often did I end up in a room full of urban, university educated people looking down on the white rural common folks.
The common people are not always common by choice. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't follow wonkish academic stories about the history of race to understand modern issues. It's not necessarily by choice that they can't see all the shades of gray of advanced morality and sort out complex issues about gender and race. These are the type of people that need to see a moral guide every week just to follow a simple morality where they can't process much beyond stereotypes.
The best AIs out there are not able to simulate advanced empathy. It is highly complex and involves multilevel recursive counterfactual meta-cognitive logic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4eDzqS2rbcBDsCLZ/unrolling-...). Given the level of complexity, I don't expect everyone to be able to intuitively get it.
A lot of people are intellectually underprivileged and too often, sjw like to scorn and mock them for their handicap.
The way I see it, Trumpism is made of an evil right wing elite that has managed to capture a large swath of simple minded folks party because these simple folks were pushed away from more reasonable political affiliation.
Populism doesn't have to be negative. The US constitution starts with We the People, not We the Scholars. Yes populism means unsophisticated views but these could be aligned with reasonable policy as much as right wing policy if the left didn't show so much contempt for the intellectually and morally disadvantaged. Democracy means you need unsophisticated people to vote with you to win elections.
And it's ultimately hopeless. No matter how hard we try, someone on the left will scold. Oops.
This seems manifestly false. A lot of adult behavior can be changed by scolding, a lot of society runs on scolding.
I'm a pretty rational and strongly opinionated person. You won't change my opinions with scolding. But if someone says "don't talk so loud, you'll wake the baby", well, you can certainly change my behavior. But even more, a lot of people do not operate at anywhere near this the level of rationality and a wider area of their behavior can be changed by scolding. Which is to say the population of fully adult humans is a lot less than the population of humans above the age of majority.
And sure, you can't control everything with scolding, you can't replace the police and the army with scolding but scolding, peer (and non-peer) pressure, etc is a tool in the hands of all the different incarnation of "society".
The urge to label them fascists and make them seem monstrous and unworthy of engagement is the impulse leads to civil war.
Not only will they not listen to reason, they burned our downtowns, just like Mussolini's fascists, or the Russian Red Terror, around WW2.
Make no mistake, the left/DNC are Marxists and fascists.
We are in an ideological civil war, and have been since 2012. Anybody who's studied history already knows this.
edit: At least nobody I've seen yet. People are probably gonna say it (this goes for any "it" as conversation length grows), but I'd expect it to be downvoted.
So regardless of the HN crowd's restraint when using labels, the labels themselves can carry unintended implications.
Fascist is not just "extreme right" it's a specific political ideology or goal. The extreme left is therefore ???
Because while the US certainly has a small following of communists like how every country has a small following of everything, they're certainly not the group which attempted to seize the Capitol building on January 6.
You can't tweet at them though.
2) How do you determine that a specific person you're dealing with can be specifically categorized into that bucket?
3) Are you calling them that name because it accurately defines that person's identity and behavior or is it because this tag is a really easy tag to slap onto people so you can deal with them very easily without having to think too much..
Like if I call someone a simp, beyond me insulting him and conveying I don't like him, it doesn't really mean anything..
not like he's going to become one (whatever that would mean) because I called him that..
Science is an excellent framework, leftists are very good at it when it’s about criticizing the opponent, and we are very good at it when we want to criticize the PC of the moment. Now we need to converge.
Please don’t despair. Please don’t give up discussing and trying to sort out truth from pollution.
1. Declare people who disagree with you fascists 2. Declare that it's impossible to dialogue with fascists
Then it all becomes very easy.
1. Declare people that want a fascists form of government fascists
2. there is no 2.
It's not word play, it's just facts.
Or do you mean fascist as a slur, ie. anything I don't like?
Maybe that’s what they meant by “fascist form of government”?
So, if "that's what they mean", they're mis-using the term.
Just as there was an attempt by a presidential candidate to overturn the results of an election and install himself in 2000. And many times before. Challenging election results is not something unusual, it happens all the time. And will undoubtedly happen again. There's nothing "fascist" in using free speech and court system to try and prove there were election fraud (or miscount, or whatever the next candidate could think of). That's why we have the court system, so they have their chance to prove their case.
> Maybe that’s what they meant by “fascist form of government”?
Except nobody tried to change the form of government. So either we already have the fascist form of government right now, or trying to prove, using existing form of government, that you were - by existing laws - the rightfully elected candidate - can not be seen as advocating "fascist form of government".
If it looks like a Nazi, espouses Nazi beliefs, and says it's a Nazi, it's a god damn Nazi.
How else are you supposed to respond to a comment like this?
I'd suggest you might try the other path, as Chomsky also suggests:
> “If you're in favour of freedom of speech that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise you're not in favour of freedom of speech.
> There's two positions you can have on freedom of speech, and you can decide which position you want.”
[1] https://youtu.be/4-oV42OMQoE?t=408
This is the story of Daryl Davis, a black man who convinced 200 KKK members (yes, real violent racists, not just people who disagreed with you on tax rates) to change their ways. If a black man can do it by talking to KKK members, maybe it's after all possible for you to dialogue with your neighbor about tax rates?
THAT is how you beat fascism. Not censorship.
Lazy programmers trying censor via bits and bytes are never going to accomplish in a million years what Mr. Davis already has.
It seems unlikely that at least a thousand people out of 90 million aren't gullible enough to be swayed by hellbanning.
"it seeming unlikely" hardly compares to a man with 200 trophies to prove his method works.
Mr. Davis has 200 examples. I'm only asking for one. His method works. The deplatformers' citation of their own platforms only proves that they control their own platforms, not that any extremist view was changed.
Some great things are done by great people, but they don't necessarily scale well.
Do you want a (difficult) method that works (personal involvement and direct conversation), or a simple, easy, lazy one (deplatforming/cancel/censorship) that doesn't?
Nazi censored. Stalin censored. Xi censors. Seems hard to explain if censorship doesn't work.
Nazis also killed the speakers. Stalin killed the speakers. Xi kills the speakers.
Citing mass genociders as "censorship works" is hilariously bad evidence of censorship working when terminating the speaker most definitely works.
We want something that works and that doesn't have the nasty side-effects. Nazi, Stalin, and Xi's tactics aren't the answer we're looking for.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Very good quote.
FTFY!
Which ironically runs right into the famous poem:
>First they came for the Communists >And I did not speak out >Because I was not a Communist
>Then they came for the Socialists >And I did not speak out >Because I was not a Socialist
>Then they came for the trade unionists >And I did not speak out >Because I was not a trade unionist
>Then they came for the Jews >And I did not speak out >Because I was not a Jew
>Then they came for me >And there was no one left >To speak out for me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
The same goes for your post about tolerance towards intolerance. And then you complain about anti-white racism, which is not a thing.
Care to elaborate?
The right is the one failling at cancelling people, but they try just as much as the left
But I do believe you need to give reasonable responses to extreme views, to prevent others from becoming extreme. Calling someone "fascist" is in that sense never constructive.
Reasonable views are hard to argue with.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
step 2: declare that you cant debate fascism
step 3: ...
step 4: censorship and violent supression time
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432620.
We restrict freedom in general when it hurts other people (slavery, rape, killing, trespassing,etc) and we don't go around crying about slippery slopes and lack of freedom for it.
Clear examples of good censoring of free speech are the courts decision in the Alex Jones - Sandy Hook case and the Washington Post paying reparations to Nathan Phillips (the child mocking the native American). In both cases their "free speech" caused damage to people and the court decided that they didn't were protect under the free speech laws.
On the contrary, the Verfassungschutz and other federal organisations built to work against enemies of the state support the enemies of the state! And that is where the 'vast and varied far-right network' comes from, it's supported by tax money.
The Verfassungsschutz is a special intelligence agency observing enemies of democray, which includes neonazis and the like. This agency uses 'V-Maenner', which is a network of paid informers within these structures.
In 2013, every fourth criminally active neonazi V-mann was receiving state payments: https://web.archive.org/web/20130405050440/http://www.tagess...
When the NSU murdered people in Germany, V-mann informants used the money paid for them by the state to support the group (https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-02/nsu-a... ).
Early 2000 Germany tried to outlaw the NPD, the then-biggest far-right political party. The outlaw process failed because the Verfassungschutz had too many of its members in the party's rank, so the judges could not say which party activities were anti-democratic, or what was the government's own doing ('fehlende Staatsferne' - not enough distance from the state).
Because the state taxes itself a measly 10% on these payments we have a rough idea on how much they pay - Tino Brandt, one of the NPD's party functionaries in Thuringia, received 200,000 DM over 6 years until 2001. In the same state alone (remember, Germany has 16 states) in the same time the government paid out 1.5 million DM.
The last head of the agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, is now retired after it became apparent that he was ignoring evidence. He has since opened a Twitter account where he's spouting Fox News-level far right nonsense. This was the head of the agency 2012 to 2018.
The OP's whole argument falls down if you consider that the German state is saying they're fighting Nazis but then they go and fund them very well with tax-money. It would be much easier to fight Nazis if they wouldn't get millions in funding.
How does this do anything but support the OP's argument? OP argues that hate speech laws are futile because those in power get to decide what is hate speech and how it is enforced and it is always possible for the wrong people to be in power. Has-Geog Maassen and the overall failure you highlighted seems like a perfect example of this seeming inevitability in practice.
We restrict freedom in general when it hurts other people (slavery, rape, killing, trespassing,etc) and we don't go around crying about slippery slopes and lack of freedom for it.
Clear examples of good censoring of free speech are the courts decision in the Alex Jones - Sandy Hook case and the Washington Post paying reparations to Nathan Phillips (the child mocking the native American). In both cases their "free speech" caused damage to people and the court decided that they weren't protect under the free speech laws.
The point is - we have laws for speech that enters the criminal realm.
And about Alex Jones, the case proves beyond reasonable doubt that he should had been censored to prevent the damage and that is my point. His speech has real life serious consequences that hurt people even if he didn't do it personally and he didn't intended to happen.
The line, at least in the US, is that all speech is free unless it "incites imminent criminal behavior". And no, the criminal behavior doesn't include criminal speech (that's just circular logic).
Yes, the line the US draws favors free speech far more than almost any other country. And that's a part of the ethos of our country. Other countries are free to do whatever they want.
And no, Alex Jones shouldn't have been censored (by the government). We don't allow the government to arbitrarily deny citizens rights unless they have been given a fair trial. In his case, a judge decided his speech fell into the realm of defamation and thus his victim was due restitution.
And that's how it should work. We don't need "speech police" and we don't need to create new laws to further remove people's rights. If someone oversteps the bounds of free speech then a judge can decide what to do, not Facebook.
Private business and private individuals are free to set whatever rules they like about your behavior in their establishments.
They're also allowed to just not listen or want to repeat it.
If someone shoves a bunch of pamphlets in my hands, I'm allowed to dump them in the trash.
It's such a generic statement that it's meaningless and could apply to any group of opinions.
Usually I've seen forms like this
"I strongly believe in (basic description of X)"
"You know that's X, right?!"
"I'm not X"
"Alright, would you say you believe in (wikipedias first paragraph on X)?"
"Oh yes! You really understand!"
"You know I just lifted that from wikipedia article on X"
"Let me hear it again. Ok, that's not exactly right." Etc...
Try it yourself next time, it's pretty remarkable. They're not acting in bad faith or trying to deceive.
It's like an addict who believes they smoke cigarettes not because they have an addiction but because they enjoy the taste.
Most people want to believe they've made the right decisions (https://grist.org/article/80-percent-of-humans-are-delusiona...). They think racism is wrong so therefore their beliefs can't be racist.
I don't know a lot (any?) racist right folks, but I know a shitload of racist left and they ALL publicly, verbally, in writing, rail against racism in one breath, and then shit on white people in the next.
I acknowledge that this is anecdotal, but still...
Calling white racists out definitely isn't racism.
"White male" has become a demeaning putdown by many enthusiastic liberals, which is evidence enough.
Enough.
Also, please note I said in the northern hemisphere. Assuming most of us here are living there. Could be different in, say, Africa or Asia. But even there it is not even close to the "white farmer genocide" shit that is still being spread.
Not sure the rest of your post makes any sense. I don't consider myself a racist or a sexist and I find it appalling that I am unable to comment on ongoing social issues without being called a "white male" or being told that my opinions are invalid because my lack of melanin seems to imply I am part of an elite group of oppressors. This is insulting and lacks any intellectual merit.
Historically speaking, there was bo group more privileged than white, European males. Being one myself, I don't see anything wrong with simply acknowledging that simple fact.
An internet rando blabbing to their cellphone camera isn't what makes median black family wealth 1/8th that of their white counterparts (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...).
It's institutions and power structures which creates that.
For example, speculative home values in whiter neighborhoods lead to higher home prices and thus higher property taxes and thus better funded schools and so the racist-system continues.
Nobody is explicitly being racist there. Speculating in the white neighborhood is genuinely a better investment yield. Just like with investing in Javanese over Sudanese neighborhoods in Indonesia or Croat over Serb towns in Croatia.
The human created systems, the cultural milieu and its structures, they lead to racist outcomes. It's all artificial. That's why passing works (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)).
Realizing it's mostly cultural just like it is with say the Hmong and Lao people, where you can just change the clothes, grooming and mannerisms and our minds recategorize, that's the radical leap for people. There's physical differences but they're more imagined than real and can often be short-circuited. Our collective minds have an invisible override switch.
When people are being racist, they have an epistemology that the different outcomes is a natural result of racial hierarchies. They use these human created systems as their empirical evidence and not realize this logic is a self-reinforcing system.
It's like when police departments disproportionally patrol and focus on one group, find more things in that group and use it as evidence that their suspicions were well-founded. At different times the supposed more criminal groups have been everything from the roma, suffragists, gays, 7th day adventists, rock and roll fans, jewish people, Chinese immigrants, jehovah's witnesses, Catholics, italians... It's all arbitrary. The closed logic loop it perpetuates, that's racism.
You know the answer - they're actually at least as well off as the average white. So, what can we learn from that?
https://gab.com/tags/whitepower
https://gab.com/tags/jews
https://gab.com/tags/blacks
Just scroll. They also have literal Nazi groups such as https://gab.com/groups/248 that are genuinely and sincerely advocating for nazism.
Not necessarily.
Even Richard Spencer, proud Hitler-saluting Neo-Nazi, essentially the founder of the "alt-right", denies being racist.
People know that racism is bad, but a lot of racists will deny being racist while very explicitly saying they don't want to live next to a black person or will call the police just because they saw a black man walking through the neighborhood.
He knows that racism is not socially acceptable, so he makes bad faith claims of not being racist while expressing obviously racist views. And the problem is, it works. It doesn't take much searching to find racists that don't think they're racist. The fact that people don't think Donald Trump is racist, despite a long list of racist remarks and actions [0], is proof of that.
And of course, later, Milo Yiannopoulos later released an audio recording of an explicitly racist rant. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump
[1] https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20947833/richard-sp...
1. Being called a racist. 2. Black people.
The youtube algorithm suggested this to me the other day, posting it here because it's pretty relevant.
When Wokes and Racists actually agree on everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
Because if someone has mostly bad opinions, you have to wonder if he managed to have just one good one or if this is a bad opinion too.
How about you watch the video and let me know what's objectionable about it specifically?
After 5 seconds, it does the exact thing which I expected it to after only looking at the titles of his other videos. Grossly misrepresenting positions to make them look similar enough to "both sides" the issue so he can present himself as an "enlightened centrist" but really is looking to quiet people who would call him out on his problematic opinions.
It's a lot like your "assumption". You're trying to present your position as a "gee golly jeez, I'm just asking questions" being sort of overly, even comically naive about content you wish others to consume.
You're also asking people to be able to refute the entire video or not voice their objections. To ignore the context of the channel. Blah blah blah. The entire "foot in the door" approach to radicalization.
I personally don't believe your claim that you don't watch the channel. Otherwise, why even post a disclaimer? The only reason to post a disclaimer is because you kind of know what to expect from his channel. Either because the video itself is telling (it is) or you know what the rest of the content of the video would show (not great).
So please, stop with the disingenuous positions. A good number of people here are savvy enough to see through it.
Occasionally he takes on the far right as well. The problem being that it's just too easy and boring to do that.
You are arguing for ignoring the content of an opinion, and only evaluating it only by the association of people who agree or don't agree with it?
So, tribalism as the only acceptable form of reasoning?
this is a good breakdown https://youtu.be/m0ZDHgD9084?t=950
Emphasizing race as the most important determinant of an individual is regressive, not progressive.
It's possible for a reactionary agenda to fall prey to the errors of its foe, and that's exactly what's happening with anti-racism today.
The only way to move forward is to tackle racism with explicitly non-racist policies, not anti-racist ones.
It would help, if you would the issues the left should soften up on.
The official right wing position towards the left is "your outcome would be lovely, but it isn't worth the excessive cost to getting there".
There isn't a sizeable lobby who is "against environmentalism", for example. There is a huge lobby who just doesn't see how a comfortable living standard can be achieved without fossil fuels.
Can you give me one right-leaning healthcare or environmental "plan" that anybody in congress is pushing that will cover every American 100% for healthcare, drugs, mental health, dental, etc?
Single-payer is the best plan I've seen because it negotiates rates for drugs in bulk - one price for all of America and the government can choose different companies if they won't play ball but it's a huge ass market so they'll play ball.
Likewise for the environment - the right tends to deny climate change is even happening, so how do they support environmentalism?
Why do the right also think it's okay to spend 700 billion per year on the military (that's more than the next ten countries combined, China for example only spends 200 billion), and the DOD is the only government agency never to pass a fiscal audit. If they're worried about "costs" then maybe they should start with the defense budget.
> There isn't a sizeable lobby who is "against environmentalism", for example. There is a huge lobby who just doesn't see how a comfortable living standard can be achieved without fossil fuels.
How comfortable a standard of living will we have when we have wars over water, and species of animals becoming extinct at ever faster rates (including the very species we eat and rely on for food)?
That answers itself - if someone doesn't believe in a threat, it doesn't make sense to invest in stopping it.
> Can you give me one right-leaning healthcare or environmental "plan" that anybody in congress is pushing that will cover every American 100% for healthcare, drugs, mental health, dental, etc?
If there were exactly 2 choices, maybe there'd be a point there. But there is a spectrum of choices and no possible future where everyone has enough healthcare. None of the plans on the left or the right are pushing for the extreme scenario of 100% of the economy is devoted to healthcare.
The right wing would prefer the arbitrary standard trades off a little less against the economy, the left a little more. Both those positions are pro-healthcare, and both are arbitrary. You're welcome to your opinion on where the line should be drawn, but someone drawing the line differently isn't anti-healthcare.
> Why do the right also think it's okay to spend 700 billion per year on the military...
US's high military spending basically only goes up. If the left wanted to reign that in, they've had their chances and not taken them. It is a tragedy.
But you're the one claiming they're not anti-environmentalism! This is literally what anti-environmentalism is [1]. You might claim that they're not anti-environment though: I doubt anyone would actually choose to destroy the environment if it had no other effect. (Other than the small minority that's in it just to own-the-libs.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-environmentalism
All the resistance to the actual policies is people observing that they will have markedly lower quality of life and that the overall strategy of environmentalism is explicitly to dismantle big chunks of the west's way of life. That is why there is substantial organised resistance to the environmental policies the left wants, and why the resistance is more sustained. It is very damaging policy. That is why it is so unpopular. The people it is damaging aren't going to bear any consequences otherwise.
The premise of the question is that more=better, without acknowledging more=less of something else. The argument over what gets given up is exactly the political process, and that isn't going to be fun to rehash. People throw out "what if we trade off [thing I don't like]" and the whole argument becomes divorced from what will actually happen in the actual policy implementation.
The more productive response is to lay out the viewpoint, without delving in to the theoretical justifications. The view is pithy and might help a few people understand what the thinking is.
It's pretty straightforward, everything else is frantic hand waving.
Which makes even less sense, because the right since Regan have nearly continuously run up the deficit.
> The right supports environmentalism
You cannot simultaneously deny climate change and support the environment. They are mutually exclusive.
They aren't. Eg, Germany has an energy policy shaped by an acceptance of global warming and their electricity grid is a hot mess compared to France that has better outcomes on pretty much every axis including emissions if you care about that. The French policy was shaped by military concerns about energy security.
And air/water/etc quality in the major US cities were off the charts good compared to the major Chinese cities, for a long period if not currently, and it has nothing to do with climate change.
Plus, the obvious way for the US to get knocked down to the #3 emissions producer from #2 is for India to industrialise, lifting the living standards of a billion people. I'd bet the actual environmental outcomes in India would improve if they burned fossil fuels like the US and China, then they'd tighten up environmental standards like the west has. In that instance that is a direct conflict between believing in climate change and actual observed environmental outcomes. There isn't really a question in hindsight that India should have done the same things as China in the 80s/90s and built up their coal fired power plants. That would have left them in a better position to tackle environmental issues today.
> Eg, Germany has an energy policy shaped by an acceptance of global warming and their electricity grid is a hot mess compared
They don't, because they don't build nuclear power plants. Simply put, if you don't build nuclear power plants, you don't (fully) understand climate change. Unless you have a plan for your country to use dramatically less energy (which I don't believe is tenable), its the only feasible option in the time frames we need as far as I know.
> I'd bet the actual environmental outcomes in India would improve if they burned fossil fuels like the US and China, then they'd tighten up environmental standards like the west has.
I believe there is not enough time for that process to happen.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432620.
But instead I'll just say, I now know why Godwin's Law exists.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26432620.
I see censorship has putting dirt under the carpet. People will try again. There’s no accountability. Social media censorship would ban flashing boobs with the same enthusiasm as Nazi propaganda. The latter is not a breach of terms and condition, it’s literally illegal over here, in the same way punching someone in the street would be.
Why not put these people in court? I understand it won’t entirely eliminate right wing ideology, but at least it sends a clear message that racist, homophobic, and threat to use violence are illegal.
If you look at right wing parties in France and Germany, their speech is a lot more nuanced. They can’t go about and say things like “all Mexicans are rapists” (a Trump quote) because it would lend them in jail or worse to be stripped of the right to run for elections. So it works!
The only problem is that it is not enforced for anyone else. People can go about and write things like that on social media and face no consequences whatsoever. At worst, their accounts will be disabled.
Edit. Typos
Except he didn't actually say that. It's actually Tim Kaine misquoting Trump, so technically it's a Kaine quote.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/08/tim-kaine/...
By enforcement, I assume you mean arrest and jail people for speech. It will probably work for a while, as it does it more dictatorial countries. At least until the cities start burning down.
Not so much. You weaken your argument with such blatant falsehoods.
How can any sane person claim this without even giving a source?
First of all. I intensely dislike Donald Trump and I'm glad he's gone. I hope its for good. That being said that's not a quote from him. Its an unnecessary and dishonest embellishment of what he actually said. Unnecessary because what he said is bad enough to make the same point.
Finally, if a person simply said the exact quote you listed, and the result is that they were imprisoned, the most offensive thing in this story would be the government that thinks someone saying something nasty and untrue alone is enough to warrant time in jail.
It is a complex issue, but censorship does "do" something, lots of research out there about how making things like QAnon just a little harder to access trims off support at the edges. If you want to make this argument you have to reckon with those facts.
Racism and hate did not go away. People were much less capable of organizing it and normalizing it's behavior before the internet. You actually had to go vast distances to get people together before. Now, it's a facebook group or 'conservative social media' platform away.
With the dawn of anonymity began the demonstration of human nature when it does not receive local social pressures. A completely new and unique prototype of communications that bypass our evolutionary social ques.
Without identity, pressure from peers, and authority, humans are left with the freedom to choose any way they want to conduct themselves.
Sadly, humans chose to conduct themselves poorly. A result a 2nd grader could also predict. Instead of caring about the truth they care about superiority. Instead of honesty they care about being on a team.
We can censor people. Governments can absolutely create a great firewall where only approved businesses are licensed and given access by ISP's to receive incoming socket connection requests. ISP's prevent this all the time due to multi layer NAT. ISP's can lock down ports and prevent two subscribers from communicating without a server that is explicitly allowed on their IP range to do so.
Certainly, we could. But anonymity has benefits. People can discuss important matters without that social threat. People cannot seek a recourse when they are offended, cannot censor information, etc.
Ghost in the Shell had a very interesting scenario in which people would VR dive into a group chat to discuss controversial events - and it all went mostly professional and fact seeking. This prediction is so far away from what we actually have now - actual fabrication of facts and cults that surround them. People entirely uninterested in reasoning or being reasoned with. Just a room full of people reinforcing each other without any basis in fact.
Also the author disagreeing "hate crimes" being a thing: the reason for hate crimes is that individuals would organize to intimidate the lives of others that belong to specific ethnic groups. People have a right to be free from that, and it's absolutely the purpose of government to uphold that right. Organized crime has always received special laws targeting it to deter it.
1. It says that society (with the power to make laws) has your back. 2. It does what it can to prevent the environment from being toxic (obviously with limitations raised in the article).
Society has never had your back. In so many other areas including this one. What we have is interest groups as people within society. And these groups will always have different and sometimes directly opposing ideas.
Thinking that society or even the law has your back is an error in logic.
Again, about toxic social spaces. There is much reason to place Twitter & Facebook as toxic just as much as Parler was. Platforms aren't necessarily toxic, people are. And to be frank, this is a media consumption choice. If you unintentionally visit Gab today and feel the majority of the content does not align with your values and beliefs. Close the tab and visit another platform. Freedom of speech needs to encouraged in any modern society and should be protected as a human right. Anyone who tries to influence your thinking by diluting this, is seeking to control and weaken your mind for their own gain.
While I'm highly opinionated, I've always followed these subreddits' rules because I do believe rules are important for functional forums. These subreddits are also not some niche forum catering to a select group; they're major forums around topics of very general interest, so they really should have very high tolerance for unorthodox viewpoints.
All the bans I received were entirely politically/ideologically motivated.
In /r/politics I was permanently banned for saying something like 'I don't think little girls should be forced to share change rooms with little boys who identify as girls'.
For that I was accused of transphobia and permanently banned. The mod who imposed the ban wouldn't even quote the offending statement or try to explain what was transphobic about it. In private messages, they just stuck to their guns and stonewalled me on my requests for elaboration.
The /r/science ban was due to a comment I posted which contained a harsh criticism of the authors of a posted article. These authors were not forum members, so there was no subreddit rule violation, as far as I'm aware. I strongly suspect the real motivation for the ban was that in the comment, I also criticized the study's premise, that observing "racial blind ideology", was by definition, "anti-Black".
This is the article in question:
https://academictimes.com/belief-in-white-jesus-linked-to-ra...
I really think there is a significant amount of extremism coming from the establishment nowadays, and the attempts to silence opposing viewpoints is a symptom of that.
"Strong moderation" and "heavy censorship" are the same thing, just dependent on whether you agree with the moderation or not. If you disagree, please show me a site without moderation that still has high quality discussion.
What are you going to do, shut down all group chats that doesn’t conform to your standards? It’s a much harder problem than creating a site that has good moderation.
Like it's so frustrating to talk about issues like this on HN because huge swaths of the US part of crowd see themselves as very distant from the "gods & guns" crowd but then fall into the same patterns of thinking that hate and extremism are just part of this world and that the free market (of ideas) will solve everything with proper education and personal responsibility. That any solution that isn't perfect or has a downside for them personally is worthless because they're so insulated from the actual harm being done.
That's all fine and good in a world where everyone is acting in good faith, truthfully, and that propaganda, and emotional manipulation don't exist. But the internet isn't some some big Socratic circle.
The people in the comments here haven't had their online life improved by a huge subreddit ban, forumn takedown, or twitterspehere implosion after having exactly zero power to do anything other than endure the abuse and hope to not catch their eye and it shows.
I mean, sure, it’s nice if it isn’t in your face all the time. I’m glad Google’s SafeSearch exists. But keeping people who are actually curious from finding things is much harder than that, and there are a lot of curious teenagers.
This isn't even specific to extremist views or even politics in general; in all parts of life, from the foods people eat, to the religion they practice, to the music they enjoy: people will consider "normal" that which they constantly perceive.
FWIW, I agree. But the people who are shadow banned for trivial offences would probably be writing replies to your comment about this ... if they knew they were shadow banned that is. And we wouldn't be able to read it either way, so it's a moot point. Just one data point, but one of my friends has been shadow banned from HN for years and he never even knew that he was. Say what you will about twitter and Facebook, but at least they're up front about bans.